Parenting After Trauma: Breaking Generational Shame While Raising a Fierce Child

I have a beautiful 12 year old daughter.  She’s beautiful, strong, protective, and ferocious.  She’s in so many ways who I wish I was at times.  This child was not born with the affliction I have, she wasn’t trained into it… she’s not a people pleaser.  Like… at all. It’s a beautiful part of her and one that I have to survive and foster into a child that knows her worth, without performance (a baseline need for all kids). 

I feel often that parenting, after surviving a dysfunctional, gas lighting, shame-riddled upbringing, created a split in my thinking.  Surviving requires creating parts of myself.  At any one moment while parenting, I have a reaction like my parents, leaping to shut her down because she doesn’t care about my feelings. We are talking about that moment when you hear your parents' voice fly out of your mouth and you cringe.  We all do it.  It echoes how I was squashed as a bubbly, happy, sensitive child. And this is the voice I cannot listen to.  

Then there is the scorned, shamed child.  “Of course my kid doesn’t love me and care about me, this is a life long feeling.”  This part of me has way too much hold on me still.  It’s the voice that pops up at every event I throw or attend.  The voice of “ too much and not enough” at the same damn time.  This is my inner child, who I cannot stand one more rejection, it's just too painful.

Then there is me.  The one who knows she’s here to break chains.  No more expecting my children to snuff out their unique light, to fit the box I put them in.  No more “what is wrong with you” moments because there isn’t a damn thing wrong with her.  The woman who experiences no personal shame over my child’s mistakes because she is supposed to make mistakes! I am supposed to process for her the impact of her mistakes despite her intent. This is the me I want to be, allowing my fierce child to be fierce and not make that a wrongness.

So when I found myself, yet again in the vice principal's office AGAIN, I had 3 damn voices in my head with their own narrative… 

Voice 1: (the one I don’t trust) “Oh my gosh, I am so embarrassed!!! Again?!?!?!” 

Voice 2: (my inner child) “Gosh, look. I fucked up again. I am a shit parent. My mom and dad were right about me.”

Voice 3: (my functional adult self) “This is what being 12 years old can look like. Undeveloped brains need empathy for their consequences, no shame for being human, and not to be allowed to get out of the consequences of their actions.”

And in a heightened moment of emotion, it's so hard to hear myself. With CPTSD, PTSD, so very often, it’s so easy to believe that I am a piece of shit and the problem, even when it’s my child’s fuck up. And it all wears me down sorting out what part is me.  

Who do I want to be in the  moment? Who would I have needed when I was a child? Is this really my lack of leadership? Is this because I made decisions that impacted her and I am fuck up? Or is this the cost of humanity… of growth… of shedding the shackles of being in a type of bondage that was generationally passed down to me?

Parenting often exhausts me, especially in times that her give a damn is impenetrably broken.  I am a deeply empathic person who cannot understand how people can be mean to each other.  She, for her part, has watched me be hurt, beaten, walked on, and seen cruel things said to me, by family.   No wonder she chose differently. So, as a Mom, I stand in awe of this fire and grit, even though I have to survive it.  I believe in her and I have to keep working on hearing The Self I always was underneath all the messages of drama, sensitivity, too muchness. She is magic and so am I.

I will continue to shed layers of my story, one falsehood at a time, understanding these “triggers” are meant to show me what I still have to shed… and there are generations of them.  I will hear the voices, knowing they are there to protect me, and tap into my true inner wisdom that lives deep in my body. SHE IS MAGIC. In all her mess, ferocity, and mistakes, this life is for her and I hope I am the mom she needs to guide her away from shame and into her deep inner knowing.