Welcome friend! This is the Living With Joy Renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present and hope for the future.
I'm Jeanette Nafziger, and I'm here to come alongside you on your parenting journey each week with tips, real-life stories, and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the living with joy renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present, and hope for the future. Joy renewed is here to support you on your parenting journey each week with tips real life stories and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home. Here's this week's episode
Hey, everyone, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me again today. As we walk together on this journey of being the parents are adopted kiddos need us to be. Today I want to talk a little bit about resilience. In our context, we are talking about a psychological resilience, the ability to handle difficult situations. Whenever I hear the word resilient, I think of strength, but not strength in the way of grit, as in like gritting their teeth and getting through something. I think true resilience is more than that. It is a way of being that doesn't negate triggers and reactions. But it identifies the ability of someone to go head to head with those triggers, and to learn coping mechanisms that actually help them to overcome them. We have talked in previous podcasts about the importance of us as parents having the ability to remain emotionally steady in the midst of our children's difficult moments, and how our children learn to model that behavior. And that is a type of resilience. It's an inner strength, it helps us to take a split second to pause to think about how to respond instead of react. Eventually, it becomes our first response. And eventually we realize we are stronger people mentally and more effective at parenting than we were before we learn these skills. But today I want to talk about how this should be a goal for our children as well. Most of what we've been talking about in these podcasts up to this point has been helping us learn what the trauma of adoption looks like in everyday reactions and behaviors of our children, and how we as parents can learn to recognize that those behaviors as trauma, so we can respond to it appropriately and in a way that does not create further trauma. But now we want to start looking beyond using our responses to limit further trauma, and to begin really doing the work of realizing how our responses begin healing traumatic effects. Studies are beginning to reveal that people who have experienced adverse childhood experiences or traumatic events are able to become mentally and psychologically stronger, they are able to live in higher states of mental well being. And it's because of the traumatic experiences. I'm gonna go over some statistics with you, the World Health Organization reported that trauma experienced during childhood can have negative impacts on an individual throughout the entirety of their life. Now, if you couple this with the same organization statistics, that at least 1/3 of the global population has had at least one traumatic experience in their childhood years. And the fact that this may be the cause of at least 28.9% of the diagnosed mental disorders of adults. It reveals that it is imperative to find these links between childhood trauma and future mental distress and then determine how to bridge the gaps that have been created by that trauma in order to actually promote mental wellbeing. Now I know I just threw a whole bunch of numbers and statistics at you. But let's go back and say in a different way, the trauma that our children experienced whether they actually experienced abuse or neglect or removal from biological parents at a time that they can remember, or when they were young infants, this trauma can have a negative impact on them for the rest of their life. It can also very likely cause some sort of a diagnosed mental disorder as an adult in them, so it is important that we help them overcome it. That's our job as parents learn how to help them heal. So how can learning resilience be a key to this healing? The American Psychological Association describes resiliency as the ability to remain stable in distressing or difficult situations. Many of the behaviors and outbursts and meltdowns of our children have come from a place of not being able to cope with or process what their brain is experiencing at that moment. Now as parents, we can't protect them from any and every difficult to handle moment or distressing situation. And the truth is, we shouldn't actually want to and an article published in 2013 by CNN Yang, entitled resilience and post traumatic growth. The author uses the terms resilience and post drum added growth when describing the positive effects that adversity can bring to someone's life. And it defines them as the ability to cope, to adapt and to recover, while also experiencing positive personal changes and increased well being in the aftermath of that experience. So in other words, the difficult to handle moments can be used to help our children learn how to cope, adapt and recover. It can also help them have personal positive changes, it can help them increase their well being. And if we continue to protect them from these situations, they will never have the opportunity to do that. And what better time is it for them to be able to learn how to cope to adapt and recover than when they are in the home of parents who love them. If we're constantly protecting them from distressing situations, or trying to protect their feelings, from these situations, we don't give them the opportunity to heal while they're with us. And life is going to throw some difficult moments at them when they're adults. And suddenly, they're going to either have to learn how to cope all of a sudden, or their mental well being is going to be affected. And they may become one of these statistics of those who are diagnosed with mental disorders. This is not what we want for our kids. So that's why it's important for us to understand that as parents who love our children, we need to be thankful for some of these meltdowns, these outbursts and these adverse behaviors that we're seeing, because these moments can be the moment of time that when responded to appropriately and consistently can build the ability for our children to become stronger and more capable of handling what life will inevitably throw at them. Now, the key to this is that it happens over time. So say, for example, that you have a child who cannot cope well with change. Storytime, we experienced this in our household very recently, we were preparing to move to a new home. My two youngest children still live at home. And they're ages 19 and 21. So they are young adults, this new home is an upgrade. It's a great place. And it's less than two miles down the road from where we were currently living. Everyone was excited for the idea of this move. But as we came closer to moving day, I began seeing reactions to triggers in my children, my daughter was so excited. Her new room, she wanted to paint it to decorate it move into it. But the day that she was moving everything into the new house, she actually woke up we'd be irritable, and overall just not okay. Now we're all in the hustle and bustle of moving activity. And patients really was running a bit thin everywhere. But suddenly I realized what was happening. And I knew we needed to take a minute to address her feelings. She has a really difficult time with change of any kind. And I think I've mentioned this before positive change, negative change. She has a difficult time. But all it took was a conversation to remind her of this fact to remind her that her brain is trying to play some old tricks on her. And it's attempting to protect her from a danger that does not actually currently exist. She is safe, she is loved. And she has the ability to effectively cope with the unknown of a new location. Now I'm talking literally, maybe a two minute conversation. This was not a big drawn out thing. It was me popping my head in her room and saying, Hey, I think I know what's going on here. In the midst of that conversation, I literally saw the light come back on in her eyes. See, this kiddo has spent years trying to understand her triggers and how to overcome subconscious mind and body responses to them. She just needed a reminder to implement some of these coping skills that she has learned. So she took a break from moving activity, she went out got something to eat, because sidenote, not eating is a bodily reaction for her. And she was able to complete the move without mental or physical symptoms. But did you hear what I said? She spent years working on this awareness is so important, but it's not an automatic cure. Post Traumatic Growth and resiliency are not immediate, but they are changes that occur over time. And they're often dependent on seven factors that were actually pointed out in this article by cn Yang that I talked about earlier. I'm going to name the seven factors here for you. But we're going to spend some time over the next couple of podcasts really kind of diving into these seven factors, and how we can use them to help our children gain resiliency. Number one positive relationships and social supports personal control and empowerment is number two. Number three, the ability to experience more positive emotions while having control over the negative ones. Number four, using cognitive skills such as problem solving and acceptance, number five, being able to control life pursuits and personal values. Number six, the quality of social, emotional and financial resources. And number seven, the ability to confront adversity without avoiding or denying the feelings and emotions that come from them. And boy is this. The key. I mean, I feel like this is the most important factor, the ability to confront adversity without avoiding or denying the feelings and emotions that come from them. And this is exactly what I was talking about a little bit earlier, when I say we can't protect our children from these difficult situations. We want them to learn how to confront them, how to understand the big feelings and the big emotions that's coming from them. And then they are going to begin to learn how to cope with them. All of these factors play a crucial role in the ability for anyone to move through trauma in a way that creates future resiliency and growth. Adoption is such a beautiful process. How many times have we said this on this podcast, it's the creating of families and the consistent choice to choose love for your child over and over again. But we all know that adoption is a sort of necessary evil to it means our children had to experience a reality about life that they did not choose. And as much as I will be forever grateful that I was given the gift of being my children's mother, a gift, I wouldn't exchange for a single thing in this world. I am heartbroken that this was chosen for them, that they had no control over it, and that it has caused some dramatic survival responses in their brains. But the truth is Life throws things at all of us. And the ability to overcome adversity can make us all stronger people. So let's learn how to help our children use what they've been dealt, to become stronger, more resilient, and even more amazing human beings. Let's not let the trauma win. Let's be parents that embrace the hard moments and use them to help our children learn how to stay strong in the midst of difficulty, not by gritting their teeth and baring it out by becoming humans that have weathered the storm, and that I have come to understand a little bit more about themselves because of it. This same article concluded people who have experienced trauma and have gone on to learn what the triggers are, what their adverse reactions are, and then have learned coping mechanisms and gained resiliency. They have an increased ability to cope along with a surge in positive benefits such as altruism, spirituality, human kindness and unity. We didn't choose this for our children, but we can help them overcome it in a way that gives them a greater advantage in life. A way that makes their lives better, makes the relationship stronger, and helps them continue to grow as wonderful human beings. Thanks so much for listening again today.
Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Living with joy renewed podcast. We hope that this episode resonated with you and provided some hope and inspiration for your own family's journey. If you'd like to join a virtual or in person life group with other adoptive families, visit us at www dot live with joy renewed.com. In the meantime, stay connected with us on Instagram at live with joy renewed. And remember to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss the next episode. As always, thanks for allowing us to be a part of your family's journey.