Welcome to another exciting episode of the Post-Traumatic Parenting podcast! In today’s podcast episode, I’m joined by Stephanie Chandler, the founder of the Nonfiction Authors Association. I recently attended her conference and when I heard her unique post-traumatic parenting story I knew I had to share it with you all because I love bringing post-traumatic parents on the podcast so that we can hear real-life Post-Traumatic stories. Stephanie is someone I admire a lot, she turned her trauma into a superpower, while remaining a conscious, present parent. Tune in as we talk about Stephanie’s story, how she suddenly lost her husband and became a single parent, how to process grief when you lose a loved one, what is grief hijack, different ways to process your trauma, and managing trauma while parenting a traumatized child.

• Stephanie shares how she suddenly lost her husband
• The difference between being a single parent and an only parent
• A missing male figure in Stephanie's son's life
• When should you seek professional help with processing your grief
• What is a grief hijack
• Stephanie’s journey of starting the Nonfiction Authors Association
• How did Stephanie hack her trauma and turned into a superpower
• Different ways to process your trauma
• How to supercharge your therapy
• What motivated me to become a psychologist
• Suicide is not selfish, and depression is not only in your head
• Stephanie's son's reaction to his dad passing
• What they don’t teach you in school about business
• Stephanie shares how she started her first writers' conference 
• Tips on writing a book, building a platform, and finding an agent
• Turning your fear into a helpful friend
• Why post-traumatic parents are the world's natural entrepreneurs

Connect with me on Instagram @dr.koslowitzpsychology and for full show notes and more resources visit www.drrobynkoslowitz.com/turning-your-trauma-into-superpower-with-stephanie-chandler

Postpartum can be tough. Whether you are a new parent or you already have children, you have never done this pregnancy before, you have never adjusted from one baby to two and from two to three. That’s why postpartum recovery might look very different for every one of us. Postpartum shakes, not feeling the rush of maternal love, or feeling incompetent and unsupported, it’s all part of the postpartum journey.

Your body goes through intense experience during childbirth, so it’s important to be kind to yourself. It will take time to adjust to the new period in your life, but it will pass and it will get better. Being post-traumatic just intensifies that experience! I want to normalize this experience for you, that’s why for today’s podcast episode, I invited Chelsea Bodie, the co-founder of Mama Psychologists. Tune in as we talk about postpartum recovery, what you can expect from postpartum, things that most people don’t tell you about, how to set boundaries with your loved one in the postpartum period, and much more!

• Who is behind Mama Psychologists
• Postpartum experiences that aren’t talked about
• What can you expect from Not Your Mother’s Postpartum Book
• How to filter through parenting content on social media
• What are the most common things moms wish they knew about postpartum
• Why are you experiencing retraumatization symptoms 
• The importance of validating your feelings and having a community
• Setting boundaries with friends and family in the immediate postpartum period
• How did starting Mama Psychologist influence Chelsea’s parenting journey
• What phases children go through that are completely normal but make parents freak out

Connect with me on Instagram @dr.koslowitzpsychology and for full show notes and more resources visit www.drrobynkoslowitz.com/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-postpartum-life-trauma-with-chelsea-bodie-of-mamapsychologists

Do you worry about how to protect your kids from online dangers, from predators to porn? As Post-Traumatic Parents, we are especially aware of how dangerous the world can be! In this episode, Kristen A Jenson, from Defend Young Minds, helps us explore how to protect our kids in the digital world. We talk about her books, like Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, her journey towards being a kid safety crusader, and why digital safety is particularly important for those of us who have been traumatized.

You can find Kristen online at
www.defendyoungminds.com

Website/Books: https://defendyoungminds.com/books

Trigger warning – for those Post-Traumatic Parents who have experienced boundary-crossing touch or physical abuse – this episode will explore those topics. Make sure to take some self-care precautions before listening. As Post-Traumatic Parents, we sometimes feel safer when we don’t think about these dangers, but that’s replacing the illusion of safety for actual safety. Instead, it’s better to educate ourselves and come up with a proactive plan to keep our kids safe. It can be done!

Is shame the hardest part of Post-Traumatic Parenting? Shame and trauma go together, and shame and parenting do, too. Dr. Patti Ashley, author of Shame Informed Therapy, website https://pattiashley.com/ is the expert on this. We talked about how shame is a sense of not being enough, no matter how well we’re doing, and how trauma leads to shame. Most crucially, we talked about what to do about it. So many PTPs want to avoid shaming our own kids, but we don’t know exactly how. Dr. Ashley has some great ideas.

Post-Traumatic Parents know what helpless feels like, and we don’t want to inflict that feeling on our kids. We don’t want to parent coercively. But the behavioral approach to parenting seems to be the only game in town! Is there a way to help our kids learn emotion regulation or coping without sticker charts? Dr. Mona Delahooke https://monadelahooke.com/ has a parenting plan that combines Polyvagal theory with child development research and neuroscience. Let’s apply her work to Post-Traumatic Parenting.

Post-Traumatic due to divorce? You’ll want to hear what Dr. Ann Buscho has to say. She’s a psychologist and an expert in “Nesting,” a form of divorce where the kids stay home and parents rotate in and out.  Her book, The Parent’s Guide to Birdnesting, is a roadmap to the only truly child-centered divorce possible. You can find her and her book  at https://drannbuscho.com/ Here’s my review of her book: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/targeted-parenting/202012/book-review-the-parents-guide-birdnesting

Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Indistractable. Distraction is familiar to us Post-Traumatic Survivors and Thrivers, right? It’s part of our recovery. As PTPs, we struggle with time management and distraction.  Reading Indistractable changed my life – and my conversation with Nir – even more so! His insights on attention and the post-traumatic brain are fascinating. He makes a crucial distinction that will blow your mind. You will never think about attention the same way again after hearing this.

Part II of my interview with Dr. Kelly Odenweller, a professor of communication at Iowa State University.

To read my Psychology Today blogpost about Dr. Odenweller’s research on Mommy Wars, click here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/targeted-parenting/201910/have-we-weaponized-parenting

Here’s what we talked about – as two working moms who research this:

As long as we’ve been momming, we’ve been mom-shaming. The Internet just lets us do it on a grand scale. In this installment, I talk with Dr. Kelly Odenweller, a professor of communication at Iowa State University. Turns out, mom-shaming is predictable and quantifiable. Specific types of moms are shamed for specific types of behaviors, and some moms are more universally shamed than others. Post-Traumatic Parents are super-vulnerable to mom-shaming. Let’s discuss why we mom-shame, and what to do about it.

Are you passionate about doing parenting right, and desperately afraid you’ll mess up? Parenting Perfectionism is common for us Post-Traumatic Parents. Problem is – the burning desire to parent perfectly can mean…. burning out. In this episode, we talk to groundbreaking researcher Dr. Moïra Mikolajczak, who discovered parental burnout is a thing. This episode explores the implications of her research for Post-Traumatic Parenting.  Turns out – parental burnout is real, and it can be fixed. Let’s learn how.