Understanding Resilience and How to Build It

Resilience is more than just bouncing back from a challenge. Join us for a conversation about building resilience in ourselves and our kids, understanding coping tools, and caring well for ourselves while raising kids who may have significant gaps in their resilience. We talk with Kathleen Harnish McKune and her sister, Karen Dickson from Remarkably Resilient, Inc., a non-profit organization committed to partnering to empower healing from trauma. 

In this episode, we cover:

• How do you define resilience? What does it look like in real life, not just in theory?
• What are resilience cups? Why do we need a full cup?
• How can parents and caregivers fill their cups while raising kids impacted by trauma, prenatal exposure, etc?
• What are your “5 Rs” of resilience?

1. Regulation
2. Relationships
3. Response
4. Recovery
5. Reflection

• What are some typical challenges – or symptoms – we might see in a child whose resilience is undeveloped or lacking? 
• When a child is struggling with challenging behaviors that show some gaps in their resilience, how can parents/caregivers practically implement these 5 Rs in the moment?
• What are the coping tools you’ve identified to help people implement resilience-building strategies – the 4 Cs: 

1. Calm
2. Care
3. Courage
4. Connect 

• Strengthening resilience at the individual level ripples out to families, communities, and beyond. What gives you hope as you do this work?

Chapters

• 1:09 Please tell how your own history and life journey led you to research resilience.
• 6:43 How do you define resilience? What does it look like in real life, not just in theory?
• 8:36 What are resilience cups? Why do we need a full cup?
• 12:00 How can parents and caregivers fill their cups while raising kids impacted by trauma, prenatal exposure, etc?
• 18:27 What are your “5 Rs” of resilience?
• 18:45 Regulation
• 21:02 Relationships
• 23:17 Response
• 27:48 Recovery
• 31:48 Reflection
• 38:48 What are some typical challenges – or symptoms – we might see in a child whose resilience is undeveloped or lacking?
• 45:56 When a child is struggling with challenging behaviors that show some gaps in their resilience, how can parents/caregivers practically implement these 5 Rs in the moment?
• 55:28 What are the coping tools you’ve identified to help people implement resilience-building strategies – the 4 Cs
• 1:00:14 Strengthening resilience at the individual level ripples out to families, communities, and beyond. What gives you hope as you do this work?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello and welcome to Creating a Family, talk about adoption, foster care, and kinship
care. I'm Tracy Whitney, the content director for Creating a Family dot org, and I'm
your host for today's conversation about understanding resilience and how to strengthen
it. My guests today are Kathleen Harnish -McEwn and her sister Karen Dixon.
Kathleen is the co -founder and CEO of Team Tech, a trauma -informed strategic
facilitation firm, and the CEO of Remarkably Resilient, a non -profit organization
committed to partnering to empower healing from trauma. Karen is the program director
of Remarkably Resilient, Incorporated, and together they regularly present Remarkably
Resilient Together workshops with the vision of changing the world by strengthening
community resilience one person at a time. I'm so thrilled to have them here with
me today. I first saw them on a webinar that I took about resilience and I'm
grateful to share this time with them. Thank you so much and welcome Kathleen and
Karen. Hello. Hi, thank you Tracy. We're going to jump into our conversation about
resilience. I would love to hear you talk to us briefly about how you got into the
study of researching resilience and breaking multi -generational cycles of trauma and
health challenges. I should state at the beginning that I actually attended a webinar
that you guys put on and was so impacted by the things that you shared that I
immediately went about how to contact you and pull you in for an interview.
So I'd like to hear a little bit more and share with our listeners the history
that brought you to this work. - Absolutely, Tracy. We all have those kind of
amazing turning point moments in our lives, and I had one of those. In April of
2017, I happened to be facilitating the Bringing Together of the Trauma and Form
Movement in Kansas City with the one in St. Louis. And on that day, they asked me
to go to the back of the room and hear the trauma 101 training. They wanted to
present it to the whole group. And it was during that presentation that I realized
for the first time ever, I was 55 years old, that the childhood that Karen and her
twin Sharon and I had shared was in fact very unusual. They put up ACEs,
the adverse childhood experiences scoring, And we are in the nine and 10 range,
so kind of that 2 .5 % of the population that group in a household like that. And
so then I knew that this research could help us answer our two questions we've had
our whole life. Why? Why did we have so many chronic health conditions? And second,
how? How would we have been able to break that multi -generational cycle of incest
abuse neglect in our paternal family. And then Karen, over to you, I called you on
the way home. - Called me on the way home and it was a big aha moment for me
because again, we had had chronic health problems, particularly my twin sister and I,
and always thought there was something wrong with us. And we would say, you know,
what's wrong with us? What's wrong with us? And it was a lot of trauma in that as
well. When Kathleen gave me this information, I had never heard about ACEs, and I
was like, "Wow, honestly, Kathleen, my number would probably be higher than a 10."
It would be higher. So it was eye -opening. It was something that gave me hope to
understand and learn more about the responses that I have, the way I parented,
everything in terms of life itself. So we just delved in, and Kathleen started
saying we need to learn more about the neuroscience of trauma. - And where did you
go to start learning about the neuroscience of trauma? What were your kind of go
-tos in those early days? - I was really lucky. Part of the trauma informed movement
in Kansas City had birthed some experts. And so I got to know them through my
facilitation and I asked them to please provide me with a list of reading and
research. The book that I found most helpful was by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris who
does great TED Talks. I find her very easy to read. I also heard Dr.
Bruce Perry speak three different times. Poor man never got to take a break because
I went up on stage and asked 18 more questions and then eventually wrote a white
paper that I presented at a county -wide summit where we were working on preventing
children and families from entering the system. So that was really a deep dive,
reading everything that I could and that was recommended by people that were way
further along in their learning about this than I was. And then coupling that with
lived experience and constant conversation with the twins.
- Karen, how about you? Did you have any additional resources that you were digging
into or? - No, I was reading the same books. Kathleen was reading, we were sharing
information, we were having aha moments, sharing information, honestly that we hadn't
shared with one another ever. - Okay. - And so that was a huge insight for us, is
like, wow, we started to say, you know, these are the reasons why we're different,
these are the reasons why we react the way we do. So That's that was the journey
And I imagine it was probably quite a gift to have somebody to do this journey
with Absolutely, I can't imagine Having done this by myself In fact,
all three of us would say that that if we would have had to do this by ourselves
and Talk about the things that we've gone through and you know go on this journey
it would have been a lot more difficult. And I honestly would not have done it.
When I called Karen, I said, "Karen, I have to have one of you twins with me."
And I think, you know, we have the tightest relationship right now. And initially,
Sharon said no. And that was her right, her prerogative, her absolutely what she
needed to heal. And eventually, as we kept writing and talking and sharing learning
and insight, Sharon said, "You know, I think I want to join in on writing the book
as well in telling parts of my story."
to do it together.
Let's talk about resilience. I'd love to hear how you define resilience and what it
looks like, what healthy resilience looks like in real life, not just in theory.
Well, resilience is really the capacity to cope, the ability to grow,
and change just through adversity. That's probably the best definition that we've come
up with. What that looks like in real life is that, you know, it's not always
constant. We keep learning. We keep growing. We keep running into some adversity that
we weren't aware of. Maybe it was hidden way back in our psyche. Maybe we run into
it on the streets and it triggers something. But that's what resilience is. and that
real desire to keep growing and healing, I think, Kathleen?
- I agree that we were really careful in how we defined resilience in our book. We
had read a lot, people talking about resilience as bouncing back from adversity.
And we, I couldn't disagree with that more. There is not a bounce back when you've
just had a sexual encounter with your father or your grandfather. There is not. It
is much more in real life about a decision and it's about these beautiful coping
mechanisms that come flying in that you don't even know are there until you get
older and look back at them that protect you, that help you survive. So it's much
more about that really that coping. That's what Sharon and Karen and I talked a lot
about, and then it is that movement through that decision to keep going, the
decision to see bits of hope, and the decision to keep learn change and growing,
that is resilience to us. And I love when you described the resilience cups as a
metaphor for how to do that. Can you talk a little bit about that for and why
it's necessary to keep your cup filled. This was a hard lesson to learn when you
grew up in a home like we did. Self -care and taking care of yourself is not
talked about and certainly not valued and not something that is part of who you
are. And so we came to that learning, at least I did, in 2021 when so many very
difficult situations came upon me and I fell over. I never fell over.
I was the energizer bunny of the family. Nothing took me down, nothing stopped me,
nothing got in my way. I was driven from age five on. And it was in the
conversation with our mental health center director, Tim DeWise, who I value as a
dear friend and colleague, where he said to me, "Now, Kathleen, you've let your
resilience cup run dry. And it was in that moment, another kind of turning point,
aha moment, that I suddenly realized that I spent so much time taking care of
others and not enough time taking care of myself that my cup didn't runneth over.
My cup was dry and I didn't have anything to pull on to give to anybody else let
alone give to myself. And it was my beautiful sister Karen who came to my side,
picked me up, helped me get up, and helped me move forward. So it's very much
about that taking care of yourself so you can take care of others. And I used to
think about self -care as, you know, the woo -woo -foo -foo for everybody else, but
not me. Thank you very much. Have you seen my busy schedule? It is not that at
all. It's much, much more than that and so very important. - Karen,
do you have anything you wanna add to that, to the metaphor? - The metaphor works
and I saw it and I witnessed it. And it was a beautiful way of stating that it's
so important to take care of yourself. And it's like that old saying when you're on
the airplane, put your oxygen mask on first. And we grew up where we were always
taking care of others or situations and not taking care of ourselves. And we,
in fact, were told that that was selfish. So it was another aha moment as well for
me because the strongest person I knew on the face of this planet fell down.
So we just started conversations about that saying self -care really is important,
you know, it's a big piece of this resilience, healing journey that we hadn't
considered before. So that's what I would add to it, how very important it is for
everyone. Well, you don't have to convince me because it's one of my favorite things
to talk about. I love encouraging our adoptive foster and relative caregivers to find
meaningful nourishing self -care, I think that it's good for me to encourage them to
do it because it's the one finger pointing at them saying, "Don't forget to do
this," and four pointing back at me saying, "I need to do this too," but I want
to talk it, let's frame it a little bit in terms of the importance of self -care
and building up our resilience cups so that we can do the job of helping our kids
heal, helping our kids thrive, setting them up to succeed. Because I think sometimes
when we have a good why, that's what gives us kind of that impetus to go for it
and do it. So can you talk a little bit about the, not just the importance,
'cause I think we can all agree It's very important, but that connection of the
why. - The why for me is very simple. It's self -care enhances parenting patients.
And I think that's what it taught me. And when I looked back at the times when I
was not patient or I could have had a different response, I now know that it was
because I myself wasn't, I didn't have a full resilience cup and I didn't understand
about what true resilience was. So for me, the why is about that patient factor
because of all the neuropaths ways that get formed when you grow up with complex
trauma, you just tend to have like this rebound kind of reaction and you learn that
you know you've got to take that step you've got to breathe you've got to do all
of these things that take care of yourself so that you can patiently parent yeah
Karen that was beautiful I don't know what I can add to that I would say that we
often ask people to think about what does depleted feel like what is that empty
resilience cup feel like to you, and people will tell us exhaustion. The proverbial
last straw is right around the corner. For me, it's frizzle -frazzled.
Other people talk about feeling very weighted down. And so, as Karen so beautifully
expressed, it is super hard to be your best in taking care of other people when
that depletion is the way you're feeling. And so being aware of it, noticing it,
I used to ignore it. I don't anymore. And saying, I need to take time right now
to do something that provides self -care. And the other thing that Karen and I and
Sharon, we grew up in poverty. And so self -care also used to,
for me, and I think for you care and cost money. I go get a manicure, pedicure
massage. Yes, however, there are a lot of no cost or very low cost options.
We volunteer and teach with correctional populations, and we remind people that some
of the most important self -care is free. It's that moment to step out in nature if
you're able or to visualize it. It is those moments of quiet time. The best story
is an incarcerated woman said to me, "I found quiet time," because she told me in
our first workshop, "There is no quiet time here." And so we want to challenge you,
see if you can find it. She found it early in the morning, stepping outside,
complete quiet in nature. So there are just a lot of parts of self -care,
things that feed your soul that don't have to cost anything. So, being aware of
that depletion and then understanding there is a whole plethora of things you can do
for self -care that don't have to cost anything and honestly don't have to take
loads and loads of time, which I also used to think of in my busy schedule.
Yeah, I think if we can try and reframe it from another thing for us to do to
something that sustains us and gives us the ability to hold capacity for the people
that we are caring for. Self -care can look like ordering groceries instead of
actually grocery shopping with the cart through the store. Self -care can look like
meal planning. It can look like sticking to a budget. It can look like regular
doctor appointments, regular dentist appointments, all those things that go into
helping our whole person be present and patient and have the capacity for the things
that are inexperienced, untrained kids bring to us that they need our help and our
guidance with and we can't do it if we're so depleted. Like, one of the things
that came to mind when Karen was talking about patients was just kind of how a
porcupine, when they're triggered, all their quills are up. And the goal of self
-care for raising kids who've experienced trauma or prenatal exposure or any of the
other difficulties that our children come to us with. The goal is to be calmed and
regulated and we can only do that when our cups are full. So I appreciate that
metaphor.
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also because the guide will help them if they're facing some tough stuff with their
kids as well. Thanks so much, and we're gonna go back to the interview now.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the five Rs that you have used to
encapsulate the whole concept of resilience. And I'd love it if you could state them
and then define them. And you can take turns, kind of bounce this back and forth
between you as we go through the five. Well, I'll start with the R of regulation
and let you know kind of the caveat. Everything that we discovered, we discovered
through the neuroscience of trauma coupled with our lived experience and there's just
no one clarity that understanding and recognizing your emotional regulation and
dysregulation is one of the most important pieces of resilience. And also one of the
most important pieces that you can demonstrate and model for your children and
something that children like Karen and Sharon and I raised in the home we were have
no clue about. And we are completely dysregulated humans and honestly didn't know
that until our mid '50s when we first learned this. So regulation, no uncertainty
and the neuroscience community, every human needs to understand and learn emotional
regulation. - Well, in neural, like I said before, neural pathways shape your
emotional reactions. And so if you are constantly in that dysregulated state,
that's what your brain learns. And so it's so important to unlearn that if you can
and practice that emotional regulation so that you create new pathways and you do
that for your children as well because the more their brains experience that calm
sense and that ability to think and that ability to stay present,
the more that pathway will develop. And we didn't know that. We knew nothing about
the neuroscience of the brain. And now that we know it, we can't unknow it as
Kathleen says. - Right. - And so we wish, we, everyone says, what do you wish you
had? And I think they expect us to say, a great childhood. Of course we wish that,
but more than anything, the ability to recognize when we are dysregulated,
because everything revolves around that. Relationships, conversations,
your ability to feel joy in life, so very important. That's a critical R.
The second R we discovered, again, neuroscience was very clear, our lived experience
matched perfectly with relationships. The importance and power of relationships and
connections. And the neuroscience says it takes only one. This was shocking,
shocking to us. We thought it was like a dozen, takes one. One safe,
caring, loving, secure adult relationship in the life of a child to in fact help
them build and strengthen resilience, especially children going through the kind of
experience we did, but all children. And we have that natural need to connect, that
attachment need from the moment we're born and Sharon and Karen and I knew when we
read that piece of research every one of us knew immediately who that person was in
our small town of Kinsley, Kansas and Western Kansas that community member without
knowing what we were going through gave us some resilience because of that
relationship and connection. Well and I agree with Kathleen, we were so lucky to
have been raised in that small community, because that's what small communities do,
they take care of each other. So that's why the tagline in our book was community
matters. It really did. Those relationships were so important. I happened to be extra
lucky because I was born a twin. And I say to my twin all the time, and I say
to Kathleen all the time, had I not been born a twin and had that special
relationship, that one -on -one, where we even had our own language and we understood
each other without even talking. I wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't be here. And
so that's how important relationships are. I actually helped raise my niece or my
husband's niece when she was a teenager and she had gone through a lot of complex
trauma. and I understood very clearly that having the one person care for her would
make a huge difference. So that's our challenge to everyone, be the one.
If you didn't even have the one, try to be the one for someone because it can
make a huge difference. - Yeah, thank you, Karen. The third R that we discovered,
no surprise to you all will be the R of response and that response was coping
mechanisms. So Sharon and Karen and I all discovered throughout our conversation,
our research, that we had developed coping mechanisms. In fact, the coping mechanisms
came to us unasked and undefined. They simply showed up and my first one I remember
was at age five and those wonderful beautiful protective mechanisms that help you
survive what you're going through. I am grateful for every one of them. The reason
I'm here today, I know Karen and Sharon feel the same. What's so wonderful about
being an adult is you can then, when you get help, therapy through connections and
relationships. This is a not do it on your own. People that tell you you pull
yourself up by your own bootstraps do not have a clue what they're talking about.
This is about in connection with the larger community and your safe group of friends
and your counselor, that you begin to say, you know, is that coping mechanism really
serving me well? And I had let go of my, what I called Stealed Up Kathleen Coping
Mechanism until 2021 when I fell over. And Stealed Up Kathleen showed up at the
door and I didn't ask for her and I didn't invite her in, She just was there and
she took over the driver's seat and did what she did when I was five years old,
head down, eyes forward, you have to keep moving. And I've just now, it's been five
years, well, almost five years, of still that Kathleen is sitting in the passenger
seat. He's not in the back seat, he's not out of the car. But I'm having a
dialogue with, do I need that protection still like I absolutely needed as a child
and I needed throughout my young adulthood and it came in and allowed me to stand
back up with my help from my sister. So it's those coping mechanisms and really
you're grateful for them, you need them, they are everything when you're going
through it and then when you're able take a look at them. So what I hear you
saying is that pretty much, we all have kind of natural coping mechanisms that will
surface when we need them. And then the imperative is as we mature and as we grow
and as we learn more, we don't just identify them, but then we assess them as to
whether or not they're serving as well. Is that what you're saying here? Absolutely.
That's - Exactly what we're saying. And for me, it's the same way. My coping
mechanism was dissociation and I actually had the ability to leave my body and view
things, go somewhere else and then come back. And I did that a lot, or escaped,
ran away a lot. In fact, they called me She -Wolf Gypsy Girl 'cause I traveled so
much, moved from here to whenever it got painful I move somewhere. So I have to
really look at that whenever I'm super stressed or something's horribly painful and
say, you know, should you really, should you stay here? Should you stay here and
should you learn and grow and adapt? And is there a lesson here that you might be
missing? So again, very, very important to recognize what that was for you,
be grateful, I'm incredibly grateful that I have that ability and had that ability,
but also discern when it's needed and when it's not needed. And considering the
community that we're talking to today of parents that are raising kids impacted by
trauma or abuse or neglect, be willing to assess does my coping mechanism improve my
child's ability to cope, or is it hindering my child's ability to cope? Because the
difference of the two could sometimes be budding up against and not serving you
well, but then it's also not serving the child well and how to reassess. Because
we're the adults in the room, we have to be willing to say, okay, maybe I need to
put my coping mechanism on the back burner for a little bit because it's gonna hurt
this child or this child's ability to cope. - Absolutely. - Wow, that's pretty
powerful stuff. I appreciate you sharing so vulnerably about your own coping
mechanisms. What's number four? - Number four is one we call recovery,
which everyone is familiar with. Recovery is that journey, right?
It's not a destination. It is in the roller coaster that everyone tells you that it
is. Our lived experience would say absolutely. It also is step forward and sometimes
two steps backwards. It is not a straight trajectory. It is not something that you
can predict. However, it is something that you learn to manage and go through but
again not alone it's very much in connection with others and with the community and
we'd like to say to communities in our call to action please provide the spaces the
places and the graces that we all need to go through this healing journey this
recovery journey from whatever it is that we've experienced whenever we've experienced
in a life's journeys because every one of us has had trauma. Every one of us has
stress. Every one of us needs that kind of grace and understanding as we go through
our recovery journey. So that's kind of how we talk about it. Karen, what would you
say? No, I agree wholeheartedly. I think it's that,
especially when looking at parenting, having the ability to give grace for an
outburst or a reaction that you didn't understand that you might not have ever seen
or predicted what happened. And then stepping back looking at it and saying,
this may be a part of the recovery journey. It might be a learning moment. So I
do think that spaces, graces and places is so important. Life is about the ups in
the downs and so is that recovery journey as well. And you have to give yourself
grace for that. And those children need to as well. They need to learn to give
themselves grace for what they're learning and going through and trying to adapt to.
- Karen, it makes me think about, I don't know that I mentioned to you, Tracy, but
I was left infertile by my abuse. And so we adopted a kiddo. And my adopted son
had a very dysregulated birth mom and we've learned a lot about regulated birth moms
can pass on that regulation or dysregulation to their birth children, which happened
in our case, the dysregulation. I've had to journey Zachary through a lot of ups
and downs. He has a lot of complex mental health issues. And I have to say that
holding on onto that piece of, it only takes one, safe, secure,
loving relationship, and I will be that one no matter what. I made that decision
when I decided to adopt. And then second, what Karen just said, it's been so
helpful for me to understand my own trauma recovery journey and understand Zach's
recovery challenges through what he's been given to be able to give that kind of
grace and stand in there and be that loving, consistent,
It's true. It's real. It's foundational. It's brain science. Hold on to those those
pillars. And this is a perfect example of the old adage more is caught than taught.
Our kids are not going to learn how to give themselves grace and margin and space
to heal if we're not learning how to give ourselves and then showing them that
we're giving ourselves grace and space and margin to heal. So I appreciate you
bringing it up in in that particular way. That was great. Yeah. Number five then.
Number five is reflection and it's one that revealed itself kind of as we wrote. We
snuck it in every chapter. We built in reflections both personal and also for the
community. Reflection is something that I learned. Gosh, when I was 30 working with
my business partner Joel Wright, who I partnered with for 20 years in business and
in every way with my chosen father. It's where I learned reflection. I learned the
power of reflective capacity. I learned what it meant to pause, to step back and
really think about that interaction, that event, that experience. And in that,
just maybe, maybe you get a little different perspective or even get a new insight,
you learn something. And Dr. Deming, who I interned with, gosh, back in the 90s,
always said to me, Kathleen, that is the profoundness of knowledge, his theory of
knowledge. And that is carving new rivers of thought in your mind. And the way that
happens is through the powerful open -ended reflective question. And so I learned that
as an adult and it was very much important when Sharon and Karen I started writing
to say we've got to sneak in that just building reflective capacity in people
throughout the book. Every time we introduce an R and decided why are we sneaking
it in let's just say what it is. And that is the power of reflection because it
is how humans learn change and grow and that's what it means to the human, kind of
out simple. - The story that I'll tell is I used to be annoyed when Kathleen would
do all these reflective questions. I think-- - Oh no, stop telling secrets, Karen.
- Well, you know, can I just tell her about experience and she doesn't have to ask
me a million questions? But then over time, I saw Now,
it helped me step outside of myself and get a new worldview or say,
"This is what I learned from the experience," or it helped deepen the experience for
me, or deepen a relationship because of a question that I would ask.
So for me, that was an aha moment, and it took practice.
It's a this thing again, where instead of just going about your day and saying,
you know, how was your day or how was school, asking a reflective question and say,
what was the thing that made you most excited today? You know, what did a teacher
do that felt like care? You know, just different questions that came out where you
would have a completely different conversation with your child or even in a personal
relationship between husband and wife. So I'm glad that she taught me about
reflection. I'm glad that it gives me a new worldview all the time. And it's
something that I'm still incorporating. She's the master at it, but I'm learning and
I'll continue to learn. And it does help you learn, change and grow. It really
does. - So do you feel like there's one of these five that maybe is most
challenging to get straight or kind of set well so that you can keep building?
You know when we finished writing our book and we had our calls to action and
we're distraught that you know the world didn't pick them up and move them into
action.
So we said well guess we have to do that. I stepped back and thought,
where do we start? And the conversation I had with myself first, and then with
Karen, was I've always, I've learned through my mentors the importance of empowerment.
And I looked at those five Rs and said to myself, I think the one that is most
empowering is regulation. It is that which you can do in and of yourself.
It's about you learning, you recognizing, you selecting regulation techniques,
things that soothe, calm you. Something that you can do on your own, you're
completely empowered to do. And when you feel you're in a situation where you don't
have a lot of choices, Sharon and Karen and I growing up and even into our young
adulthood, it's important to pick something that each individual in this world could
pick up and just do and so that's the one that we started with as we rolled out
the Rs to give more information, more tools. We'll roll all Rs out in a same kind
of workbook fashion with tools but regulation is so empowering and it's so
foundational because as Karen said earlier a dysregulated human is very hard to have
a relationship with And very hard to be going to recovery and very hard to give up
coping. Like it's just, that is kind of that without which. And certainly the
neuroscience community. I remember when I heard Dr. Bruce Perry say, "We must teach
emotional regulation to everyone." And we would say, "Absolutely, that's the case."
- No, I agree that that is the one, that is the most important piece to start
with. It's not easy. I wouldn't say any of them are easy, but I would say it's
very important, and for me it has helped me grow the most.
Because I recognize pieces of myself that I didn't know existed.
And I was able to grow those parts that were good and put aside the things that,
you know, I might need to put aside. And understand even the differences between my
other sisters and I, how we were different. And that gives the grace to say,
"Oh, well, of course, you know, that was one of their coping mechanisms." And yeah,
I would say that that's the most important piece to start with. And I would say I
would add to it that it's probably the one that we, when we're committed to
building our own resilience and our children's resilience, it's the one that we have
to continually keep addressing because ages and stages of our life,
whether it's our own adult stages and seasons of life or our kids' developmental
growth and development as they're becoming into adulthood, like the way that we
regulate necessarily changes as our lives change.
And I'm looking at the other four of the five and those can be kind of responsive
to when we've attended to the regulation piece as it shows up in this stage of my
life or in this season of my life. So I appreciate that kind of like the flexing
and the timeline of that. - Yes. - Let's move on a little bit and talk about some
of the challenges that a child who has a history of abuse or trauma or neglect,
some of the challenges with the resilience that they might face as they're
experiencing life at home or life at school, like how does difficulty with resilience
show up for a child like that? - Well, for me as a child, it showed up as
frequent illness. And so I was the child that had the stomach ache that told the
teacher, I need to go home. And I constantly had a stomach ache or some medical
situation that no one could figure out why, but it was there for me. I was also
quiet and withdrawn. I would be also the one who tried to give of herself without
thinking of my own, what would happen in terms of harm for me or anything else.
Just keep giving, keep giving, keep loving, and it'll all get better. And I now
know I was depressed as a child. I didn't know what depression was, but I had that
response where, you know, I was hypoaroused and I would get quiet and disassociate
and everyone thought, well, she's just quiet. I'll speak for my twin. She was,
we called her the Taz and she broke every rule that you could break. And in fact,
she loved doing that because that was her power. And she now knows that that's how
she survived. But she was bold and bossy and brassy and,
you know, the Taz, um, so she didn't follow any rules, and she brought me into a
lot of situations where, uh -oh, no, she blamed me for them, and I took the blame
because I was quiet and nice, and so, you know, it can, it can show up in a lot
of different ways in a child, and so you just have to be aware that they have
that history, I think more than anything, that awareness lets you set yourself up
for looking for those differences in the child and trying to help them in the ways
that they react. So it's looking at their behavior and saying,
hmm, what's underneath that behavior? What's driving them to behave this way?
Absolutely. Is there a gap in their development, is there a need that's not being
met? So you mentioned challenging behaviors certainly fall under your sister's Taz
little nickname. That summons quite the mental picture for those of us who are of a
certain age and understand that cartoon. Yes. Kathleen, what are some other things
that you might see in a child that's struggling with healthy perspective on
resilience? - For me, and for my son, I'll speak first both. For me,
this all comes back to the neuroscience neurobiology of understanding the natural
human stress response, which is our natural fight, flight, or freeze that we get
when we feel in danger. And those of us that grew up in homes like we did, our
human stress response is on all the time. We don't know where the danger is coming
from, when it's coming, but we know it's coming. And that human stress response that
you get as a kiddo or whenever you first run into that, if you get into overdrive
like we did, stuck on on, it chooses you. So your child didn't choose the TAS.
Karen didn't choose to be the quiet one. I was a fighter, a little bit of a
fighter like Sharon, but a little more of a fighter. So I was the workaholic. I
was always in my zone. You couldn't get close to me if they called me the ice
princess in high school and that was what I was. You could not get close to me if
you tried out here what you did and if it needed to be done give it to me
because I got it done because I got everything done and everything read in order
and everything was this way and everything had to be just perfect. I am such a
perfectionist and so I think understanding that children that are raised and what we
were raised in or anything in that kind of trauma environment you have a human
stress response that gets kind of an overdrive and the only way to get it off
overdrive is to help that child experience
calm loving soothing situations and giving them techniques and those you first learn
emotional regulation from the heartbeat of your birth mom which is why my son had
trouble because hers was very irregular just again not her fault just the
circumstances she found herself in but anything that soothing calming giving your
child the opportunity and giving them choices so when Zach and I learned this
together he and I used to do what I call go up the explosion ladder so we'd start
at each other and the only way I knew how to get in those battles which I used
to get in with my dad was I was one -on -one and I might have been five years old
but I was one -on -one and I stayed in it and then there was the explosion where
you do or say things that you later regret and Zach and I used to go up that and
our explosion was with words we never hurt each other never never did anything like
happen to our to us but I was a dysregulated mom and I used my words
inappropriately and so we learned to recognize that.
And so helping your child recognize that that response of fight, we need to separate
because what happens is you get in your emotional brain, you can't get to your
thinking brain. That's a problem. Your emotional brain is running you. You're also
dumping adrenaline and cortisol, which they have linked now to those chronic health
conditions that Sharon and Karen and I have had lifelong. all that dumping of
cortisol and adrenaline that you didn't need. So understanding to recognize when you
get in that dysregulation that fight flight freeze a piece Karen on the freeze a
piece side Sharon on that fight or flight helping all parties stop separate do a
regulating activity Zach puts his music on you know and beats his head like I go
to the rocking chair, get my pup pup, I rock with my and pet my pup pup, anything
that can help soothe and calm you and also recognize that getting to your thinking
brain isn't always a poof. Sometimes you need an overnight because you get so worked
up and particularly people like Karen and Sharon and I, it's easy to get ramped up
really fast or Karen withdrawn really fast and it is like seconds and you and you
are out. And so it's not an instantaneous coming back to all the time.
Sometimes you need that time and space and then come back to whatever that situation
was. So I just share a couple of those because just so fundamental and so
neuroscience and so neurobiology, just to understand and Sharon and Karen and I
didn't know any of this until we started learning from the unbelievable searchers of
physicians and neuroscientists we are beyond grateful for the work that they've done.
So let's put feet to kind of a couple of those concepts that you just mentioned.
If you have, say a listener has a toddler who is raging about being asked to turn
the TV off, where do you start with that scenario to to accomplish the regulation
and the building of resilience. Start with that one. - Well, first of all,
recognizing that the child is in having an emotional response is the first part of
it. And then not meeting that with said emotional response in terms of yelling at
the child or doing something loud. That's the last thing that they need. Toddlers
like to correct you. And so I was watching a podcast the other day in this dad
that's so good at neuroscience and positive brain parenting said,
you know, what toddler who knows how to count isn't going to try to correct you
when you say, hey, I just remembered that I that, you know, you go like one and
then is it one and three and then five and eight, and yeah, that's how you do it,
right? And the toddler's gonna be like one, two, three, you know?
And what he was doing is getting that child back into that thinking brain and
trying to re -regulate that child as opposed to yanking their arm and telling them
to stop it and knock that off right now and go to your timeout. My daughter gets
upset. And now she has a just a water bottle that she carries with these food
coloring drops in it that she now goes and gets it. She recognizes when she's over
the top, and she'll say, I need my bottle. And she'll go get it and she'll go
into her room. And she'll work with that. And then she'll come out and say, I'm
feeling better now. You know, so much different from the type of parenting I did
when my children were little. Again, I would tend to say, you know, knock it off
or something like that to a child. And now I would, I would parent totally
different, knowing what I know now about that neuroscience of the brain and these
emotional responses. The other thing that I've learned over time.
My son with all of his complexities had a lot of trouble with transition, more than
than what was maybe age appropriate according to the parents' teachers and his
anyway. And so prevention. So I learned to say,
"Hey, Zach, we're going to have to, you know, do this." And so I'm going to set a
timer and he's very visual. And so he could kind of watch the timer when that goes
off. We're going to need to do something over here. And then as Karen said, we
always had a, again, parents' teachers taught me this. I didn't learn it on my own.
A place where Zach could go, honey, if you need to in the transition, you can go
to your safe beam bag. And then we had different, now I know, didn't know then,
but regulating tools. I never got that neuroscience. I just got, here's what you
need to do. And so he would have those kinds of things. So prevention for Zach,
who hated transitions, most kids do, he really did. That helped a lot too.
And then giving him an opportunity to watch it, see the countdown.
And then if he needed a way to more easily transition to try to keep him in his
thinking brain and out of that, you know, emotional, but does it always work? No.
Right, right. Well, and they're toddlers, so they could be pretty unpredictable. But
I think too, another thing that would be very helpful in those moments is, oh,
buddy, I know, I'm so sorry. I understand it's frustrating to have to turn your TV
show off in the middle. How about next time we watch this show, we make sure that
we do it, you know, so we have the whole half an hour to watch a show. And just
learning how to empathize with them because it doesn't feel like a big deal to us
as adults because we know that we can always go back to it later. But particularly
toddlers are so present, which is such a gift of the toddler brain,
but it can also be weaponized against us. And so just empathizing with them about
the immediacy of what has to happen. Let's talk about, say, an eight year old who
is hoarding toys. Maybe that eight year old knows that it's her sister's favorite
toys and she's hoarding them. What are some things practical things that we can do
to step in and rework this situation? I think for that age range they understand
the difference between right and wrong. They kind of know what they're doing. But
they also struggle with sharing. And I would probably give them,
Hey, you know, I understand that you like this toy as well, or it may feel
important to you. But can we work out a situation where you have the toy for half
an hour, and then your sister gets to play with it for half an hour. Let's learn
to share, teach them about the concept of sharing, the concept of having a
conversation about something that's difficult, and allowing them to also express maybe
why they feel the need to do that. Maybe sister wasn't nice this morning to them,
and they're feeling hurt. And so the way to respond to that is to hurt the sister
back, so that you understand that people have different reactions.
What feels right, you know, like, would that feel good if someone did that to you?
Probably not. Giving them that sense of what does empathy look like. I think
mirroring some of those things would be very helpful at that age. Yeah.
I, Karen, you're so good at this. I was such a dysregulated mom and felt like I
had so many mental health challenges. I think what neuroscience has taught me about
this one is the importance of the relational. That's what I hear Karen talking about
is when you discipline a child and break that relational,
which is what happened to us and our family, we were competitors, we were not
siblings, we were competition, that is so unhealthy. And so bringing that back to
the relational and teaching that empathy, understanding we all need to live in
connection. That's what I thought was so appropriate about what was underneath what
Karen talked about. I had an only child and so, you know, that was less at the
sibling level and if anything was more at kind of the adult level. But I do think
preserving that relational and then to what both of you said, the empathy, really
teaching your your child empathy. - Yeah. And I think too, Karen touched on it a
little bit, is trying to figure out why are they hoarding? Why are they hiding all
of, in particular, their sister's favorites? And maybe it's that they're trying to
get revenge or retaliation for something that happened earlier. Maybe it's an
insecurity or a jealousy inside of them that has maybe nothing to do with the
sibling, but it's something inside of them that needs to be built up or short up.
And just taking the time to be patient and listen to maybe what they're saying
without the actual words that they're saying, kind of like figuring out the whole
context. I think this is one of those situations for me. We have six children and
two of them are adopted, four of them are biological, all six of them have
experienced this in some form. And for me,
it was the most important key was paying attention to the individual child who was
expressing that behavior, and not assuming that what maybe a sibling had expressed or
done in the past was the same as what this child was doing right now. Yeah. It's
often happening for very different reasons between very different children and taking
the time to observe and know your child. For me, that was the key in situations
that happened in our home like this. And boy, with six kids, there was a lot of
interesting dynamics.
I'm sorry for one final interruption. I just wanted to let you know about our
library of free courses. We have--
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Thanks so much and I'll let you finish listening to the interview with these two
fantastic sisters.
Let's move on a little bit to talk about the specific coping tools that you guys
have labeled and named and how parents can use them. They come in what you guys
call the four C's. Yes we would we first said let's teach emotional regulation and
self -care, the first R. We created two decks of cards, one deck that is what we
call in the moment 52 emotional regulation techniques and then overtime 52 self -care
practices but we said what if people lose their decks apart you know which we know
will happen and so we began to say there are categories there are things you can
do both in self -care and emotional regulation that are in the four categories of
care calm connect and courage. And so we wanted to leave people with those insights
to say, "Oh, I need something in self -care. Maybe it's something that cares for me,
something that allows me to connect with nature or myself, something that is
courageous, something that I need to say that I've been afraid to or something to
do." And then same with the whole connection and relationship too. So Care Com
Connect and Courage were really meant to provide the framework and then those just
kind of help delineate different ideas in all those categories. So I just pulled
some of my favorites. This is one in the moment. So calm,
slow down, pause, make a choice about how to respond. And I picked that one because
our mental health center director, when he does these presentations, that's the one
he has clipped in his notebook when he's up in front of public groups and sometimes
questions that might make him really angry get asked, he pulls his card and reads
it before his passion spills over and looks like anger. Just to connect one pause,
take a moment to connect with and notice your breath, slowing down your breath. So
connecting with your breath, absolutely regulating your most regulating technique that
you carry with you all the time is your breath. So that's an example of the next
one. And then we did the same thing in the overtime. I'll just give the courage
and the care. Care. Take time to be still. Slowing down is profound self -care.
For a little energizer bunny me, that one is huge. That one has been really
important one. And then courage. This has been really hard for me because I'm so
independent and have been since I was five. I raised the family. I took over the
family at age five, asked for help when you need it. That is profound self -care
for somebody like me. Super hard to do, which is why we put it in the courage
category. So just remembering those four, we wanna give that gift to people.
- We do acknowledge that the courage ones are maybe harder to choose, but it's
important to look at them and decide if you might be able to pick up one in terms
of those four categories. For me, definitely the hardest. I remember when we wrote
the card, learned how to set boundaries and voice them. I was like, "Oh, no way, I
don't have boundaries. I don't know how to ask about that." You know, that was
very, very, very difficult. So we encourage people to look at all the categories and
give them all a try because It's really part of that learn, change, and grow that
we're asking people to do. And again, most of these things, well, they're free to
do. You just have to think about them and access them. And I'll do the same thing.
We wrote the cards, but I'll carry a different one around. If I know I'm going
into a situation that might be upsetting, and remind myself. And what Kathleen said
was most important is that we all have, well, we all carry with us our breath and
breath work is so vitally important. Just take that deep breath, breathe in for four
seconds, hold it for four seconds, release it, rest, do it again,
as many times as you need to, to help reset that parasympathetic nervous system.
So we're learning so much about the nervous system and it's so exciting for me that
we can connect it all and our bodies know how to regulate them itself.
It really does. We just have to learn how to help it and I think that's something
that we can all do is whether you're in chronic stress or you've experienced a
trauma. And I think it's just vitally important. Well,
ladies, I thank you both for sharing so vulnerably about your own stories and your
own journeys as you've gotten to this point. One of the things that you said in
the webinar that I attended that was quite impactful for me was that strengthening
resilience at the individual level ripples out to our families, our communities and
beyond. And before we go, I just want to hear from each of you, what is one thing
that gives you hope for that rippling effect as you keep doing this work?
For me, it's a comment that resonated so deeply, a turning point moment. I'll
probably get emotional again. But when I work with a lot of the women in
corrections, I know when I walk in that each one of them has complex PTSD and I
do too. And when they say to me, Kathleen, I thought I was just always this way.
And now I realize that that's not who I am. That was my trauma response. It is
that recognition of letting your authentic self come through, unencumbered by those
trauma responses, that's healing. And that gives me great hope.
- And For me, it's about that recognition, especially with trauma victims, that it's
not what's wrong with you, it's what happened to you. And that was so huge for my
healing journey, because, again, you grow up thinking there's something wrong with
you. If I could only change this, if I could only change that. And I worked with
some women at a domestic shelter, a domestic abuse shelter. And again, They lived in
relationships where heck, if I could just only please somebody this way or change
that about me. And so it's just that recognition and learning and that self
-awareness that gives me hope that the more aware individuals are,
the more they'll give grace and ask for kindness around the world.
We all need more kindness. And so I think it's that's what gives me hope is that
we're going to teach and and then they'll teach their children and then those
children will teach their children and it'll be generational in a good way. Right.
Yes. Changing intergenerational trauma to intergenerational healing.
Absolutely. Love that. Love that. Love that. Well, ladies,
thank you for your time. I so appreciate you helping us dig into the topic of
resilience and how to build it and how to build healthy coping skills for
resilience. So thank you for your time today. Absolutely. Thank you.