Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

And so that instead of me being like, I am a damaged person, I am a person who carries some damage.

And I've integrated it into my sense of self.

I'm also many other things, right?

And then mission.

We make some sense of meaning or mission out of it.

Now that I have this unique knowledge of the world based on this traumatic experience, based on it being part of my sense of self, I have a mission in life.

I know something about the world that no one else knows.

Maybe for me, it's like a macro mission of teaching people about the impact of trauma on parenting.

Maybe it's a micro mission.

My family will not have a parent who will not come home to a parent who's drunk and passed out on the couch.

My kids will know they matter.

My kids will know that they are the most important thing in the world to me.

My employees will feel valued, whatever that micro mission is.

So whether it's a macro mission or a micro mission, we turn it into a mission.

When you do those three things, the A, the I, the M,

you've really processed your trauma.

And if you look at every trauma psychotherapy out there, they all have an AIM component.

Whether they're the very behavioral ones like trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, whether they're the more processing ones like EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or IFS, internal family systems, all of them have the AIM component.

And I think it's important for parents to know because not everybody can access therapy and not everybody right now can benefit from therapy.

Sometimes you've got a whole bunch of kids and a really demanding job and you're going to have to do some of it on your own.