Slow Down 
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
My mother was quick to anger. She had very little patience with me and I was all thumbs and left feet. I have a salient memory of needing to make an apron from a paper pattern (which was child abuse, if you ask me) at home for Home Ec. My mother was an excellent seamstress and while I struggled with something bunchy under the tines of the sewing machine foot, she snapped, “Let me do it.” In two seconds I was standing aside watching while she silently and effortlessly finished the whole thing. I will never forget that. The things I learned were this:
My children and I have something in common. We have all three been scared “to death” in our lives and survived to see another day. That kind of trauma can have varying impacts on people. Some become more fearful and others repress fear completely, thus NO FEAR (or any other feeling for that matter.)
Eventually, the feelings of fear must be uncovered, so life can be engaged with appropriate amounts of risk taking and caution. I think my children have work to do in this arena. When my daughter calls in tears about how scared she is to be on her own, I hear the grief and work to soothe her. My son still glazes over to avoid his fears. There is more processing to be done for them to emerge feeling safe inside themselves and in the world.
Felt safety needs to be our parenting goal for our children, so they can face forward without fear and with love in their own lives.
Spitting Mad
You’ve heard the terms spitting mad, fighting mad, biting mad, right? How often do you feel this way in the face of your attachment challenged (or not) child’s persistent behavior that causes you to repeat yourself? If it is often, then you have to do something different! It won’t just go away.
I am intimate with anger, my own. My misunderstanding about the meaning of behavior in the early years of parenting made my blood boil. I really thought my kids’ behavior was purposeful. It “felt” that way to me. Those were only my feelings though, not the facts of the matter. The facts of the matter were more complex and required me to dig deeper into two things: 1) my own history and 2) my children’s history.
Once I realized that the attachment challenge and trauma suffered in my childhood and the attachment challenge and trauma suffered in my children’s early years transformed our normal brains into chemical turbine factories, I had a better way of understanding behavior, which facilitated the growth of my own empathy for myself and for my children.
Empathy significantly cools the jets of anger.
If YOU are too familiar with anger in your relationship with your children, then it makes sense to up your empathy through understanding the impact of attachment and trauma on the brain’s function. In traumatized humans, survival mode is chronic and pervasive. Turns out it isn’t really that hard to understand from the factual side. 
However, when you are swirling in a chemical spiral of emotion, it is pretty hard to see the fear at the center of the tornado.
Behavioral symptoms of a traumatized brain:
Emotional Out-bursting
Controlling
Inflexible Reacting
Demanding
Sneaking
Lying
Stealing
Hoarding
Arguing
Defending
Refusing Responsibility
Resisting Parental Authority
Defying Direction
Running Away
Distracting
Opposing
Freezing
Freezing
Freezing
Fleeing
Fleeing
Fleeing
Fighting
Fighting
Fighting
Fearing
Fearing
Fearing
How this unfolded this morning in me made me think of YOU and your children. Grief often plays a big part in the background of our lives. Our children have lost their sense of felt safety along with original attachments and sometimes many subsequent ones. We parents have our personal grief from wounds past and re-worked dreams for the family life we hoped we were creating when we brought our children home. The grief is deeply stored as trauma in our brains, one painful event on top of another, that lends to inexplicable, triggered emotional experiences throughout our daily lives.
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 