5 Steps to Becoming a Cycle Breaking Parent

Every parent carries with them an inner template of the ways they were parented in their own childhood. Sometimes those internal templates carry profound psychological wounds due to abuse they suffered at the hands of their earliest caregivers. Other parents have maladaptive templates of having been raised by parents who had great intentions but lacked the emotional and relational skills to parent well, having been raised by relationally unskillful parents themselves.

Parents usually come into my practice already having decided that they want to parent their own children in more adaptive ways than they were raised. They want to be less reactive in the face of their child’s big feelings than their own adults were with them in childhood. They want to be less punitive when their child displays challenging behaviors, and end intergenerational patterns of using psychologically harmful strategies like shaming, spanking, and time-outs.

But while parents may want to break the cycle of unskilled parenting and pass down healthier ways of managing emotions, they aren't sure how to go about it or where to start. That’s because the desire to parent differently is necessary, but not always sufficient, for actually parenting differently. Breaking the cycle of misattuned and/or hurtful parenting requires an ongoing and intentional commitment to certain internal and external behaviors.

In this episode, I'm going to break down the first 5 steps to becoming a cycle-breaking parent.

1. Understand how maladaptive parenting gets passed down through generations

You can't break unhelpful cycles of parent-to-child disconnection without first understanding how they are passed from one generation to the next.

Let’s start with the term “trauma”—I know that’s a weighty term, but hear me out! The word “trauma” means the combination of the experience of an overwhelming event plus the after-effects it has on an individual. Anything you experienced as life-threatening or physically or emotionally harmful in your childhood that also had a lasting negative impact on your well-being can be considered psychological trauma.

Intergenerational trauma occurs when unresolved trauma in one generation is passed to the next generation through familial or cultural socialization. It can also occur when parenting behaviors are experienced by and modeled to a child in such a way that the child experiences the effects of the previous generation’s traumas—despite not having experienced the original traumatic events themselves!

Ongoing trauma that starts in infancy or early childhood is called relational or developmental trauma. It usually occurs within significant relationships with early caregivers or family members. This can include child maltreatment such as abuse or neglect, as well as a serious disruption of the parent-...

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