Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. If you are a regular listener here, you may have heard the previous episodes that I did with Elizabeth Corey. She's my special guest today, and I think you'll really appreciate her experiences, her insights, and her messages of hope.
She has survived a very dark childhood during which she suffered severe childhood trauma, including incest and even being sex trafficked by her own parents as a young child, as well as other intense physical and emotional abuse. She says, by the age of nine, I was fully indoctrinated. I had given up. I remember the moment when I realized there was no hope of being saved from this terrible life.
In that moment, I made a conscious choice to forget. And she did forget until out of her desperation for help, when she was struggling to function as a mom of twins, she finally began her healing process as heroes do. Elizabeth's dedicated her life to helping others who may be finding themselves easily triggered, not functioning as well as they would wish to as a parent or a person. She says, as I advocate for trauma recovery, I'm helping survivors of childhood trauma move past the trauma and find new ways to uncover who they were meant to be.
I'm thankful to have my friend Elizabeth back here today to help parents recognize and understand the reactions that they may be having to their children's behavior and how maybe some of these reactions are worth a deeper look because they can give us the clarity that we need to strengthen our relationships with our kids and make our lives easier as parents. Hi, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for being here. I am so glad to be here with you today.
Thank you. Honestly, I think when the two of us come together, we create something really cool. So looking forward to it. Thank you.
Well, that's an honor to meet you because to me, you're a hero. I've told you that before. You're my hero. And parents have loved your episodes.
You've brought so much healing and hope to them. So it's such a gift to have you again. I wanted to bring up today because I think it's a great topic. This is your idea that we talk about children being mirrors to our own issues, our unhealed trauma.
And your story is that you, with the severe trauma that you had, you did not even realize it until you had children, right? No, I didn't. You know, people come to me all the time and they're like, how do I know about trauma? Because I relate to everything you're talking about.
And I remember none of my childhood, you know, or maybe I remember just A few things, and it's not very much. And my message to them is always, if you're asking that question, there's something to look at, there's something you need to explore. Because the truth is, we do forget. It gets a dissociative thing for us to forget.
It is a trauma response, and it is a survival skill to forget. But we don't forget the good stuff. Generally speaking, if we've forgotten things, it's because they're not good. And yeah, I was one of those people.
Like I, before I had my kids, I went to the therapist going, why am I anxious? I don't know. But the first thing out of my mouth to my therapist was, I had a great childhood and my family's just fantastic. They're great.
I think maybe she didn't totally believe me, but she didn't have any reason to go, you're wrong. So when the kids were born, it felt like my anxiety spiked about a thousand times the minute they came into my life. And that's not what we want. That's not.
That's not what the advertising said. It says, you're gonna have kids that are gonna feel love and beauty and more love and connection. And I was terrified. I was terrified.
That is when I knew something was really not right. And so which, which part was. I mean, what was an example of something that really scared you about caring for your children? Well, you have twins, right?
So you have. Yeah, they have twins. And one went right into the pcn. So that was a stressor.
And that would make anybody nervous, but she wasn't significantly sick or anything. It was pretty mild stuff that went on. And they were born small, so that is a stressor. But that wasn't the stuff that got me.
Actually, when we have a trauma background, sometimes the crises are like what we're used to. And so I actually handled the crisis moments pretty well. And even doctors were like, wow, you are weirdly calm. But it was the day to day stuff.
How do I feed them? How do I get them to sleep? How do I change their diaper? Just to do the basic stuff I would be, like, panicking about.
What if I don't feed them enough? What if I mess this up? What if I make mistakes? Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna screw it all up.
It all just felt totally and completely overwhelming to me. Like I was supposed to have a motherly instinct and I could tell that it was, on some level, blocked. But I also, you know, had that deep down unworthiness feeling in me that Said, I'm gonna get this wrong. And I didn't realize at the time that that was based on the idea that I was not raised well.
I didn't know that then, but I think that had a lot to do with it. It's like, how do I know how to do this when none of it was ever really done for me? And that, I think, was behind a lot of my anxiety. But at the time, I didn't know that, not yet.
So I felt some of those things. I mean, I've not had the trauma that you've had at all, but I've felt a lot of that. And you had twins, so some of that is just to be expected, I think. But some, somehow with you, you had the sense that it was on a different level.
Yes. And it affected me so physically, like, you know, it was very panicked. Right. It was very desperate.
It felt to me, I think I intuitively know this is more intense than what I would consider the quote, unquote, normal reaction people might have to parenting. They don't know what they're doing. I mean, it felt like every decision was life or death. And I knew that wasn't right.
I'd known enough parents and heard enough things and read enough books. Of course, I've read parenting books, as we do. And I was like, yeah, I don't think it's supposed to be quite like this, that desperate, desperate feeling that I had in me. So was it your therapist then that worked through this with you and figured it out with you, or how did you figure it out?
Well, and this is where it gets kind of intuitive on my part. Yes, my therapist was helpful, but I actually never retrieved memories in my therapist's office. That actually never happened. I talked to her and she told me, this is okay.
This may be a sign of something. This might not be totally normal to feel this way. And it was a great relationship. I was able to establish trust with another adult human being, and that was very helpful for me.
But I started to write. I just intuitively and inherently felt this need to start writing things down, writing how I felt, writing my story, what I knew of it at the time, which was very limited, writing, you know, on a daily basis what was coming up for me with my kids. And the next thing I knew, I was starting to write more from the emotions I was feeling. And around the time the kids were about 2 years old, I started to get flashbacks, probably after I'd been writing for like a year or so.
And that's when the memories started coming back. And I really used the writing as a facilitator for the memories. I would write what I remembered, I would write how I felt about what I remembered. And that really began the process of memory recovery for me.
So how did you have time to write with twins, by the way? In the bathroom sometimes. Yeah, no, it would probably mostly be when they went to sleep at night. I mean, I, I was working, I was a single mom by the time I got my first memory back, because my relationship unfortunately itself was mirroring a lot of the trauma that I experienced.
So that didn't last. And so I was a single mom and I had, I was lucky enough to have a good job. And so sometimes I could write on my lunch break or, you know, I could write when I got up in the morning if there was time. I only needed to write for 10 to 15 minutes at a time.
Like, it's not that I wrote all day long, but writing really helped me to understand myself and start getting the memories back and start the journey. But yes, I mean, logistically, I work with a lot of parents and clients who are like, when do I do this? Like, I can't walk away from a two year old, so I can go right. And there is a lot of logistical challenges to processing your own trauma while raising children.
And there is no easy answer to that. It's going to be a bit messy. So sometimes you're not going to be able to do it, but it's about finding a balance that works and doing it when you can. And the good and bad news for me was that I used to get triggered a lot at night.
So when I got the kids down to bed, it actually was a really good time to write. So I did a lot of it then. But everybody's different. I would say the number one catalyst for writing in my clients is the anger that comes up, especially when kids trigger us as they do.
But there's lots of different emotions that we can write from. I'm wondering too if it's a coincidence that you start to have the flashbacks when your children were two, since that can become the peak of them suddenly pushing back. And they're not just that simple anymore. They're not just kind of like, well, they need this and they need that.
And it's all really apparent. Suddenly they're saying no to things that we think they need, but they don't think so, and they're demanding things that we don't think they need. And it's confusing. I mean, that's when the classes that I teach A lot of times, parents wouldn't want to join until kids were already at least in the ones they didn't think, you know, they needed to add much or they needed to know more with an infant.
But now the child is over one, and now it's getting more complicated. Yes. And I would say a lot of people who come to me also come once they have those toddlers and they are pushing back. And, yeah, my anger started showing up around that time.
So it was when my writing escalated to more emotional journaling, which is what I call it. And emotional journaling, in my opinion, is what can be a catalyst to memory recovery. So, yes, I'm sure it was tied to their age in so many ways. My son was one of those, I'm gonna push back on all the things.
And he did. He did. And it was. It was a challenging time between the two of us at first.
And that's interesting, because I've not had the chance of meeting him, and he must have done really, really well, because I could not imagine a more polite, charming child. Thank you. I. I will say that we turned it around, but really, it wasn't his job.
So I turned it around in that sense when I was able to figure out where all of those emotions were coming from. And, yes, I love who he is. And I. I do know that if I had repeated my trauma patterns, it would be a very different scenario right now.
But instead, yeah, I've got a really wonderful, wonderful kid who is just about to turn 18, and I can't believe it. It's wild, isn't it? So how can parents begin to know that, hey, what I'm feeling, the anger I'm feeling when my child does this behavior, that that's more than just this really natural feeling of responding to something unkind that a child does to you, hurts you, hits you, let's say, or refuses to do what you say. How do we know when our response is going beyond what would be expected with any parent to something where, hey, there's something here I should look at?
That is a really good question. And I commented this from a slightly different perspective than a lot of people and that I think most emotional responses do actually have some level of trigger associated. That doesn't mean we have to use the word trigger. We don't.
But I do think, in my personal opinion, that there is. There's a lot more trauma out there than we know there is. And I think most people are dealing with at least something traumatic. And what I have found is that our children, who we Love Dearly are here to bring this to our attention.
And that's why children's behaviors and the impact it has on us can be so varied. You know, as I talk to my clients, like, one client can have an extremely strong response to something that another client barely is impacted by. All right? So I think when it comes to knowing if it's a trigger, the first thing I would do is, if you're having an emotional response to it, assume that it might be just stuck there.
Just be like, you know what? This might be pointing to something. It's that curiosity that can take us places and heal things for us that is just so valuable. It's also hard to have it because our system is geared to shut that down.
We don't want to dig. We don't want to look at that thing. Whatever that thing is, it feels too scary. So our system will just naturally explain it away.
Oh, you need to eat something. You're having a bad day. You need more caffeine. It's just fine.
That's where we go. But in reality, if we're having a relatively strong emotion, I'm not talking about the panic that I had, but if we're having an emotion, it's worth being curious about it. And some of the primary emotions that I've seen that have really been trigger response one is fear. And I was talking about this a minute ago.
I was talking about it on a really extreme level. Right. I was saying I was panicking because I didn't know if I could feed my kids enough. But fear in the parenting process can be a sign that we are, in fact, projecting traumatic relationships onto the child.
Right. This is something that I see. And so that feeling of fear can be a flashback feeling. It can be coming from a trigger that's saying, like, the power differential is working the wrong direction.
That kid, that child has power over me. And when we feel that way, we start moving into kind of survival mechanisms which are very powerless in nature. Instead of doing something grounded, like, you know, setting a boundary and holding it, we move into some other technique, some powerless technique to solve the problem. Yeah, we can have control of ourselves then.
Yeah, right. Yeah. And that could be anything from manipulating, bribing, you know, blaming them for the emotion that we're having in the moment. The list is endless of what we may do when we move into that powerless flashback that we have.
But that is. That is a trigger. That is a flashback. And we've talked a bunch of times about rage and.
And, you know, and just really intense anger. That's going to be a trigger response. That's going to be an unresolved trauma. Oftentimes rage is blocking fear.
It's almost like it's protecting us because now we're scared. So up comes the anger, right? To say I have to protect myself. So that is going to be a trigger response if we really step back.
And this is what I try to help parents do because this is what I would do for myself if we really were able to step back and look at this realistically. This person is 2, 3, 4, 6 years old. How could I be enraged by this small, immature person? You know, it doesn't make sense on that really objective level.
Yeah, you bring up an excellent point too, that this isn't even about the mind. And maybe that's when we know it's a trigger response. Is our mind that knows better is not involved. It's not involved.
My clients tell me all the time, you're like, it's so frustrating because I know what to do, right? Like I've read Dan's book, I listened to her podcast, I know what to do. So why can't I just do it? And it's like, because it's not about your mind.
When you get triggered, you're having an emotional response. That emotion lives in the body. Your mind is gone, it's checked out. It's not a part of the scenario.
You're responding from that nervous system, adrenaline, cortisol filled place. There's no mind, there's no logic involved in that. Yeah. And then we beat ourselves up with guilt for how could you feel like that?
What's wrong with you? How could you do that? And that of course just piles on, makes it harder the next time, makes us tap into more of that lack of control and rage and fear when what we really need is to blast ourselves with self compassion around that. This is sad that this is going on.
It's not that you're, you're bad, you know, but that's the other thing too is that these people that were probably doing the best they could, I mean, I don't know in your case, but it's really hard for me to see that in your case. But a lot of times my parents were doing the best they could, but they instilled all this doubt in us about what we're feeling. And you know, you said that you were afraid as a parent you would know how to do it. Well, there was so much doubt instilled in you, you know, not to trust yourself, not to trust what your Instincts were telling you that these people are doing bad things to you, but you can't trust that.
You know, you have to love them. And so anyway, it's like this. It sounds impossible for anybody to be able to unravel this and figure it out. I mean, that's how challenging it is.
Like the odds are so against it on one hand. And that's why it's such a brave thing to do. Exactly. It is a very brave, very amazing thing to move into this place because it requires hope.
When we're probably feeling some of the most intense hopelessness we felt since childhood, hope that we could work it out. Because the truth is we can't solve it in the mind. I like to use the phrase figureoutable. It's not figureoutable.
We're not going to work it out in the frontal lobe. It requires us to sit with those emotions until they tell us what they need to tell us. And that in and of itself is terrifying. It really isn't a controllable process.
You know, it's so easy to solve a math problem with the frontal lobe, if you know some math. But this is a completely different thing. It requires hope, it requires faith. It requires some tolerance for the unpredictable or the unknown.
And that's. That's scary. And doing that on top of parenting, which also requires most of those things as well, this is asking a lot of a person. And so we do need to sit with that futility.
That futility is also a sign that we are triggered. What I call futility, you can also call hopelessness. But it is this feeling that we often get in parenting that there's no way to move out of this place. Like there's.
There's no hope that this will turn out and we will get paralyzed. We will freeze up. That is also a trigger response. And it is coming from that powerlessness that I mentioned earlier.
When the survival skills kick in for us, you know, these things really tell us that we're triggered. Right. We're in that place. You said this really spot on thing in regard to children being mirrors.
Children sense our emotions before they hear our words. If they don't match up, children will be anxious or confused. Yeah, it took me a long time to figure this out. But what often happens is when we have trauma, we will kind of roll through our adulthood with a lot of emotional blocks in place.
So we'll be shutting that stuff down, numbing ourselves out, dissociating, which comes in many forms, and really being ungrounded. And that can work. Okay. I Mean, it's sort of like a band aid, but it can work okay around adults.
Maybe we can make it work in our work environment or in school because those environments are very rule based, they're pretty predictable. It's not perfect, but enough that maybe we can keep the lid on this stuff and flunch it. Because the truth is, people with trauma are not just people who are drug addicted or homeless. You know, we often have that image.
I mean, my clients, oh my gosh, like they're extremely successful people. They're doing amazing things in their lives and they for a long time were able to keep that lid on the trauma and push through their life. The problem is, is that children, as I said here, they don't operate in that verbal world. I mean, they do to a degree.
I mean, obviously they learn to speak, all that, but they're, they're all about energy and emotions. So while we may have been able to hide it from everybody else, we aren't gonna hide it from our children. When we walk into a room and we are just have this intense fear under the surface. But when we're saying everything's fine and everything's good and we're fine and it's all gonna work out and please eat your peas and you know, whatever.
Our kids are like, what? This is scary. This is freaky, right? Yeah, it's like, is this a kind of Twilight Zone?
Because I'm sensitive that you just want to run out of the house breathing and you're telling me to eips. Yeah. This is actually what I love about children, that they don't live in that superficial world. But it is also scary and they reveal these things to us through their own discomfort.
When we're trying our best to just do the work and be the good parent and do all of that, but we haven't dealt with what's really going on underneath and then it's not working and then, ah, so frustrating. But children, like you said, that's kind of what they're here for. But whether it's what they're here for or just part of the magic of them, I think it's what they're here for. I really do believe that.
I think these little beings come out of this planet going, we're going to show you your stuff and we're going to work it out together. And I love that feeling. Actually. I think about that with my almost 18 year olds now, it's easier now that they're that age to think about it this way.
But I think that's Actually wonderful. Whether this is true or just the way you're thinking about it, I'm sure it's part of the picture. You're turning something that could feel very adversarial into. They're my helpers.
Yes. Because when we go to the kitchen table and we're beer driven all over us, and we're like, eat your peace, and everything will be great, and our kids are like, you know what, Mom? You're angry, so I'm gonna throw a tantrum right now, and I'm gonna throw the piece, frankly. I'm gonna throw the piece because I need you to know you're angry so that you can process that in the moment.
Are we gonna. Are we gonna see them as helpers? Oh, no, we are not. We are not gonna see them as helpers in that moment because we were working really hard to hide all of that.
And it can feel almost like we're being victimized all over again because we were doing what we were taught to do, which is hold all of our emotions inside and pretend everything's fine. And now these kids are saying, no, don't do that. And, yes, we can have a really intense reaction to that because that's everything we were ever taught. I never learned how to do anything other than that until I kid.
Yeah. This is also part of the reason that parents that listen here now that I'm not a big fan of scripts that are being put out today everywhere. If you just do this thing and say the words, I feel like on their face, they're not. They're not bad.
We can see them as what they represent, but the fact that we want to rely on them is keeping us in that superficial mode. It's not helping us to really engage in the way that children need us to and want us to and will not really accept otherwise very easily. It's not like I think even that it's hurting children per se. It's just.
It's not helping us go where we want to go. What can parents do besides, okay, so they're writing. They're becoming aware. They're listening to all Elizabeth's wonderful words about what to look for, what are the signs.
And then other than the writing, which I do feel, it actually helped me a lot to take your advice on this. And I discovered this whole piece just recently that needed healing. And writing from the feeling was a big part of that. And I still don't know the specifics of it, but I know that something that brought these certain feelings up in me happened that really really hurt me.
That really scared me where I felt emotionally abandoned and I can sort of know which room it was in. But that was about. That's about it. Well, so far that's it.
So far that's it. I want to be done with the. I cried a lot about it. I just felt it.
I, you know, went to being angry at, you know, somebody I would never, ever dreamt of being angry at. So all that really helped. But, you know, I don't feel like I have something that's interfering as much as a lot of people do, you know, these adverse childhood experiences, traumas. So what else do we do?
How can we get ourselves there, especially for a parent and our time and energy is small. Yeah, well, I mean, this is a good question. I'm answering something that seems kind of broad, but then I want to bring in an example or two to explain what I mean. But I think the key is we have to get out of that figure out mode, that mode where we're using the mind to fix the mind, which is actually impossible, and follow our emotions where they go, which is what you were just describing that you did.
And yes, it feels horrible. And yeah, we all, we want to be dominant for sure. But each time we follow that emotion where it goes, we get the answers that we're looking for, like from these scripts and from all the books we read and everything. Because we have it like it's in us already.
We know the answer. That's probably one of the most common statements from my clients is they're like, there's no way I can know what to do because it was not done for me. And my answer is always, you're not going to be operating from your past experiences. You're going to be operating from that grounded place within you, what I refer to as the grounded itself.
That aspect of self knows what to do. We have to follow the emotions until we can find it. The biggest problem with that is that it's not a quick process. And we want quick.
We want fix this now before I make another parenting mistake. Exactly. Give me a one minute reel about the fixes for me. Because we often have these rules that live in our mind and our system that say I'm either going to be the perfect parent or I'm going to be horrible.
And there's no room for anything in between. A none. There's no way we can just do our best getting something wrong but doing lots of things right. Those things don't occur to us in these moments.
I need answer. I need it now there's all this fear and anxiety and panic. That actually is a really good place to write from, by the way. That's often a really important place to write from.
That panic, that need for perfection, that need to get it right. And that place doesn't hold our compassion. So as we. As we follow these emotions, where they go, we can find compassion for ourselves, which in turn then gets mirrored back to our kids as well, which is the beauty of it.
I'll. I'll just throw out a couple examples real quick of, like, following the emotions of what that would look like. For example, maybe our kid has learned that when they say a particular phrase, it triggers us. And by the way, the way, they know this is not by our behavior, right.
What we talked about earlier. They know because they sense it. So, wow. I just felt some pretty strong energy coming out of mom when I said that.
Right. And her words and her whole demeanor just don't match. I mean, her demeanor is one thing, but what she's saying is not matching what's inside there. So we want to take that phrase.
We want to study that phrase. You know, the first thing we often try to do is solve it, like, say, don't do that or something to that effect. Find a way to make the statement stop. But what we really want to do is explore the phrase.
We want to dig into it. We want to write from it. Why do we hate this phrase? Why is it driving us crazy?
Where did we hear it before? Chances are we have. What does it mean to us? Really explore that.
And if we're feeling anger right from. How dare you say that thing? If we're feeling fear right from. Oh, my goodness, like something bad is going to happen.
Because this phrase, which does sometimes happen, sometimes we can have moments where we're nervous our kids are going to be treated the way that we were. That is a fear that does come up. And that, by the way, is writing for the feeling. I just keep getting that that was something.
Yeah. There's a difference between writing about a feeling and about an experience and writing from a feeling, and you show me that and maybe. Sounds subtle. It's a game, Dange.
Yes, it's powerful and it's hard to do. But another. Another way that we might follow the emotion is, let's say our kids are starting to maybe display some kind of personality trait or authentic gift that we were not allowed to have in our travel. So when they do this thing, whatever this thing is, could be anything.
My son was an extreme extrovert. Well, guess what? So am I. But I was taught not to be.
You know, I was taught that I was too talkative and too confident, too this and too that. Too much. And so my son came in the world. I was like, oh, my gosh, he's too much.
He's too much. He's too much. He's too much. People are gonna be annoyed with him.
And I followed that fear, and I realized, oh, I feel this because they told me I was too much, Right? And now I don't want my son to be too much. And it's like in following that fear, where it went, which was, oh, he needs to be quieter. He's going to disturb everybody.
Nobody's going to, like, his fault for being an awful parent. Okay, that's me writing from that fear. And then where does it go from there? I'm just curious, like, just for an example, because I think it'd be good to explain to people.
So you're writing down from that fear. Oh, gosh, this is how this is going to happen. That's going to happen to him. All these bad things.
And at what point did it start bridging to you? So as I'm writing from this, it starts moving into, everybody's going to hate you, and you're all going to think you're weird and you're overwhelming and you're this and you're that. And as I'm writing it, I'm like, that is my mother talking to me. Wow.
It's like, oh, okay. So what I'm really scared of in my son is that he will exhibit the traits that I was told I was not allowed to have. Right? And I was told very blatantly and quite rudely that those things were unacceptable and that I would even get in trouble for them.
And now I'm looking at my son being exactly like me, and I'm going, oh, gosh, he's gonna get in trouble. And then I'm getting in trouble because he's behaving this way, not his parent, and we're all just gonna get in trouble. And as I'm able to see that it's actually what I was told as a kid, and it's all total bs. It has zero credibility.
I'm able to go, oh, never mind. He can be loud and he can talk. Not hurting anything, Right? It shifts my perspective on the situation.
We're generally not going to hit this the first time we write from it, Right. It's going to take some time. It's going to take some processing, some dedication to get there. And that sounded like somehow writing about the feelings brought you back into your mind in the end.
Yes. The mind is impacted by it. Like, so. Yes.
Like, there is a belief system change. That familiarity that you felt, you felt like a familiarity. There's something about this that I know that feels familiar. Yes.
I heard this before, you know, like, and sometimes this is when flashbacks will happen. I'll get, like, an image in my head of a location, like a kitchen or a bedroom, and I'm like, oh, that's clearly where I was when I saw these things. At least one of the times. I'm sure it's all one ones, but yes.
And those are where really we want to be building self trust. Like, we want to be able to trust ourselves. Because honestly, we've got a lot of survival mechanisms in place that are going to try to put down on all of this saying, no, that didn't happen to you. Your mom was fine.
She was great. She never said anything like that. That's all the old defenses that kind of get in the way of letting ourselves see the truth and feel the truth. Right.
But that's really where we're trying to. Trying to go. So learning which voice to trust when the other voices come in, starting to realize those are not the helpful voices. Exactly.
And even with the unhelpful voices, it can help to write from those because it can help to give us a distance between us and that voice so we can kind of see it and just feel just a tiny bit of detachment. Not dissociation, but detachment, where we can say, oh, oh, that voice. That's probably not the best perspective for me in this moment. I can write from it, but I don't have to do what that says.
So then when you got to that place, like, let's just say with your son, for example, then the next time he's showing this wonderful sort of gregarious personality, you're not cringing anymore, or you're still a little bit cringing. Is it streamlined like that, or does it just. How does that work? So we are peeling this stuff off in layers, right.
And sometimes we think, okay, I got it. And then it might come back again a little bit or in a slightly different way. And we need to process that new thing. I wish.
You know, it's like, okay, I've done this, I'm done, but I want to go away. I would love that to be the case. And sometimes it is, Sometimes it is. But many times we have to go back to it, and we have to look at Other ways we might have been told things, there may be nuances we need to look at, but in general, yes, I will feel a shift in my response to my kids, like when those realizations come in pretty quickly and it does change.
And we were recently at Disney World because we live here in Orlando, and they had a sing along. And my son is a singer and his. One of his favorite Disney songs came up, which is from that Oogie Boogie guy. I don't know what that is.
I think it's either from Nightmare. Oh, okay. I don't think I saw that one. Anyway, he has this really deep voice and he starts singing along to the song and he knows every word.
And he had like, he has a beautiful deep voice. So he. It wasn't like somebody tone deaf singing along to the song. And I was sitting next to a friend of mine, and after he sung the whole song loudly and beautifully, my friend looks at me and he says, yeah, that was.
That was loud. Gosh, some friend. I know. Well, you know, and I, I looked at, I said, yeah, I know.
Was it greed? And the old me would have never wanted that kind of attention drawn to myself ever. Like, obviously the attention was on him, but I was sitting at some. I would have been cowering in my seat in the old me.
Yeah. You found that separation, that healthy separation between you and your child where it's not like reflecting on you and your child's behavior isn't putting a mirror to the world on you. I think that's one of the fears a lot of us have. It's not showing the world you in any way.
Yeah. And in addition to that, if a guy loves the spotlight and you already know he wants to be an actor one day, musical theater actor, if he loves a spotlight, that isn't dangerous the way I was taught that was. Right. It's just him being in the spotlight.
Yeah. I'm mad at your friend. I just need you to lose that friend. The good news is my son didn't hear him say it.
It was just me and that's it. I know that he said that to me to reflect my past back to me. This would have been a problem for you. And my job in that moment was to take that little universe hint and say, no, it's fine.
And actually, that friend was probably reflecting something that was put onto them. And that's what's great about doing this work is we can really start to see that when people come at us about our parenting, it really is a reflection of where they are in the process, totally. And that includes in laws, family members that are judging you, everybody. It's their own stuff.
And sometimes it's also, I think, a bit of envy. Absolutely. I believe that wholeheartedly. The same way that we as parents have the judgment towards our kids in those moments.
Oh, my gosh. Don't be so much. Don't be so much. The reason why people say, oh, my gosh, your kids so much is because they've also had to suppress a bit or too much.
Right. They're a bit of that in themselves. So let me bring you down to how I feel. You know, instead of allowing you to shine your light brightly, we're not gonna do that to each other or our kids.
Right. If we can help it. Wow. You have just so much to give.
I know. This makes me want to do, like, 12 more of these with you, at least. I love to do that. Whatever you want.
It's great. You're amazing. Like I said before, I learned so much from you, and I just think everybody should, whether they're a parent or not, tune into what you're doing, and there's something for everybody. I really do appreciate it.
Yeah. I do work with people who are not parents as well on the journey of healing our trauma. I just think that parenting really brings out so many triggers for us and so many things that, honestly, it can elevate and escalate to some degree, this journey for us. And it's certainly good that for me, in the end, this is gonna sound dramatic, but it may have been what saved my life, because I was heading down a path of never really realizing what I had experienced in that has a major impact on the body.
So I will say that this work is for everybody. You're right. But my favorite topic is to talk about parenting, and I enjoy doing that the most with you. We do seem to just have a really easy way of talking about this stuff.
So thank you for involving me in your podcast. Wow. The pleasure is all mine. This conversation is so difficult, and you're diving right into it.
And I'll be honest, we don't live in a world that wants to talk about this, so thank you for being willing to go there. Well, you're my inspiration, and, yeah, it's my favorite thing to go deeper and get into things that really matter and really make changes. So, Elizabeth, how can people get in touch with you or find out more about your work? What's going on right now for you?
I know that you do different programs and different courses. What have you got going right now. So right now I don't have a specific scheduled course. I do offer some pre recorded courses, but I'm also currently offering a few slots to people for one on one consultations.
If it's something that you might be interested in exploring on a more detailed foundational level for yourself, feel free to reach out to me. You can contact [email protected] and that is Elizabeth with an S because that confuses lots of people. Or you can go the old email route and email [email protected] Wonderful. Well, people should take full advantage of that.
Thank you again with all my heart, Elizabeth, thank you. You're the best.