The Hidden Reality of Post-Traumatic Parenting: Breaking the Cycle | Dr. Robyn Koslowitz - EP 719

Coming up next on Passionstruck. Not only will your damage not damage your kids, but your damage can be the catalyst for you to break the cycle. Right? Your damage can actually make you into a better parent. You're not flawed. In some ways, you're uniquely qualified to parent because you know what your values are. Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 719 of Passionstruck. We're continuing our series The Meaningmakers, an exploration of how meaning takes shape early, develops through experience, and is strengthened through conscious repair. In our recent episodes, we've been tracing how environments shape the inner life. Last week, I was joined by Alex Emus, where we examined how uncertainty and competition influence adult decision making. And then earlier this week, Shana Pearson joined us to explore how sustained misalignment between mind and system shapes identity and self-trust. Today, we move further upstream into the family system. My guest today is Robin Caselowitz, clinical psychologist, parenting expert, and founder of the Targeted Parenting Institute. She is the author of the new book, Post-Traumatic Parenting, Turning Surviving into Secure Connection. Robin's work focuses on how early experience shape regulation, attachment, and emotional safety, and how parents can build secure connections while continuing their own healing. Our conversation centers on post-traumatic parenting as a developmental pattern, one that reflects adaptation persistence and the nervous system's intelligence. We explore how early experience shapes emotional regulation, why presence and attunement support secure attachment, how parents can build stability while honoring their own history, and how emotional safety becomes the foundation for meaning across generations. This conversation matters because meaning begins early in our relationships, in regulation, and in whether a child experiences consistency in care. Before we begin, a brief note. If you're interested in the broader work around visibility, worth, and mattering, including how these ideas translate across generations, you can learn more about my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, at umatterluma.com. And if this episode resonates, please consider sharing it. We're leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your support helps these conversations reach the people they're meant for. Now, let's continue the meaning makers with Dr. Robin Caslawitz. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. Hi, I'm so excited today to be joined by Dr. Robin Caslawitz. Welcome, Robin. How are you today? I'm great. I'm so excited to be here. I'm going to start in a place that wouldn't have been the normal start, but I understand you just did a TED Talk yesterday. So I'm interested about that experience, having not done one myself yet. So it was a TEDx event. I've been applying to give a TEDx talk for about five years. And because I really have this big idea worth spreading about trauma and how it impacts us. And I've been applying and applying and getting no after no after no. I don't know if you're familiar with that idea of rejection therapy, where you just look for rejections as a way of inoculating yourself against them hurting. Because rejection actually activates the same pain sensors in our brain that stubbing your toe does or falling down a flight of stairs does. So it's painful. And I've been applying and applying and had some heartbreaking last minute nose. One event that actually accepted me as a speaker, they then canceled the event because one of the organizers got very sick. So that was very disappointing. I'm sad for her, but it was also very disappointing. And then I had other events where I was through three rounds of interviews before I got the no. So it was hard and it takes a lot to keep applying, even though you get nose. And then finally, TEDx Union Women said yes. And I finally got to do that TEDx talk. So yeah, five years of preparing, applying, getting those nos before I finally got the yes. Yeah. And as you were preparing for it, any secrets you want to share on how to give a good TED talk, given you only have seven to 12 minutes to do it? You really want to only talk about one big idea. You have this desire when you're on that stage to share everything by myself. I tend to talk fast. I tend to be very excited about a lot of things. So it took me a long time to figure out like what's the one big idea. And there's a lot of other stuff I'd love to talk about. But let's focus on this one thing. And then really write the speech, say it in front of people that you really trust, who are the kind of friends who will tell you the truth, not the kind of friends who be like, it's great. But someone who'll be like, well, I didn't quite get that part. And keep practicing until you have something that you're happy with. And I would say, I think it was Bruné Brown who said, write your speech, cut out 50% and then cut out 50% more. And then you have your one big idea. I remember a number of years ago, I was talking to Susan Kane and her talk that she did on Quiet has 35 million views. And people look at her and they think it's all easy. And I was asking her what was the preparation like? And she said, I probably practiced that thing about 250 times before I gave it. Yeah, just along the way. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Yeah, it's cringe when you practice in front of the mirror. And it feels very intense. But in the end, it was like someone asked me what like what it was like. And I said, it was so scary and so awesome. And I'm so glad it's over. Well, at the same time. Well, I'm not sure what your journey to becoming an author was. And today, we're going to be discussing your brand new book, post traumatic parenting, turning surviving into secure connection. But for me, my author journey was nothing but rejection along the way. I must have gotten rejected 150 times before my first book came out. Yeah, and I feel like we don't teach kids that enough. How to I wouldn't say not take rejection personally, because actually, you do need the helpful feedback aspects of rejection. But how to look at rejection as only feedback and nothing to do with self worth and nothing to do with you, even though it does make you feel like you are personally being rejected. I was bullied as a kid. So it's activated the bullied circuitry in my brain and made me feel like once again, the cool kids don't like me. But it had nothing to do with the cool kids not liking me. And sometimes it did. Robin, I'm going to start before we go in the book with something I read in an article that recently published on medium and authenticity. And you shared this story that I think is so relevant. It was about your 10 year old. I think he's older now, but at the time he was 10 years old. And your son looked at you and asked, where do you go when you go away behind your eyes? Can you take us back to that moment? Because I think, based on my work and my own life, it's something that's happening to more and more of us as parents. What was happening inside you? And what did you realize in that instant about your relationship and with yourself, but also with your child? Initially, when he asked me that question, and it was really hard for him, he actually started to cry. I realized in that moment that what I was doing in going away behind my eyes, which is what psychologists call dissociation, it was a trauma response. It's something that I do whenever I'm very stressed out. And it happened through my intensely traumatic childhood. I would disappear into my work. And like I could be chopping vegetables in the kitchen, taking care of my kids, but my brain is coding data right now. And it really helps because then I'm calm. I'm like that if I'm like when I was in graduate school, if I was really anxious, I could focus intensely on the patient in front of me, the research I was doing, a book I'm reading, really anything that takes me out of my body. And then my panic attack goes away. All of those yucky feelings inside me go away, but I'm not present. A piece of me goes away. Until my son said that to me, I thought that I had my whole PTSD thing handled. I knew how to breathe through a panic attack. Like I had figured that part out. I had done some therapy. The worst of my flashbacks, they existed, but they weren't taking me over anymore. But I thought that this association was great. I was like, this is fabulous. I get to get so much accomplished. I do triple what everybody else does. And I never have to feel stressed out. And I thought, great, fabulous. I've got this covered. And then when my son started to cry, it just broke my heart. And I said, Oh no, this was my biggest fear. Like even when my husband proposed to me and I knew we wanted kids was like, I'm so damaged. How can I be someone's mom? Like my damage is going to damage my kids. And then I thought I had this like brilliant shortcut until he asked that to me. And I remember looking at him and just thinking, do you want me to feel my stress? Because I will yell at you. I don't want to yell at you. It was almost like as if he had said to me like, mommy, you're five feet tall and I need my mom to be six feet tall. So just grow a foot please, because I need you to dunk basketballs. Okay, but I can't. It just felt so impossible. But at the same token, for him, I was willing to try. In other instances of my life, I had a friend who said it to me in high school. She's I hate that you space out. Sometimes it's so weird. And I remember looking at her and being like, okay, yeah, I do. Sorry, take me or leave me. Like, I owned it. I was like, yeah, sorry, it's this weird thing my brain does. I apologize, but I don't think I can change it. My bosses loved it, right? Because I got a lot done. My husband knew how to be like, are you with me? I need your attention now. And I could shift gears because he was asking me for my attention. He knew let's not have any major emotional conversation when she's heavy on a research project. And it worked. It was only my kid that I was willing to change it for. And I think that's one of the things that we're traumatized as parents, many of us, and we have these trauma adaptations that our brain does for us. But the only thing that at least got me to change it, that made me even see that I needed to change it was my son. Yeah, I used to work at Lowe's. And one of my favorite peers was a gentleman named Steve. And Steve at the time, ran all of our distribution network, which was a team of about 30,000 employees, he went on to run all of supply chain for Lowe's later on. But he was one of the best leaders I had ever seen. We would walk into a distribution center and these things are about a million and a half square feet. They're like a city, hundreds of people. And he would literally know everyone and not just their name. He would know their wife's name. He would know what sports the kids were into. And the associates loved him. And I loved him. But he shared with me the more we got to know each other and became friends, is that he was putting so much energy into his job. By the time he got home, he was completely wasted. And so his kids started to do this routine where they actually bought a brick and painted the brick. And anytime that he was phasing out, they would put the brick in front of him as a reminder for him to be present. The reason I'm telling this story is here you have a highly performing person who ended up later in his career getting burned out like so many people are. But I think what was happening to you, what's happening to him is happening to millions of parents around the world where whether it's work, whether it's a trauma, whether it's something else, we're tuning out on life. And I call this, we become invisible in our own life. You describe this kind of as a disassociation or your lifelong coping mechanism. But what do you recommend for parents or even partners who are facing the same situation? So I think you first, before you take down a fence, you kind of want to figure out what that fence is protecting, right? So the first thing we have to do is figure out, why does your brain do that? Because it's to me, dissociation felt like malware. It didn't feel like I was consciously choosing it. It took me over. Like it took over my brain and I did not get a choice. And on the one hand, that was helpful, right? But on the other hand, it was a little scary. So I think you first have to figure out, why does my brain do this at certain times? Maybe it's perfectionism. Maybe it's being really critical of people. Maybe it's putting all your energies into work and having none left when you come home, which is like an adaptive dissociation, like workaholism. Or maybe it's scrolling your phone. It could be anything that you do. Maybe it's people pleasing. I never say no to your kids because you're so scared of other people being upset. You can't tolerate that. So what you do is first you figure out, what are my if then rules? If I feel a certain level of stress, then I dissociate. If I feel a certain level of stress, I yell at people. If I feel a certain level of stress, I people please and I make sure everybody in the room is happy. And then you ask yourself, how do you know that? You say, and again, I do this in parenting, but it's really in any area of life. When you mean to do X, but Y happens, right? So you say, oh, today when my boss asks me to do that totally inappropriate thing and gives me a project to finish by close of work today, and it's three o'clock and there's no way I'll leave on time. And every fiber of my being is saying no. And I find myself saying yes. So today I'm going to say no, I'm going to say sorry, I need to leave on time today. My kids are expecting me at home or whatever. I have another appointment after work. And somehow yes comes out again. What just happened? And it's like that with anything today, I'm going to stay calm. I'm not going to yell at anyone. And then you find yourself yelling. Today I'm going to allow people their own process and not control every aspect of it. And then you find yourself micromanaging again. That's where we say what just happened? You did, you intended to do X and Y happened. That tells me there's a trauma app in your brain. That's what I call it in the book, the metaphor for how trauma rewires us. And that gives us data, which is really helpful. If you think about that scenario with your son, you're a psychologist. So you already understand trauma on a professional level, but that moment for you was really personal. So I'm interested in how did it shift your relationship with your own expertise, but then putting your human self in there as a mom and an individual? What did it teach you about the two? And did it help you become a better counselor? It definitely helped me become a better psychologist. I'll tell you why. Prior to that incident with my son, I looked at trauma. I looked at anxiety, OCD, whatever I was treating as a monster that we keep at bay. So we learned techniques like deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation, behavioral techniques that can help us. And I thought that was enough. If I learned those techniques, every time I have a panic attack, I breathe this way and I can manage and I can get through it. I thought I really thought that was enough. After that conversation with my son, I realized I need to process my trauma. I need to go back into the story and really examine it and really process it on a deep level and integrate it into my sense of self. And in the book, I talk about how, and that's when I really started researching trauma therapies, not just behavioral trauma therapies, which is a good place to start. I always say cognitive behavioral therapy has its place. It's fabulous to know those basic behavioral tips. A kid comes into your office and she's, I'm really shy. I'm really scared of people and my school has a public speaking requirement and I can't get out of it no matter what do I do. Write me a letter. You're a psychologist. Say that it will traumatize me to do it. And I say, or perhaps instead of writing that note, we could learn how to not be utterly terrified of public speaking and get you through that speech and imagine the sense of victory you'll feel. And we would use these cognitive behavioral techniques to learn how to lower her heart rate and how to reinterpret her body signals. It's a great place to start. But it doesn't really help you deeply process and understand yourself. So in the book, I have this model. After that, I studied every single form of trauma psychotherapy. And they all have these three things in common. I call it AIM, acceptance, integration, and meaning. The first part is acceptance. Like you really have to accept that what happened to you, you cannot undo it. You can't like think your way out of it. It really did happen. Like it wasn't okay that my childhood was so traumatic. Not that it was my parents fault. My dad had a very severe heart condition. He didn't choose it other than the fact that he was a smoker and he couldn't break that addiction, but he didn't choose to be addicted, right? So he didn't choose that. He didn't choose to have heart attacks in front of me. That was his life. But I can't undo it. I can't somehow go into my brain and imagine it differently. That's what a flashback is and trauma where you keep, let's say you were in a car accident and you were traumatized and your brain keeps replaying the moment of the accident. And somehow you keep seeing yourself at the corner and you're about to turn left. Your brain is trying to get you to turn right because the part of your brain that houses traumatic memories can't tell the difference between past, present, and future. So that part of your brain is trying to get you to turn right. You can't. It happened. It's over. It was 15 years ago. You're never going to have turned right. Your brain though doesn't know that. So that's acceptance. We undo what's called counterfactual thinking. If only I had better parents, if only my dad hadn't been so angry, so then I wouldn't be yelling at people. Whatever it is, we undo that. It happened. It is as it should be. It wasn't great. It happened. Then we have integration, which is we're going to integrate it into our sense of self. Now that this happened to me, I am this person who experienced this and also has a big life around it. And it's part of my sense of self. It's not the thing about me. It's a thing about me. And it's fine. And so that instead of me being like, I am a damaged person, I am a person who carries some damage. And I've integrated it into my sense of self. I'm also many other things, right? And then mission. We make some sense of meaning or mission out of it. Now that I have this unique knowledge of the world based on this traumatic experience, based on it being part of my sense of self, I have a mission in life. I know something about the world that no one else knows. Maybe for me, it's like a macro mission of teaching people about the impact of trauma on parenting. Maybe it's a micro mission. My family will not have a parent who will not come home to a parent who's drunk and passed out on the couch. My kids will know they matter. My kids will know that they are the most important thing in the world to me. My employees will feel valued, whatever that micro mission is. So whether it's a macro mission or a micro mission, we turn it into a mission. When you do those three things, the A, the I, the M, you've really processed your trauma. And if you look at every trauma psychotherapy out there, they all have an AIM component. Whether they're the very behavioral ones like trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy, whether they're the more processing ones like EMDR, eye movement desensitization or reprocessing or IFS, internal family systems, all of them have the AIM component. And I think it's important for parents to know because not everybody can access therapy and not everybody right now can benefit from therapy. Sometimes you've got a whole bunch of kids and a really demanding job and you're going to have to do some of it on your own. Maybe your favorite therapist is on maternity leave for a year or your local clinic closed down and you haven't found someone good yet. So you have to be able to do some of it on your own because we don't all have the privilege of a guide. So knowing that I think is super helpful. Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. Conversations like this offer insight. Reflection turns insight into integration. Inside the Ignited Life, each episode in the Meaning Maker series is paired, guided prompts and tools designed to help you recognize patterns, clarify values, and apply what you're learning with steadiness and care. You can join us at theignitedlife.net. Now a break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to PassionStruck on the PassionStruck Network. Now back to my conversation, Dr. Robin Casalitz. For those of the audience who are not watching this video, I love the background behind you because you've got stuffed animals and children's toys surrounded by your book. And I think to make sure everyone is on the same terminology, can you explain this term that you coined post-traumatic parenting? So post-traumatic parenting is just parenting after trauma. And the way I look at it is a lot of people question themselves whether or not they've experienced trauma. And I always say, is there an experience that you had in your childhood that you would cross a continent or spend your last dime to avoid your kid having to go through it? Congratulations, you're traumatized. Right? Whatever that experience was. Because if you look at trauma checklists that you might get from psychology, you'll get questions like, did you ever see someone die or were you in fear of death? Did you experience a serious assault? Like they'll have those sort of major rip from the headline stories. And those certainly can traumatize us. But what's lacking there is, were you fat-chamed your entire adolescence? Were you completely bullied to the point that you didn't even feel like a human? Did you have parents who were super critical? A mom who's a functional alcoholic and one day you came home and she was lovely and one day you came home and she was just absolutely ready to hit you? That doesn't make its way onto that list. But that's also traumatic. If you grew up and you said, my kid will never have a parent who does that or if my kid is being bullied, I'm going to intervene the minute it happens, that experience was traumatic for you. It's like as simple as that. I liked how you started the book because you described the striking contrast between the endless to-do list every parent carries and the invisible to-don't list that post-traumatic parents jogging their heads. And it reminded me of my own parenting because when I started to parent my son, I realized I was falling into the trap of how my father had parented me, which is something that I didn't want to do. And I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be to unlearn his parenting styles and to completely shift. It was really a struggle to do it. You know why that is? Our brains are really in some ways extremely efficient. We might even call them lazy. So what our brains do is whenever they can, they're going to copy paste and attachment, like the attachment system, the whole system of parenting in our brain, the fancy term is internal working model. Your brain creates this internal working model of attachment and you get it from your own parents. So your brain is set up to have this circuitry to say, I know what to do, what would mom do, what would dad do, do that. Your brain has to work really hard to say, I don't want to do what dad did. You probably thought before you became a dad, you were probably like, oh yeah, I'm just going to not do that and it'll be fine. And then you find yourself doing that. And it's like what just happened, I didn't want to do that because your brain was primed to do it that way. That's literally how your brain, your neural circuitry around parenting was formed. So you're fighting the circuitry that's in there because your brain doesn't want to work hard. It doesn't want to say, instead of this, I want to do that. Your brain's like, oh, do this, what would dad do, do that. That's easy copy paste. Our brains very often function on a copy paste system. Like sometimes we even call that a social skill. You want people to be able to read the room, right? There's a good aspect to that. There's an adaptive aspect to that. But it's when your brain does not even realize, like wait a minute, no, we're going to have to put in the mental energy to not do, you know, WWDD, right? What would dad do and do something else instead? That is much harder. I'm impressed that you did it because like that you realized to do it and that it must have been a lot of work. I think people who haven't parent and don't realize just how hard that is. Well, the first thing is I have still to this day have never found a parenting book that gives you the absolute map for how to parent. And I think I had an internal working model because of the trauma that I had faced that was insecure. And so my default mode was to go back to what I knew. And it's hard as you're, we're just talking about to do something that's different to change the pattern. But I knew if I didn't change the pattern, my son was going to turn out just like me. And so it was really important for me to parent on a different level and to not criticize and to not be physically, I don't want to say abusive, but be physical with my son. And we call harsh discipline because that's how I grew up. And I also grew up with a parent who was absentee and who wouldn't let me make any mistakes because any mistake I would make, I would just get screamed at. And so I realized in my own son that if you were going to make mistakes, it's far better to make them when you're young than when they count. Like I did so many times when I became an adult. So I started to just put myself into the future about what I wanted him to be like when he got older. And I realized if I didn't start to think about that future self I wanted him to be, he was going to end up being more like me. And so that's what finally got me to change. And what you did was so incredible, right? Because one of the things trauma does is it takes away our ability to envision a future self. So you had to build your ability to envision a future self. You had to build your ability to say, what do I want him to remember of his parenting when he's an adult? And you had to retrofit it and figure it out backwards because you didn't have a model of it. That takes an incredible amount of work because our brain doesn't want to do it. Our brain is like, what's wrong with the old system? It's there. Like don't make me work so hard. And yet we have to work so hard. Otherwise we can't break cycles. It's absolutely true. But if you're a parent like I was and maybe they haven't had the wake up call that I reached, what's the first self check you might want them to try? I think the first thing is, and we just said it, this idea of time travel to the future. What do you want your kids to remember about their childhood or about you? We call that the castle on the cloud from the Thoreau poem, right? You should build castles in the cloud. And then we have to build the staircase. Okay. So how do we get there from here? What's the staircase? So if you want your kids to feel like they had a really functional, well run home where things were stable and unpredictable. What are some elements of that kind of a home? I had a post traumatic parent come into me and she said, I grew up in absolute chaos. My parents were completely dysfunctional. We're talking like mold on the walls, empty fridge, multiple child protective services, visits, no routine medical care. I do not know the first thing about running a home. And now I'm pregnant. I don't know what to do. And the first thing we did was rather than be like, okay, let's start from the bottom up as we started from the castle. So you want your kids, what do you want? And what she really wanted was her kids to feel the sense of safety someone feels when they go into a well run organized home where, you know, there's always going to be dinner on the table at the same time, like that there's routine health care, the sense that the parents are in charge of keeping you safe. And so we just then went backwards from that. What would be those ingredients? And she had this one foster family as a model. And she was like, I want it to be like that foster family. I was there really short, but like, it felt so homey, I would come home and there was a smell of cooking. And she would say, all right, now we're going to do our homework, and then we're going to eat dinner, and then we're going to do our chores. And then we're going to go to bed. And it sounds crazy, but having to do chores made me feel taken care of like a grown up was telling me what to do. And I didn't just have to figure out myself how to pay the mortgage so we don't get evicted. And I'm eight years old. This is great. I want my kids to feel that. So we worked on that. There might be another mom who has the opposite. My home was so authoritarian and strict and rigid. I want my kids to feel like they can breathe in this house. And like, I don't want meals to be at the same time every night. I wanted to feel like we're coming together for dinner because we like each other. Great. That's your castle in the cloud. What do we need to establish to make that happen? And that's what we're really saying is your values. And what blocks you from getting to your values? Usually your trauma, usually what you learned or the fact that your brain just wants to replicate your childhood. But once you know it, once you say that, that's the image, that's the shining goal, great, then let's just get to that castle in the cloud. I want to just give you a scenario. So let's say as a child, you grew up in a dysfunctional family where maybe your father was very abusive to your mom. And maybe that was verbal abuse and it wasn't physical, but it could have been both. But that's what you grew up seeing. So now you're an adult and you're having a hard time letting all of that go. How do you break free from something like that? So in the book, I talk about the trauma app, which is this idea that in a moment of trauma, your brain creates if then rules. Sometimes if then rules are just like dad, I will yell whenever I feel a certain amount of stress or just like dad, I will criticize everybody around me because I can't ever be to blame. It's too threatening for me to be to blame. So I have to look for who to blame. And that's your trauma app. And think of an app on your phone. In an app on your phone, there's permissions. And what you do is you go to that app on your phone and you de-select its permission. So in your brain, you say trauma app, today is going to be stressful. Let's say you're moving or you're making a wedding or there's something major going on. There's a family thanksgiving dinner and everyone's coming over and there's a lot of moving pieces. It's going to be stressful. You are going to want me to criticize people. This is your default. When I feel stressed, I criticize people. I am de-selecting the criticizing people. I am not allowed to criticize anybody today. Every time I want to criticize someone, I'm going to have to talk in a daffy duck voice or I'm going to have to sing. Okay. If I need to criticize someone, if I'm like, don't put that, even something like don't put that on that counter, I can only sing it. I can't say it. And what's your trauma app going to do? All good apps. It's going to say, warning, de-selecting these permissions is going to destabilize the entire system. Are you sure you want to proceed? It's going to do that by making you anxious and you're going to say, yes, I want to proceed. And then that's what you're going to do. You have that rule for yourself and that's what you're going to do. You're going to interrupt that pattern. I will only sing. Very hard to criticize someone harshly if you're singing, right? I can't do it. A friend of mine has opera training. I could yell at someone while singing. I'm like, most people don't have the benefit of your arts education. I cannot. So the idea is you come up with something that interrupts that automatic pattern and you do that thing. For me, it's like going to shut off my phone because that's a great dissociation engine. And I'm going to name three things that are red and two things that are blue and one thing that's green. I'm going to stay present. Sometimes it's, all right, kids, let's all dance together so I can get some of my energy out. You're also going to set yourself up for success, right? If you have making a Thanksgiving dinner and you're already stressed out because like your family of origin has drama, you're going to prepare as much as possible in advance. You're going to hire whatever you can. You're not going to bake muffins yourself. You're going to buy them. You're going to be smart about it. So that day of you've taken care of as much of the stress as you can so that those little stressors aren't so stressful that you revert to old patterns. So you're going to do it on both levels, right? You're going to open the spigot on the bottom also, getting some of that stress out beforehand. But the idea is you're going to be very mindful about it. I want to break the cycle. It's really hard. And then you're going to celebrate it. Like you're not going to do, because a lot of post-traumatic parents do it, when the day happens and it's good and you didn't yell at anyone, you're going to be like, okay, so I basically behaved like a normal human. You're going to be like, I did something amazing 14 times today. I wanted to yell at someone and I didn't. I deserve a medal of honor, even if it's just me in my own brain giving me a medal of honor because I did something that's really hard to do. I just rewire a neural connection in my brain. Maybe you say that to your significant other. Maybe you say that to an adult child. They know what you've been through and it's appropriate. Maybe you say that to your best friends or your therapist, but you really acknowledge it because you also have to tell your brain, yeah, brain, that's it. That's what we want to be doing from now on. You did it right because your brain, like anybody else, needs that feedback or it won't change. Oh, that's what you wanted to me to do. Great. I will keep doing it then. That's what you do. It's hard work. It's not easy. I'm making it sound like very simple, right? You just do this and that. It's hard. It can be done, but it's the most difficult work you'll ever do. In my own journey, I had to go through CPT. I went through EMDR. I went through other, I went through prolonged therapy exposure. I went through other modalities and this stuff is not, it's not easy, but if you don't get to those step points, it's very difficult to lead the life that you want to lead if you've got so much baggage. I was one of these high-functioning trauma survivors that you describe in the book. I look calm on the surface, but underneath, I felt myself paddling furiously. Yeah. Yeah. I think what I was doing is I was equating, having control and competence in my professional life with safety, but what was happening underneath, it was quietly destroying me and numbing me. Why do you think so many of us equate control and competence with safety? Well, I think it is safer, right? If you felt very out of control at a certain point in your life and you felt very vulnerable, there's a certain safety in being one of the top executives of the company because there's not that many people on top of you who can fire you, right? There is a certain sense of safety there. It's just not psychological safety. It's one level of practical safety and it's worked for you for so long. I was a perfectionist for a very long time. In the book, I talk about when I actually, and this is hard to hear, but when I actually performed CPR on my father during his last fatal heart attack, he died in my arms and I thought I had done something wrong. I thought that I for a long time had this like image of myself of robbing the girl whose mistakes kill people, right? So therefore, I must not make a mistake. And so I always lived my life doing everything perfectly and having to do double what anyone else did because otherwise I didn't feel safe until I first of all learned that I actually didn't kill my father. There was no way a young woman, like my father was a very large man. He was on a bed when he had his heart attack. You can't perform CPR with enough force on a mattress. There was no way, like the physics of it, I could never have moved my father with the amount of muscle mass I had back then. So there's no way I could have moved him to the floor. I didn't know to. It's not like my CPR. I was lifeguard, but we have never told that you should move someone onto the floor. I don't know if they don't include that. I don't know if it's someone smaller than you. Maybe you could exert enough force to perform CPR, but if you're not cracking ribs, you're not restarting someone's heart. I didn't have that kind of strength in my body back. I probably weighed like a hundred pounds soaking wet back then. There was just no way I could have ever exerted enough force. I knew that sort of intellectually in my 20s until I was in my mid-40s and my very good friend who's a trauma nurse pointed it out to me again. Did I really believe it? Yeah, perfectionism made me feel safer a very long time, but it wasn't making me actually be safe. And that's what the Trauma app does. It doesn't make us safer. It makes us feel safer. It's perceived safety, not actual safety. I'm so sorry that happened to you. I had a similar situation. It wasn't my parent. I was in my late 20s at the time and I had recently gone through CPR training and in the office building we were working in, we got a call that there was a person on, not even in our company, but who had a heart attack and a co-worker and I went up there and unfortunately too much time had passed. I can still see him. I can still feel those moments because it seemed like eternity while we were trying to save him. But for a long time I really felt down on myself because I felt like I should have been able to save him, but we got there too late to do anything. And our brain does that. You should have been able to. You should have done it better and sometimes there's nothing you can do. You're just not going to work. But there's something about those moments and I think people who haven't performed CPR don't understand just how intense an experience it is, but it really, it can be a very intense thing. And I think that a lot of the traumas we experience as kids, we almost gaslight ourselves. Oh, that's not traumatic. Lots of people were bullied. Oh, that's not traumatic. Lots of people were criticized a lot by their dad. Yeah, that was like, old men of that generation were like really critical and beer-ly around and when they were around hitting you or yelling at you. Like that was just like what dads were back then. But that doesn't mean it wasn't traumatic just because a lot of people went through it. Exactly. Well, Robin, in the book you introduced pretty early on three blunt questions to help people determine whether they're carrying trauma. And I'm just going to go through them real quick. One of them is, did something happen that changed how safe in the world? Well, did something happen that changed how safe the world feels to you? The second one is, do you still live as if that event could happen again at any moment? And then do your relationships, especially with your children, trigger that sense of danger? Is there one of these questions that you think happens more predominantly than the other? Or is it really do all of them work together? They do all work together. I think that really that first question, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of trauma that we have in this world because of the word trauma. Right. And this is what I spoke about in my TEDx book. The word trauma comes from the Greek word travmah, which means a wound and really time heals wounds. So we expect like it's been a long time. I'm over it. It's like I'm better now, but trauma is not a wound. Trauma is an experience you happen that makes you feel unsafe. That makes you feel whether you feel unsafe, like physically unsafe, like I might die, or whether you feel unsafe in the sense that I thought I understood this world, and now I completely don't understand this world. I thought I was a competent operator of this world. And now I don't get it. Picture a kid who's bullied, right? She comes to school and all of a sudden all the other little girls were like, we don't like you anymore. She used to understand things like if you're nice to people, they're nice back to you. If you share your snack, then your friend will share her snack. She thought she understood the world. And now all of a sudden, wait, I don't understand the world at all. And whatever she tries to get the other little girls to like her again, backfires. So she doesn't feel like a competent operator of the world. So what's her brain going to do in that moment? Her brain's going to create some form of software to help her feel safe. Maybe it's, eh, I don't need other kids. I can just read and be a perfectionist student. As long as the teacher is like me, I'm good. Maybe she's, oh no, they will like me. I'm going to figure out how to be as ingratiating as possible. And I'm going to become a real people, please are, but I'm going to make friends. Maybe she's going to like really embrace the, I don't care about society. I'm nihilistic. And I don't care about anybody and lash out in some way. Her brain is going to do one of those things. There's a lot of options that her brain can do in order for her to feel like this is a safe world that I know how to operate it. And once her brain does that, once your brain creates that trauma app, it just rehearses that response over and over again, because that's the only response that feels safe, that works, that you know how to do. So for me, like dissociate, like whenever you feel stressed, just go into this like sort of compartment in your brain where you're thinking about something else, you're fine. And any experience that makes your brain develop a trauma app is traumatic. It doesn't matter if it fits on some checklist, or if it's ripped from the headline, it doesn't matter if it's something that other people would say, oh yeah, that's for sure traumatic, or if other people would say, I don't know why that's traumatic. It's the impact on you that matters, and your sense of safety. If it's too big for your brain to metabolize, it's traumatic. That's just the way it is. Since you were just talking about the perfectionist, in the book you describe common parenting defaults. Perfectionist is one of them, disengaged is another entangled, paralyzed, and survivor. And you include a post-traumatic parenting quiz to help someone find their default. Can you go through that quiz and maybe what's a telltale scenario that distinguishes a perfectionist's default from a paralyzed default? Sure. And this really came from years of doing post-traumatic parenting classes and talking to parents and realizing that they fit into these categories. Not everyone fits into one category. Sometimes people are like, I'm this with a flavor of that. This is not a diagnosis. This is just, oh yeah, I do tend to do that a lot. So a perfectionist post-traumatic parent is someone who feels like I'm so damaged by my childhood, and I am so on guard against ever harming my child that I must do parenting perfectly. So I'm going to read all the books and I'm going to memorize all the parenting scripts and I'm going to go on to all those forums on social media and I'm going to do it perfectly because if it's not perfect, it's terrible. Like they have no in-between aspect. The paralyzed parent, it sounds very similar, right? The paralyzed parent is somebody who is frenetically busy, but they're never accomplishing anything. And it's usually because they lack discernment. Like deep down in their gut, they really don't trust their own judgment. So you might have a, in the book, I described this woman, Maria, who's one minute, she's, her kid comes home from school and she's helping one kid with her homework. And then one of the kids is screaming from another room, but suddenly the rice is burning on the stove. And then she's cleaning up because her husband hates coming home to a mess. She's trying to like keep everybody happy. She's never finishing anything. She's like a real people pleaser coming from her childhood where she was criticized so much. She doesn't trust herself. She doesn't trust her own ability to say the kid who's bleeding is more important than the kid who's screaming for help with their homework. Even if they're screaming loud, I'm going to go in order. Like maybe tonight, my husband doesn't like takeout, but sometimes takeout is what we're having for dinner. Sorry, you don't like it, you can cook. And we're going to do that. Trust my own God. Then we have the entangled post-traumatic parent. That's somebody who is so tangled up in a prior relationship, they can't actually get towards their kids. I have this image in the book of a fish that's trapped in a net and their kids are out of the net and they're trying to swim towards their kids, but they're trapped. That might be a toxic spouse. It might be a boss or like a golden handcuffs job where you get paid really well, but you can't say no. It might be a family of origin. You see this a lot, especially with immigrant families where one kid is the one who speaks English for the family and then they're just always functioning for the family, even in adulthood. They just get that role of like, I carry the burden of the family. Sometimes it's a toxic best friend, like it's a front of me kind of situation. And in that situation, you want to put your psychological resources into your kids, but you're putting them into your family of origin, your spouse, whatever it is instead, maybe it's a divorce, right? But like you're tangled up in something else. Then there's the disengaged parent and that's somebody who deep down feels like my damage is so sharp. It will definitely damage my kids. So let me stay away. So they might outsource their parenting. They might dissociate like I do. They might become a workaholic, but they're really, they might be drinking to take the edge off because their edges just feel very sharp, but really deep, deep, deep down, they feel so damaged that let me stay away from my kids. I'm going to do this wrong. Like when I have a parent who calls me and says, my kid's going to camp, I think someone needs to give them the body safety talk and can you do it for me? I will mess it up or they'll go to the youth pastor to do that. They'll just outsource everything they can because I will mess up and the kid just feels so lonely because all they want is the parents' presence. The kid doesn't want a child psychologist giving them the body safety talk. They want their own mom or their own dad or preferably both giving them that talk because that will make them feel safe. And we work on that. Like in that, for me, I was somewhat entangled and somewhat disengaged and I had to learn how to be present. I had to learn how to set boundaries with my family of origin to focus on my kids because they deserve my psychological energy. And then we have the survivor parent and that's someone who's not post-traumatic. They're actively living in trauma right now. We call that acute stress disorder. Their business is imploding around their ears. They're about to get divorced. There's a huge illness in the family and they're just focusing on keeping the little humans alive for one more day. But sometimes survival mode can last years and years and suddenly you wake up and you're like, wait, what have I been doing? My kids are five years older. I just had this with somebody who in the post-traumatic parenting community, one of the like membership groups, she was talking about how one minute she was living in one state with a business and a husband and three small children and the next thing she knew COVID happened, her business failed, she lost her house and she's back in her home state living with her parents and her kids aren't like five years older and she's divorced. Wait, what just happened? And that and she's like waking up out of survival mode and she's not post-traumatic yet, but she's about to be right. So there's a lot of people and there are people who do that for 20 years. Well, thank you for going through all of those and one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about is you underscore a hopeful concept in the book called earned security, which is repairing our own attachment by giving secure attachment to our kids. What does earned security look like for a parent on a typical since it's a Friday, we're doing this typical Friday afternoon? So I think like a lot of times people hear about attachment theory, right? And they're like, if one sentence, oh man, this explains so much about me, I get it. Yeah, that's my attachment style. And then you go, wait a minute, I have a terrible internal working model of attachment, like I'm insecure or I'm disorganized or whatever I am. And oh, that's it. That's my attachment style. My poor kids. I hope I saved up enough money for their therapy. Thankfully though, there's this other concept in attachment theory called earned secure attachment. You can repair your own attachment in adulthood. It's not only like I had secure attachment, I can give it, I can repair my attachment. So in the book, I have this line that resonates with a lot of people, which is your inner child can't raise a child. But in raising your real world child, you can heal your inner child. So you can repair attachment by parenting in accordance with your values, you say to your inner child, look how this is possible. Yes, we are, we wished we would have had supportive adult attention. And now we're experiencing what supportive adult attention feels like from the perspective of the adult giving supportive attention and something heals like we start to get better. And when we do that, we really do heal our own attachment for our inner child. We're not, our kids are not responsible for healing us. We are responsible for healing us. But at the same token, in raising our kids, we can heal ourselves too. And I think that's the most hopeful thing about post traumatic parenting that parenting is the most opportune time for healing yourself and rewiring your own brain. So yeah, it's great for the kids and we do it for their sake. That's the engine. That's the why. That's the mission. It's the only thing that may have gotten us to be willing to do this hard work and look at ourselves and examine ourselves. But then it's for us. In the end, it benefits us as well. And I think that to me was the most hopeful thing from the book that you're not like you're not finished just because yeah, my childhood was terrible. So that's it. I'm damaged irretrievably. Like I can heal. Parenting is the vehicle and the venue with which I heal. Like I use my parenting and for me at least, I don't know that I would have ever undone my dissociation had my son not said that to me because I, it really was working very well. And like on the surface, I really looked, I was so productive and I had very small children while in graduate school traveling from New Jersey to NYU every single day, managing my home, both me and my husband were students. So managing like a family on a limited budget and going to work and going to grad school and doing research and getting it all done. I looked like I was doing great and I wasn't yelling at my kids. So I looked like I was doing great. It wasn't until my son held up that like mirror to me of what I was really doing that gave me the energy to even undo it. Otherwise, I would have stayed that way forever, I think. So it's parenting that gives us that mirror. And maybe for some people, it's not parenting. I think it can be done. You can do it for your inner child. It's just, I personally wouldn't have ever realized that I needed to. Thank you for sharing that Robin. The last thing I really wanted to hit on was you have something in the book called R-squared parenting, which is responsive and responsible. In my own book, Passionstruck, I had this concept of the Gardner leader. And I describe this as a leader whose eyes on but hands off. And this kind of reminded me of it because you need to be responsive to the needs, but you want an employee, a child to learn from themselves so you don't want to be overly directive to them. What's a quick litmus test for listeners for how they can use connection over correction if they're in a heated moment? So I think this goes into this whole debate online between like gentle parenting and more authoritarian forms of parenting. But and for some reason, the online rhetoric makes it sound like you have to pick one or the other. Either you're being this like positive discipline kind of one, two, three magic person where it's my way or the highway or your responsive to your kids and you're hearing their emotions and you're allowing them to grow. And I look at it as a seesaw. You got to do both. You can on the one hand be very responsive. You can say to your kid, I get that no is hard to hear. You really wish I would say yes. You badly want to watch that movie because like your friends are making it sound cool. I get it. I'm I really see that it's hard for you. I feel for you and my no is going to stand. That movie is dangerous. I know you and I know that movie will give you nightmares for weeks. So I'm going to say no. You can do both. You don't have to either be responsive and then give into everything your kids want without ever saying no, this is not good for you. And you don't have to only be responsible and teach skills and make sure they get good grades and all of that. There's no reason why you can't honor both sides. The reason I even put that into the book is because post traumatic parents doubt themselves about parenting all the time. It's I'm so flawed. I don't know. But I saw the social media account and she sounds smart. So I'll do what she says. And I want to give people that rubric for understanding that what the research actually shows on parenting and what like good common sense and what me as a child psychologist knows is you absolutely have permission to do both. There are corners of the internet where people will talk about how like forcing your kids to brush their teeth can be an element of coercive control. I guess you're sponsored by the American Dental Association who really want a lot of business. I don't think you should force your kids to brush their teeth with a horse whip. But I do think that as a parent, perhaps you're going to use a sticker chart and be like, I get it, buddy, you don't want to brush your teeth. You want to run around and play. And it's going to take two seconds and we have this really fun toothbrush that plays a song and we're going to play the toothbrushing game now. I don't think you're being coercive and controlling. I think you're being a responsible parent. So there are corners of the internet that will make you feel like doubt what you're doing, whether like you're raising a snowflake and you have to like demand everything of your kids or, oh my God, is telling your kid to brush their teeth or using a sticker chart is coercive and abusive. But it's not. Let's get real here. Sometimes you got to do the sticker chart to get the five-year-old to brush his teeth and then like when he gets an extra episode of Bluey, all is good in the world and eventually it becomes a habit and you haven't harmed anybody and all is good. You've taught him that, yeah, we got to maintain our bodies. Robin, if a listener remembers only one thing from post-traumatic parenting, what line do you want living on their fridge? I think this idea is that you're not only will your damage not damage your kids, but your damage can be the catalyst for you to break the cycle, right? Your damage can actually make you into a better parent. You're not flawed. In some ways, you're uniquely qualified to parent because you know what your values are. I love it. And can you tell us a little bit about your podcast? Sure. So, my podcast is called Post-Traumatic Parenting and we do one of two things. We either talk to big experts in the field of trauma. We talk to experts in the field of child psychology or parenting, people who've written books that are really interesting, that are relevant to the post-traumatic parenting community or people who have a backstory about trauma that's really compelling and can teach us something because we have to keep restoring hope and remembering that trauma is the beginning of the story, not the end of the story. So, we just really want the whole post-traumatic parenting community. I don't want anyone to ever feel as isolated and alone as I felt when I started that post-traumatic parenting journey. And I felt like my damage is going to damage my kids and there's nobody who gets it and nobody who can help me with it. So, it's like one post-traumatic parent at a time hearing what they need to hear. And we were on both YouTube and on the regular wherever you get your podcasts and we try to release two episodes a month. We're about to start season three, which is exciting. Awesome. And where's the best place people can go? Is there a central hub? So, my website is posttraumaticparenting.com. The post-traumatic parenting community tends to hang out a lot on Instagram, which is my Instagram page is at Dr. Kastel with Psychology. That's also my Twitter, my TikTok. That's really where we mostly hang out on Instagram. We have a membership. We have a community, a lot of conversations in there. I really do my best to respond to DMs and to people ask topic suggestions or they'll send me a reel and say, can you comment on what this parent is doing and stuff like that? I really do my best to stay on top of it because this always was the mission of making sure no post-traumatic parent ever feels isolated and alone. So, we really are a community and you can find the book wherever you get books. Okay. And last question, what does it mean to you to live a passion-struck life? To me, it's really about the mission. It's about doing something that only you know is important that will then change the world. Awesome. Love that answer. Robin, such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much and congratulations on the TED Talk and your brand new book. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That brings us to the close of today's conversation. Robin Caslowicz, what stayed with me is how clearly this work reframes parenting as a relational practice grounded in presence, regulation, and consistency. Robin shows us that awareness creates capacity. When parents understand their own patterns, they gain the ability to build safety intentionally. As we continue the Meaning Maker series, this architecture becomes more visible. Alex Emas helped us understand how systems influence behavior under uncertainty. On Tuesday, Shana Pearson illuminated how sustained effort shapes identity when support aligns with need. And today, Robin Caslowicz brings us to the origin point, where early environments shape worth, boundaries, and belonging. Next, we move from family systems to the inner discipline of excellence. Next week, I'm joined by Jim Murphy, author of the book, Inner Excellence, for a conversation on internal stability, self-mastery, and sustaining performance under pressure. Fear is where you're in self-protection. You're concerned about other people thinking, and will I fail? And that lifetime, and this is saying, look, the default is if you don't do anything, you're going to go towards fear. That's human nature. You're going to start thinking about yourself. You're going to think about everything you want, but can't control. You're going to start comparing yourself to others. Your subconscious mind is going to remind you of all your failures and you're going to move towards anxiety and fear. So you need a clear, intentional plan and path to live an extraordinary life. And that path is based on the three most powerful resources, I believe, in the universe's love, wisdom, and courage. Today's episode resonated. Please share it with someone who might benefit and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. If you'd like to continue the work, visit the UnitedLife.net for episode workbooks and reflection tools. Watch the full conversation on YouTube at John R. Miles or PassionStruckClips, or explore intention-driven apparel at StartMattering.com. As we continue the meaning makers, remember, significance grows where safety supports truth, contained, grounded, forward. I'm John Miles and you've been PassionStruck. Thank you.