Passion Struck with John R. Miles
The Hidden Reality of Post-Traumatic Parenting: Breaking the Cycle | Dr. Robyn Koslowitz - EP 719
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up next on Passion Struck.
Not only will your damage not damage your kids, but your damage can be the catalyst for you to break the cycle, right? Your damage can actually make you into a better parent. You're not flawed. In some ways, you're uniquely qualified to parent because you know what your values are.
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming.
Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey, friends, and welcome back to Episode 719 of PassionStruck.
We're continuing our series, The Meaning Makers, an exploration of how meaning takes shape early, develops through experience, and is strengthened through conscious repair. In our recent episodes, we've been tracing how environments shape the inner life. Last week, I was joined by Alex Emis, where we examined how uncertainty and competition influence adult decision-making.
And then earlier this week, Shana Pearson joined us to explore how sustained misalignment between mind and system shapes identity and self-trust. Today, we move further upstream into the family system. My guest today is Robin Kaslowitz. clinical psychologist, parenting expert, and founder of the Targeted Parenting Institute.
She is the author of the new book, Post-Traumatic Parenting, Turning Surviving into Secure Connection. Robin's work focuses on how early experience, shape regulation, attachment, and emotional safety, and how parents can build secure connections while continuing their own healing. Our conversation centers on post-traumatic parenting as a developmental pattern that
one that reflects adaptation, persistence, and the nervous system's intelligence. We explore how early experience shapes emotional regulation, why presence and attunement support secure attachment, how parents can build stability while honoring their own history, and how emotional safety becomes the foundation for meaning across generations.
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Chapter 2: What is post-traumatic parenting and how does it differ from traditional parenting?
But in the end, it was like someone asked me what, like what it was like. And I said, it was so scary and so awesome. And I'm so glad it's over all at the same time.
Well, I'm not sure what your journey to becoming an author was. And today we're going to be discussing your brand new book, Post-Traumatic Parenting, Turning Surviving into Secure Connection. But for me, my author journey was nothing but rejection along the way. I must have gotten rejected 150 times before my first book came out.
Yeah, and I feel like we don't teach kids that enough. How to, I wouldn't say not take rejection personally because actually you do need the helpful feedback aspects of rejection, but how to look at rejection as only feedback and nothing to do with self-worth and nothing to do with you, even though it does make you feel like you are personally being rejected.
I was bullied as a kid, so it's activated the bullied circuitry in my brain and made me feel like, once again, the cool kids don't like me. But it had nothing to do with the cool kids not liking me. And sometimes it did.
Robyn, I'm going to start before we go in the book with something I read in an article that recently published on Medium is authenticity. And you shared this story that I think is so relevant. It was about your ten year old. I think he's older now, but at the time he was ten years old. And your son looked at you and asked, Where do you go when you go away behind your eyes?
Can you take us back to that moment? Because I think based on my work and my own life, it's something that's happening to more and more of us as parents. What was happening inside you and what did you realize in that instant about your relationship and with yourself, but also with your child?
Initially, when he asked me that question, and it was really hard for him, he actually started to cry. I realized in that moment that what I was doing in going away behind my eyes, which is what psychologists call dissociation, it was a trauma response. It's something that I do whenever I'm very stressed out. And it happened through my intensely traumatic childhood.
I would disappear into my work. And I could be chopping vegetables in the kitchen, taking care of my kids, but my brain is coding data right now.
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Chapter 3: What is the 'Trauma App' metaphor and how does it affect parenting?
And it really helps because then I'm calm. I'm like that if I'm like when I was in graduate school, if I was really anxious, I could focus intensely on the patient in front of me, the research I was doing, a book I'm reading, really anything that takes me out of my body. And then my panic attack goes away. All of those yucky feelings inside me go away. But I'm not present.
A piece of me goes away. Until my son said that to me, I thought that I had my whole PTSD thing handled. I knew how to breathe through a panic attack. Like I had figured that part out. I had done some therapy. The worst of my flashbacks, they existed, but they weren't taking me over anymore. But I thought that this dissociation was great. I was like, this is fabulous.
I get to get so much accomplished. I do triple what everybody else does and I never have to feel stressed out. And I thought, great, fabulous. I've got this covered. And then when my son started to cry, it just broke my heart. And I said, oh, no, this was my biggest fear. Like even when my husband proposed to me and I knew we wanted kids was like, I'm so damaged. How can I be someone's mom?
Like my damage is going to damage my kids. And then I thought I had this like brilliant shortcut until he asked that to me. And I remember looking at him and just thinking, do you want me to feel my stress? Because I will yell at you. I don't want to yell at you.
Chapter 4: How can parents identify their trauma responses and their impact on children?
It was almost like as if he had said to me, like, mommy, you're five feet tall and I need my mom to be six feet tall. So just grow a foot, please, because I need you to dunk basketballs. OK, but I can't. It just felt so impossible. But at the same token, for him, I was willing to try. In other instances of my life, I had a friend who said it to me in high school.
She said, I hate that you space out sometimes. It's so weird. And I remember looking at her and being like, okay, yeah, I do. Sorry. Take me or leave me. I owned it. I was like, yeah, sorry. It's this weird thing my brain does. I apologize, but I don't think I can change it. My bosses loved it, right? Because I got a lot done. My husband knew how to be like, are you with me?
I need your attention now. And I could shift gears because he was asking me for my attention. He knew let's not have any major emotional conversation when she's heavy on a research project. And it worked. It was only my kid that I was willing to change it for. And I think that's one of the things that we're traumatized as parents, many of us.
And we have these trauma adaptations that our brain does for us. But the only thing that at least got me to change it, that made me even see that I needed to change it was my son.
Yeah, I used to work at Lowe's and one of my favorite peers was a gentleman named Steve. And Steve at the time ran all of our distribution network, which was a team of about 30,000 employees. He went on to run all of supply chain for Lowe's later on. But he was one of the best leaders I had ever seen.
We would walk in to a distribution center and these things are about a million and a half square feet. They're like a city. Hundreds of people. And he would literally know everyone and not just their name. He would know their wife's name. He would know what sports the kids were into. And the associates loved them and I loved them.
What he shared with me, the more we got to know each other and became friends. is that he was putting so much energy into his job. By the time he got home, he was completely wasted. And so his kids started to do this routine where they actually bought a brick and painted the brick
and any time that he was phasing out they would put the brick in front of him as a reminder for him to be present the reason i'm telling this story is here you have a highly performing person who ended up later in his career getting burned out like so many people are but i think
What was happening to you, what's happening to him is happening to millions of parents around the world, where whether it's work, whether it's a trauma, whether it's something else, we're tuning out on life. And I call this, we become invisible in our own life. You describe this kind of as a disassociation or your lifelong coping mechanism.
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Chapter 5: What is the AIM Method for healing trauma in parenting?
So what you do...
is first you figure out what are my if then rules if i feel a certain level of stress then i dissociate if i feel a certain level of stress i yell at people if i feel a certain level of stress i people please and i make sure everybody in the room is happy and then you ask yourself how do you know that you say and again i do this in parenting but it's really in any area of life when you mean to do x but y happens right so you say oh
Today, when my boss asks me to do that totally inappropriate thing and gives me a project to finish by close of work today, and it's three o'clock and there's no way I'll leave on time. And every fiber of my being is saying no. And I find myself saying yes. So today I'm going to say no. I'm going to say, sorry, I need to leave on time today. My kids are expecting me at home or whatever.
I have another appointment after work. And somehow, yes, comes out again. What just happened?
Yes.
And it's like that with anything. Today, I'm going to stay calm. I'm not going to yell at anyone. And then you find yourself yelling. Today, I'm going to allow people their own process and not control every aspect of it. And then you find yourself micromanaging again. That's where we say, what just happened? You intended to do X and Y happened. That tells me there's a trauma app in your brain.
That's what I call it in the book, the metaphor for how trauma rewires us. And that gives us data, which is really helpful.
you think about that scenario with your son you're a psychologist so you already understand trauma on a professional level but that moment for you was really personal so i'm interested in how did it shift your relationship with your own expertise but then putting your human self in there as a mom and an individual.
What did it teach you about the two and did it help you become a better counselor?
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Chapter 6: Why is gentle parenting alone not sufficient for trauma-affected parents?
So he didn't choose that. He didn't choose to have heart attacks in front of me. That was his life, but I can't undo it. I can't somehow go into my brain and imagine it differently. That's what a flashback is and trauma where you keep,
Let's say you were in a car accident and you were traumatized and your brain keeps replaying the moment of the accident and somehow you keep seeing yourself at the corner and you're about to turn left. Your brain is trying to get you to turn right because the part of your brain that houses traumatic memories can't tell the difference between past, present and future.
So that part of your brain is trying to get you to turn right. You can't. It happened. It's over. It was 15 years ago. You're never going to have turned right. Your brain, though, doesn't know that. So that's acceptance. We undo what's called counterfactual thinking. If only I had better parents, if only my dad hadn't been so angry, so then I wouldn't be yelling at people.
Whatever it is, we undo that. It happened. It is as it should be. It wasn't great. It happened. Then we have integration, which is we're going to integrate it into our sense of self. Now that this happened to me, I am this person who experienced this and also has a big life around it. And it's part of my sense of self. It's not the thing about me. It's a thing about me. And it's fine.
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.
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Chapter 7: How can parents heal their inner child through parenting?
And I always say, is there an experience that you had in your childhood that you would cross a continent or spend your last dime to avoid your kid having to go through it? congratulations, you're traumatized, right? Whatever that experience was. Because if you look at trauma checklists that you might get from psychology, right? You'll get questions like, did you ever see someone die?
Or were you in fear of death? Did you experience a serious assault? They'll have those sort of major ripped from the headline stories. And those certainly can traumatize us. But what's lacking there is Were you fat shamed your entire adolescence? Were you completely bullied to the point that you didn't even feel like a human? Did you have parents who were super critical?
A mom who's a functional alcoholic and one day you came home and she was lovely and one day you came home and she was just absolutely ready to hit you. That doesn't make its way onto that list. But that's also traumatic. If you grew up and you said, my kid will never have a parent who does that. Or if my kid is being bullied, I'm going to intervene the minute it happens.
That experience was traumatic for you. It's like as simple as that.
I liked how you started the book because you described the striking contrast between the endless to-do list every parent carries and the invisible to don't list that post-traumatic parents joggle in their heads. And it reminded me of my own parenting because when I started to parent my son, I realized I was falling into the trap of how my father had parented me.
which is something that I didn't want to do. And I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be to unlearn his parenting styles and to completely shift. It was really a struggle to do it. You know why that is.
Our brains are really, in some ways, extremely efficient. We might even call them lazy. So what our brains do is whenever they can, they're gonna copy paste. And attachment, like the attachment system, the whole system of parenting in our brain, The fancy term is internal working model, right?
You create, your brain creates this internal working model of attachment and you get it from your own parents. So your brain is set up to have this circuitry to say, I know what to do. What would mom do? What would dad do? Do that. Your brain has to work really hard to say, I don't want to do what dad did.
Like you probably thought before you became a dad, you were probably like, oh yeah, I'm just going to not do that and it'll be fine. And then you find yourself doing that. And it's like, what just happened? I didn't want to do that.
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Chapter 8: What are the five subtypes of post-traumatic parents?
And what she really wanted was her kids to feel the sense of safety someone feels when they go into a well-run organized home where, you know, there's always going to be dinner on the table at the same time, like that there's routine healthcare, the sense that the parents are in charge of keeping you safe and And so we just then went backwards from that. What would be those ingredients?
And she had this one foster family as a model. And she was like, I want it to be like that foster family. I was there really short, but like it felt so homey. I would come home and there was a smell of cooking and she would say, all right, now we're going to do our homework and then we're going to eat dinner and then we're going to do our chores. And then we're going to go to bed.
And it sounds crazy, but having to do chores made me feel taken care of. Like a grownup was telling me what to do. And I didn't just have to figure out myself how to pay the mortgage so we don't get evicted. And I'm eight years old. This is great. I want my kids to feel that. So we worked on that. There might be another mom who has the opposite. My home was so authoritarian and strict and rigid.
I want my kids to feel like they can breathe in this house. And like, I don't want meals to be at the same time every night. I want it to feel like we're coming together for dinner because we like each other. Great. That's your castle in the cloud. What do we need to establish to make that happen? And that's what we're really saying is your values. And what blocks you from getting to your values?
Usually your trauma. Usually what you learned or the fact that your brain just wants to replicate your childhood. But once you know it, once you say that, that's the image, that's the shining goal. Great. Then let's just get to that castle in the cloud.
I want to just give you a scenario. So let's say as a child, you grew up in a dysfunctional family where maybe your father was very abusive to your mom. And maybe that was verbal abuse and it wasn't physical, but it could have been both. But that's what you grew up seeing. So now you're an adult and you're having a hard time letting all of that go. How do you break free from something like that?
So in the book, I talk about the trauma app, which is this idea that in a moment of trauma, your brain creates if-then rules. Sometimes the if-then rules are, just like dad, I will yell whenever I feel a certain amount of stress. Or just like dad, I will criticize everybody around me because I can't ever be to blame.
It's too threatening for me to be to blame, so I have to look for who to blame, right? Yeah. That's your trauma app. And think of an app on your phone, right? In an app on your phone, there's permissions, right? And what you do is you go to that app on your phone and you deselect its permission. So in your brain, you say trauma app today is going to be stressful. Let's say you're moving, right?
Or you're making a wedding. or there's something major going on. There's a family Thanksgiving dinner and everyone's coming over and there's a lot of moving pieces. It's gonna be stressful. You are going to want me to criticize people. This is your default. When I feel stressed, I criticize people. I am deselecting the criticizing people. I am not allowed to criticize anybody today.
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