Trauma survivor Elisabeth Corey returns to ‘Unruffled’ to share healing insights she’s gained from her intense struggles as a parent of twins. The emotional reactions our kids stir up in us can take us by surprise. Worse, they can keep us feeling stuck repeating dynamics with our kids that seem to be driving us apart. We often know how we “should” respond but can’t remain calm enough to do that in the moment! As Elisabeth explains, our reactions are often indicators of past hurts that need healing, and she inspires us to explore them with curiosity and self-compassion, showing us the way in this episode.
Transcript of “Triggered Again – Understanding Our Unreasonable Reactions (with Elisabeth Corey)”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
If you are a regular listener here, you may have heard the previous episodes that I did with Elisabeth Corey. She’s my special guest today, and I think you’ll really appreciate her experiences, her insights, and her messages of hope. She has survived a very dark childhood during which she suffered severe childhood trauma, including incest and even being sex trafficked by her own parents as a young child, as well as other intense physical and emotional abuse. She says: “By the age of 9, I was fully indoctrinated. I had given up. I remember the moment when I realized there was no hope of being saved from this terrible life. In that moment, I made a conscious choice to forget.”
And she did forget. Until, out of her desperation for help when she was struggling to function as a mom of twins, she finally began her healing process. As heroes do, Elisabeth’s dedicated her life to helping others who may be finding themselves easily triggered, not functioning as well as they would wish to as a parent or a person. She says, “As I advocate for trauma recovery, I’m helping survivors of childhood trauma move past the trauma and find new ways to uncover who they were meant to be.”
I’m thankful to have my friend Elisabeth back here today to help parents recognize and understand the reactions that they may be having to their children’s behavior, and how maybe some of these reactions are worth a deeper look because they can give us the clarity that we need to strengthen our relationships with our kids and make our lives easier as parents.
Hi, Elisabeth. Thank you so much for being here.
Elisabeth Corey: I am so glad to be here with you today. Thank you. Honestly, I think when the two of us come together, we create something really cool. So, looking forward to it.
Janet Lansbury: Thank you. Well, that’s an honor to me because to me you’re a hero. I’ve told you that before. You’re my hero. And parents have loved your episodes. You’ve brought so much healing and hope to them, so it’s such a gift to have you again.
I wanted to bring up today because I think this is a great topic, this was your idea that we talk about children being mirrors to our own issues, our unhealed trauma. And your story is that you, with the severe trauma that you had, you did not even realize it until you had children, right?
Elisabeth Corey: No, I didn’t. People come to me all the time and they’re like, How do I know if I have trauma? Because I relate to everything you’re talking about, and I remember none of my childhood. Or maybe I remember just a few things and just not very much. And my message to them is always, if you’re asking that question, there’s something to look at. There’s something you need to explore. Because the truth is we do forget. It’s a dissociative thing for us to forget. It is a trauma response, and it is a survival skill to forget. But we don’t forget the good stuff. Generally speaking, if we’ve forgotten things, it’s because they’re not good.
And yeah, I was one of those people. Before I had my kids, I went to the therapist going, Why am I anxious? I don’t know! But the first thing out of my mouth to my therapist was, “I had a great childhood and my family’s just fantastic. They’re great.” I think maybe she didn’t totally believe me, but she didn’t have any reason to go, You’re wrong. So when the kids were born, it felt like my anxiety spiked about a thousand times the minute they came into my life. And that’s not what we want, that’s not what the advertising says. It says you’re going to have kids and you’re going to feel love and beauty and more love and connection. And I was terrified. I was terrified. That is when I knew something was really not right.
Janet Lansbury: What was an example of something that really scared you about caring for your children? Well, you have twins, right? They’re the same age.
Elisabeth Corey: Yeah, I have twins. And one went right into the PCN, so that was a stressor. And that would make anybody nervous, but she wasn’t significantly sick or anything. It was pretty mild stuff that went on. And they were born small, so that is a stressor. But that wasn’t the stuff that got me. Actually, when we have a trauma background, sometimes the crises are like what we’re used to. So I actually handled the crisis moments pretty well, and even doctors were like, Wow, you are weirdly calm.
But it was the day-to-day stuff. How do I feed them? How do I get them to sleep? How do I change their diapers? Just to do the basic stuff, I would be panicking about. What if I don’t feed them enough? What if I mess this up? What if I make mistakes? Oh my gosh, I’m going to screw it all up. It all just felt totally and completely overwhelming to me. I was supposed to have a motherly instinct, and I could tell that it was on some level blocked, but I also had that deep-down unworthiness feeling in me that said, I’m going to get this wrong.
And I didn’t realize at the time that that was based on the idea that I was not raised well. I didn’t know that then, but I think that had a lot to do with it. It’s like, How do I know how to do this when none of it was ever really done for me? And that I think was behind a lot of my anxiety. But at the time I didn’t know that, not yet.
Janet Lansbury: So, I felt some of those things. I mean, I have not had the trauma that you’ve had at all, but I’ve felt a lot of that. And you had twins, so some of that is just to be expected, I think. But somehow with you, you had the sense that it was on a different level.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes. And it affected me so physically. It was very panicked, it was very desperate. I think I intuitively knew, this is more intense than what I would consider the “normal reaction” people might have to parenting when they don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, it felt like every decision was life or death. And I knew that wasn’t right. I’d known enough parents and heard enough things and read enough books. Of course, I’d read parenting books, as we do. And I was like, yeah, I don’t think it’s supposed to be quite like this. That desperate, desperate feeling that I had in me.
Janet Lansbury: So was it your therapist then that worked through this with you and figured it out with you? Or how did you figure it out?
Elisabeth Corey: Well, this is where it gets kind of intuitive on my part. Yes, my therapist was helpful, but I actually never retrieved memories in my therapist’s office. That actually never happened. I talked to her and she told me, This is okay. This may be a sign of something. This might not be totally normal to feel this way. And it was a great relationship. I was able to establish trust with another adult human being, and that was very helpful for me.
But I started to write. I just intuitively and inherently felt this need to start writing things down, writing how I felt, writing my story—what I knew of it at the time, which was fairly limited. Writing on a daily basis what was coming up for me with my kids. And the next thing I knew I was starting to write more from the emotions I was feeling. And around the time the kids were about two years old, I started to get flashbacks. Probably after I’d been writing for a year or so, and that’s when the memories started coming back. And I really used the writing as a facilitator for the memories. I would write what I remembered and I would write how I felt about what I remembered. That really began the process of memory recovery for me.
Janet Lansbury: So how did you have time to write with twins, by the way? In the bathroom?
Elisabeth Corey: Sometimes! It would probably mostly be when they would sleep at night. I mean, I was working, I was a single mom by the time I got my first memory back because my relationship, unfortunately, itself was mirroring a lot of the trauma that I experienced. So that didn’t last. And so I was a single mom. I was lucky enough to have a good job, and so sometimes I could write on my lunch break. Or I could write when I got up in the morning, if there was time. I only needed to write for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, it’s not that I wrote all day long. But writing really helped me to understand myself and start getting the memories back and start the journey.
But yes, I mean logistically, I work with a lot of parents, clients who are like, When do I do this? I can’t walk away from a two-year-old so I can go write. There is a lot of logistical challenges to processing your own trauma while raising children, and there is no easy answer to that. It’s going to be a bit messy, sometimes you’re not going to be able to do it. But it’s about finding a balance that works and doing it when you can. And the good and bad news for me was that I used to get triggered a lot at night. So when I got the kids down to bed, it actually was a really good time to write. So I did a lot of it then.
But everybody’s different. I would say the number one catalyst for writing in my clients is the anger that comes up, especially when kids trigger us, as they do. But there’s lots of different emotions that we can write from.
Janet Lansbury: I’m wondering too if it’s a coincidence that you started to have the flashbacks when your children were two, since that can become the peak of them suddenly pushing back. And they’re not just that simple anymore. They’re not just kind of like, well, they need this and they need that, and it’s all really apparent. Suddenly they’re saying no to things that we think they need, but they don’t think so, and they’re demanding things that we don’t think they need. And it’s confusing. I mean, that’s when the classes that I teach, a lot of times parents wouldn’t want to join until kids were already at least in the ones. They didn’t think they needed to add much or they needed to know more with an infant. But now the child is over one and now it’s getting more complicated.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes. And I would say a lot of people who come to me also come once they have those toddlers and they are pushing back. Yeah, my anger started showing up around that time, so it was when my writing escalated to more emotional journaling, which is what I call it. And emotional journaling, in my opinion, is what can be a catalyst to memory recovery. So yes, I am sure it was tied to their age in so many ways. My son was one of those I’m going to push back on all the things. And he did, he did. And it was a challenging time between the two of us at first.
Janet Lansbury: And that’s interesting because I’ve now had the chance of meeting him, and you must have done really, really well because I could not imagine a more polite, charming child.
Elisabeth Corey: Thank you. I will say that we turned it around—but really it wasn’t his job, so I turned it around in that sense—when I was able to figure out where all of those emotions were coming from. And yes, I love who he is. And I do know that if I had repeated my trauma patterns, it would be a very different scenario right now. But instead, yeah, I’ve got a really wonderful, wonderful kid who is just about to turn 18 and I can’t believe it.
Janet Lansbury: It’s wild, isn’t it? So how can parents begin to know that, hey, what I’m feeling, the anger I’m feeling when my child does this behavior, that that’s more than just this really natural feeling of responding to something unkind that a child does to you, hurts you, hits you let’s say, or refuses to do what you say. How do we know when our response is going beyond what would be expected with any parent, to something where, Hey, there’s something here I should look at?
Elisabeth Corey: That is a really good question. And I come at this from a slightly different perspective than a lot of people in that I think most emotional responses do actually have some level of trigger associated with them. That doesn’t mean we have to use the word “trigger,” we don’t. But I do think, in my personal opinion, that there’s a lot more trauma out there than we know there is. And I think most people are dealing with at least something traumatic. And what I have found is that our children, who we love dearly, are here to bring this to our attention.
And that’s why children’s behaviors and the impact it has on us can be so varied. As I talk to my clients, one client can have an extremely strong response to something that another client barely is impacted by at all, right? So I think when it comes to knowing if it’s a trigger, the first thing I would do is if you’re having an emotional response to it, assume that it might be. Just start there. Just be like, You know what? This might be pointing to something. It’s that curiosity that can take us places and heal things for us that is just so valuable.
It’s also hard to have it because our system is geared to shut that down. We don’t want to dig, we don’t want to look at that thing. Whatever that thing is, it feels too scary. So our system will just naturally explain it away. Oh, you need to eat something. You’re having a bad day. You need more caffeine. It’s just fine. That’s where we go. But in reality, if we’re having a relatively strong emotion, I’m not talking about the panic that I had, but if we’re having an emotion, it’s worth being curious about it.
And some of the primary emotions that I’ve seen that have really been trigger responses, one is fear. And I was talking about this a minute ago. Now I was talking about it on a really extreme level, I was saying I was panicking because I didn’t know if I could feed my kids enough. But fear in the parenting process can be a sign that we are in fact projecting traumatic relationships onto the child. This is something that I see. And so that feeling of fear can be a flashback feeling. It can be coming from a trigger that’s saying the power differential is working the wrong direction. That kid, that child has power over me. And when we feel that way, we start moving into survival mechanisms, which are very powerless in nature. Instead of doing something grounded like setting a boundary and holding it, we move into some other technique, some powerless technique to solve the problem.
Janet Lansbury: We don’t have control of ourselves then.
Elisabeth Corey: Right. And that could be anything from manipulating, bribing, blaming them for the emotion that we’re having in the moment. The list is endless of what we may do when we move into that powerless flashback that we have. But that is a trigger, that is a flashback. And we’ve talked a bunch of times about rage and just really intense anger. That’s going to be a trigger response, that’s going to be an unresolved trauma. Oftentimes rage is blocking fear, it’s almost like it’s protecting us. Now we’re scared, so up comes the anger to say, I have to protect myself. So that is going to be a trigger response.
Janet Lansbury: If we really step back, and this is what I try to help parents do, because this is what I would do for myself. If we really were able to step back and look at this realistically, this person is two, three, four, six years old, how could I be enraged by this small, immature person? It doesn’t make sense on that really objective level.
Elisabeth Corey: You bring up an excellent point too, that this isn’t even about the mind. And maybe that’s when we know it’s a trigger response is our mind, that knows better, is not involved. It’s not involved. My clients tell me all the time, they’re like, It’s so frustrating, because I know what to do. I’ve read Janet’s books, I listen to her podcast, I know what to do. So why can’t I just do it? And it’s like, because it’s not about your mind. When you get triggered, you are having an emotional response. That emotion lives in the body. Your mind is gone, it’s checked out, it’s not a part of the scenario. You’re responding from that nervous system, adrenaline, cortisol-filled place. There’s no mind, there’s no logic involved in it.
Janet Lansbury: And then we beat ourselves up with guilt for, How could you feel like that? What’s wrong with you? How could you do that? And that, of course, just piles on, makes it harder the next time, makes us tap into more of that lack of control and rage and fear. When what we really need is to blast ourselves with self-compassion around that. This is sad that this is going on. It’s not that you’re bad.
That’s the other thing too, is that these people were probably doing the best they could. I mean, I don’t know in your case, it’s really hard for me to see that in your case. But a lot of times our parents were doing the best they could, but they instilled all this doubt in us about what we’re feeling. And you said that you were afraid as a parent that you wouldn’t know how to do it. Well, there was so much doubt instilled in you not to trust yourself, not to trust what your instincts were telling you. That these people are doing bad things to you, but you can’t trust that, you have to love them. So anyway, it sounds impossible for anybody to be able to unravel this and figure it out. I mean, that’s how challenging it is. The odds are so against it on one hand, and that’s why it’s such a brave thing to do.
Elisabeth Corey: Exactly. It is a very brave, very amazing thing to move into this place because it requires hope when we’re probably feeling some of the most intense hopelessness we’ve felt since childhood. Hope that we could work it out. Because the truth is we can’t solve it in the mind. I like to use the phrase “figureoutable.” It’s not figureoutable. We’re not going to work it out in the frontal lobe. It requires us to sit with those emotions until they tell us what they need to tell us. And that in and of itself is terrifying. It really isn’t a controllable process. It’s so easy to solve a math problem with the frontal lobe if you know some math. But this is a completely different thing. It requires hope, it requires faith. It requires some tolerance for the unpredictable or the unknown, and that’s scary. And doing that on top of parenting, which also requires most of those things as well, this is asking a lot of a person.
And so we do need to sit with that futility. That futility is also a sign that we are triggered. What I call futility you could also call hopelessness, but it is this feeling that we often get in parenting that there’s no way to move out of this place. There’s no hope that this will turn out. And we will get paralyzed, we will freeze up. That is also a trigger response, and it is coming from that powerlessness that I mentioned earlier, when the survival skills kick in for us. These things really tell us that we’re triggered, right? We’re in that place.
Janet Lansbury: You said this really spot-on thing in regard to children being mirrors: “Children sense our emotions before they hear our words. If they don’t match up, children will be anxious or confused.”
Elisabeth Corey: It took me a long time to figure this out. But what often happens is when we have trauma, we will roll through our adulthood with a lot of emotional blocks in place. So we’ll be shutting that stuff down, numbing ourselves out, dissociating, which comes in many forms, and really being ungrounded. And that can work okay. I mean, it’s sort of like a band-aid, but it can work okay around adults. Maybe we can make it work in our work environment or in school because those environments are very rule-based, pretty predictable. It’s not perfect, but enough that maybe we can keep the lid on the stuff and function. Because the truth is people with trauma are not just people who are drug-addicted or homeless, we often have that image. My clients, oh my gosh, they’re extremely successful people, they’re doing amazing things in their lives. And for a long time, they were able to keep that lid on the trauma and push through their life.
The problem is that children, as I said here, they don’t operate in that verbal world. I mean, they do to a degree, obviously they learn to speak and all that, but they’re all about energy and emotions. So while we may have been able to hide it from everybody else, we aren’t going to hide it from our children. When we walk into a room and we just have this intense fear under the surface, but we’re saying everything’s fine and everything’s good and we’re fine and it’s all going to work out and please eat your peas or whatever. Our kids are like, What??
Janet Lansbury: This is scary, this is freaky. Right?
Elisabeth Corey: Yeah. It’s like, Is this some kind of twilight zone? Because I sense that you just want to run out of the house screaming and you’re telling me to eat my peas.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah. This is actually what I love about children, that they don’t live in that superficial world. But it is also scary when they reveal these things to us through their own discomfort. When we’re trying our best to just do the work and be the good parent and do all of that, but we haven’t dealt with what’s really going on underneath, and then it’s not working and it’s so frustrating. But children, like you said, that’s kind of what they’re here for. Whether it’s what they’re here for or just part of the magic of them.
Elisabeth Corey: I think it’s what they’re here for, I really do believe that. I think these little beings come onto the planet going, We’re going to show you your stuff and we’re going to work it out together. And I love that feeling, actually. I think about that with my almost 18-year-olds now. It’s easier now that they’re that age to think about it this way.
Janet Lansbury: I think that’s actually wonderful. Whether this is true or just the way you’re thinking about it, I’m sure it’s part of the picture. You’re turning something that could feel very adversarial into They’re my helpers.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes. Because when we go to the kitchen table and we’ve got fear dripping all over us and we’re like, Eat your peas and everything will be great! And our kids are like, You know what, mom? You’re angry. So I’m going to throw a tantrum right now.
Janet Lansbury: And I’m going to throw the peas, frankly!
Elisabeth Corey: I’m going to throw the peas because I need you to know you’re angry so that you can process that. In the moment, are we going to see them as helpers? Oh no, we are not. We are not going to see them as helpers in that moment because we were working really hard to hide all of that. And it can feel almost like we’re being victimized all over again because we were doing what we were taught to do, which is hold all of our emotions inside and pretend everything is fine. And now these kids are saying, No, don’t do that! And yes, we can have a really intense reaction to that because that’s everything we were ever taught. I never learned how to do anything other than that until I had kids.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah. This is also part of the reason that parents that listen here know that I’m not a big fan of the scripts that are being put out today everywhere. If you just do this thing and say the words . . . I feel like on their face they’re not bad, if we could see them as what they represent. But the fact that we want to rely on them is keeping us in that superficial mode. It’s not helping us to really engage in the way that children need us to and want us to, and will not really accept otherwise very easily. It’s not like I think even that it’s hurting children per se. It’s just not helping us go where we want to go.
What can parents do besides, okay, so they’re writing, they’re becoming aware, they’re listening to all of Elisabeth’s wonderful words about what to look for, what are the signs. And then other than the writing—which I do feel it actually helped me a lot to take your advice on this. And I discovered this whole piece just recently that needed healing, and writing from the feeling was a big part of that. I still don’t know the specifics of it, but I know that something that brought these certain feelings up in me happened that really, really hurt me, that really, really scared me, where I felt emotionally abandoned. And I can sort of know which room it was in. But that’s about it.
Elisabeth Corey: Well, so far, that’s it.
Janet Lansbury: So far that’s it. I want to be done with it, frankly. I cried a lot about it, I just felt it. I went to being angry at somebody I would have never, ever dreamed of being angry at. So all of that really helped. But I don’t feel like I have something that’s interfering as much as a lot of people do. You know, these adverse childhood experiences, traumas. So what else do we do? How can we get ourselves there? Especially if we’re a parent and our time and energy is small.
Elisabeth Corey: Yeah. Well, this is a good question and I’m going to answer it with something that seems kind of broad, but then I want to bring in an example or two to explain what I mean. I think the key is we have to get out of that figure out mode, that mode where we’re using the mind to fix the mind, which is actually impossible, and follow our emotions where they go. Which is what you were just describing that you did. And yes, it feels horrible. And yeah, we want to be done with it. But each time we follow that emotion where it goes, we get the answers that we’re looking for from these scripts and from all the books we read and everything. Because we have it, it’s in us already. We know the answer.
That’s probably one of the most common statements from my clients is they’re like, There is no way I can know what to do because it was not done for me. And my answer is always, You’re not going to be operating from your past experiences. You’re going to be operating from that grounded place within you, what I refer to as the grounded adult self. That aspect of self knows what to do. We have to follow the emotions until we can find it. The biggest problem with that is that it’s not a quick process. And we want quick, we want Fix this now before I make another parenting mistake!
Janet Lansbury: Exactly. Could be a one-minute reel that fixes it for me! That’s what we want.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes. Because we often have these rules that live in our mind and our system that say, I’m either going to be the perfect parent or I’m going to be horrible. And there’s no room for anything in between, none. There’s no way we could just be doing our best, getting some things wrong, but doing lots of things right. Those things don’t occur to us in these moments. I need the answer. I need it now! There’s all this fear and anxiety and panic. That actually is a really good place to write from, by the way. That’s often a really important place to write from, that panic, that need for perfection, that need to get it right. And that place doesn’t hold our compassion. So as we follow these emotions where they go, we can find compassion for ourselves. Which in turn then gets mirrored back to our kids as well, which is the beauty of it.
I’ll just throw out a couple examples real quick of following the emotions and what that would look like. For example, maybe our kid has learned that when they say a particular phrase, it triggers us. And by the way, the way they know this is not by our behavior. What we talked about earlier. They know because they sense it. They’re like, Ooh, wow. I just felt some pretty strong energy coming out of mom when I said that.
Janet Lansbury: Right. And her words and her whole demeanor just don’t match. I mean, her demeanor is one thing, but what she’s saying is not matching what’s inside there.
Elisabeth Corey: So we want to take that phrase, we want to study that phrase. The first thing we often try to do is solve it. Like say, “Don’t say that!” or something to that effect. Find a way to make the statement stop. But what we really want to do is explore the phrase. We want to dig into it, we want to write from it. Why do we hate this phrase? Why is it driving us crazy? Where did we hear it before? Chances are we have. What does it mean to us? Really explore that. And if we’re feeling anger from, How dare you say that thing? If we’re feeling fear from, Oh my goodness, something bad is going to happen because of this phrase. Which does sometimes happen, sometimes we can have moments where we’re nervous our kids are going to be treated the way that we were. That is a fear that does come up.
Janet Lansbury: And that, by the way, is writing from the feeling. I just want to get clear, because there’s a difference between writing about a feeling and about an experience and writing from a feeling. And you’ve shown me that. It maybe sounds subtle, but it’s a game-changer.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes, it’s powerful and it’s hard to do. But another way that we might follow the emotion is let’s say our kids are starting to maybe display some kind of personality trait or authentic gift that we were not allowed to have in our childhood. So when they do this thing, whatever this thing is, could be anything. My son was an extreme extrovert. Well, guess what? So am I. But I was taught not to be. I was taught that I was too talkative and too confident and too this and too that and too much. And so my son came into the world, I was like, Oh my gosh, he’s too much. He’s too much. He’s too much. He’s too much. People are going to be annoyed with him. And I followed that fear and I realized, Oh, I feel this because they told me I was too much, and now I don’t want my son to be too much. And it’s in following that fear where it went, which was, Oh, he needs to be quieter. He’s going to disturb everybody. Nobody’s going to like him. They’re all going to think it’s my fault for being an awful parent. That’s me writing from that fear.
Janet Lansbury: And then where does it go from there? I’m just curious, just for an example, because I think it’d be good to explain to people. So you’re writing down from that fear, Oh gosh, this and that and this is going to happen to him and that’s going to happen to him, and all these bad things. At what point did it start bridging to you?
Elisabeth Corey: So as I’m writing from this, it starts moving into, Everybody’s going to hate you and they’re all going to think you’re weird and you’re overwhelming and you are this and you are that. And as I’m writing it, I’m like, that is my mother talking to me.
Janet Lansbury: Wow.
Elisabeth Corey: It’s like, oh, okay. So what I’m really scared of in my son is that he will exhibit the traits that I was told I was not allowed to have. And I was told very blatantly and quite rudely that those things were unacceptable and that I would even get in trouble for them. And now I’m looking at my son being exactly like me, and I’m going, Oh gosh, he’s going to get in trouble and then I’m going to get in trouble because he is behaving this way and I’m his parent, and we’re all just going to get in trouble. And as I’m able to see that it’s actually what I was told as a kid and it’s all total BS that has zero credibility, I’m able to go, Well, nevermind. He can be loud and he can talk. It’s not hurting anything. It shifts my perspective on the situation. We’re generally not going to hit this the first time we write from it. It’s going to take some time, it’s going to take some processing and some dedication to get there.
Janet Lansbury: And that sounded like somehow writing from the feelings brought you back into your mind.
Elisabeth Corey: In the end, yes, the mind is impacted by it. So yes, there is a belief system change that happens.
Janet Lansbury: But it’s a familiarity that you felt. You felt a familiarity. There’s something about this that I know that feels familiar.
Elisabeth Corey: Yes. I’ve heard this before. And sometimes this is when flashbacks will happen. I’ll get an image in my head of a location, like a kitchen or a bedroom, and I’m like, oh, well, that’s clearly where I was when I was told these things at least one of the times. I’m sure I was told more than once. But yes. And those are where really we want to be building self-trust. We want to be able to trust ourselves, because honestly, we’ve got a lot of survival mechanisms in place that are going to try to put doubt on all of this. Say, No that didn’t happen to you. Your mom was fine. She was great. She never said anything like that. That’s all the old defenses that kind of get in the way of letting ourselves see the truth and feel the truth. But that’s really where we’re trying to go.
Janet Lansbury: So learning which voice to trust when the other voices come in, starting to realize those are not the helpful voices.
Elisabeth Corey: Exactly. And even with the unhelpful voices, it can help to write from those. Because it can help to give us a distance between us and that voice so we can kind of see it and just feel just a tiny bit of detachment. Not dissociation, but detachment. Or we can say, Oh, that voice, that’s probably not the best perspective for me in this moment. I can write from it, but I don’t have to do what that says.
Janet Lansbury: So then when you got to that place, let’s just say with your son for example, then the next time he’s showing this wonderful, assertive, gregarious personality, you’re not cringing anymore? Or you’re still a little bit cringing? Is it streamlined like that, or how does that work?
Elisabeth Corey: So we are peeling this stuff off in layers. And sometimes we think, okay, I got it. And then it might come back again a little bit or in a slightly different way, and we need to process that new thing. I wish it were like, Okay, I’ve done this. I’m done with it. I want it to go away. I would love that to be the case. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it is. But many times we have to go back to it and we have to look at other ways we might’ve been told things. There may be nuances we need to look at. But in general, yes, I will feel a shift in my response to my kids when those realizations come in pretty quickly. And it does change.
We were recently at Disney World, because we live here in Orlando, and they had a sing-along. My son is a singer, and one of his favorite Disney songs came on, which is from that Oogie Boogie guy. I think it’s either from The Nightmare—
Janet Lansbury: Okay. I don’t think I saw that one.
Elisabeth Corey: Anyway, he has this really deep voice and he starts singing along to the song and he knows every word. And he has a beautiful, deep voice, so it wasn’t like somebody tone-deaf singing along to the song. And I was sitting next to a friend of mine, and after he sang the whole song loudly and beautifully, my friend looks at me and he says, “Yeah, uh, that was . . . that was loud.”
Janet Lansbury: Gosh, some friend!
Elisabeth Corey: I know, well. And I looked at him and I said, “Yeah, I know. Wasn’t it great?” And the old me would’ve never wanted that kind of attention drawn to myself, ever. Obviously the attention was on him, but I was sitting next to him. I would’ve been cowering in my seat, the old me.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah. You found that separation, that healthy separation between you and your child, where it’s not reflecting on you and your child’s behavior isn’t putting a mirror to the world on you. I think that’s one of the fears a lot of us have. It’s not showing the world you in any way.
Elisabeth Corey: Yeah. And in addition to that, if a guy loves the spotlight—and you already know he wants to be an actor one day, a musical theater actor—if he loves the spotlight, that isn’t dangerous the way I was taught that was. It’s just him being in the spotlight.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah. I’m mad at your friend. I just think you should lose that friend.
Elisabeth Corey: The good news is my son didn’t hear him say it, it was just me. And that’s it, I know that he said that to me to reflect my past back to me. This would’ve been a problem for you. And my job in that moment was to take that little universe hint and say, No, it’s fine.
Janet Lansbury: And actually that friend was probably reflecting something that was put onto them.
Elisabeth Corey: That’s what’s great about doing this work is we can really start to see that when people come at us about our parenting, it really is a reflection of where they are in the process.
Janet Lansbury: Totally. And that includes in-laws, family members that are judging you, everybody. It’s their own stuff. And sometimes it’s also, I think, a bit of envy.
Elisabeth Corey: Absolutely. I believe that wholeheartedly. The same way that we as parents have the judgment towards our kids in those moments. Oh my gosh, don’t be so much. Don’t be so much. The reason why people say, Oh my gosh, your kid is so much, is because they’ve also had to suppress their “too much.” Right? Their bit of that in themselves.
Janet Lansbury: So let me bring you down to how I feel instead of allowing you to shine your light brightly. We’re not going to do that to each other or our kids if we can help it.
Elisabeth Corey: No.
Janet Lansbury: Wow, you have just so much to give. This makes me want to do 12 more of these with you, at least.
Elisabeth Corey: I’d love to do them whatever you want. This is great.
Janet Lansbury: You’re amazing. Like I said before, I learned so much from you, and I just think everybody should, whether they’re a parent or not, tune into what you’re doing and there’s something for everybody.
Elisabeth Corey: I really do appreciate it. Yes, I do work with people who are not parents as well on the journey of healing our trauma. I just think that parenting really brings out so many triggers for us and so many things that, honestly, it can elevate and escalate to some degree this journey for us. It certainly did that for me. In the end, this is going to sound dramatic, but it may have been what saved my life, because I was heading down a path of never really realizing what I had experienced and that has a major impact on the body.
So I will say that this work is for everybody, you’re right. But my favorite topic is to talk about parenting, and I enjoy doing that the most with you. We do seem to just have a really easy way of talking about this stuff. So thank you for involving me in your podcast.
Janet Lansbury: Well, the pleasure is all mine.
Elisabeth Corey: This conversation is so difficult, and you’re diving right into it. And I’ll be honest, we don’t live in a world that wants to talk about this, so thank you for being willing to go there.
Janet Lansbury: Well, you’re my inspiration. And yeah, it’s my favorite thing to go deeper and get into things that really matter and really make changes.
Elisabeth, how can people get in touch with you or find out more about your work? What’s going on right now for you? I know that you do different programs and different courses. What have you got going right now?
Elisabeth Corey: Right now I don’t have a specific scheduled course. I do offer some prerecorded courses. But I am also currently a few slots to people for one-on-one consultations. If it’s something that you might be interested in exploring on a more detailed, foundational level for yourself, feel free to reach out to me. You can contact me at elisabeth at beatingtrauma dot com. And that is Elisabeth with an S, because that confuses lots of people. Or you could go the old Gmail route and email me at beatingtrauma at gmail dot com.
Janet Lansbury: Wonderful. Well, people should take full advantage of that. Thank you again with all my heart, Elisabeth.
Elisabeth Corey: Thank you.
Janet Lansbury: You’re the best.
You can learn more about Elisabeth and access her resources at: BeatingTrauma.com.
Learn more about Janet’s “No Bad Kids Master Course” at: NoBadKidsCourse.com.
