My Toddler Brought Me to Tears and One Step Closer to a C-PTSD Diagnosis
A guest post by Katharine Strange
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence (and C-PTSD!) and healing from high-control environments. I will be back next week talking more about trauma (and my official, official autism diagnosis!) but for today I’m so excited about this post on motherhood + therapy = some startling self-discoveries by Katharine Strange. Thanks to everyone who supports this newsletter by sharing and investing! Because of you I can pay a small stipend to all of these lovely writers.
Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash
My Toddler Brought Me to Tears and One Step Closer to a C-PTSD Diagnosis
By Katharine Strange
I’m probably not the first person to be broken by a three-year-old. While I had managed to slog through through the first five years of parenting, the summer that my youngest was two brought me to the end of my rope. My chronic anxiety could only be soothed by controlling everything (and everyone) in my house, but my two-year-old son had other plans. One afternoon as he repeatedly escaped from nap time, I lost it. He had to obey me, and I would punish him until he learned that I was the one in charge, not him. But no matter how many times I carried him back to bed, yelled, or threatened to take away his toys, he just kept getting up. All I could think was, “I just need a break. Why don’t I ever get a break? Why doesn’t anybody care about me?” By the end of the afternoon, both of us were crying and nobody got a nap.
I knew I had to make a change. I had to…UGH…find a therapist.
I’d been in therapy off and on for the last twelve years. My therapists had given me a place to vent and taught me a new set of coping skills, but I’d never gotten a satisfactory diagnosis. First I had depression, then chronic anxiety, and some obsessive-compulsive behavior to boot. I’d tried modalities from Freudian to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to learning to meditate, and while these things helped at the margins, it felt like I was lugging around a giant boulder that was invisible even to a bevy of therapists.
My first session with Katie was different, though. I’d picked her from the website because it said she specialized in working with addiction, trauma, and family systems. By this point, I had been through enough intake appointments to cut to the chase: I told her I was raised by an alcoholic parent, and that I suspected mental illnesses lurked elsewhere in my family tree. Katie listened deeply as I complained about my toddler and offered boundless empathy. Soon, she began to gently nudge me towards books and support groups for adult children of alcoholics. Once I got over my initial resistance, I discovered there were many, many others carrying the same invisible boulder I was. No wonder I was crying out for a break!
One session about two years in, Katie and I were talking through one of my recurring fears about being attacked. She pointed out how unrealistic this scenario was.
“I know that,” I agreed. “I know, logically, it’s not going to happen, but, emotionally, I can’t talk myself out of it. It feels real.”
“Hmmm…” Katie paused. “…I think that sounds a lot like trauma.”
She began talking to me about C-PTSD. She recommended I find yet another therapist (…UGH…) who could lead me through Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR.)
I knew from my twelve-step group that many children of alcoholics have some form of PTSD. But to be honest, I didn’t totally buy it. Part of me still doubted whether my mother was really an alcoholic. Ours was the perfect Christian family—on paper, at least—and letting go of that story felt impossible. How could something be wrong with us? My father served his country for twenty years in the army, including stints overseas and in the Pentagon. My mother was a stay-at-home-mom turned children’s minister. Sunday mornings found my whole family teaching, leading, shaking the hand of every newcomer at Coffee Hour. After church it was time for a drive-thru lunch followed by a few hours of puppet practice for our internationally recognized Christian puppet troop.
But during the week, that Sunday morning family fell apart. My mother would start drinking mid-afternoon, by the time dinner rolled around, her mood was on a knife’s edge. My father often reacted to her drinking with anger and forceful attempts to regain control of the household. Not infrequently, evenings devolved into heated arguments and merciless criticism lobbed at whoever was closest at hand. As a young child I learned to dread this time of day. The best option seemed to be avoiding both parents and getting myself to bed. EMDR therapy helped me face these memories and fully realize their impact.
It also helped me realize that, for me, church has always been a double-edged sword: both a refuge from yelling and a place where I was forced to live a lie. It was a place full of adults who cared for and listened to me, but also a place where one slip of the tongue could bring disaster. When I was in first grade and my dad was being considered for church elder, my mother quoted Titus 1:6 at me, “An elder must be blameless, faithful to his wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.” The message I got was this: Talk about what goes on at home and our family will be publicly disgraced.
As a child, I couldn’t bear to face the fact that I was stuck in this situation with no recourse to help. Instead, I invented a way out—if I could just be good enough, my parents would stop fighting, drinking, and lashing out at me. But it never worked. I could never do enough. At church I learned that I had a sinful nature, one which forever separated me from God and meant I deserved eternal punishment. In this instance and many others (such as my mother’s extreme black-and-white thinking), my family’s dysfunction was reinforced by church teachings.
A lack of parental guidance around religion left me vulnerable to more extreme voices within the church—I was swept up by Purity Culture, End Times Paranoia, and the “martyrdom” stories of Cassie Bernall. My angry, critical parents became my model for an angry, critical God. They became my model for parenting my own children: obey or suffer punishment.
But therapy has taught me that loving someone and attempting to control them are mutually exclusive. After processing my trauma with EMDR, I found out that my attempts to control my children were more about me than them. As cheesy as it may sound, I had to address the needs of my inner child so I could parent my real-life children. Despite the huge pain in the ass that finding a therapist is, I’m grateful that I had access to quality mental healthcare, a support group of people who understood where I was coming from, and so many great books that guided my recovery.
That sassy two-year-old who drove me around the bend is now a brilliant, sweet, and funny eight-year-old. I have learned that instead of trying to control him and his brother, I can set healthy limits and let them make their own choices. And when that voice in my head pops up to say “nobody cares about me” I can answer it back with a long list of people who do, including the most important one: myself.
Learning about parenting boundaries has pushed me to rethink my spirituality. As a younger person I clung to certainty out of fear; I’m working on healing those fears so I can freely explore the spiritual landscape. I’m chronicling that journey over on my Substack, Heretic Hereafter. Occasionally, I miss my old faith, but I also value taking the time and space I need to figure out a belief system that makes sense to me. I sometimes imagine God as a gentle parent, one who’s interested less in control and more in watching me grow into my full self.
Katharine Strange’s writing has appeared in places such as The Huffington Post, The Seattle Times, The Moth, and many more. She writes a weekly Substack on finding meaning after leaving Evangelicalism called Heretic Hereafter. Subscribe for weekly re-construction prompts.
Thank you Katharine for this essay on the variety of ways childhood trauma can (and does) interact with high control religions. I’m curious if other people related to the double-edged sword analogy when it come to religion in your life? Let us know in the comments below.
(comments are for paid subscribers only. If you are unable to afford a subscription, please reach out to me at dlmmcsweeneys@gmail.com and we will get you sorted).
I'm thinking about how stressful it is to grow up in a family where all the adults around you keep insisting everything is fine (I think churches are a great example of this) while you as the child are noticing the adults are NOT fine, not at all. And since we as kids are biologically conditioned to trust our parents, we eventually just decide that something must be wrong with US. Leading to long-term mental health impacts like anxiety, depression, OCD, auto-immune conditions, and more. I feel like this essay did such a great job of showing what this can look like in a kid. I'm so sad for all of us, but I'm so glad we now have the language and knowledge to understand what happened to us! And that we are breaking cycles for our own kids.
Yep. I hung on with my high-control parents until I had a child of my own. At that point I absolutely *could not* tolerate being around my mother. I went no-contact immediately after my oldest child’s first birthday party -- when I was able to experience her behavior as unhelpful, controlling, and intrusive -- and I was able to witness myself dissociating in response. I realized I couldn’t parent in that state, and that parenting was absolutely my most important job. Only then was I able to be free enough to do the work I needed to do in therapy. For me this has been, most centrally, “don’t take things personally” -- to sort out what’s my fault, what’s my problem, what I have control over, and what’s someone else’s world. I can’t parent (love them, radically, and let them make their own beautiful lives) without this. And I could never learn this with my parents. And, ironically, this a deeply spiritual discipline that I find best lived in community.