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Parenting when you have a trauma history
I remember how healing it was to have my first child. I went through PTSD and had difficulty bonding, but I held him, nursed him, basically he was in my arms 24/7 because he cried so hard when I put him down. Then one day, the world had color – like the movie, “The Wizard of Oz.” I fell madly, head over heels with this little boy who grew in what I had believed was a corrupted, defiled, hideous body, but it did the most wonderful thing, it grew a baby. Oh, the healing I received. And, to be totally, unreservedly in love with this little boy was an amazing…
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A Playlist of Short Resources for Mothers!
Here’s a short and sweet post – a list of 15 SHORT podcasts to listen to to support and encourage you in your role as a parent. Titles include “What can the pandemic teach us about what working moms need?” and “2-Minute Pandemic Self-Care Reflection, feat. Season of Love Lyrics” (come on just take a couple of minutes and do the mindfulness activity?) Again, if you find that you’re experiencing more than the normal “baby blues” things like depression, scary thoughts, anxiety, sleeplessness, feeling depleted managing it all, PTSD from your childbirth experience, feel free to reach out to me me, Michelle Grunkemeyer to talk about if it makes sense…
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Pandemic Resources for Mom (well for anytime!)
On this Mother’s Day, I’ve included a somewhat diverse set of imagery depicting mothers and children. But is it truly representative of our experience of motherhood? I couldn’t find images showing mothers trying to juggle working from home and managing online schooling. I couldn’t find mothers comforting crying children, or mothers in the middle of the night after a day of work outside the home or work inside the cooking, cleaning and doing laundry. I couldn’t find images of mothers who feel the loneliness that the pandemic has imposed on us. For mothers, there aren’t play dates to get together for support. In labor, for a period of time some…
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Addiction, Anxiety, attachment, Coping Skills, COVID, Depression, Mindfulness, Postnatal, Pregnancy, Somatic, Trauma
I can say NO? No Way! – Boundaries
How did you feel after you read through this list? Or did the title of the blog post simply kind of blow your mind off? The graphic above has some great prompts to think about when you are trying to establish some healthy boundaries. When we have grown up in homes where there was substance abuse, mental health struggles, financial issues, domestic violence, incarceration, physical, sexual, verbal or emotional abuse, we often develop a set of faulty beliefs about what we can say no to. We may become people pleasers, always molding ourselves around what we think others want of us. We may develop avoidant attachment styles where we simply…
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Three Kinds of “Freeze” Response
If you have been reading much about PTSD or trauma, you have probably come across the term: Fight, Flight, Freeze (well, there’s a 4th F, Fawn and I’ll talk about that at another time.) When we’re going along with our lives and all of the sudden something happens, like we’re taking a walk in the woods and we see motion in the leaves and think, “SNAKE” before we actually enter fight or flight or back to enjoyment because you realize it’s just a little black snake, innocuous. There is actually a moment of “freeze” that we go through – things tense up and our body revs up getting ready to…
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ACT, Addiction, Anxiety, Coping Skills, Depression, Mindfulness, Postnatal, Pregnancy, Relationships, Trauma
FACE COVID – An ACT Approach
I thought this was an incredibly helpful video that incorporates a number of key concepts of Acceptance and Attachment Therapy, ACT. Being mindful of what’s going on inside you now, committed action, being open to all the emotions that may rise up when we think and feel our thoughts about how COVID has and is affecting our lives, values – look for ways to sprinkle values throughout your day so that in spite of COVID, we are still focused on living our lives with meaning and purpose. If you think that you could benefit from individualized counseling using ACT, or you find that COVID has triggered some old traumas or is…
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Resources for Pregnancy and Infant Loss
I have worked with a number of women and families who have experienced struggles with infertility, miscarriages, stillbirth and birth trauma. In my friendship group, I have known even more women that have gone through the heart break of miscarriages and stillborn babies. An organization I want to share with you is for families who have experienced a pregnancy or infant loss. Return to Hope: Zero offers a variety of resources including webinars, articles, lists of support groups and providers who work with families who have gone through similar losses. I encourage women and families to reach out to support groups to share their stories and receive support, validation and…
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More about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Handling Emotions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z29ptSuoWRc I love Acceptance and Commitment Therapy because it is filled with metaphors instead of worksheets. For the way my brain works, a metaphor “sticks” and I’m much likely to access a positive coping skill if I’ve learned it as a metaphor. So, how many times have you found yourself filled to the top with thoughts and feelings that you experience as negative? And the harder you try to avoid them, stuff them down, distract yourself from the the more you are entangled in them? This short video illustrates another option to handling those thoughts and emotions. In ACT it’s called defusion and uses mindfulness to simply notice the thoughts…
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Struggling with anxiety, depression or other “negative” emotions and disorders
I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with a lot of my clients who struggle with issues like depression, anxiety, OCD, social phobia and more. ACT gives us a path to help you move out of a stuck place into a life filled with meaning and purpose. This short little video demonstrates a technique used in ACT to “defuse” from the cycle of negative emotions that we can find ourselves caught in. We may notice that we’re having that familiar feeling of depression. As soon as we notice it, something like a switch goes off and we get all tangled up with our depression. We may then begin to feel angry that…
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Beauty after Bruises
Beauty after Ashes offers information, financial aid and the ability to support the community struggling with complex PTSD, dissociative disorders and DID. DID stands for Dissociative Identity Disorder. It was previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder. If people know about it, they generally think of things like “Sybil” or “The Three Faces of Eve.” Those depictions of DID are not quite like what it looks like in real life. A number of people living with DID have had successful careers, are wonderful parents and partners. They bring an incredible amount of resiliency because they have survived the unsurvivable. Generally, this is a disorder that occurs because of early, pervasive neglect…