How Having Kids Can Help You Recognize Your Childhood Trauma

Along with tardigrades, cockroaches, and coyotes, human children are some of the most resilient creatures on the planet (and, fortunately for those of us raising them, much cuter and cuddlier). Of course, in a perfect world, we’ll never have to learn just how resilient because, of course, we never want anything bad to happen to them.

But, sadly, bad things do happen sometimes, and kids can be so scrappy and so adaptable that they may not even fully recognize what they’re going through as uniquely awful.

But TikTok creator Karley Weinberg (@karleyweinberg), shared a recent “life hack” to help grapple with childhood trauma as an adult.

“The only thing that has ever really helped me understand my childhood trauma, or understand that it was childhood trauma, is imagining my own kids experiencing exactly what I experienced,” she explains.

“Because when I imagine that I am devastated. It horrifies me to think of them in the situations that I was in. But when I just think about myself and my own memories, I’m just like ‘Meh. It was fine. It wasn’t great but, like, you know. It was all right. I can’t really muster the same kind of sympathy for my childhood self, but I can for my own children. I think that has helped me understand the magnitude of what I went through in a way I was not able to understand before having kids.”

This advice need not be limited to parents. Anyone who loves or cares about a child or even children as a community concept can try this method.

“Put them in your shoes when you were a kid and think about how that would make you feel,” Weinberg suggests. “And if it terrifies you for them, then your childhood was not good.”

Commenters were quick to identify with this practice.

“My children were the ones who opened my eyes to my childhood,” said one commenter. “My sister and I were telling a ‘funny family story’ and our kids looked at us horrified. It was in that moment I knew.”

“Becoming a parent made me want to be in therapy more than any other time before,” attested another.

For some, having children even prompted them to confront their own parents for the first time.

“When my son was about 4 months old, I sent my parents a letter of confrontation asking ‘How could you treat your own child that way?’” one commenter shared.

And it seems this practice might be useful beyond processing childhood trauma.

“This is how my therapist helped me to leave my ex-husband,” a commenter wrote. “By imagining my daughter married to him.”

It’s incredible how resilient children are… but they should never have to be in the first place. May we all raise soft, naive, kiddos who don’t understand the ugliness the world is capable of, at least for a little while.

This article was originally published on scarymommy.com.