How Trauma Impacts Brain Development & Brain Function in Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Hi, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we are talking about types of trauma and how trauma impacts the brain and behavior of kids. Some of you may be aware of trauma that your kids have experienced in their lives. Others of you might be thinking “My child hasn’t had any trauma”, but I encourage you all to stick with us because we now understand that the definition of trauma is quite a bit broader than maybe we originally considered it, and it’s something virtually all of us as parents, and certainly as professionals working with kids, need to be thinking about. For those of you with children who have come to you through fostering, through adoption, have kids who maybe have experienced significant loss, chronic health issues, family turmoil, whatever else, this episode is going to give you a really valuable way of thinking about what’s going on in your child’s brain and how best to support your kids who are struggling. So here to talk with us today about this is my friend and colleague Robyn Gobbel. She is a licensed clinical social worker who loves coffee, pink, and everything about the brain. Once, fairly recently, her teenager went ballistic on her for getting another glitter coffee mug in the mail. Robin loves cultivating deep, resonant connections with anyone who is up for it, and is especially fond of all the grownups in the world who love and care for kids impacted by trauma: Helpers, healers, educators, and parents. Her favorite thing is teaching anyone who will listen to harness the power of neuroscience so they can cultivate deep resonant connections. This would change the world if we could all do that: To be seen, to be with, feel and deeply know each other and ourselves. Robyn really believes that this can change everything. I agree with her. I have been waiting to have this conversation. Robyn, welcome to the show.

Robyn Gobbel 

Thank you so much for having me, we are going to have fun.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

This is going to be great. I really wanted to set the stage for everybody, regardless of how they think about trauma or whether they think it’s an issue, to stick with us because everything we are going to be talking about today is relevant to all kids and to our understanding of any kind of behavioral issues that we might be facing. So let’s start with just you sort of sharing briefly how you got on this path of really focusing on kids who have experienced trauma, their families, and the neuroscience piece.

Robyn Gobbel 

I’ve always wanted to do this. Since I was in high school, I remember reading what I would now call like a memoir, this woman named Torey Hayden. She’s a special educator. They were in my high school library, and I just found them and started reading them. And I’m like, “This is what I want my life to be like, I want to do what this lady does.” And now I can look back and I can remember those books, and I’ve reread them, I have all my originals still. I was like “Oh, yeah, what I wanted to do is like work really, really intensely, really connected with the kids that nobody had any idea what to do with”. Everyone is just baffled, and she was baffled, too. But she was like,” Oh, well, we will figure this out. Let’s just get in there and be with them.” And now I look back. And I’m like, that’s why I love those books. Because I was like, “Well, yeah, that’s what I want to do too”. And then I went to graduate school, did all my formal schooling and training and realized that a lot of those kids were those biggest, most challenging, most baffling behaviors needed the most help, had had experiences in life that we would now call trauma. And then somewhere along the way, I also had many opportunities to get really deeply connected to our local adoption community when I was living and working in Austin, Texas. So I kind of just put those altogether. My love for the kids that needed a grown up to be like, “I will be here with you until we figure this out.” I wanted to be that grown up, and I wanted to help their other grownups become that person for them too, and then adoption, and then also really getting connected to trauma, and trauma-informed care, and then ultimately discovering what we would now call the field of relational neuroscience. And then I’ve just pulled all those things together.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I love it. I don’t think that I’ve ever met another person or certainly have not interviewed anyone for the podcast who was influenced early on by Torey’s books. And you said that and I was like “Wait a second. That was one of my favorite books.” And I wasn’t exposed to her writing in high school, but in college, going through my special education program, that was required reading, and oh my goodness, I have read that book several times. So powerful. So wow, something I didn’t know about you! I love it, and I’m so there with you that back before we knew even half of what we know now about the brain and all of this stuff, you and I, and some of our colleagues were just like, “Let’s figure it out”. I didn’t know all the science behind it back then, nobody did. All I knew was these are kids who are really struggling, really hurting. As you said, nobody else knows what to do with them. I don’t really know either, but I can be here with them, and I can connect with them, and I can love them. And in a lot of ways, that was enough. Now we know so much more, so I’m excited to dive into the neuroscience of this because I think the research has really started to catch up with those of us 20,25, 30 years ago, just sort of instinctively doing this.

Robyn Gobbel 

Absolutely, yes.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So before we get into the science of it, I do want to have you really sort of lay the foundation here by defining what we mean when we say trauma, because I think that most of the time when people hear trauma, they think about a big, isolated, traumatic event like the death of a loved one, or a major car accident or a house fire, or something like that. And so I would really like you to just give us the foundation here. How do you define trauma? What do we need to be thinking about with trauma?

Robyn Gobbel 

So when I think about trauma — and it isn’t a term that is well defined across disciplines, and so we do all use it in our own kind of unique and nuanced way. When I think about trauma, and specifically the word trauma, I think about not only an experience, but then what happened after the experience. What happened in the individual’s support system? Who was there for them? And that then is related to how that experience gets processed in the brain and body and nervous system, our regulatory circuits, in our memory processing, and we could go into all of that kind of stuff. What was the experience? What was the impact it had? And how did our brain and body and mind respond to it? Ultimately, the specific experience kind of becomes almost the least focused on thing, at least when we are thinking about the definition of trauma, because you and I could have the exact same not good experience happen at the exact same time and how it impacts us is going to be wildly different, based on so many things that were happening in that exact moment, as well as our previous experiences, everything that had led us to that moment. And then what happens after that moment, who’s there? How does my story get told? What happens in those moments and days and weeks afterwards? So trauma, then I guess, to get a little more succinct for me is the experience, but then what happens after the experience? How does that blend with all the things that had happened before the experience? And ultimately, it’s about something that overwhelms our system, overwhelms us in the moment in our functioning and our ability to kind of process and integrate that experience.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

A couple of things there that I think are so important to spotlight: One is how you said that two people can have exactly the same thing happen to them, or go through the exact same thing. Like two children in a family or two family members could go through the exact same thing, and one may move through that and not have lasting serious issues and another could, and so I think recognizing the individuality of that is important. I also want to touch on this idea — I don’t actually know who first put this out there, but this idea of like big T trauma versus little t trauma, this idea that the trauma is in the eye of the beholder, and it doesn’t have to be some huge life-defining event. There can be lots of smaller traumas that build up over time, and so I’d love to have you just talk a little bit about that.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, I heard that word for the first time ever, big T versus little t trauma, early, early, early, in my career, probably in EMDR training. I think it’s useful to consider that, I think it’s also useful to go beyond that sort of language, but what I learned when I learned like big T versus little T trauma, it was like single incident trauma, so say like a car accident, or a house fire, or a hurricane. One specific incident that occurred, that then impacted how our brains and bodies and minds integrated and processed that experience, versus what we could call little t traumas, or we could move into a language like complex trauma, developmental trauma, attachment trauma, again, one day, maybe somebody will define all these terms, we will have really consistent language, but until then, taking this of step back and recognizing that the frequency of maybe we could say “less intense experiences”, but that they are happening — although I don’t even like to say things like that, because who am I to say intense versus not intense? But the frequency of experiences that occur repeatedly, that we wouldn’t necessarily look at just one of them and label that a big T trauma. But when we step back and look at the frequency and the time in between what happened, that there wasn’t enough recovery time, or that those experiences happened repeatedly over time. And it doesn’t even have to be something we look at and say this thing happened. For example, in the pandemic, one of the things that’s happened repeatedly is social isolation. So as opposed to something happening, it’s almost like a lack of something happening. And that happened over a long period of time, and it happened in the context of a lack of social or cultural safety, and that those things have added up over time. And without question, for some kids now, it’s completely accurate to say they have experienced trauma because of the pandemic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Adults as well. I mean, we are sort of absolutely living with the trauma of all that. I think that that’s a great example. So I think this idea, too, that sometimes our perception of it, I mean, actually, all the time, our perception of how another person has experienced something or how a child has experienced something is really irrelevant. It’s about how that individual experienced it. And I want to raise this in the context, particularly, of something that we see quite a bit at our clinic in the community of adoptive parents who don’t recognize the process of adoption itself as being a trauma in the lives of kids, and who will say “Well, I don’t get it. We adopted him or her at birth”, or “We brought him home when he was nine months old, there wasn’t any trauma there, I don’t get it”, and not being able to take the perspective developmentally, as you were saying of what that was like to be in the brain and the body of that baby in utero, of that newborn, of that infant. We look at it through the lens of just our own experience, and we fail to recognize what’s really going on there.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, absolutely. Adoptions are a good example, especially when just looking at the infant adoption, and maybe relinquish and then placement with an adoptive family right at birth, and so we are going to pull out abuse and neglect that we might see in other sort of adoption experiences. When we say that that wasn’t a trauma, we are looking at several different things here: One, we are not totally understanding how infants and newborns and even babies still in utero are taking in and processing the world, right? That’s simply because they don’t recall those experiences, their memory networks are still alive and well, and working, and storing those experiences inside their memory networks. They just don’t recall them. So I think that’s one piece. I think we are also really minimizing what it means to be a teeny, tiny, brand new baby in the world who’s expecting one thing. Because babies do come into the world expecting what they were prepped to come into when they were in utero, and they could hear things and feel things and all that kind of stuff. So the fact that something different happened — even if we could, and we can’t always, but even if we could objectively state, what happened was better, that they ended up in a better place, which doesn’t actually always happen in adoption, but let’s just consider that it did, that it’s still a trauma because it wasn’t what was expected. But then the other thing we really overlook is remembering that as kids get older, they go through different developmental stages, and their story and their narrative means something completely different and new to them. So how a three-year-old is interpreting adoption and what that means about them, and their life experiences, is wildly different than what a 15-year-old is thinking. And so that 15-year-old’s experience, what they are bringing to that informs how much of a trauma that experience feels like.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So true. And I think that’s such a great point about regardless of what type of trauma was, how that lives in the child, and how that evolves as they go through critical developmental stages. That’s really an excellent point. And so parents who maybe feel like, “Well, we are out of the woods. The adoption or the major life disruption, or the traumatic thing that happened, they seem to be fine with it.” Sometimes we could be really caught off guard then in the teen years, for example, when that really props up. And so our awareness of that throughout the child’s developmental process, that’s really, really important.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, it’s something I spend time with, actually, when I work with families clinically. If we start to wrap up our work together, I just like to kind of lay the groundwork for them that we are wrapping up our work here together, but don’t let it blindside you if when your child turns 12, or 15, or 21, or they become a parent or whatever milestone happens, if this begins to reemerge. Just don’t let that blindside you. That’s normal. We can expect that that’s probably going to happen. Really, I think that helps lower the feeling of crisis: What did we do wrong? How did we cause this? If families are kind of prepped for that. Each developmental stage, we kind of re-integrate our past experiences, they mean something new to us.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, for sure. So let’s get into now how trauma impacts the behavior of kids. And we are going to talk about that via the neuroscience of really what trauma is doing to the brain, and to me, this is so important for all of you listening who are raising kids, who are teaching kids, who are doing therapy with kids. When we can understand this, when we can understand how these experiences shape a child’s brain, it lets us really look past the behavior and support it in such different ways. So let’s start with the brain level. What do you think are the important things for parents, teachers, and caregivers, to understand about how trauma impacts brain development and brain function?

Robyn Gobbel 

I love that question. And I actually want to start somewhere different first, if that’s okay. Where I’ve loved to start now, because of what I have discovered over the years is, we have unintentionally turned the idea of trauma-informed care, trauma-informed practices or trauma-informed parenting into another kind of behavior management technique. And so I’ve paused to figure out why. How did this happen? Because it happened unintentionally by wonderfully amazing, well-meaning humans. So how did this happen? What I realized was just like, oh, because we still are laying the idea of trauma-informed care and trauma-informed practices and the impact of trauma on behavior on top of outdated views about behavior in general. So just super briefly, let’s start there because I feel like we have to layer trauma-informed care on top of that. But without question, since I was in graduate school, what I’ve learned about what behavior is, and I actually don’t know if I’ve ever told you this either, but I started my undergraduate training as a special education major. So I started in the education department, and then shifted over to the psychology department, not until the end of my junior year. So I also had a probably similar training from the special education world about behavior, what behavior is, and what we do with it. And I’ll just succinctly say, we just learned so much more about where behavior emerges from. And so when I start with working with a family or when I start teaching, I like to kind of go back to ground zero and say we have learned something new about what behavior is telling us, and I have kind of these three things I’ll usually talk about. One is simply: Let’s just agree that behavior is only information. It’s something we see on the outside, that gives us some clues about what’s happening on the inside. And we can get all into the autonomic nervous system and affect theory and attachment theory and all those things. But usually, I just say “Gust trust me on this one. It’s just clues. It’s just clues. We are just going to take it as data. It’s just information,” and let us go “Hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s happening underneath that, why is this behavior happening?” And then the second thing I always teach is one of my pillars, and again, I keep reminding people, this is about all people. This isn’t about trauma yet. We will get to the trauma piece. First, let’s just agree on the neurobiology of being human.

So then my second one is connection, and we know this is from the science, connections are a biological imperative. Meaning, we are all always seeking connection. All, always. It’s actually our default, we are expecting it. So when kids are behaving in a way that’s like pushing connection away, or making us not want to be connected to them — you and I are parents, we probably don’t have to go that far in our memory banks to remember a time our kid was doing something that was like, “Ah, I don’t even want to be by you. Right?” It’s not that that’s not real. That really happened. It really was a behavior that’s pushing away connection. But when I’m in my most regulated self, I want to pause and go, “Well, that’s curious, what’s up with that?” If you have connection as a biological imperative, and we are all always wanting connection, seeking connection, we prefer it, it’s our baseline, why would we have a behavior that is clearly pushing connection away, or not letting connection in? Right, so just more curiosity. So that’s number two.

And then my third one is just a summary of all the relational neuroscience. For me, I kind of bring it back to “Here’s what we know: When regulated and connected kids are feeling safe, they are doing well. They are behaving in ways that the adults are going, “Yeah, we like that.” So when we have a kid who’s not doing that, whether in the moment or pervasively, to pause and go, “Okay, so is this about regulation? Is this about connection, and attachment? Is this about felt safety?”, which again, all of those are big topics that we could spend lots and lots of time on. So those are just my three things: Behavior is just what we see. So what’s happening on the inside, connections are biological imperative, regulated, connected, kids who feel safe are doing well. And this again, I go back to, is true about all kids, but also all humans, all grownups, me and you too, right? It brings us to a new understanding of what it means to be human, and that I think that pulls us back out of this, again, unintentional place that we came to by very well-meaning humans, of trauma-informed care, having been turned into another behavior intervention.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

It’s so true. And that’s happened in so many different ways beyond even just trauma. When we operate out of the framework or the core idea that we just look at what’s on the surface, and the goal is to stop that, we might be successful in doing that with our behavior charts and our rewards and our punishments and our whatever, but we never really get beneath that surface level. And I think that’s why so many parents, as their kids start to get older, and people in schools, have this experience too. It becomes like this game of Whack-a-Mole, right? Where it’s like, okay, I got that particular behavior down, or I’ve got them to stop doing that, but now these other things have popped up. And it’s because we fundamentally aren’t viewing the behavior as just the red flag, as the tip of the iceberg. We are not looking deeper and saying “What’s actually going on here?” And so I just think fundamentally, that’s so important for us to approach child behavior, adult behavior, human behavior in that way.

Robyn Gobbel 

I agree. And then there’s been this way that we have come to believe that if we do get curious about behavior, somehow that’s synonymous with just letting bad behavior go, right? And it’s absolutely not right. Both are 100% possible. We can be completely curious about behavior and do things that communicate, “This behavior is not working for me, and so you and I have to figure out how we are going to adjust.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Both things can exist at the same time. That’s very important.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yeah. So then, if we want to go to the next step, okay, so how does trauma impact that? Well, words that you’ve heard me say like regulation, a connection, health, safety — trauma impacts how our regulatory circuits are formed if the trauma happened early enough in our life, meaning when I’m using the word regulation, I’m thinking about the energy and arousal that’s underneath and driving our behaviors. We all have go, go, go energy and we all have stop, stop, stop energy, and when the energy is regulated, our behaviors tend to make sense. Again, regulated behaviors aren’t usually the ones that are driving parents to listen to behavior podcasts, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Their behaviors match what’s going on in the situation. Like I can be aroused, busy, and running around when I’m outside and playing, and I can manage my body and my voice and myself in a way that’s quiet when it needs to be. That’s the idea of what it means to regulate ourselves.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yeah. And we can even be mad, but just if you said, it makes sense. Like, we can all look at me like, well, of course, you’re mad. It makes perfect sense that you’re mad right now. You’re not totally losing your mind or flipping over desks. You are mad, and I get it, right? So regulated doesn’t mean calm and zen all the time. And then the way that trauma and experiences of harsh care, or dangerous care, or an absence of care during the time when these regulatory circuits are forming, that could be really severe. Things that you and I would easily look at and say like, “Yes, that was abusive or neglectful.” But it also can be a lot more subtle than that, based on as parents, kind of our own experiences being parented, the stress in our lives in this moment in which we are parenting can absolutely impact just how present we are for our kids, how attuned we are for our kids, how well we are able to be with them and offer them the co-regulation that they need, right? It doesn’t have to look exactly like what we would easily label abusive or neglectful for our children to have some impairments in how their regulatory circuits are built when they are brand new babies, toddlers, preschoolers, when this when this autonomic nervous system is really getting built. So trauma impacts our regulation, and turns us into what — most parents are very familiar with this, which is this idea of like the “mountain out of the molehill” phenomenon, where you’re like, there’s a small problem. We can all agree, usually there’s a problem, it could be as simple as, “No baby, dinner is in five minutes, so we are not going to have a snack right now. I’m like actively plating dinner for you.” Right? And then the reaction is as if you’ve just said, “You’re never going to eat again for the rest of your life.” Right? Sure, there was a stressor, but it was a small one compared to the what the reaction was. And so there are a lot of things that are going into that. One of them is just impaired regulatory circuits. My 15-year-old, when I say “No, baby, we are going to have dinner soon. Let’s pause and have that after dinner if you’re still hungry.” He’s disappointed, right? He wants what he wanted right now. He’s disappointed, but his regulatory circuits help him manage that disappointment. And also, he trusts me that really, I’m about to feed him soon, and that feeling of hunger in his body isn’t going to last forever. And so his regulation is helping him kind of just tolerate that disappointment, and tells him an accurate story. Like, “Yes, I really am going to get dinner soon. Yes, this feeling of hunger is going to be over soon. Yes, I am going to get my needs met.” So then if we look at the connection side of things, especially when we think about complex trauma, developmental trauma, that early attachment trauma, those traumatic experiences either happened inside the caregiver in relationship, or in the instances of medical trauma, or other traumatic experiences, the things that can happen to really small children that are the parents and really not at fault, they didn’t do it to the child, but because of the circumstances, they also were not really able to help the child co-regulate that experience, or frankly, just stop the experience, right? When our kids are hurting when they are tiny babies, one of the things we try to do is to get that hurt to stop, like in an instance of medical trauma, we can’t do that. And not only can we not do that, but maybe we are actually standing by while the child is experiencing more pain, and we have to, and we are not doing anything wrong, but the child’s experience and their nervous system experience is “I’m not getting what I need, my parents are not helping me.” And so when these experiences happen inside the connected relationship, what can happen is that the child’s nervous system learns that connection is both exactly what they need and want, and also it’s scary or it hurts, or they don’t get what they need and want there. And then that kind of conundrum creates some baffling behaviors, right? If I have something I need desperately to be okay in the world, like connection, and also, I’ve learned that that thing hurts me or doesn’t get me what I need, and both are true: I need it desperately, and I’m afraid of it, that combination results in some behaviors that we could just call bizarre, strange, baffling.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, but what’s coming to mind too, as you talk about that sort of conundrum there that kids have of like, “I need you, I want the connection, but it has caused pain, it’s overwhelming.” I think even about all of you who are parenting or working with kids with neurodivergent brains, kids, who maybe from very early on are very overwhelmed by the sensory environment, or the ways that we typically engage with and communicate with young kids is very overwhelming and adverse to their nervous system, and it’s that same sort of like, dilemma in the kid, of, “I desperately need and want this connection with you. But it’s also super-overwhelming and I can’t handle it.” And so we get all of these really dysregulated behaviors that come out of that, then.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, and then the parents often aren’t aware that what’s happening is that their child is processing information differently. And when you don’t know that that’s happening, almost always the story you tell yourself about that is that it’s your fault. “I’m a bad mom, I’m doing…”, and then that mess, that story that we weave can have an impact on connection as well.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so many ways that this shows up in kids and then the stories that parents tell themselves about that. And then we have the piece of well-meaning but really not helpful or accurate information and advice that parents are given about how to handle this stuff, right? Because as we shift gears and start talking about what parents and caregivers can do about this, we have to acknowledge that one of the core issues that comes up when parents try to seek help around, “Something is not working here. What do I need to do?” If they are advised in ways that go back to that old behavior paradigm that you were talking about of rewards and punishments, all of these kinds of things, behavioral kinds of approaches — Wow, we can really make things worse, can’t we?

Robyn Gobbel 

Oh, yeah. unintentionally so. And I think it’s so important for us as professionals to just have a moment of pause, where we realize how much power we hold on families. And really, it’s so important for us to start every single day, maybe every single appointment by remembering how much power we hold on people’s families, and how people do what we tell them to do. And so let’s get really clear about how we are handling that power. And yes, I think one of them is making sure that we are understanding to the best of our ability and whatever we know right now about what behavior really is, whether it’s about a kid with a history of trauma or not, right, what behavior really is, so that we can really empower the parents to see that themselves, and then have tools that actually solve the real problem instead of — I love how you said whack-a-mole, because that’s exactly the language I use, just playing behavior whack-a-mole. Sometimes we are successful, but then the behavior just pops up somewhere else, and we never stop that kind of frantic feeling of “How do I get this to go away? How do I get this to go away?” And if we can really take a step back, that feeling stops, right this whack-a-mole, try, try try, try, try, because that brings such a powerful change to parent child relationship, too.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Right. Absolutely. So let’s give people one or two specific things that they can be doing or thinking about, because these kids really do need a unique form of parenting, right? There are some shifts that we need to make, some things that we need to understand. And so I’d love for you to share a couple of really tangible things — and preface that by everyone understanding that these things that Robyn is going to talk about are actually good and important for all kids. If you are a parent to multiple kids or you’re like a teacher in a classroom or whatever, and you’re going “Oh, great. I have to have one specific way for this kid and another for this kid.” No, actually, what we are talking about here is fantastic and works for all kids. So just want to put that out there as something to keep in mind, this will actually make your life easier with all of your kids.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, very much so. Okay, let’s talk about practical stuff because absolutely, none of this information is helpful at all if we have no idea what to do with it. So I like to start off by saying that there are some things that we are doing practically that we might not label as being practical. And truly, it really is a practical intervention to just be changing how we are seeing behaviors. It’s practical for probably a lot of ways, but the two ways I really talked about are if we can just see like, “Oh, this isn’t about my child being controlling or manipulative or just whatever run of the mill bad behavior, this is about my child struggling.” If we are just shifting that lens, we are doing two major things: One is our child sees something different in our eyes when we are looking at them. That is an intervention. It really matters. It changes things. It might not change the behavior instantly in the moment, and I get that, but it does change things in the long run. And so I say changing how we see people changes people, it is an intervention. The other part of that, too, is it changes my own physiology. Like when I’m with somebody who is just honestly, there’s just no two ways about it, they are behaving badly. I’m not trying to convince people that other people’s behaviors are not bad. It’s bad. But if I can see it some of the time — it’s just it’s not possible to do this all the time, but if I could do that just some of the time, and I can see that person is struggling, and still know, that doesn’t mean they get to do it, I could still have a boundary. But let’s start with “They are struggling.” That changes my inner physiology, and it keeps my nervous system — I’ve talked about our nervous systems being in either connection mode or protection mode. Either experiencing felt safety or not experiencing felt safety. If I want my child’s behavior to change, they need my nervous system to be in what I call “connection mode”. If I’m dysregulated, if I’m in protection mode, if I’m seeing my kids behaviors as just a result of them being a really bad kid, then my child doesn’t have the opportunity to experience me as kind of their beacon of felt safety in that moment. And so even though I know parents feel like “It’s not practical, just tell me what to do.” I do want to, and I can do both, I promise I can do both, I can also give you things to actually do, but they have to be grounded on top of this shift. It truly is an intervention to just really change how we see behavior.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, to change how we see behavior and to be willing to focus on changing ourselves. Yes, so often, and again, in that old paradigm, the emphasis is on changing the kid. And understanding behavior, now, as you’ve talked about, as we understand it, it really forces us to shift the focus to ourselves and say, “How do I need to change myself and bring myself to this situation, so that my child can be more regulated, can get their nervous system together, and we can move forward?” And that’s a huge difference. A mentor of mine told me, I don’t know, probably 20 years ago now, a kid can only be as regulated as the least regulated adult in their environment. Oh, if we start thinking about that, suddenly we go, oh, I have a little more of an understanding, if we are willing to be honest with ourselves about why our kids are struggling. A lot of it is where are we as the key adults in their life? And what are we modeling? And how are we managing ourselves?

Robyn Gobbel 

Absolutely. And I know you do this so beautifully in the work that you do: Also reminding parents like, “Hey, we are human too”. We can say these things are like “Your kids are only as regulated as the least regulated person in the room.” And honestly, my first thought is like, “Oh, no, this is not going to work out well for my child.” Yeah. And then taking a breath and pausing and being like, “Okay, actually, there are so many things that I can do to support my own regulation that my child deserves me to do, that I deserve for me to do those things for myself, and so do my…” So again, this isn’t like “This is your fault, caregiver.” And I know so much that that’s nowhere near what you feel or think or believe or put out into the world, yet it is still so easy as a parent to be like, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.” So just pausing. For me, my most practical first steps are: Notice your reaction, notice that you’re about to really flip your lid on your kid. Just know, just acknowledge that that’s actually what’s happening instead of trying to talk yourself out of it, or “I shouldn’t be reacting this way” or all these things we tell ourselves. And then pause for a moment of self-compassion. This is hard. This parenting gig that we have, even in the best of circumstances, is hard. And then we add in parenting kids who have experienced really hard things that have happened to them, whose nervous systems just aren’t fitting what we would call the neurotypical norm, and we still have so much work to do to make the world a safe place for them. And we are working on it, but it’s not there yet. Just pausing to acknowledge that these things are true: Parenting is hard. Being with dysregulated kids is hard, even when we know “what to do”. It’s still so hard. Lots of self-compassion, and then kind of just a big breath. “Okay, now what?”

Yeah, and so then I go back to my question of, okay, if regulated, connected, kids who feel safe are doing well, what’s up with my kid right now? Is this a felt safety issue? Do I need to look at what’s happening in their environment? What’s happening with me? What’s happening with my kids’ inner physiology? Sometimes our kids aren’t feeling safe, because they are tired. I mean, there’s an enormous amount of information, of things that could be contributing to our kids not experiencing, felt safety in that moment. Or we can look at connection. Is my kid not feeling connected to me right now, overall? And as a full-time working mom, that’s a place I go to a lot, and not out of mom guilt, because I don’t really have a lot of mom guilt about being a full-time working mom. But just a reality check of, “Am I more disconnected from my kid than usual, right now?” And part of what’s happening right now, is his way of letting me know that. He’s not getting what he needs from me right now. Do I need to just kind of call a pause in this moment and just be present? Do I need to do bigger picture things? Do I need to look at my work hours? We could ask ourselves lots of questions. And then regulation. Is my kid not regulated right now? I really love this question, because I think there are so many ways we can get creative about supporting our kids that have nothing to do with traditional behavior management. For my home, that looks like making sure my kid has snacks during homework time. I think to myself, when was the last time that kid went outside and moved their body? That makes me remember that what my kid needs to feel regulated, and what I need to feel regulated aren’t the same thing. So when he likes to do his homework while he’s listening to audiobooks, and my first reaction is, “Oh, no, no, no, no. We don’t do homework while we have got words in our earbuds.” And I pause and I’m like, “Well, is he actually doing it?” Okay, so maybe there’s something about that that’s helping his system feel regulated, and then actually able to do what he needs to do. So I’m thinking a lot. When I’m looking at bad behavior, I am really thinking, when was the last time he ate? Does he need a snack? What kind of a snack does he need? When was the last time he had a drink? If I got my kid to drink a thick drink through a straw, would that help? Because sucking things that are thick helps us come into regulation, and I think that’s just a much more fun way to parent. I would so much rather be thinking about those types of ways to help my kid feel better than be thinking about what sort of punitive consequences I need to give out in order for his behavior to change. That’s just exhausting to me. It’s not a very fun way to parent.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And I think even when we may not ever figure out what’s really going on under that — sometimes we just don’t know, I’ve had that with my own kids, I’ve had that with kids, patients that I work with. Sometimes we don’t know. But there is something about our presence of being oriented in that direction of “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here beneath this, but I know there’s something,” and I’m going to try to figure it out. But even if I don’t figure it out, there is still such a benefit in my presence with the child in that scenario of appreciating the fact and coming from a place that I know there’s something going on here, even If it doesn’t make sense to me, or I don’t know what it is, and that connection then has such a benefit for kids too. So if you’re like, “I don’t know what it is half the time”, that’s okay. And you might not, but just thinking about it in that way, I think, is beneficial for building trust and building safety and regulation.

Robyn Gobbel 

And then so often what happens next as parents, we are like, “Okay, this is great. I love this idea. But what about a consequence? How do I actually teach my child that being mouthy to me or disrespectful or screaming at me that they are not going to do their homework? How do I teach them that that’s not acceptable?” I’m like, oh, that’s such a great question. And let’s go back to what we know about what it means to be human. And it is that connection is a biological imperative. We want to behave in ways that promote social connectedness and social relationships. So generally speaking, if we help kids feel regulated, connected and safe, they are behaving in ways that are the behaviors we are looking for. Even though we haven’t given them a consequence to know not to do those other behaviors. It’s first, a lot of times, not always, a lot of times, that behavior is just going to emerge. But then I also like to ask parents this, because the answer is always the same. And I ask: “Does your child know that it’s not okay to talk to people like that? Does your child know that it’s not okay to hit people when they are mad?” “Yes, they know.” “Okay, then we actually don’t have to teach them.” “Right. They do know and they know because you’re a great parent.” And it’s so clear, of course, my kid knows a respectful, appropriate way to communicate with other people. Right? He doesn’t need me to punish him to know that, right? So the question really isn’t, “Well, how will they ever learn?” Well, they learn in all the other moments. And we can still, once our kids are regulated, once you’re connected, once you’re feeling safe, we can go back and revisit, “Does my kid need some additional boundaries that are helping them be more regulated, be more connected, and be more feeling safe? Does my kid need a little reminder that in our family, we work really hard to be kind to each other.” Sometimes my kid does need that reminder. I’ve given it to him recently. But it didn’t come in the form of a punishment, or even a consequence. It came truly in the form of like, “Hey, let’s talk about this. What’s been happening lately? I know that you know in our family, we really value being kind to one another. What’s up? How can we help you?” And I’m not worried he’s learning it’s okay to act this way. He’s completely clear that it’s not okay to act that way, and honestly, he doesn’t like acting that way anyway. So if I can help him, and again, still give him a lot of boundaries. Boundaries and consequences are synonymous. Our kids need lots of boundaries, and there’s so much opportunity to really support them by giving boundaries. That doesn’t mean we have to give them a punishment, though.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, that’s such an important distinction. And I know you have so many resources and great things available to help parents know on a very practical level how to implement these things, how to bring these things to life in their own home, for professionals, working with kids and families, and therapy settings, and schools, all of that. So as we wrap up here, I want to make sure that people know where they can find all of those great resources that you have available.

Robyn Gobbel 

I would love to get as many people across the whole world connected to so much of this, because so much of it is free. I have a ton of free resources like you do. I have a blog and a podcast and e-book on attachment that’s just free. Just access it, no cost, nothing. And then I do have some more in-depth opportunities for families. I have a parent course for families, digital totally on-demand. I have a virtual community for parents, where we really practice very practical skills on top of “What do I need to do as a parent to take care of me so that I can remember even what these tools are”. When we are dysregulated, we don’t even remember what the practical tools are, let alone actually use them. That’s not because we are bad parents. It’s because we are not regulated enough either, just like our kids. And then I will be offering, very soon in 2022, I am going to be offering a brand new program for professionals, for a long, immersive experience for professionals who really want to be able to work with families in this way of giving them very practical skills, but also being with families in a new way that helps families’ nervous system shift, so that they can, again, use the tools that that they are learning, so they can find — any listener can find all of the stuff just over on my website.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Can you say what the website is so that they know where to go?

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, it’s just robyngobbel.com.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Great. And you have a podcast as well, correct? And that they can access that there too.

Robyn Gobbel 

The podcast is on my website. The podcast is called Parenting After Trauma, so you can just search for it wherever you’re listening to this podcast.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Fantastic. I know you’ll have lots of new friends coming in and benefiting from all of the really amazing resources you have available. Thank you so much for all of the important work that you’re doing in the world around all of this, and also for taking the time to spend with us today. We really appreciate it.

Robyn Gobbel 

Yes, I mean, the same thing to you. I know you do so much to support families all over the world. I’m so, so grateful for that and love getting to chat with you whenever I can.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And thanks, as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.