On today’s episode, I talk with parenting expert Dr. Hilary Mandzik about the basics of trauma: What is trauma, who has it (spoiler – all of us), and how it can impact your wellness. This is such a great episode. It’s really going to rock your wellness!
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
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If you enjoyed this episode, check out this episode with Dr. Hilary about 3 Ways to Make Parenting Easier: 3 Ways to Make Parenting Easier with Dr. Hilary Mandzik • Lauren Chante – Wellness Strategist
Wellness for mothers with unresolved trauma with Dr. hilary mandzik – episode transcript
Lauren Chante 0:07
Hello friends! I have a repeat guest today. I am so excited to have Dr. Hilary Mandzik back today, and we’re going to be talking about something interesting about trauma. This is rooted in an episode that I listened to on Hillary’s podcast, which is called Raised Resilient.
Lauren Chante 0:27
I was actually the person who asked the question that inspired that episode. Hillary was really sweet and didn’t out me about it because she’s all therapy and confidentiality, but I was like, “It was me. I asked the question”. The question I asked was about how you can go through this journey of raising children while you’re still working on resolving your own trauma?
Lauren Chante 0:47
In the course of that episode, she’s said this amazing thing about how unresolved trauma can sometimes cause us to not meet our own needs. When I heard that sentence, I thought, I know I have a lot of people in my audience, a lot of clients who need to hear about this topic. So Hillary is here to share about that today and to kind of provide us a trauma one on one.
Lauren Chante 1:10
Hi, Hillary! Let me give you a real intro here!
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 1:13
Hi, I’m so glad to be back on your podcast. This is so fun!
Lauren Chante 1:16
So fun! Okay, so I’m going to read her real short bio, because I’ve got to let you guys know how legit she is because she is legit!. As I’ve said before, Hillary is my favorite right now in the parenting space. 100%.
Lauren Chante 1:29
She is a licensed psychologist and parenting specialist. She’s a mom of three who’s passionate about helping you parent in a way that feels good for you and your child. She has an online therapy practice where she specializes in perinatal mental health and mental health for parents. She is also an online parenting support business where she offers a virtual parent coaching and is working on an online course.
Lauren Chante 1:51
She’s the host of the podcast ‘Raised Resilant with Dr. Hillary’. By the way, you should pause right now, go find that and tap the subscribe button and then come back to this episode because it’s amazing. So welcome, Hillary, so excited to have you!
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 1:51
Oh, thank you so much for that lovely introduction. I am so excited to be back.
Lauren Chante 2:08
Yes, me too. Okay. I feel like we just need an introduction to trauma. Some people have heard about trauma in the mental health sphere before and some people haven’t. I feel like some people’s only knowledge about it is through like memes that they see online or inspirational quotes. So what do we need to know before we have this conversation?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 2:28
I think it’s really important to understand that trauma, I know it’s a word that’s being used a lot in our society now which I actually think is great, but we need to understand what trauma is. I think there can be a lot of trauma shaming. The kind of, you know, “Well that’s not actually traumatic” or “Well, yeah, but you didn’t have it this bad” or whatever,right? We start to compare, we start to wonder what actually qualifies as trauma? So let me help clear that up because I think that’s really important.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 3:02
Trauma is anything that happens to us that our brain cannot process and logically integrate at the time that it’s happening. And this is why vulnerable populations, like children and birthing people in the throes of labor, are really vulnerable to trauma. They are more able to be overwhelmed.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 3:27
Kids don’t have the same language to talk them through things that are happening. They don’t understand the world the way that adults do. So when children are not getting their needs met, or being spoken to in a way that is harsh and unkind, repeatedly as the way of being in the parent child relationship, that is traumatic. But a child doesn’t know that right?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 3:52
A child is doing their best to just be loved by their parents. So if the parent is yelling at them, the child is not going to look at the parent and say “you need to change”. That child is going to try to change themselves to stop the yelling from happening. That’s the basis for our conversation today.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 4:09
Just to speak a little bit about birth trauma too. We are very vulnerable to trauma while we’re birthing because we are not in our logical rational minds. We are in our bodies. So things that happen to us are more likely to be encoded as traumatic if they are not explained to us or if we don’t feel like we have a choice in the matter,right?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 4:29
So trauma is in the eye of the beholder in the sense that there are so many factors that could go into why one person experiences something as traumatic and somebody else doesn’t. Those factors could be dependent on that moment.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 4:43
I remember being in a car accident in college and I had PTSD after the car accident. My friend, who was right next to me in the same car, didn’t. I was asleep up until the moment of impact. She wasn’t. She had more of an ability to understand what was happening going into that. That’s just one example of how situational factors can impact how we encode things and how they might get encoded as traumatic for one person and not for another.
Lauren Chante 5:08
Oh my gosh, that’s so good! It explained so much about all my birth experiences and WOW! I just learned so much! Okay, so just to make it clear for people who are listening, which when Dr. Hillary is talking about, like childhood trauma and things that happen to you in childhood, we grow up! We were all once children.
Lauren Chante 5:10
So we’re not necessarily just talking about your relationship with your kids. In this particular conversation, we’re talking about you growing up into a person and then the possibility for experiencing trauma can continue quite long into your life like anytime, right? So it’s fair to say just about everybody has trauma of some sort, right, Dr. Hilary?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 5:47
Absolutely. And I think we were, I’ll just say collectively, kids growing up in the 80s and 90s, and certainly people growing up before that. We were raised in a culture that said good kids don’t cry. Good kids don’t show mad feelings. Good kids do whatever their parents tell them to do with no pushback.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 6:09
What we know now about child development says actually none of that is right. Kids need to cry. Kids need to express angry feelings. They are incapable of doing it in a healthy way until a parent coaches and shows them how to do that, by letting them feel and not letting them hit, right? It’s okay to be mad but I’m not going to let you hit.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 6:29
None of us grew up with that. We grew up being punished if we hit somebody. We believed we were bad and that we were the problem. So our needs didn’t get met. Not because our parents were bad or because they didn’t love us. They were doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. But we have so many decades of research on attachment theory now and attachment is just a fancy way of talking about the quality of the parent child relationship.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 6:56
There’s so much research now to tell us actually, kids really need to be able to feel their feelings, they need to have their parents delight in them, even when they’re making mistakes. They need to feel unconditionally loved by their parents. Many behavioral approaches of parenting are very conditionally based. You’re good when you’re doing what I tell you to and you’re bad when you’re not.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 7:19
So as kids, again, we didn’t look at our parents and go, “Man, you’re yelling at me, you’re the problem”. We looked at ourselves and thought, that part of me that feels the need to tell my parent how I feel and push back on that limit because it doesn’t feel right. That part of me is bad. I’ve got to make that part really, really small. Or the part of me that has a different opinion. I gotta make that part really small because, if I express that, everyone around me is going to feel uncomfortable and I’ve got to keep them happy. I got to keep them comfortable. This is not conscious.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 7:51
We all learn how to sort of curate our personalities so that we could show up in a way that let us be loved. And so now you might find yourself having this tendency towards people pleasing, because you learned that you needed to keep everyone else comfortable. Saying no didn’t feel safe. That’s just one example of how that childhood trauma, that you didn’t realize at the time was trauma, can carry through a lifetime and manifest as an adult.
Lauren Chante 8:23
So true. Just as a side note, kind of related but not related. I know that trauma can have a very physical impact on as to when it’s not resolved in terms of the stress response that’s constantly going on in our body and affecting sleep responses without knowing.
Lauren Chante 8:38
I know for me, I did EMDR for a while which is a type of a somatic therapy for trauma. You would obviously know better, but I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t sleeping well until I started doing EMDR. Then I was so rested and I was sleeping so well that I was like wow! The physical impact that this has had on me is insane.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 8:56
Absolutely. Yes. So just a quick plug for somatic therapies. There’s somatic experiencing, which I actually don’t know a ton about. But as a provider, I actually practice something called brain spotting, which is kind of akin to EMDR. It’s different but it’s a similar body process that’s involved. Body brain connection, and EMDR I’ve done as the client, I’ve also done brain spotting as the client and I will tell you that if you have trauma to resolve, these are the therapies you want.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 9:00
Talk therapy is great. I’ve done a lot of talk therapy in my career, but nothing compares to the power of these therapies that really integrate the brain with the body because that’s exactly right. We encode these traumatic experiences in our bodies and our bodies remember, even when our brains don’t. When you think about it, a child is literally dependent on their parents for survival. So kids are wired to stay in their parents good graces. .
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 9:28
So if you have a parent who’s emotionally reactive, that’s not your fault, it’s probably due to their own trauma, right? But your nervous system feels incredibly unsafe. Anytime that parent is angry, speaking harshly, giving you the cold shoulder, you know, not showing you delight, then your whole body, your nervous system is in fight or flight. You become hyper vigilant to the cues of people around you.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 10:26
So if you’re now somebody who’s always like “Are you mad, are you feeling okay?” to your partner or to your kids or to people around you. Or you’re always wondering if your boss is secretly mad at you? That is probably rooted in childhood where you had to adaptively get really hyper vigilant to keep yourself safe. Our bodies remember that and when we spend the majority of our childhoods in fight or flight, it’s very easy for our bodies now to live in that state. That same fight or flight, hypervigilant state.
Lauren Chante 10:57
Okay, so now I want to get to the thing that started all of this. The idea that unresolved trauma can cause us to not take care of ourselves and to meet our own needs. I’m thinking of a couple different types of people that I work with. I’m especially thinking of the people who are a step before the people I usually work with. When people come to work with me in my intensive they’re ready. They decided they have a need and they’re going to meet it.
Lauren Chante 11:25
I’m thinking more about the people who know that maybe wellness or some sort of physical thing needs to be a priority for them but, as much as they know it, they just can’t get to the point of meeting that need for themselves. And obviously, this applies to any need that we have. But since this is a wellness podcast I have to look at it in the wellness lense.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 11:44
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you grew up accustomed to your own needs not being met and accustomed to being hyper vigilant to your caregiver’s needs, so that you could stay safe emotionally and sometimes physically, then you are going to be wired, right? What we do, the patterns that we enact, they persist, right?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 12:07
We wire our brains to be a certain way, which is why childhood trauma can sort of persist into our adult relationships, our adult patterns and ways of being. If you get used to focusing on everyone else around you, again in childhood that was adaptive. Now as an adult, you might be the type of person who wants to exercise, who wants to eat well, but at the end of the day, you find yourself saying yes to the PTA people, saying yes to your kids when they need you, saying yes to your partner, saying yes to your friend when they want to meet up instead of prioritizing yourself.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 12:07
You are used to focusing on everyone else around you before yourself and that can be a really hard pattern to break. Especially if you don’t understand its roots because it’s really easy to be seeing it in the light of “Oh, well, this is just really altruistic. I’m just a really selfless person”. But actually, the truth is if we’re not caring for ourselves, and I’m not talking about going to get a manicure once in a while. I mean sustainable, regular, real and deep self care. If we’re not doing that, we have nothing to give anybody else. And what we are giving them is burning us out and making us feel depleted. And that’s not selfless. That’s just hurting yourself. But we don’t see it that way. And I think our society kind of glorifies this, especially for moms. Like this selfless mom character.
Lauren Chante 13:35
I was just gonna say how there’s like a dangerous convergence between the tendency for this with trauma and then mom culture! So keep going because I’m like, yeah!
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 13:46
Yes! Well, I think you know, it’s very easy to become all about your kids, like everything you do is about your kids. I see this a lot actually in the gentle parenting community. I’m in a couple of different Facebook groups for gentle, respectful, conscious parenting. Sometimes I’ll get messages from people saying things like, “Well, you know, I’m slowly weaning my son from breastfeeding, but he’s crying about it and I’m obviously doing something wrong and hurting him. I’m traumatizing him” and I say no, that’s not trauma.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 14:19
Feeling our feelings, especially in the presence of a safe caregiver who can validate and help us make sense of those feelings. Like “Yeah, you really wanted to have milk and we’re not doing that right now”. That’s not trauma. That’s actually meeting a really important attachment need. But because we are so deeply worried, like at our core about disappointing others, and so afraid of repeating our own childhood trauma that we often won’t set limits with our kids when we need to.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 14:47
Another example people tell me all the time is “Well, my kid just won’t ride in the stroller anymore”. Oh, I get it. I have an almost two year old and she’s at that age. She’s wants to walk everywhere. She gets bored in the stroller. And yet, my 60 minute walks every day are my sanity. And so there are some tears and there are some times where I have to really hold space for her feelings and tell her “I hear you. You really want to get out and Mommy’s gonna walk for a little bit first”.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 15:12
It’s not easy. But if you believe that you are doing harm when you set that limit and prioritize yourself, then yeah, you’re not going to do it. You’re gonna get that that kid out of the stroller, you’re not going to get your exercise. But you have to be able to see that, putting yourself first allows you to show up for your kids in a way that’s going to meet their needs. And it’s not trauma to tell your child no as long as you allow them to then have feelings about it.
Lauren Chante 15:38
Oh my gosh, there was so much in there. That was so good. That was so good. It’s like, I think for me, this is one of the reasons that I asked the question that sparked your podcast episode. There’s just so many layers going on at once. There’s this layer where we are resolving our own trauma and learning to meet our needs. At the same time that we are trying to learn to parent human beings without not meeting their needs. While still trying to meet ours. It’s like this, this dance and this web. It’s just so much sometimes.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 16:15
Yes. Well, I’m so glad you asked that question because it turned into this really beautiful episode that I will tell you, I myself am going to come back and listen to multiple times. I think it’s really easy to have this fantasy that we’re gonna reach a point someday, where we’re just healed. And once we get there, we’re just not going to make mistakes with our kids anymore. We’re going to meet everybody’s needs, including our own just beautifully and that’s not life.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 16:40
That’s not reality. I don’t believe we are ever just healed. It’s not a black and white, you’re there or you’re not kind of thing. It’s a journey and a process and it’s iterative. And the more you heal, the more you realize that you have to grow and heal and so it is never just done. And I think if we have this fantasy that, “Well, I should have done this work before I came into parenting” and if you feel that way you’re not alone. I have felt that before. I have felt like, “Man, I should have stayed in my therapy a little bit longer before I was in grad school, before I met my husband and before I had kids”.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 17:15
No, it’s not like that. That work I did then was important. And the work that I’ve done since then is important and the work that I have yet to do is important. And so it is very easy to get wrapped up in this sense of “I need to arrive at some point at this healed space”. No, every day we have opportunities to do little things that reparent ourselves, that heal that inner child in us that is wounded and didn’t get their needs met. And so that’s what that episode became.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 17:45
I think I listed like 25 things that you can do and some of them are very profound. Some of them are very simple. Some of them might be things you’re already doing and you don’t even realize that those are healing things. And I think sometimes when we know “Okay, there’s all these different ways to heal”. It’s not just about going to therapy every week.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 18:05
Don’t get me wrong, therapy is amazing. But I don’t think it’s realistic for any of us to be in therapy continuously for our whole lives. And I don’t necessarily, even as a therapist, think that’s a good thing. I think we need a little breaks to integrate what we’ve learned and sort of put it into practice.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 18:20
So it’s about these little moments. We have choices in these moments to set that limit and meet our own need. To keep a promise to ourselves. Even if that means disappointing somebody else.
Lauren Chante 18:32
So true and as a wellness strategist, I really just want to remind people that sometimes when you’re struggling to start your wellness journey, to start a lifestyle change, you feel like it’s just because you’re not disciplined enough, you’re not motivated enough.
Lauren Chante 18:47
Maybe your priorities are different from other people. Maybe you think you’re someone for whom your appearance just isn’t that important to you, your health just isn’t that important to you? These are a lot of identifiers that people sometimes say at that point, when in fact you just simply may not have been aware of everything we’ve been talking about in this episode, which is that deep down none of those labels about you are true.
Lauren Chante 19:09
It’s simply that you’ve never learned to recognize your needs and to meet them. Meeting your needs, ehen you’ve spent your lifetime meeting everyone else’s needs, oftentimes involves a reset and a reintegration of multiple parts of your life.
Lauren Chante 19:23
Your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your children, your relationship with you know, even acquaintances, things like the PTA meeting and things that you say yes to. That neighbor who always asks you “Will you pick up Johnny after school for me”? It’s a very multi layered thing. So just from my end, I would always just urge you to seek support because it’s a very challenging thing to do on your own.
Lauren Chante 19:44
What would you say to someone, Hilary, who wants to take that first step towards meeting their needs?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 19:50
Well, I would say first of all, the fact that you recognize that you are worth getting your needs met is huge, and it’s true and lean into that. That voice that tells you “Wait a minute, I deserve this”. And I think all of us, in our healing journey, start to have that voice come up a little bit more and more and more, right?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 20:08
It might be with your partner. I can say for myself, when I had my first child, I was a stay at home mom at that point in time and never planned on it, but it just it worked out that way out of necessity that I stayed home with him for a little while and very quickly that entrenched this default parent dynamic. I was breastfeeding, I was a stay at home mom, my partner was was working out of the home. He was the full breadwinner at that point in time.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 20:32
So he would go to happy hour after work with his buddies, you know, something I used to do with him. And he didn’t think anything of it because you know, he had me taking care of our son and he was already out. And I didn’t feel like I had a right to speak up because I wasn’t bringing in money and all this stuff, right?
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 20:52
All these stories we tell ourselves. I remember I got more and more resentful. And that voice that was saying “you deserve to have time to yourself” got louder and louder. And finally I had a conversation about it with my partner and he said, well, all you have to do is ask. If you want to make space for this stuff then I will make space for it. And I was like, oh, well that was easy.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 21:15
I think that it didn’t even occur to me that I should be asking. I had this guilt that like “No, no, I’m a stay at home mom, I have to do this” and that is so not true. And so I think we all have that voice that gets a little bit louder. So pay attention to that voice. It’s not selfish. It’s not you asking for the world. It is the part of you, the very healthy part of you, that’s like “I deserve to take up space”. “I deserve to be whole and well”, listen to that voice.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 21:44
I will say too, if you feel like you’re somebody who’s like just not motivated or you look at people who prioritize their health and think well, I’m just not like them. I don’t have that makeup. That is not true. People who prioritize wellness and I would be curious, Lauren, what you have to say about this, I just feel like people who prioritize wellness, it is about habits that we commit to and we do day in and day out. It’s not about being more motivated or being more of a natural early riser. People who get up early, I don’t think anybody likes it.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 22:15
It’s something that people prioritize because, at least for me, I know I’m a better mom if I have a little bit of time before my kids wake up and need me. So instead of looking at yourself as the problem, start asking yourself, “What would make me feel good? How can I create space and time in my day to get those needs met?”. And then from there, what would that look like? Where do I need to build in some different habits?
Lauren Chante 22:40
I love that so much! A mantra that I love to use before you do that is just to repeat to yourself, “I deserve to feel good. I deserve that. I deserve to feel good”. So thank you, Hillary! This has been this so so good. And if you guys want to keep in touch with Hillary, like I said, you have to listen to her podcast Raised Resilient. It’s on all the podcasting platforms. It’s so good.
Lauren Chante 23:04
We’re actually going to go record an episode with me for your podcast right after this. So you can watch out for that and she also has this awesome free guide and six mindset shifts to ditch the overwhelm and parent in a way that feels good. That’s at Raisedresilient.com/mindset. If you feel like you need parent coaching and parenting support, make sure that you reach out to Hillary because she is amazing and she will really help to transform your family.
Lauren Chante 23:31
So thank you so much, Hillary.
Dr. Hilary Mandzik 23:33
Thank you for having me. This was such a great conversation.