A quote by lived experience trauma therapist Glenn Patrick Doyle -
"We're not ourselves when we're triggered. We become who we think we need to be to survive. When we're constantly being triggered our identity can slip away because our personality and our values are constantly getting hijacked by fight or flight reflexes."
Trauma and secondary trauma are common when we're parenting children who mistrust good care because of previous experiences of interpersonal trauma. Some parents come into the parenting journey with unresolved trauma from their own childhood. Parents can be traumatised by high level challenging behaviour like violence, aggression, and passive aggression. Secondary trauma can happen when we feel overwhelmed by their pain and suffering. We can feel it as though it were our own. Even children who are loved and well-cared for from the moment they take their first breath can be traumatised.
It's hard to parent from our values when we're experiencing trauma or secondary trauma. Our higher thinking gets hijacked by fight, flight, freeze, or shut down. It's difficult to attune, to empathise, to reflect, to weigh things up, and to make good decisions.
One of the great things about NVR is the focus on staying connected to ourselves and our values, giving ourselves what we need (and asking for help from others) so that we can give our children consistently good enough parenting - whether or not that's received, accepted, appreciated.
It’s liberating when the measure of parenting success isn’t our child’s behaviour but our own behaviour increasingly aligning to our values.
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