Tag Archives: Parent Self Care

This Is What Empathy Sounds Like

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Maybe using the word empathy to communicate what is required to support your child’s healing is not ringing the “I can do that” button for YOU.  YOU can do it though. Empathy sounds something like this:

 
Your child: “I hate you and I don’t care that you love me!”
 
YOU: I am sorry that you are feeling so bad Honey.  It must be awful to feel so alone. 
 
Your child: “Get out of my f***ing room! I don’t want you in here.”
 
YOU: I can see you are very angry right now and I think you are telling me you need some space, so I am going to go turn the spaghetti sauce off and give you a few minutes.  I will be back though.
 
Okay, dinner is taking a time-out while we talk. I am not sure why you are so angry.  Maybe I am missing something.  Tell me again please what you are angry about.  It is okay, I can handle you having angry feelings. Try me.
 
Your child: “I am never going to love you, so leave me alone.”
 
YOU: Sometimes love takes a long time to grow and it sounds like you think I won’t be here for you if you don’t love me. I want you to know that I am here for you either way.  I think you might be mad about being a kid that needed to be adopted.  Is that right?
Your child: “No!”
YOU: Okay, you don’t think so right now.  I am going to hang out in here with you for a while.  Something has been making me really nutty, I keep trying to figure out why Easter bunnies lay eggs. Shouldn’t they be Easter chickens?
“Da-ad.”
What?  I can’t figure it out. What do you think?

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Stay present, adult, and focused on the feelings beneath the biting words.

Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.
The Attach Place/Neurofeedback Solutions is an active supporter of The Wounded Warrior Project. We give free neurofeedback treatment to veterans.  If you know someone  in the Sacramento area who is suffering from the effects of war, we are here to help one soldier at a time.

Empathy, Really?

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Are you freaking kidding me?  This kid has kicked me, scratched me, bit me, broken my favorite things, run off, told lies about me and to me, stolen things from everyone I know and YOU want me to show him empathy?  I know he went through a lot in his first few years. I know! But this is five years later and he acts like I did it to him.  He doesn’t care about anything, let alone me.  He has to be punished for his behavior or he will never learn.

First, I empathize with YOU. What you are going through every day with your very challenging child is painful and tiring and I know you are on the edge of hopelessness. Me, too. I have felt all of these things, too. I can see you are brokenhearted and desperate to have peace in your family.

YOU can do this, but it will be hard and take all the strength and determination you have.  Yes, empathy in the face of trouble is the first step toward turning this all around.  It will not be fast and it will not be easy.  It will be a daily practice of mindfulness, self-care, and love to be the “adult in the room.” It has taken me years to become that adult. Years. That was my personal journey.  Who knew that I had so many childhood wounds that would be healed along the way to learning how to love my attachment challenged children?

Ready or not, this is your journey.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Every journey begins with one step.  Why not empathy?
Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.
The Attach Place/Neurofeedback Solutions is an active supporter of The Wounded Warrior Project. We give free neurofeedback treatment to veterans.  If you know someone  in the Sacramento area who is suffering from the effects of war, we are here to help one soldier at a time.

The Opposite Of Traditional Parenting

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Parents of attached children from relatively smooth beginnings parent with the end in mind.  From the moment of birth parents are teaching their child how to grow up to become competent, confident and responsible adults. Of course there is some playing around in between, but most of the parental engagement is designed to make the children (age appropriately) more and more responsible for their own lives.
 
Our children from difficult beginnings are often traumatized and forced by biology into thinking, believing, and acting as though they are on their own to survive. When all of a child’s efforts are focused on survival, s/he misses out on very basic parts of being a happy human being–things like play, pleasure, joy, delight, and carefree doddling.  (Yes, they all definitely know how to doddle, but it isn’t carefree.)
 
Parenting for these kinds of children is all about helping them be “children.” This doesn’t mean they don’t have to learn to be responsible adults.  It means they have to learn to be children first. 
 
I know you are scared that encouraging your child to be a child will perpetually stunt an already delayed developmental process. After all, aren’t our children the most disorganized, unconcerned, selfish, irresponsible, illogical, childish people you have ever met? (I can’t tell you how many adoptive parents introduce their child to me as “28 going on 2-years old.”) So, yes and no.  Our children are equally filled with huge levels of fear, anxiety, hypervigilance, control, panic, and dysregulation?
 
Attachment challenged children need the opposite of traditional parenting first. Teach them to play by playing with them–a lot. Withhold the constant nagging, teaching, training, and consequencing for their lack of follow through, lack of organization, lack of concern, lack of responsibility taking.  Let your child off the adult hook until play comes easily, pleasure abounds, and joy is abundant.  Once this occurs, it will be much easier to help them become happy, responsible adults.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th.  Save the date.
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.
The Attach Place/Neurofeedback Solutions is an active supporter of The Wounded Warrior Project. We give free neurofeedback treatment to veterans.  If you know someone  in the Sacramento area who is suffering from the effects of war, we are here to help one soldier at a time.

Play today or pay tomorrow.

 

Teach Respect

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I have always liked that bumper sticker that says Teach Peace. Look!!! Here it is.

teach peace 2

Whenever I see it on a car, I feel a kinship with the driver.  The fact that the sticker might be left over from three owners before and this driver is actually not particularly Man of the Year doesn’t keep me from feeling a little extra love juice in that direction.  Nothing wrong with that, right?  Both of us can probably use it.

Teach Respect is better as a mantra than a bumper sticker.  If our kids have knowledge gaps, then we have to teach them things we think they should already know–like respect.

I am forever shocked at how little our tiny attachment challenged professors actually know about the subtleties of life.  They have to be taught.  Respect is no different.

Believe it or not, parents have often been the teachers of disrespect to their children in two ways:

  1. We respond to disrespect with disrespect. Because we are the adults, we don’t always go back, apologize, and redo our disrespectful words with the one’s we wish we had used.  We just feel justified and move on.
  2. We respond with compliance. When Sam says, “I don’t want this for dinner. I hate f…ing pork chops,” many of us will tell him to “Shut your f….ing pie hole and sit the f… down!” Certainly none of my readers. Others of us will simply get him something else to eat to spare the family the shenanigans.
Neither of these methods teach respect.  Actually, they teach the opposite.  Try these on for size:
 
1. Be respectful, even when your child isn’t. Save all your angry, disrespectful words for your mental bubbles or therapist (who will definitely understand.)
2. Gently require respect before your child gets the thing s/he wants.  For example:  Whoa Sam, not sure you realize that saying that the way you did about the pork chops is a sure fire way of making me deaf. That hurts my sensitive ears. Go ahead and try again.  If Sam gives you more disrespect, tell him you love him and go back to dealing with dinner–mental bubble: pork chops it is .  If he gives you respect, you can decide to stick with pork chops because that is all there is and let him choose dinner for another day or maybe give him the choice of something leftover.  It’s never a good idea to allow him something special while everyone else gets what is on the menu.
 
Of course, there are a zillion ways to respond.  Those are just a few.  I have heard plenty of people react to my suggestions with, You have got to be kidding; my kid would explode all over the place if I tried to correct him.  If you don’t correct him now and withstand the tantrums for a good 21 days, YOU will live with this tyrant for an entire childhood.
The Attach Place Logo
 
Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Pay now or pay later.

I fixed the link to the parent training if you have been trying to sign-up and couldn’t get through.  Sorry about that; my techno wizardry only goes so far–about a foot.
NOTE:  Space is limited this time around. The nextREVISED Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Registerhere.  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.

 

Straight No Chaser

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No, I have not taken up drinking–much. Just wanted to inject a moment of harmony into your day (in-case you were having trouble finding some.)

Christmas Can Can

 

 

 

 

Straight No Chaser

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Find some cheer every day of the year.

 

 

 

 

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

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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.

The Art of Repetition

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You might have noticed that I say the same things to YOU, over and over and over in a bunch of different ways.  I do this because it it is difficult for parents to develop new mental models for therapeutic parenting, because you have to bust through the old template of how YOU were parented.
 
Our kids are the same, because their brains and our brains are similar. Depending on your early childhood and trauma experiences, YOU may actually have a VERY similar brain, as your child.
 
I say all of that in order to say this:  Therapeutic parenting requires a tremendous amount of repetition to create new neuro-pathways to replace the negative templates in a traumatized child’s brain. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over.  NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over.  See what I mean?
 
Your child does not need exasperated, humiliating, eye-rolling, hard repetition of a command.  That is nagging with negative attitude. That tells your child, “I am sick and tired of you and you are too stupid to live, YOU annoying, worthless brat!” Yes, that is how your child hears it, even if you think they know you don’t mean it.
 
Your child needs soft eyed, patient, empathic, brain-building, neocortex developing, repetitive interaction about how, why, and when something either needs to happen or something did happen. Build the prefrontal cortex, executive function of your child if you want them to make better choices.  It’s not what you tell them. It’s how you engage them that develops the part of the brain that will allow you to be less repetitive over time.  Your child has to be helped by YOU to use that part of the brain in order to grow it.  
 
Nagging keeps your child and YOU stuck in a negative feedback loop.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships


Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Engagement is like water to a garden in Spring.

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.

The Quiet Talks

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The quiet morning talks are always so enlightening around here.  Today’s topic:  Hatred.
 
“I do love you, but I also hate you.”  Never has a truer sentence been spoken.
 
My son tells me that he, “Can’t put two and two together when it comes to any sort of consequence.”  He says, “Consequences seem like they will last forever, even though I know nothing ever goes away for longer than a day or a day and a half.”  In that moment, “I hate you.”  
 
“The rest of the time there is this feeling inside me like defiance of rules…Whenever there is a rule, I feel hatred for it…Sometimes I just won’t ask you for something because I am afraid how I might react if you say no.”
 
How frightening it must be to react so emotionally violent to every day structure, rules, and expectations?  That is a thwarted, everything-is-against-me worldview many of our traumatized children experience.
 
My compassion for the collective struggle our children experience continually increases over time, and my ability to hold my son with soft eyes and empathy grows exponentially alongside it.  Better late than never, I tell myself, though my grief for how long it has taken me is right there, just under the surface.
 
                                                                 Love Matters,

The Attach Place Logo 3Ce Eshelman, LMFT

I Wish I Had An Attitude Adjustment Earlier

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I bought a panini maker.  Mmmmm, nothing like a cheesy/carbo-load to get the kid out of bed. What I discovered is how sweet my son is when he knows I made it for him, whether he has time to eat it or not. When he was younger, I would have pitched a fit if he lollygagged and didn’t eat it.  Then he would have pitched a fit back, maybe throwing the hot panini puck at my face. I would have insisted at higher and higher volumes that he NEEDED to eat breakfast, but why was I MAD when he didn’t. After awhile, I took everything personally.  It felt like these shenanigans were by way of gutting me with a fishing knife. I started to hate my life and my kids, too. This is the ugly truth.
If you are waiting for your children to have love in their eyes before YOU have love in yours, YOU will be waiting a very long time.  Oh, I know you used to have love in your eyes, but your child’s attachment challenged shenanigans drained you to flat, hopeless, and sometimes bitter despair. I’ve been there. I know. And, I don’t judge YOU. I get YOU. I am YOU. I am YOU years down the road.
When my kids were younger, I wish someone had bonked me on my head, like a V8 commercial, so I could have had an earlier attitude adjustment.
So, (if you need one) here is my attempt at a “bonk” on your pre-frontal cortex.  If you are a parent who adopted a child, YOU are their best hope of finding the buried treasure of love in that damaged heart (a.k.a. pre-frontal cortex.) Have I mentioned that pre-frontal cortex is my favorite set of words? Of course I have.
Here is the key:
YOU must make a DECISION every day to BE a loving person. Period.
No one loves the shenanigans of traumatized children–the mean, hateful, scary, snide, cunning, unrelenting, mind-boggling, mind-numbing, heart-stopping, shitty crap (clinical term) they dish up. No one is made for that, better suited for that, temperamentally predisposed for that.  So, YOU wishing you could give up, throw them back, leave them on a corner, put them back on a plane, or relinquish them is very human, understandable, and evidence of the magnitude of grief YOU feel to the bone.  I wish I could hug YOU.  I know you need it.
If you consider yourself capable of being a loving person, then be that in the face of adversity. Raising this kind of child is the definition of adversity. There is a payoff.  It is down the road. Essentially, your love is “paying it forward.”  It will come back to YOU.  Gandhi said it best,Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the love you want to see in your child.  It starts with YOU.
Shenanigans be damned, but not the heart-broken child or the heart-broken parent.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 
Love in the face of adversity is the definition of love.

My Hindsight Might Help YOU

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My daughter gets regular check-ins with CPS workers because her baby is so sick and, understandably, the hospital staff thought it was possibly due to neglect. Thankfully it wasn’t, but CPS stayed on.
In the middle of last night (the only time she thinks she should talk to me) my daughter texted me that she was dreading the visit from CPS in the morning.  I responded that I remember that feeling very well.
“CPS was called on you, Mom.  YOU never did anything.”
I am forever amazed at how little either of my children remember about the vast shenanigans that occurred in our home throughout their childhood years.
CPS opened cases on me three or four times–false abuse allegations, being on the run, living on the river, living with strangers, pregnant minor, etc. Every one of them scared me to death. I know this has happened to many of YOU.  And I know many of you live in fear of this.  Some of you have lost your homes, gone bankrupt defending yourself, lost family and friends, and had children taken away because of CPS allegations.
Oh, the stress and grief of it all.
Now that I am nearly on the other side of CPS’ grip (my son turns 18 in January and my daughter is 19 now), the PTSD has mostly faded and I am thinking about what I could have done differently during the “crazy” years.
1.  I could have parented with more understanding and less control. This might have saved me from some threats at the point of a butcher knife.
2.  I could have “seen” my children as individuals separate from me, and attended to their life experience more.  I never allowed wild, revealing clothes, colored hair, outrageous talk… But I wasn’t doing it either, so what was the big deal?
3.  I could have found more ways to soothe my own pain and fear, so I wasn’t so reactive.
4.  I could have joined with others more for support–online or in local groups with others going through the same thing with their attachment challenged children.  I didn’t think I needed all that.  Who was I kidding?
5.  I could have insisted on respite for myself more (though I have to say I did a pretty good job of this.)
6.  I could have shared my fear with CPS workers more, instead of being fearfully defensive. Yelling, You don’t get it!in the face of a CPS worker was probably not that helpful.
Hindsight, I know.  Some folks often feel I am hard on myself when I talk about what I could have done differently. That is not my intention.  I am pretty forgiving of myself, as I truly know that I did the best I could at the time.  I am simply hopeful my musings on the past can help YOU in the present (especially, if you are in the midst of the crazy years.)  
I know this in my bones: Our kids get better if we hang in there and give ourselves the benefit of everything we can find to support our herculean efforts.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

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