A short YouTube talk by Dr. Karol Darsa (psychologist, founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment) explaining how parents’ own childhood experiences and traumas shape their parenting—often unconsciously—leading to repeating, overcorrection, or emotional depletion. She recommends increasing awareness by listing received messages, checking feelings behind disciplinary behavior, balancing self-care with child care, and seeking professional help when trauma interferes; two client vignettes (sexual abuse reminder, reaction to a military upbringing) illustrate common patterns. The talk closes with a call-to-action to comment and to contact Reconnect for professional support.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darca, author, psychologist, and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Do you know how much your parenting skills are impacted by the way that you are parented? This is what we're going to talk about today. Parenting is a tough job, actually. It's quite overwhelming. And a lot of people are aware and they just say, okay, this is difficult because, you know, we have kids to take care of. What they don't consider, though, is how much that's been impacted by the way that they are parented. If especially you are not parented properly. And I'm going to explain what that means, you are going to have much, much tougher time to parent your own kids, despite all your willingness and all your good intentions. So let's talk about a little bit about that. When you were growing up, have you ever had a thought that said something like, I'm never going to talk like my dad, or I'm never going to yell like my dad, or I'm not going to say what my mom used to say. I'm going to ignore. I'm not going to ignore my children. I'm going to give them much more. Whatever I didn't get, I'm going to give my children. Yes, I'm sure you have said some of these things. And did you find yourself sometimes saying the same exact things to your kids the way that your parents used to say? So don't be surprised. You're definitely not alone. And in fact, a lot of people, when they first realize that, they get really angry at themselves because they hear themselves almost seeing in the mirror, oh my God, I sounded just like my parents. I hated my parents for it and now I sound like them. So don't panic. Let's start there. Don't panic and increase awareness. First of all, if you can really look at this as an opportunity to get to know yourself and maybe even write down all the messages that you got about parenting. Were you abused? Were you hit? Were you verbally abused? Were you treated with love? Were you ignored? Were you abandoned? Were you maybe overly given things right? There was maybe not even space, space for you to breathe? Were you controlled? Were your parents scared something bad is going to happen? Start writing all these down, the messages, the direct messages, the indirect messages about what it means. How did you think your parents felt about being a parent? Did you hear them say things like, I can't wait for my kids to grow up or when are you leaving home? Or I gave all my life for you, all the sacrifices I made for you, you know, those kind of statements. And these are all the messages that you might have heard. And of course, if you carry those with you into your own parenting, you got, you are going to be impacted. So after you write all these messages, start really trying to find specific examples of where, how these messages are showing up in your life as a parent. Right. So we talked about, for instance, if you got the message that work is more important than you. Right. That could be one thing. So start seeing if you do this. So you have to be very objective as you look at that list and as you look at your own behavior, you might have a bit of a hard time because it's really not fun to look in the mirror and go, okay, here are my mistakes with my kids and here's the parallel to my parents of how I do the exact same thing. So. But I'm going to help you with that as well. So try to see also your feelings underneath every behavior. It's very easy for us to sometimes just discipline our kids or just tell them what to do, you know, because we are sort of maybe raised that way. But see if you can catch your feeling underneath the behavior. So if you're really purely, I want to say, impartial about when you discipline your child and you find yourself more neutral, then maybe you're not as impacted as I'm saying. But if you have a lot of charge, a lot of emotions, you might think, well, I'm getting upset because my kids are behaving that way. But you might really find yourself actually that the reaction is more coming from your own childhood. So as parents, we might feel inadequate, or we might feel not good, not good enough, or. Or we might just be really plain overwhelmed. Especially children who have not had enough love and attention in their childhood. They don't have much to give. So when the kids demand love and attention, which is their right, parents are quite depleted about it. And that's how the childhood trauma might be affecting your parenting capacity. So, well, you might also go to the other side of this, which I've noticed a lot in our generation. What do I mean by our generation? Well, I'm born in the 70s, but usually my generation parents were very much more focused on what's good for the parents. Like on the weekends it was about what do the parents want to do, right. So we came from that generation the attention being more on the parents. And then what I've seen around make it friends, colleagues or clients is that there's over giving to the kids now so because we didn't receive it, we want to over give. I noticed a lot of the parents, parents, the only question maybe they're asking is what does my kid need? It's almost like what do I need? Question does not even come to their mind. And that's also, believe it or not, a childhood trauma impact. Yes, the intention is good because we want to give to our kids, but it's mostly because we want to repair whatever we couldn't have in our childhood. And that attempt to repair our childhood is often, you know, projected onto our kids. And yes, it might look good. Well, the kids get a lot, but the parent might be really burning out and physically might be there, but emotionally not really there. So watch for those tendencies I'm seeing over the years. There's sort of generational issues that happen. Maybe one generation gives a lot and then the other one doesn't and then the next generation does that again and really throwing off what's supposed to be balancing act between self care and the care of kids. I took some notes, I'm looking at my notes. So yes, it's very important to take care of yourself. I know it's a cliche to say put you know, the oxygen in your face before you, you give the oxygen to your kids during a airplane, but it is true, especially in such a difficult job as parenting. So take care of yourself, become aware of your shortcomings. Oh, very important to not have this idealized self of a parent. I, I think we became really perfectionist in the past. Parents were good enough and now we want to be the best parents in the world. And any little thing, you know, we're blaming ourselves. If we work, we are upset, we're leaving our kids if we don't work, oh my God, we are at home too much with our kids and we don't have enough money or you know, you name it, we have it. We tend to be much more self blaming as parents. So be easy on yourself, but keep awareness, don't make things automatic because the more you see the connection between how you are parenting your child and your childhood, the more you can actually correct it. If you find yourself sort of helpless and not sure where to go and you need guidance, I highly recommend that you get professional help. Someone who understands parenting issues and maybe even childhood issues. So the marriage of two, actually you'll find the most helpful. Most parenting tips are about the behavioral stuff, what you have to do to the kids, right? So it's just like a manual, so to speak. But they're really Missing the point of what is it triggering in you when your child is saying something? What, what does that mean about you? Or how does it remind you of your parents? If you can look at the those you are much more likely implement the parenting strategies. They're, they're great parent parenting books. Don't, don't get me wrong, the tools are great, but I'm just adding the piece about the childhood trauma into your awareness, into your life, so that you can always make the connection. I'm a huge believer that awareness is a number one key for any healing and any really improvement in our lives. Let me give you a couple of examples based on everything that I told you. I want to share two clients that I've seen over the years and those are actually some common things that I've seen. So in the first one, my client has a 5 year old daughter and she started becoming quite as my. Actually the daughter turned five, she started becoming really overly protective and worried about everything that her daughter was saying or doing and, and really finding herself quite in fear. Well, as we started working on that, it became clear that when she was five years old herself, she was sexually abused. So her daughter's turning five years old was a huge reminder of her own sexual abuse and it was almost like she was waiting when and if her own daughter would endure such abuse. Of course it is normal to be cautious as a parent, especially in these ages, but it was important for the client to become aware of her own trauma and to work on her trauma so that this fear was not translated and projected onto the daughter. We want to give them a sense of caution and awareness, right. The children, so that they know, but we don't want to raise them in such fear that they are now constantly in a hypervigilant state. So this is how the trauma work was really helpful for my client. Another example is a little bit of different, but this was a client who was raised by a military dad. And you might understand it or you might relate to this, but a lot of the kids who are raised in such environment, they talk about their parents being very, very controlling, highly disciplined and, and pretty much everything is like a military in home, which to a certain extent is good. But after a while what it started happening is that the client wanted to give the exact opposite experience to the child and became overly relaxed. It was almost like there's no rule you can go to bed anytime, you can do anything, anyone, you know. So to go from one extreme to the other extreme. And as we started getting into this topic, it became very clear for them that it was really the dad's controlling behavior and parenting style that made the client go completely to the other side. I'm very curious about your comments and questions about this topic. I hope you can write below the comments and let me know if you are able to change your parenting style based on how you are raised or if you're relating to any of the things that I was sharing. Also, please write down if you have any questions or if you want to contact us at Reconnect. And if you would like more professional support, you know you can reach us@renect center.com we are here to help you. And remember, as always, trauma equals disconnect. Healing equals reconnect. Stay connected. SA.
