5 strangely specific holiday triggers for post-traumatic parents

The holiday season has arrived. “Now is the season to be triggered, especially if you are a post.traumatic parent. Even if your trauma isn’t explicitly “holiday-related,” holidays can be a trigger if: child rearing and PTSD, cPTSDor trauma-related stress.

1. Overstimulation

Overstimulation can trigger PTSD. When we are traumatized, the “trauma app” in our brains tries to manage stress by keeping our lives small, manageable, and predictable. The holiday season is not like that. In my pre-parenthood life, I was sometimes able to manage holiday triggers by declining some invitations and consciously cutting holiday-themed content out of my life. But once you have kids, your holidays mean coming home from school with germs, carefully worded notices, and moldy oranges.

Vacations also mean we have to deal with the overstimulation of our children alongside our own. Holiday parties are often noisy, crowded, and full of exciting people, including extended family reunions and holiday revelry. Of course the children will be very excited! Even if school assemblies, neighborhood and religious events, and family parties are child-friendly, they will still introduce many unfamiliar people and experiences, unfamiliar foods, and perhaps over-sugar or nutritional supplements to children. There are many foods that cause deficiencies. And a major change in plans. For adults with PTSD or cPTSD, this can be difficult to manage. And even more difficult to manage on behalf of smaller, less capable, and more needy humans.

2. Holiday-based triggers

For some post-traumatic parents, the holidays remind them of specific traumatic events that happened during or around that time. Often, holidays can again provoke a feeling of loss, even if the loss was not so recent, especially when compared to previous holidays when the loved one was still alive.

Also, in many toxic families, the holidays were the perfect situation for abuse. Predatory adults take advantage of lax supervision during family gatherings and the false sense of security that parents feel around family members. Parents may have thought this. “Oh, the kids are around here…somewhere. They’re playing with their cousins ​​and having fun.” I’ve listened to stories from adults and older children.

There are other forms of abuse as well. embarrass and harmful or annual rituals that shame and blame families that can have a huge impact on children who have already experienced a lot of psychological damage from trauma.

Developmentally inappropriate teasing is never good for children. I like to use the “spoon theory” to understand why it has a particularly devastating effect on traumatized children. The “Spoon Theory” was developed by blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 to explain her life. chronic disease. In spoon theory, each spoon represents a unit of energy, and people with chronic illnesses begin each day with a limited number of spoons. The number of spoons a person has varies from day to day and from person to person. Similarly, children who experience trauma wake up with diminished psychological resources and must conserve those psychological resources to manage life. Being teased and the butt of jokes by family members during the holidays consumes a ridiculous amount of spoons that they simply can’t afford.

If you are an adult receiving treatment, childhood Trauma, family holiday gatherings feel excessive stressfulperhaps this is the reason.

3. Memories of implicit threats

One of the ways that PTSD and cPTSD have a lasting impact on us is that they affect our subconscious memories and default mode network of our brains. Our implicit memories are our automatic associations with situations. When you hear “Mr. Rogers,” you have that warm, fuzzy feeling – it’s an unspoken understanding. memory. If you feel scared when you hear the words of the DMV, dentist, or IRS, those words can evoke implicit memories of pain, frustration, or real fear. Even when there is no specific memory to focus on, implicit memories are often part of the trauma.

If you feel more hypervigilant, alert, and persistently feeling low-level threat during the holiday season, you may find yourself feeling more anxious about the holiday season, even if you can’t specifically recall any traumatic memories associated with the holiday season. Implicit memories may be the trigger. This may be the case if you have experienced ‘family shame’ of the type described above, if you have experienced a sense of loss in childhood and are reminded of it on holidays, or if you are close to your family of origin for an extended period of time during school holidays. This can be especially true if you have never felt safe. .

4. Activate your inner child

If you were able to break this vicious cycle and give your children a much healthier childhood than you experienced, congratulations. I know how much work and how much effort goes into it every day. And it’s also normal for your inner child to see that and feel jealous, angry, and resentful.

The problem is that a dysregulated inner child cannot co-regulate with children in the real world. Therefore, it is important to first identify and talk to your inner child.

Yes, your inner child is a child in the real world, the kind of child you are protecting them from, the safety and stability you provide, and the kind of child you are helping in their lives. It’s perfectly normal to be jealous of the times. These feelings become easier to manage if you acknowledge them instead of shaming or blaming yourself.

5. Markers to show the passage of time

Holidays mark the passage of time, which can be frightening for traumatized parents. This is especially true if we have experienced a loss. A loved one has passed away, another holiday has arrived, and they are still dead. Holidays also mark the passage of time during children’s childhoods in the real world. You imagine that by the time your child is 5, 10, 15, everything will be fine, but that’s just not the case. The holidays can bring back all that anxiety.

If you are a parent on a post-traumatic healing journey and are concerned that your own healing is being overshadowed or that your child’s childhood is being disrupted, Remember that you are making the effort. Our progress usually happens gradually rather than suddenly. .

It is also true that all loss is loss, and that even expected, good, and developmentally appropriate losses can cause us grief. As our children grow and mature, we miss the stages they left behind. Yesterday’s innocent toddler completely enchanted by the magic of the holidays is today a jaded middle schooler obsessed with just the right shade of Stanley Cup, and yesterday’s adorable and predictable middle schooler is tomorrow’s peer-obsessed high schooler. It will be.

Although these are predictable and expected losses, they are still losses and can cause triggers around the loss. If a post-traumatic parent is grieving a person, or a childhood they didn’t have, or a loss of safety due to trauma, these losses trigger the “Loss” tab in the trauma app. Possibly.

what to do about it

If your vacation is triggered for any or all of these reasons, it’s important to start by naming and claiming the feeling. If the holiday season makes you feel hyper-vigilant or threatened, or if it’s triggering your inner child feelings envy or angeror if it’s causing a sense of loss, give yourself time to acknowledge it.

Instead of judging yourself, accept these feelings as a normal part of breaking the cycle. Talk to your inner child and acknowledge what it’s feeling. Tell them that we can’t go back in time and undo what happened to them, but we can also allow them to experience what children in the real world are experiencing with them. . As you raise your real-world child, imagine for a moment that you are doing the same with your inner child. If your inner child needs to grieve and grieve, let it. It may sound a bit strange, but many post-traumatic parents have told me that this is a game-changer.

(For a demonstration of how to allow your inner child to grieve, see click here.)

Second, it is important to remember that we are biological creatures. If you feel overstimulated and tired during the holidays, lower the stimulation and take a rest. See if you can decline some invitations and tasks (Adorable Cookies Saw on TV Instagram I think it’s just as delicious if you buy it at the bakery. )

Holiday triggers can be difficult, but they are not an inevitable trap.