Is It You or Your Trauma? Breaking the Cycle in Parenting with Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

You know what you’re supposed to do. You know what you’re supposed to say. You know you’re not supposed to react. And then… you react anyway.

Sound familiar? On this episode of Parenting with Impact, Elaine Taylor-Klaus talks with clinical child psychologist Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, author of Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be, about trauma and parenting, and what it does to our ability to show up for our kids.

Why do I yell at my kids when I know better?

Dr. Koslowitz (her clients call her Dr. K) has a concrete answer: you learned that somewhere. Something happened between knowing better and doing better, and she calls that moment “what trauma taught you.” 

She describes trauma as an experience too big for your brain to metabolize, one that shakes your sense of self or your sense of safety in the world. To cope, your brain builds what she calls a “trauma app.” Maybe yours freezes. Maybe it yells and becomes the biggest voice in the room. For Dr. K, it was dissociating. It worked great in grad school. It doesn’t work so well when your 10-year-old asks, “Mommy, where do you go when you go away behind your eyes?”

What if I “can’t” because of my trauma?

That’s a real question, and asking it is step one. Dr. K connects neurodiversity and what she calls “psychodiversity.” In both instances, the next question is: What do I need? Accommodations? A new skill? Another adult to tag in? Those trauma apps can be reprogrammed. It takes work, but it can be done.

Can parenting a neurodivergent child be traumatic?

Yes. And it doesn’t mean you love your kid any less. Maybe your childhood was fine, and still, nobody ever modeled the skills you need for the kid you have. Getting overwhelmed by that is real, and you deserve support. Elaine shares her own moment: as an adult with undiagnosed ADHD, she could manage two kids. The third kid made it too big to manage without more help.

Key Takeaways

• Yelling, freezing or shutting down are coping strategies your brain learned. They don’t mean you’re a bad parent.
• Trauma is an experience too big for your brain to metabolize, and the coping mechanisms it creates can be reprogrammed with new skills.
• Saying “my trauma says I can’t” is step one; step two is figuring out what skills, accommodations or support will help.
• Many parent questionnaires and evaluation tools weren’t designed for neurodivergent parents, which adds frustration to an already complex process.
• Parenting a neurodivergent child can be its own source of trauma, and that says nothing about how much you love your child.
• Your inner child can’t raise a child, but raising your child can help heal your inner child.

Here’s the bottom line from Elaine: if you’re overwhelmed, that’s not a sign you’re broken. It’s a sign you need a little more help, and there’s a very good reason you’re struggling.

At ImpactParents, Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster help parents of complex kids notice how they’re showing up, so they can be the parents their kids need right now. This conversation leads right into that work.

Find Dr. Koslowitz at posttraumaticparenting.com and on Instagram at @drkoslowitzpsychology.

What to expect in this episode:

• You’ll learn why we as parents react in ways we don’t intend, and how those reactions are coping strategies trauma taught the brain, not personal failures.
• Dr. Robyn Koslowitz explains her “trauma app” framework and how parents can reprogram learned responses like yelling, freezing or dissociating.
• You’ll hear why acknowledging “I can’t because of my trauma” is step one, and how accommodations, new skills or support from another adult can be step two.
• Elaine and Dr. Koslowitz explore the overlap between neurodiversity and psychodiversity, including Elaine’s own experience as a parent with undiagnosed ADHD.
• You’ll come away with the acknowledgement that parenting a neurodivergent child can be traumatic in its own right, and that this doesn’t mean you love your child any less.

Childhood Trauma Affects Your Parenting: How to Break the Cycle, with Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

Related Links:

• Welcome to Parenting With Impact
• Parent Behavior Training
• What To Look for in a Behavior Therapy Program for ADHD
• Parenting Neurodivergent Kids: From Information to Real Change
• Get Curious, Not Furious: A Better Way to Parent Complex Kids

Our Discussion

Elaine: Welcome everybody to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast Have you ever had one of those moments as a parent where you know what you’re supposed to do and you just don’t do it, right? When you know what you’re supposed to say and you’re not saying it, or, or you know you’re not supposed to react and you can’t seem to stay calm. Our guest today is Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, and she is talking about the impact of trauma on parenting and what it does to our ability to parent. I love the question. We talked about it before we got started. Is it you or your trauma? So, um, let’s talk about that. Robin, thank you for being here. Thank you for the work you do, ’cause this is so important. We are, um, for those of you listening, we are gonna start talking about understanding what we need to understand to break the cycle that a lot of us bring into parenting. A lot of… Uh, that’s the work that Robin does, it’s the work we do at, at Impact Parents, is to really raise awareness to how we’re showing up as parents so that we can make the changes we need to be the parents our kids need us to be now in this moment, in this day, where they are right now. Yeah. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: And I love that. I really love that because I think that there are so many well-intentioned parents nowadays. If you look at social media, you have parents who will, you know, be posting their mea culpas all the time. “I yelled at my kid. I really didn’t mean to. I reacted this way. This happened.” And I think that little missing piece that they have is you learned that somewhere. There’s a reason why your brain went to yelling instead of responding the way you wanted to, right? Yeah. There’s a reason why, you know, you went to a harsh punishment when you know they’re not effective, right? Like, something happened. Yeah. There was an interim moment, and that, I’m gonna call that interim moment what trauma taught you, and that’s why my book is Post-Traumatic Parenting. 

Elaine: Okay, so we’re gonna come back to that in, in a second, ’cause that is beautiful… Like, it, it’s, it’s so true. And as you were saying that, I was thinking about, um, I remember when my husband and I first got together, and I remember the conversation still. I can tell you where I was standing in the apartment at the time when I said to him, “You don’t have to scream to have a conversation about something when we disagree.” Like, it was a new concept to him. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: Right? Right. Because that was how he had learned. So, um, so let’s start by I just want you to introduce yourself to the audience through your lens of, like, what is it… You know, not the long version, but what do you do in the world and what got you to be focusing on this work? ‘Cause it’s really profound work. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So I’m a clinical child psychologist, and I work with children and families. And I think like a lot of psychologists, I went into that field from, like, the physician heal thyself kind of model, where I myself as a teenager had PTSD, and I always had this question of, what will my PTSD do to my children? Like, initially, I had this very small question of- Like, what will my flashbacks and my panic attacks do to a baby inside of me, right? Like, will this, will, will these stress hormones poison the baby, right? How do you explain a flashback to a toddler, right? Like, and then it just went progressively from there, and I started looking for, like, the impact of maternal PTSD on children, and there was nothing. There was no research. Wow. You know, this is, we’re going back a very long time. Um, I was pregnant with my oldest in 1999, so I don’t even think, you know, The Body Keeps the Score had been published yet. it was before 9/11. Like, there had, there wasn’t yet this, like, understanding of trauma in the zeitgeist. We knew what anxiety was. We knew what panic was. We knew what depression was. PTSD was, like, not something that you dealt with that much, even in your abnormal psych class. So for me, that was, you know, I’m, I’m just looking at the literature, and there’s nothing, and I kind of realized this is what I’m gonna have to figure out for myself 

Elaine: Well, and for a lot of other people too, so thank you for that. Yeah. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: But- I think we all write the book we would’ve needed to read, right? 

Elaine: Don’t we all? I know I did. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: Overtly. I’m really struck by the fact that you started thinking about it so young, that, um, that you were looking at, “I wanna have a kid, and how does this, how does that show up?” That, I mean, ’cause in 1999, the whole epigenetic awareness wasn’t, uh, wasn’t a common thing either. I remember having a conversation about it around that time and people thinking I was crazy. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right, right. It was not in the zeitgeist at all. Trauma was really, like, this, like, little cousin of psychology. It was like, you know, in abnormal psych it was a paragraph. It wasn’t what we spoke about, you know? it just was, “Yeah, war veterans, they get shell shock.” PTSD is what we call it now. That was, like, the extent of what we were, you know, really talking about back then in the clinical psych world. It just wasn’t… I mean, there were theorists who were starting out. Judith Herman was already speaking about trauma. There were, you know,the Stone Center theorists. There were theorists talking about trauma, but it didn’t have the cultural, you know, attention that it does now. It seems, like, wild, but it really doesn’t. So back then I was more worried about my panic attacks. I was just like, “What am I gonna do if I have a panic attack and, like, I’m alone with my toddler?” Like, I can’t control these panic attacks. I didn’t even realize to that extent that my panic attacks and my PTSD were the same thing at that point. 

Elaine: Wow. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: Well,  and, and I just, I just… I know we need to get into this, but I’m just gobsmacked a little bit by this. Um, what really, what, what really strikes me, before 9/11 we didn’t understand trauma, and since 9/11 we’ve lived in a PTSD world.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: Right? There are so many ways in which trauma has defined the 21st century- 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah … 

Elaine: because of that experience, at least in the United States, and in, and probably even in the Western world. Um, so, so I’m curious about- And maybe this is a private conversation, but I am, I wanna just touch on the difference between individual trauma and kind of cultural or collective trauma. Do they show up differently? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So in my mind, you know, trauma is an experience that’s too big for your brain to metabolize, and it’s something that shakes your sense of self or shakes your sense of safety in the world. 

Elaine: Okay. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Now, sometimes that’s a global event, sometimes that’s a personal event, and sometimes you’ve experienced a personal event, so you already don’t feel like the world is so safe, and then something global happens that really shakes your sense of self or your sense of safety or your ability to be a competent operator of the world, right?

So for someone like me, being a PTSD survivor and then actually being in New York City during 9/11, um, as a very brand-new green extern in a psychology clinic, right? Like, pretty much almost day one, right, I think was 9/11. So, like, the school year started, what, 9/2? And then, like, I was there a week. Um, and we were, like, literally on those front lines. Yeah, right? It’s gonna reawaken old trauma circuitry in your brain, ’cause how could it not? 

Elaine: Right. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So I think there’s, like, a, I think there’s, like a, you know, some sort of an interaction, right, where personal trauma- Almost like a, almost like a negative 

Elaine: symbiosis … 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: and global trauma interact. Yeah. Yeah. 

Elaine: It’s a symbiotic relationship that’s not going in the good way. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. Exactly. 

Elaine: wow. Okay. So, so you came to, so you recognized as a, as a young graduate student clinician that there needed to be attention to this. What brought you to write a book about it? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So honestly, I would search for research for myself, like all research is me search, and there really wasn’t anything. So I just started sort of… And then I, I, I remember actually having this amazing conversation with one of my dissertation supervisors where I was talking about how so many of my classmates are, um, you know, they’re, like, so focused on their research goals. You know, they’re studying, like, Piagetian, you know, understandings of, of, you know, uh, I don’t know, language acquisition in four-year-olds. You know, like, they were like… And I’m, like, in this child encopresis clinic, which is the kids who can’t control their bowels, and I’m in this clinic for kids who act out a lot, and I’m doing this temperament research. Like, I don’t have one specific clear research interest like some of my classmates, and I was starting to feel like the runt of the litter. And then it suddenly dawns on me, like, as she was, like, helping me think this through, that I’m studying the impact of trauma on parenting and on child development. And because if you go into a clinic for kids who lose a lot of control of their, l- lose control of their bowels, and you’re in a clinic for kids who act out, primarily boys, because that’s who ends up referred to that clinic a lot, you’re gonna see a lot of trauma survivors, right? Yeah. And then if you’re working on a parenting study on, on temperament-based parenting, you’re gonna see a lot… The parents who are signing up often are parents who are saying, “I don’t have a roadmap for how to parent.” 

Elaine: Yes. I hear that all the time, right? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right? The selection bias of who walks into the study, right? So and that’s what I was studying. Like, it suddenly crystallized for me. Like, I’m just studying something that wasn’t a crystallized question yet. 

Elaine: Right. Nobody had thought to, to make the connection. And, and it’s so interesting that you’re saying this because, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work in the last few years to try to get some research done on the modality that we teach, ’cause we’ve been doing this for 15 years. We know it works, but the research is kind of important. Um, and the metrics that are used to evaluate research on kids of, with neurodiversity are not well-designed for parents who also have neurodiversity. So the very tool… The, the very questions we’re using to ask the parents aren’t designed if the parents have the issues themselves.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: And so what’s been recommended multiple times is that we should be creating new instruments for, for survey analysis which is totally not in my arena, 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: You know, survey construction is its own whole specialty. 

Elaine: Right. Right It’s a whole specialty, and, and, and I wanna… But I want the parents who are listening to this right now, who have kids with neurodiversity, who probably many of you have it yourselves, to just hear when we say a lot of times the processes, the procedures, the surveys, the questionnaires, the things that we get as parents to try to support our complex kids were not designed for neurodiverse parents. They were designed for neurotypical parents. Right. So they kind of aggravate. They add insult to injury of trying to figure out how to support these kids because the system isn’t designed for, for neurodiverse adults. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: It’s also just you’re, you’re pulling a different, like, competency of mine, like, not trauma, but very often those instruments, because, you know, child evals is something that we do here. Very often those instruments were actually designed for research.  And they just sort of took the questions that were designed for trained research evaluators and just, like, rewrote it for parents, but parents are not trained observers of kids. Parents know their kids best, but they’re not trained observers. So when you say often or always or sometimes or occasionally, when we train people to evaluate kids, like when I’m training someone to, like, evaluate a parenting class, right? We train the raters, like, what do I mean when I say the instructor spoke about this concept occasionally? We’ll, we’ll sit there and be like, “You said occasionally, you said occasionally, but you said sometimes. What did we mean by that?” Right. Until we come to, like, a very close consensus, right? So it’s even worse than that, ’cause it wasn’t even for neurotypical parents, it was for trained evaluators, and there was just trained for instead of, “The child I am observing in the classroom does this frequently.” I know what frequently means. I know exactly how many times they mean by that. Does the mom? 

Elaine: The standard parent does not. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: That, that is the most affirming thing you could have ever shared with me and I hope for the audience, because after almost 20 years of doing this work, I- it is just incredibly frustrating the way that the established medical and psychological community treats the parents who are expected to make all of these complex decisions without any education or information.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: It, it, it sets us up in ways that, that actually will… Let’s go back to the trauma conversation we’re gonna get to, I promise. But it, it kinda sets us up to be reactive, to be frustrated, to, to not be able to manage whatever cycle we bring into it, because now it’s not just us and our kids, but the system is supporting, is not supporting us in, in ways.  And that, that was a great, um, rabbit hole. Thank you for that. We’re gonna take a quick break, and now we’re gonna get back and talk about post-traumatic uh, parenting, I promise. Welcome back. Uh, my guest is Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, and we are gonna… We’ve been having a really interesting esoteric conversation about, um, what it is to parent in the world of neurodiversity, and the frustration around it, and some of the, some of the ways that the system itself re-traumatizes parents in a lot of ways. Let’s, let’s go back and say, what do we mean when you say people are bringing their trauma into the parenting dynamic? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So I look at trauma, like I said before, as, you know, an experience that was too big for your brain. But what happens is your brain then creates a way of coping with that experience, and I call that… My, my analogy for that is an app, right? Like a trauma app. So your brain might say, for example, whenever I’m overwhelmed, I freeze. Like, that makes me feel safe. That worked maybe when I was a child and my dad’s emotions got really big, and he got really loud and really scary. If I froze, he didn’t target me. So now when my kids get loud, I freeze, right? Because I learned how to do that. Maybe it’s, you know, I yell. I, I lash out. I wanna put out the fire nearest to me first, and, like, I become the biggest voice in the room. Whatever it is, right? Trauma will teach us certain coping tools, and they worked in the moment, right? For me, my trauma taught me to dissociate. I am very, very good at, like, focusing very hard on my work, and dissociation does this wonderful thing. If you’re a real dissociator and you’ve ever done it, it takes away all symptoms of stress. So for me, trauma would absolutely… I would get a certain level of stress, and I would disappear, and that’s great, and it worked well as a graduate student. It worked well in many areas of my life. Doesn’t work well if you wanna be a present parent, right? Because you can’t be a present parent if you’re not present. So for me, it was figuring out, is there another way to manage stress that isn’t dissociating, even though what my trauma app wants to do is just dissociate. It’s my superpower. My trauma app’s really good at it. And there, the problem with trauma is it’s really telling the truth, right? The app is really telling the truth. Like, the situation is dangerous. Dissociating would help, right? If I don’t wanna yell at my kids and I dissociate, I will not yell. This is true. But there’s a cost, right? If you have… And in my book, I have, like, five post-traumatic parenting subtypes where I sort of take you through what trauma taught you how to do and why that might be impacting your parenting, and why that might make it hard for you to parent in accordance with your values and to do what you’re trying to do. So I really look at trauma as an instance of learning, and the goal then is to reprogram that app, right? The goal is to say, “Wait a minute, maybe I can act in a different way. Maybe there’s another option.” That is an option, and it has worked for me for many, many, many years. It’s not working for parenting, though.

Elaine: Yeah. So I, I’ve heard people say, “Well, you, I can’t do that because of my trauma.” 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Okay. 

Elaine: So can you- 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: But that’s just step one, right? Like in other words, I have that with anything, and I, I look at, like, neurodiversity and psychodiversity as very, as very similar. Yeah. Sometimes we have a challenge, right? You have something. I have sensory needs, right? And, you know, a certain sound annoys me, and yet there’s something rewarding about the situation and I’d like to be there. So then the question becomes, “So how can I be there even though I have these sensory needs? What do I need to do? Do I need accommodations?” Right? Is there a way that we can accommodate the situation? Is there a way that I can train myself to tolerate it? One or the other, when we’re rational actors, when we’re adults, we have to figure that stuff out. I know for me, um, you know, I get triggered in very loud, very chaotic environments, so- Sometimes I have to decide if I wanna take my kids to Dave & Buster’s, do I have to prepare myself and really sort of empty my bucket of stress because I am gonna be on edge? And sometimes I have to say, “I am not the parent who takes you to Dave & Buster’s,” right? Right. Somebody else needs to  Or maybe I need my earbuds, right? Or maybe I need to take breaks, and I need to, like, tap another adult in to be on duty so I can go take a break. There’s always a way to say, “Okay, step one is I can’t because of my trauma. Step two is, okay, how do I reprogram that? How do I learn a skill to handle it?” And sometimes not. Sometimes there’s something that, like, I’m never gonna be able to learn a skill to handle, or it’s way above me at this point, so I’m gonna come up with a plan of other adults who can do that thing. Sometimes, right? Sometimes it’s like, you know what? It’s not worth it right now for me. But usually the goal is, well, what can I do to learn a different set of skills? And that’s where hope lies, right? Because we can actually reprogram our trauma app. It just takes a lot of work. Like, it’s not easy. And I hate the word just. I always say just is a four-letter word. 

Elaine: Agreed. Agreed. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right? Right? But it takes a lot of work. It can be done. The reason I wrote Post-Traumatic Parenting, because really, it’s any trauma. Any trauma can be reprogrammed and relearned and reprocessed. I just find, at least for me, it was only my kids that made it worth it for me. It was only when, I actually talked about this in my TEDx talk, where my 10-year-old son, um, came to me and said, “Mommy, where do you go when you go away behind your eyes?” And he started to cry. And that’s when I realized I need to get a handle on this. Like, this superpower of mine that works so well for me, that, like, allowed me to be a grad student who was a working mom. I was able to, like, get on a bus and just work on, like, homework. Like, I would sit there with my laptop and just focus. Yeah. And, you know, my commuting time was my focus time. It worked very well for me. I had supervisors who really liked my work ethic, right? There were times in my life this worked well. Had I not had kids, I don’t know that it would ever occur to me that dissociation is not the ultimate stress management hack. Because it was only my son who I cared enough to change for. 

Elaine: So it, what strikes me, Robin, is that you got curious about it in the first place because you knew you wanted to have kids, and you were worried about it.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. Yeah. 

Elaine: So, so then once you had kids, in those early moments and years before your son said the most profound thing, um, I’ve ever heard a child say- 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah … 

Elaine: uh, that’s just sad and gorgeous, right, as kids are. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: He’s always been a very observant kid, yeah. 

Elaine: They’re so wise. They, we train it out of them, but they’re so wise. Um, what happened before… ‘Cause you were consciously learning it, and yet weren’t even seeing it. Can you speak a little bit to, like, how do we address it if we don’t even know it’s there? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So initially it was really my panic attacks, and my panic attacks and flashbacks were the thing I was worried about the most. But as I got older, my brain got better and better at dissociating, and I really did think of dissociating as this magical bullet out of my panic attacks. Now, I was still worried because the initial moment of panic, like when you’re pregnant, the baby’s experiencing all those stress hormones, so that has to do something to the baby. So that was my initial fear, was just like, “How do I not have these stress hormones?” But then my brain figured this dissociation thing out, and I would, and I would be like, “This is great. This is so good. I can have a flashback.” Yeah, and it would work. “And then I dissociate, and I do research in my brain, and, and the, it goes away. This is so fabulous. Like, I, I have this, like, I have this, like, magical bullet.” 

Elaine: I said, so I’m gonna draw a parallel. You said that there’s a lot of correlation between psychotherapy and about neurodiversity and psycho- 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: And what I call psycho diversity, yeah. 

Elaine: Right. And as you were saying, you were worried about having panic, panic attacks, right? I’m an adult with ADD. I didn’t know it at the time. I was worried that I wasn’t gonna be able to wake up. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: My kid needed me. That was my greatest fear- 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah … 

Elaine: about having a kid, was that I wasn’t… And to, almost to your point, I wasn’t gonna be able to, to get myself to do what the kid needed me to do because I was an, a, an adult with undiagnosed ADHD who couldn’t get myself to do what the world wanted me to do. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. 

Elaine: So it’s a very parallel issue. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. Yeah, you have this, and I have a lot of young parents who come in, and sometimes the onset of parenting brings back the psychological, brings back the concern about the psychological condition that they’ve sort of learned to, to live with. You know, let’s say someone has OCD, and it’s like, “Oh, no, but what if my OCD flares up while I’m caring for an infant? Like, caring for an infant takes a lot of energy and attention, and caring for my OCD takes a lot of energy and attention. What if I have to do both at the same time?” Right. And they’ll come back into therapy from a place, very often, especially when it’s people who had been in therapy as kids more because their parents wanted them to be.

Elaine: Yeah. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Like, “What do you care? So I’ll sanitize my drawer 17 times. Why do you, why do you care? It’s my life.” Why do you care? 

Elaine: Right. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right? Yeah. But suddenly it occurs to them, and I don’t mean suddenly occurs to them, ’cause that sounds very flippant and dismissive. No, no. Suddenly it resonates at a very deep level. They make the connection. I don’t, I’m not gonna have the time to care for an infant and manage my OCD, right? I’m not gonna have the time. For me, it’s like I’m not gonna… when I have a flashback and I lose sense of where I am in the world, and a toddler there, that could be really dangerous. What’s gonna happen? And until then, you know, the standard CBT therapy that had worked for my panic attacks was good enough, right? It was enough to have just done that, okay, learn how to breathe, learn progressive muscle relaxation. Like, that helped enough. It got my symptoms enough under control.

But then there was this other whole piece that when my son asked me that question, that’s when I said, “Oh, I need to go deeper here.” 

Elaine: Well, and, and can I share for the neurodiverse parents listening my moment? This is so clear in what you’re saying. Like, I can totally relate to it. It was when I had my third kid.

I could kind of hobble along through the first two, and when I had the third kid, it was like I could not I could not manage anymore, the three kids and my ADHD without getting a better handle on all of it. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. The project just got too big to manage the way you had been managing it.

Elaine: So, so, it, it, you know, the take-home message I hope for those of you listening is if you’re finding yourself feeling like, “I’m overwhelmed, I can’t handle it,” whatever it, it, it is, right? Trauma, neurodiversity, like, what, you know, aging parents, whatever it is, um That’s not a sign that you’re broken or that there’s anything wrong with you. That’s the sign that you need a little more help to learn to manage this. Because there’s a very good reason you’re struggling. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. Right? And I always say it’s not you, it’s your trauma, right? Like when people come to me and they’re just like, “I yelled at my kids. I just know it. I’m, I’m giving them the childhood I had. This is terrible,” right? You really did learn how to yell somewhere, like, and that wasn’t you, right? Yeah. You’re not mean, rotten, and nasty that you just yelled at your kids. You love your kids. Something taught you to yell, or something didn’t teach you to self-regulate. 

Elaine: Oh. This is a beautiful conversation.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So let’s teach you something else. 

Elaine: Thank you. This has just been lovely. I hate to end the conversation. We have to start wrapping. Robyn, people can find out about you. Your website is posttraumaticparenting.com. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yes. 

Elaine: Your book, which is on our carousel, we’re, we’re gonna have everything you need there, is also Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. They can also find you on Instagram at drkoslowitzpsychology, right? And again, all this will be in the show notes if you have a hard time pronouncing Koslowitz. And, um, or you said people call you Dr. K. I love that. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Dr. K, yeah. 

Elaine: Uh, before we wrap, is there anything else that you wanna share with our listeners that we haven’t had a chance to talk to, or that you wanna highlight from what we have talked about?

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah, sure. First of all, I wanna say for neurodiverse parents, I recorded the book as an audiobook as well. I personally recorded it, because I know that, like, we don’t always have time to read, and I firmly believe that reading with our ears is the exact same thing as reading with our eyes, so, you know? And, and I liked, I wanted to record it myself, ’cause I think it feels more intimate and like a conversation. Um- 

Elaine: I, can, can I just, moment, I just have to share this. Sure. I wasn’t allowed to based on my contract. Okay. And so because they required a professional voice, and my eldest child was an actor, is an actor, and so my eldest child voiced my book.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Oh, wow. That’s amazing.  That worked out. 

Elaine: Okay, they’re an actor. Right. Anyway. Beautiful. Love that you did that. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah, I fought for that right. I think the other piece, um, if we go down a different, a different, like, way of thinking about trauma is I have this line that, you know, your inner child can’t raise a child, right? But in raising your real world child, you can absolutely heal your inner child, right? There is a way to really profoundly heal yourself while parenting so that it’s not just for your kids, because of course our kids are what gives us the energy to change. But even more so, ultimately it’s for ourselves, ’cause we wanna bring our whole selves to parenting. So parenting can actually heal you, too. 

Elaine: Good work. Uh, yeah. I love it. Right? Yeah, it really, it really… There’s so much there. Like, this, this notion, like, we’re on this journey as parents. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: What I love about parenting is that parenting is actually about us, not about them. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: Right. Right? Awesome. And when we give ourselves permission to say, “Well, this is our journey. And yes, it’s about them, but it’s also about us.” 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah, yeah. 

Elaine:  I like to say our journey is to be with them on their journey. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah, yeah. And also, for those listening, sometimes the first trauma was parenting a neurodiverse child, and that doesn’t mean that you love your kid any less. But if you think of trauma as an experience too big for your brain to metabolize that makes you feel unsafe and incompetent and alone, sometimes that first instance of trauma is not childhood. Sometimes your childhood was fine, but you never were modeled the skills you need for the kid, the kid you have, and that’s okay, right? That is in and of itself traumatic, and that’s, that’s okay. That just means that that was the first time you were overwhelmed and you needed new skills. 

Elaine: You got to a point where it got too big. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. 

Elaine: You know, one of the things I love, Gabor Mate says, “Trauma isn’t what happened to you, it’s being alone with what happened to you.”

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Right. Right, exactly. 

Elaine: Right? And that’s what I hear you saying is, like, if you are feeling traumatized by this really complicated experience of raising a complex kid, um, that’s real and that is worthy of your love and attention and support, and not just surviving the thing, I should.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. And, it’s not less love for your child. You can love your child deeply and be traumatized by the experience you had when they were born or, you know, when they were first diagnosed or before they were diagnosed and when people were, like, just looking at you like the worst parent in the room ’cause your kid’s the only one not with the program or whatever happened, right?

Elaine: Beautiful. Yeah. I, I could talk to you all day. Unfortunately, I can’t, but thank you. Right. Thank you so much. Before we wrap, do you have a favorite quote or motto you wanna share? 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: So I really love, “Richer than me you’ll never be, for I had a mother that read to me.” And I feel so strongly that when we share stories and fun experiences at play and games with our kids, that ultimately that joy is really what makes parenting work, right? So whether it’s actually reading a book or whether it’s telling a story or sharing your day or playing a game, there’s just something about the riches that that creates. I’ve always loved that. 

Elaine: I love that. I’ve never heard that quote. It’s beautiful. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Yeah. Thank you. It’s Strickland Gillan. Yeah. Beautiful. I think I’m pronouncing that right. 

Elaine: I love it. Thank you. Robin, thank you. Thank you for doing this profound work in the world, for sharing it with our community and your community, um, and, and for really giving me a lot to think about today. I really enjoyed that. That correlation between, um, psychodiversity and neurodiversity is really profound and, and really real and, and very, very present in this community, so thank you for that. That was a real gift for me. Thank you. 

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. 

Elaine: My pleasure. To those of you listening, take a moment. Ask yourself from all of the juicy stuff here, what did you take away from this conversation? What’s your insight, your a-ha, your gem? Maybe how do you wanna apply it to your life this week? What’s one little moment that you wanna take from this and use in your, in your life and as, in your world as a parent or a provider? And as always, thanks. Thanks for what you’re doing for yourself, for your kids. It makes such a profound difference. And if you like what you’re hearing on this podcast, please take a moment, like, follow, subscribe. Apparently, I was supposed to be saying subscribe all this time, I just learned. So please subscribe. Even better, leave a review. Help us reach the pe- the parents who need this most. Um, and, uh, until the next conversation, have an amazing week, and we’ll see you on the next one. Take care, everyone.