Category Archives: Parenting

Trauma Brain Sandwich

Leave a reply
Some kids who have Complex Developmental Trauma are white knuckling day and night.  Their need to manage every single little thing to keep themselves feeling safe takes the life, the joy, the play, the spontaneity right out of them.  Their need for the safety that control brings to them takes the life, the joy, the play, the spontaneity right out of YOU, too.
 
Upshot: Be super sure you are getting plenty of adult respite time to play, laugh, love, and be untethered so you are not having a steady Trauma Brain Sandwich diet. YOU will starve to death otherwise.  
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Trauma Brain Sandwiches are all carb, no protein.
The Attach Place Logo
The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships
Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment.
Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to sign-up for Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

Know-It-All

Leave a reply
This morning my son woke up about 2 minutes before his ride for school was to show.  Instead of popping up and getting clothes on, he ran toward the kitchen to take his meds like he always does. 
 
Whoa, whoa, you have two minutes to get dressed, Goof-ball.  Get dressed first and grab your meds on the way out the door!
 
Goof-ball stopped in his tracks, deer in the headlights style, then reluctantly (and very slowly, I might add) turned back toward his room.
 
In my infinite know-it-all condition I was thinking, This kid has no prefrontal cortex access to logical thinking.  
 
Off-handedly, I asked him, “Why do you think it is so hard for you to make a little change that would help you do something more efficiently–like get out the door on time?”  I wasn’t really expecting him to tell me his prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped.  As a matter of fact, I have no idea why I persist in asking these kinds of questions. One might wonder about the capacity of my pre-frontal cortex.
 
He said, “I don’t like change.  Change scares me, so that’s why.”
 
Huh, wrong part of the brain, Ms. Know-It-All.  He is all limbic all the time. Of-course, that IS the reason he has so little access to his neo-cortical functions.  
 
Ta-Da! Ms. Know-It-All retakes her slim lead in the I Know More Than An Eighteen Year Old Game we play around here.
 
Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Change is scary for our kids, even tiny changes in the daily routine.
The Attach Place Logo Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment.
Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to sign-up for Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

Once Upon A Time

Leave a reply
Everyone needs to make sense of their lives.  Our children especially need to understand their own stories.  Until they do fully, tell them stories.  Once upon a time stories…  I remember when stories…  Moral of the story stories… Happy ending stories… I’ll start and you add-on stories… Alternative ending stories… When I was little stories…  My grandfather stories…  Hero stories… Good vs. Evil stories… Tell me a story about your day stories…  When you were a baby, I bet stories… One time stories… Bedtime stories… Daytime stories…  Story for the sake of stories stories…
 
Children love stories, whether you make them up, repeat a few, co-create them, imagine them, write them, share them, re-tell them, or listen to them.  Do more of what your children love.
Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Children love stories.
The Attach Place Logo Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment.
Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to sign-up for Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

YOU Are Scary

Leave a reply
Ever wonder why your children from hard places are more shenanigan prone with YOU than with any other person?  Doesn’t it seem sometimes like your mere presence in a room invites behavior that your mother-in-law swears didn’t happen all day until YOU showed up?  Doesn’t it feel like all of these shenanigans are your fault or directed at YOU?  After all they are mostly happening when you are there.  
 
Okay, I give you credit for knowing the ins and outs of this. I know you know it is because they come from difficult beginnings and have been hurt and abandoned by the beloved.  Just to drive it home–truth be told–the real reason is simple: YOU are scary. Yep it is YOU. YOU, the current attachment object.
 
Attachment is scary.  Have you ever had the feeling that you might be falling in love and really needing someone before you know for sure they feel the same way?  Ever been hurt by someone you trusted wholeheartedly and then felt guarded and apprehensive about the next relationship?  Ever act completely a fool in the presence of someone you gave yourself to, but the relationship deal has not been struck yet?  Ever found yourself doing shenanigans that you are not proud of out of insecurity or fear of loss?  See, attachment is scary; and, you are an adult.
 
You and your child from difficult beginnings are in the scary dance of attachment.  It takes a long time for any human to give their heart vulnerably and securely to another.  If you come from your own difficult beginnings you can multiply that vulnerability by 10 or so. Our kids are right there.
 
It is NOT your fault.  It is your gift to them to hold steady, keep dancing, and be the safety, the love they don’t yet trust exists in the world.
 
Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Love the way you want to be loved–wholeheartedly.
The Attach Place Logo Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment.

Eyeballs

Leave a reply
When was the last time you said to your child, “Let me look at those beautiful eyeballs of yours”?  
 
When you do playfully get them gazing back, YOU can respond with a sweet, loving, eyeball-to-eyeball smile of recognition–I claim YOU, sweet child; YOU are home in my heart.
 
Soft, eye contact is a pathway to the deep heart of your child’s brain. With every intimate look, you and your child get a jolt of oxytocin and dopamine–ahhhh, love juice.
Eyeball Challenge: Consciously double your soft, playful eye contact every day for a week and see what happens.  I dare YOU.
Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

YOU must claim your child first
before expecting your child to claim YOU back.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment.

Practice Regulation

Leave a reply
Attachment breach and abuse in the first two years of life almost always instills an inability to self-regulate emotions in a child. Providing emotion regulation is one of the fundamental functions of a mother or caregiver for a newborn baby.  That looks like consistent caregiving in the form of meeting a baby’s survival needs to be soothed, dry, full, and safe.  Separation from a birth mother or abuse by a mother or other person in this formative time prevents the child’s emotion regulatory system from developing properly, which can cause regulation problems for a lifetime.
 
As adoptive parents or parents of children from difficult beginnings, our job is to understand, teach and practice emotion regulation with our children.  When we do this, we help develop parts of the brain that are underdeveloped.  We can literally create new neuro-pathways in the brains of our children.  Cool, right?
 
So, resist the urge (and the headache) to keep your child calm “all the time.”  Instead, at regular intervals (practice every day), purposely get your child excited with sensory stimulation, then help your child calm down. That is what is needed. Being calm all the time will not teach your child to self-soothe.  In a playful manner, amping up and calming down, over and over, is the way.
 
Ready, set, go play.  Fall down, calm down, and start again.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships


Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Practice makes perfect neuro-pathways.

NOTE: If you are planning to sign up, please go ahead and do it because I think the space will end up being limited this time around. The next REVISED Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.  If you have been through this course in the past, you will be getting significantly more hands on experience than ever before.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

Milestones

Leave a reply
If your child is healing from Complex Developmental Trauma, ticking off milestones is a little bit foreign.  We know what two steps forward, three steps back feels like.  We know what stuck at about 2 years old feels like.  The excitement of seeing our children grow emotionally in accordance with their chronological age is rare indeed.

 
Let me share my delight last night at sending my 17-year-old son off to his very first rock concert.  I will be forever grateful to his friend’s father who said he would be the chaperone if I would foot the bill. I would have bought the tickets, stretch Hummer limo, and a Morton’s steak to get him to do it.  When my son came home this afternoon, he was all smiles and full of stories for me.  He is finally enjoying teenage things–milestone.  Delicious milestone.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships


Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 Hang in there.  Milestones do show up.

NOTE: If you are planning to sign up, please go ahead and do it because I think the space will end up being limited this time around. The next REVISED Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.  If you have been through this course in the past, you will be getting significantly more hands on experience than ever before.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

When YOU Get Tired

Leave a reply
When YOU get tired, take a Mommy or Daddy time out to refuel, readjust, reenergize, and reconnect with yourself.  Without YOU, then what?

I know this can go against the grain of what having children is all about.  Aren’t we supposed to put our children’s needs above our own?  Yes, sure.  And most of the time YOU do.  But sacrifice to the point of martyrdom will not a healthy family make.

After you have taken a breather, put your head back on with a new set of lens for your eyes.  The second best way to take care of yourself is to re-adjust your attitude about your traumatized children.  Their pain, wounding, outbursts, hatefulness, rejection, meanness, and fear has nearly nothing to do with YOU, and nearly everything to do with how they experience themselves and others in a dangerous world.  YOU scare them to the core.

If you were made of cardboard, YOU would still be the object of reactivity and likely be covered in spit and kick marks.  So, refocus your thinking.  Don’t over personalize your child’s reactivity toward YOU.  It is not about YOU.

Here is a suggestion: Love from a higher place.  Some of YOU have the love of God in your hearts.  Others the love of passion.  And still, there are folks who are rising to a call.  Some are engaging the challenge.  How ever you keep your heart alive and giving, do it.  Do it every day like your life depends on it–because it does.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships


Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 Love is not just a feeling.  It is a commitment.

NOTE: If you are planning to sign up, please go ahead and do it because I think the space will end up being limited this time around. The next REVISED Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.  If you have been through this course in the past, you will be getting significantly more hands on experience than ever before.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

Everything Is A Seed

Leave a reply
Everything you do or say to your child is a seed.  Beware of what you sow, because you are planting the internal garden of a future adult. What kind of person do you want your child to become?

 
I am so disappointed in you and your behavior.
I hate you sometimes.
I don’t like you.
You are nothing but trouble.
You make me sick.
You are annoying.
I cannot stand being around you.
You are selfish.
You are ugly.
I think you are ridiculous.
What a worthless piece of crap you are becoming.
Get away from me.
You stink.
No one will ever love you if you don’t change.
You can’t be trusted.
You are hopeless.
No wonder your parents gave you up.
You are thoughtless.
You are stupid.
You are frightening to me.
Our lives are ruined because of you.
You are lucky I don’t drop you on the side of the road.
You don’t deserve a nice home and loving parents.
That’s it.  I am done with you.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Beware the gnarly seeds of self-hatred.

The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.

 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

Let’s Get Real

Leave a reply

Over the course of raising children there are some contributions we make, right? All parents make them, attachment challenged or not.

I donated two leather couches, the walls (including quite a bit of drywall) in four different houses, window screens, window panes, window sills, bathroom mirrors, more carpet than I care to tell you about, too numerous to count glasses and plates, pans, cabinet hinges and doors, car seats, various bicycles, skateboards, dining room tables and chairs, mattresses, furniture of every kind really, musical instruments, computers, DSs, smartphones, iPods x6, video cameras, and a number of precious jewelry items that I loved with both sentimental and actual value.

That was stuff. It was my contribution. I let it go, after grieving for some of it. Now it doesn’t matter a bit. Time has erased the significance of the stuff and left me with a lesson learned.

The other night my husband broke several crystal glasses reaching for a water glass in the darkness of our kitchen. I am so grateful I know that stuff doesn’t matter more than love. When he came back to bed, I was only concerned that he escaped injury. There was a time I would have been upset about losing my stuff.

In ten years from now the stuff you get upset about losing to the rearing of your children will be meaningless. I am not saying that one should not value and be respectful of hard acquired comforts. I am saying that they are not as important as they seem, when put up against the value of saving the heart of a child.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Tend to the heart of the matter.

 

 

Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.

The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.

Please share freely. Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.