Grow Forward: Transforming stress and trauma into resilience

Kendra: This idea of reaching a finish line or the end zone, it comes up a lot. Sometimes we’re searching even unconsciously for a time when this will all be over, when we can just get through it. I was like that too. And then I began to realize I was wishing my life away and missing potentially great moments with my kids. This is A Little Easier. I’m Kendra Wilde.

We’ve discovered a lot this season. And to end, I wanted to catch up with some of the parents we’ve talked to and find out where they are on their journey. And spend some time thinking about the future. What kind of future can you imagine for yourself when your  present is so busy? If what we’ve been through in raising our kids is traumatic, does that damage us or make us stronger? And how will this experience change us? 

Lisdaly: I was really shy growing up. I was the kid that – don’t pick me. I don’t wanna be seen 

Kendra: Lisdaly was just a teenager when her son Louie was born. From the start, he was a restless crying baby who was hard to comfort. Eventually he was diagnosed with ADHD and during his school days, she got no respite.

Lisdaly: I could be doing something and I would get, I have to go save Louis. Like I have to go save Louis. It was always like, I have to go, I have to go. I have to go. And I cried so much because sometimes I’m like blaming myself, like, am I doing it right? Did I do something wrong? Like, what is it, how can I help him? Um, and I mean, it was hard, but it, I feel like at the same time, even though it was extremely stressful, um, it made me stronger. I always say like, even though he is my first son and he did make me a mom, like, he really taught me how to be a mom.  You know, this little person depends on you. And, I like, I had this like, transformation that. I just stood up and this is, you know, what my son needs, and I need this help. And I have to do this. The day that boy graduated this summer from high school. I was like, we did that. We did it. You didn’t just graduate. We did it. We made it happen, you know, and it was like a relief.

Kendra: Lisdaly had her own graduation experience. She was able to go back to work and trained for a new job. Her success during the training course made her see herself differently. 

Lisdaly: Like my confidence level went up so high. I felt like I was on top of the world, like I could conquer it all. Like let’s do this. And, I actually was chosen by the trainer, to do a speech, like to give my a speech during graduation. And that was like the first time I had ever been asked to do anything like that. So of course I was freaking out, but I did it. Like, I felt like I can do things for myself, like push yourself, do this. And I used to, I remember I typed up the, the speech and I was standing in my bathroom in front of the mirror and just cry. Like I couldn’t help myself. Like, I’m trying to read it, just reading my story and knowing like how far not only I had came that year, but how far my son, you know, had come. And because he had made it so far, I was able to do this for myself. It was like the beginning of something so great. 

Kendra:  It was a whole new beginning. Lisdaly is now housing programs administration coordinator at Project Hope, working in partnership with women and families on their journeys up and out of poverty. That transformation that Lisdalt experienced, from shy teenager to professional woman and proud advocate for her son, is a more common story than you might think. But parenting can also change your trajectory in other ways. 

It brings me back to a much younger me, fresh out of business school. I had a plan that I would run a media and technology company some day. I already had a cool job at a huge entertainment company. We were inventing the future. How kids would fit into the mix wasn’t really a concern for me. If you rewind to those early days, women were encouraged just to do like men do. I mean, I wore these huge shoulder pads and I carried a clunky briefcase. So when I had three kids in a row and everything was more complicated than I expected, it totally threw me for a loop. Eventually I stopped working. I should say I stopped working outside of the home. Eventually I stopped my job so I could focus on what our kids needed. And I know I’m fortunate that that was an option, but at the time it felt like a hard pivot. I felt sorry for myself, like my whole identity had been tied to my career dreams. And I remember feeling awkward when people asked me what I do. I probably said something like, oh, I’m on sabbatical or something like that because I felt like a loser that I just couldn’t do at all. Is it any wonder I ran into those burnout issues? At that point, I never could’ve imagined how that experience would inform my passion and purpose in life, which is to help other parents – like you – on this path, feel less alone and more grounded. Looking back. I’d like to say, it’s like, you have to give up in a radical acceptance sort of way, before you can see the possibilities of where you are.

We’ve all heard of PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. A less well-known phenomenon is post-traumatic growth. Here’s Chris Willard. 

Dr. Christopher Willard: Actually most people who experience traumatic events, experience post traumatic growth, more than post traumatic stress. And many people experience both. But I also don’t want that to be like, pressure, there’s something wrong with you if you’re not experiencing that, or not experiencing that right now, or right. We don’t know the timelines always, but we know that it’s, it’s actually a really likely possibility – the most likely possibility. And, I think it’s just useful and helpful to focus on. We can’t make it happen, but what are the conditions under which it’s, it’s most likely to happen. And again, not to be Pollyannaish and everything’s gonna be great. And every cloud has a silver lining. It’s not, like that’s definitely not true. Like this is hard, this sucks. But also are there opportunities to learn and grow, even though, you know, this, this situation may be hard and awful. Maybe there’s not. Maybe there’s not right now. But let’s not foreclose ourselves to those opportunities. And let’s, let’s kind of fertilize and, and prepare the soil, um, for when that growth is ready to happen. Let’s be ready to water those seeds as they start to emerge. 

Kendra: So growing through experiencing stress and trauma is a likely outcome. It’s actually the experience of hardship that makes us evolve and adapt. Last episode we heard from Oanh.

Oanh: I think, um, the more I was put in adversity, the more I grow that way. if I were not encounter hardships, difficulty as an immigrant, as a single mom, trying to navigate the whole system yourself, I don’t think that I am who I am today. But I have been thrown in so many different situations, many different encounters that blow your mind in a way, that stress you out in a way. But then I think because of some of those experience that you just become so much more resilient and build more strength in yourself. Because you know that it’s only you who can help you. 

KendrA: In fact Oanh’s advocacy for her daughter led her into a new career path as an advocate for others, just like Lisdaly. And Dr. Rita Eichentein says she’s seen that happen a lot. 

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Let’s take, um, the example of one woman in the book that I interviewed who had an autistic child and she fought the school system, spear and sword, because they weren’t giving enough support to this child. He remained unidentified and undiagnosed for way too long. This is a common story. This is common. Anyway, this woman goes on as after her son, you know, she’s helped her son. She becomes an advocate. And what an advocate does is they help parents work through the system, because she now can decipher all the initials. I E P, I E E, S A T you know, they love their acronyms. So she can decipher that. So she helps parents and goes with them to their IEP meetings. And she gets hired by a lawyer. And becomes his paralegal in special ed. Then she goes on to law school and becomes a lawyer specializing in special ed. So this is just one story of how someone –  post traumatic growth takes her from a place of weakness, despair, and struggle into a place of strength and challenge.

Kendra: When parenting is all consuming, it’s hard to step back and take perspective of where this journey might take you. 

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: I often say to parents, you know, when you’re ready, you’ll rise. You will find your passions later, you know, but you’re wired to sort of – your own individuation goes underground for a little bit while you’re raising your kids. If you find it poking its head up and you’re feeling resentful, Those are, yeah, those are little signals that it’s time to let them breathe a little bit. Start making the heart space for what you’d really like to do. So even feelings of resentment. When they show up that’s a sign, huh? What kind of change can I make? How can I reclaim the heart space for myself? Cause you know, but there is a time in life where you just don’t feel you have to be. And I feel there’s pressure on parents that they have to be so many things. But if you trust your gut, your gut will know when it’s time to be all engaged in your child and when you can sort of start reinventing, rediscovering who you were before. 

Kendra: Of course, having your kids graduate from school, leave home and establish life on their own is not in the cards for every family. 

Dr. Rita Eichenstein: Some people do not get the luxury of saying goodbye to their child at 18 and sending them off to college. Some parents will have their children at home for a long, long time. And you could cultivate bitterness or you could cultivate joy.

Kendra: While joy is certainly possible in that situation, it’s not a given, it takes work to achieve. For some, the heavy weight and responsibility of caregiving might mean that it’s impossible – or at least really hard – to imagine a balanced and sustainable life.

Mantu Joshi: It’s not like we give up completely who we were cause who we are is still who we are. We still need to have that sense of self as a parent. And yet it’s gonna take a very different shape. Right.

Kendra: Like many parents of kids with high needs, Mantu Joshi had to give up his job for a while when his kids were young.

Mantu Joshi: I was a Methodist pastor. And I was preaching every week. And for a while, suddenly I wasn’t doing that anymore. And I wasn’t teaching people anymore. And yet, in that time, when I kind of accidentally, as I sometimes say, began writing a book, I was doing the same thing. I just was doing it in a totally different format. I was still giving people hope, which is what went my work had been before, but now it was through the writing. And ironically, that the book, you know, I’d worked with thousands of people before that, but the book has reached 10 or 20 times more people than I did when I thought that I was really living my life, when my life was, what, the way that I thought it was supposed to be. And so the irony which is life and the joy of life is that once I was able to kind of accept the reality of where I was. When I was able to let go of my old roles, you know, was this this way of saying, I’m still who I am. I’m still giving people hope. I’m still reaching out to my fellow person, but it’s in a new way. You know, all of these thingsbegin to give us a sense of wholeness and I believe maybe even give us more impact than we could have possibly imagined. 

Kendra: As we try to figure out the future. Dr. Nicole Beurkens says our aim shouldn’t be to get to some non-existent place of peace and stillness. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens It’s not a, you figure it out and then forevermore you have it.

and you’re done. It’s a constant evolving process that we have to engage with. And really it’s, it’s about helping ourselves to stay as resilient as we can, even in the midst of really stressful, difficult situations that we don’t have control over. And I know that resonates for so many of your listeners who do not have control over the progression of their child’s challenges, or maybe what’s going on in some of their family relationships or work, or certainly for all of us, we don’t have control over what’s been going on more broadly, you know, in the world over the last many months. And so this recognition that even in the midst of lots of challenges and things that we can’t control,it’s looking for those little pieces of things that we can control that help keep us more resilient. Even with all of that going on around us.

Michelle: Fear is your recognition or your belief that you can’t handle something. 

Kendra: We met Michelle when we talked about the nervous system. If you remember, she showed us how calmly she handled a little outburst from her son, Curran. When her younger son, Jojo was also diagnosed with autism, she says her professional training as a project manager kicked in. She didn’t think about the big, scary picture. She just put one foot in front of the other. 

Michelle: I took it, and I had all the list of things that they needed me to do. And I just, one by one started you know, going through checking the boxes and, and seeking the services I needed. So that was, I think one of the most proud moments that I have was like – sorry, it’s like you know, it’s emotional because you really are like, I’m so proud of it.

But it absolutely is something I’m so dang proud of was I think –  sorry, I’ll just stop crying for a minute. My was my ability to like to say, you know what, like, even though here I am, I have fear. I don’t know if I can handle this. The only thing I know how to do – you can stick your head in the sand and ignore it. You can totally walk away. You can begrudgingly give all the excuses in the whole world of why. Or you can say, listen, even though I’m afraid, even though I don’t know totally what I’m doing, I can, I can try and embrace the challenge and just take one step at a time. 

Kendra: And so that’s what she did, by framing the quest to help her son almost as a professional project, she controlled what she could and made it bearable in her own mind.

Michelle: The only way through traffic is through it. And so you can hate it, or you can turn some music on or a podcast on and, you know, make the most of it. And so I think I just said, even though this is gonna be tough. Here are the next steps that are recommended. And at least I can make the calls. I can follow up on the appointments. I can ask the questions that I need. I can try and do some research, getting speech therapy, getting occupational therapy, engaged. And, but what was really cool was that between October, 2018 and October, 2019, he had made like, in the cognitive development area, he had made like 21 months of progress in 12 months. That to me was like and, and, you know, don’t celebrate a lot, sometimes I don’t recognize like milestones, but like getting that letter and that independent evaluation, all that work, all the calls and the follow up and the fear and the, you know, doing it anyway, just it paid off and it was like, wow.

Kendra: For some parents, the victories along the way might seem small, but they can mean everything. Joanna endured the breakup of her marriage after she and her husband adopted two girls with severe challenges. She says she’s working with her girls to create moments of connection and peace. One tradition she misses is family dinner.

Joanna: We can’t always eat together and it doesn’t always work well for us. Like we just can’t be together in the same way. I mean, but I still wanna be able to tune in and give and have like intimacy. It just might not be all at once at the same time, you know. It might just be a much smaller moment. And then the thing that’s amazing for me is that over time they do it for me.

Kendra: And so she got creative to allow her girls a way to give back to her.

Joanna: In the morning I bought the instant Starbucks, you know, I basically got it so Ella can make me coffee. Because in the morning she’s so hyper and so over the top, before she has her medicine, um, and I’m so not a morning person, I’m just like, I need to get one nice thing from Ella. Like I just, I feel like this will help so much. And so she makes me a cup of coffee and she measures out, you know. And she puts a little cinnamon on the top and stirs it. And that is like a game-changer for me and her in the morning. Um, so yeah, I’ll sit and she’ll bring me my coffee and – it doesn’t look like the family dinners I grew up with. It’s just important to me, you know, it’s just like an expression for me. It’s my way. Like, there’s a lot of different ways to communicate if you can’t communicate well through words,

Devon: I don’t think I’ll ever reach the end of the tunnel, but I feel like I have a flashlight and I don’t feel lost in there. 

Kendra: Devon’s son is now in second grade. He has a new I E P that reflects his diagnosis and he is doing well.

Devon: So I feel like we are making appropriate progress. And at the end of the day, like that’s all I want for my son is to continue to make progress. I want him to be a good person. 

Kendra: She says from a shy, shut down little kid, he’s begun to blossom. 

Devon: He never let anybody leave him a stranger. Like he walks up, speaks to everybody. He holds his head so high. And that’s not who he was when he was four or five, because he was so like, why, what am I doing? Like, why do they keep sending me to this room? And I’m not learning in the class with the other kids. He remembers all of that. So sometimes I’ll be like, you you’ve came so far. And I thank him, because now I’m like, you’ve helped me so much because now I have a job I love. It’s flexible. And I can concentrate. I’m just so proud of him. He’s just making progress and it’s not, it’s not even to do with his academics. It’s his self-esteem and confidence for me.

Kendra: And as her son has blossomed, so has Devon. She moderates a flourishing online community for parents, and she also advocates for people going through the special ed system. In a recent article, she wrote about the emotional stages she went through on her son’s diagnosis journey. 

Devon: Well, so the “seven stages of parenting a child with ADHD” really went through all of the emotions that I felt. And I ended it with hope because I feel like at the beginning, and going through the seven stages, we feel so hopeless. And we feel so lost. And we feel so defeated And they are all valid experiences due to the situations that you’ve had to go through with this. It gets so easy to beat yourself up.

Kendra: And just like those swirling stages of grief, your journey won’t always be straightforward. 

Devon: I tell parents all the time, like it’s not linear. Some days I’m on stage seven. Some days I’m at four. I’m feeling defeated again because they’re trying to change his IEP cuz he’s doing so well. And I don’t, I don’t wanna do that. Like I think he’s doing well because he have the supports. But this is a time where I need to be hopeful and express grace and patience with myself so that I don’t spiral all the way back to stage one. 

Kendra: And she says, never forget: you’re more than just your experiences as a parent.

Devon: So I just tell parents that just so that they don’t get so caught up. Because before we were parents, like we were regular people. You know, and I don’t say that to – cause I know I’m the bomb. Like I’m resilient. I’m smart. I’m cute. I’m all this stuff. But first we are human people first, with emotions and experiences outside of our kids. You were a person before you had babies. Like just because you’re somebody’s mom now don’t mean, you know, that you’re, you still don’t wanna feel like a human being. Sometimes we take on these titles of being so I’m formidable, like, oh, I’m a tank. Nothing can get to me and I’m gonna do whatever I gotta do for my kids. It, it gets so heavy to have to carry all that around all day, every day. So I always tell parents, like, please be patient with yourself. Take all that stuff off. Cause you not gonna get far carrying all that stuff with you. 

Kendra: Sometimes what we all need is perspective. Linda Budd has gained a lifetime of wisdom through working with families. She tells us that we need to learn to see our struggles as lessons. 

Dr. Linda Budd: It’s such a blessing, such a blessing, to get to watch any child grow. It is such a grace, you know, and that is, you know, having seen five generations of children grow up and become adults. And I don’t get afraid as easily as most parents, because I have seen so many people overcome their differences and their difficulties. So I don’t go to fear. I go to belief.

Kendra: I think that’s such an amazing lesson to go to belief. Creating this podcast has been an amazing experience for me. And I’m just filled with deep gratitude for the people who were willing to share their stories and their insights for this. I thought it was reassuring that everyone pretty much converged on the same themes. It didn’t matter what their background was or what their challenge was or what their area of expertise was. We learned that emotions are information, and that they’re all valid and important – and contagious. And that the nervous system is behind so much more than we ever realized. Understanding the reasons behind our children’s behaviors can enhance our compassion and our connection with them. And parent wellbeing is part of the whole thing. Parent wellbeing matters. It’s foundational. Looking after ourselves begins with tiny microsteps. And acceptance is a process. Relationships heal. There is always hope. And most of all, you’re not alone. 

Each of us will take away different lessons from this podcast. And that’s my true hope. Take what you need. It’s like Chris Willard said, there are many, pretty good things to do. What helps you might be different from what helps me, or what helps the next person. There is no one answer. That’s one reason why it can feel so lonely and hard on this path. But it’s also part of the growth process that is parenting. I’m inspired by the resilience and the growth that can spring from our challenges. And if this project touches someone, it helps just one parent or one caregiver find a little more peace and ease, it was worth doing. It doesn’t have to be so lonely or so hard. Just keep showing up. Because what you’re doing matters more than you know,

I’m Kendra Wilde, and this has been A Little Easier, the show that was created to help you find more joy and resilience when parenting is extra challenging. Thank you so much for being here. Make sure you’re subscribed to A Little Easier in your podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. And while you’re there, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast, share it with family and friends.

We’re an independent show focused on elevating parents, because you’re the most important force behind your child’s wellbeing. Visit ALittleEasier.org for show notes and discussion questions. Plus resources on parental burnout and resilience building.

A Little Easier is written by Harriet Jones and co-produced by Harriet and Rae Kantrowitz. Sound design and original music by Rae. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Peace for Parents and me, Kendra Wilde.