My Adult Child Says I Traumatized Them: What Should I Do?.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

trauma therapy, family conflict, family systems, childhood experiences, big T trauma, little t trauma, emotional safety, protective factors, adverse childhood experiences, parental response, relationship healing, vocabulary, resilience, post-traumatic growth, Bridge to Connection

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:00

Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, family conflict coach and a parent educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confusing, and even painful. We’re going to do it through a family systems lens, and that means that we’re going to look at much more than just one event and one relationship. We’re going to look at the whole system. This gives us much more information about what’s really happening, because here’s the hope I want you to hold on to: is that when one person in a family becomes more steady, that entire relationship system begins to shift.

Tina Gosney  00:43

Today’s episode is about another therapy word that’s become pretty common in vocabulary, and I’ve had parents come to me saying this their child has used this word with them, usually with a little bit of a shaky voice. It might sound something like, “My daughter told me that she’s traumatized by her childhood. I don’t understand what she means. I fed her, I clothed her, I showed up to every game. I never laid a hand on her. Where does that word even come from? Or it might sound something like this: My son said he’s still working through all the trauma of growing up in our home-we weren’t perfect, but we loved him. I don’t know what to do with that word.

Tina Gosney  01:27

Well, if you’ve ever heard a version of that, I want you to know something before we go any further into this podcast. You were not a passive bystander in your child’s life. You showed up. You loved them. You tried. You almost certainly did the best that you knew how with what you had at the time, and your child using the word trauma does not any does not erase any of that for you. But I also don’t want to rush past it because something real is usually sitting underneath that word.

Tina Gosney  01:57

And today we’re going to slow down, and we’re going to look at look at it honestly together. We’re going to talk about why this word can feel so much bigger, and it feels sometimes more final than some of the other words that your child could say. We’re going to talk about real differences between what researchers call big T trauma and little t trauma, and why that distinction really matters for you. We’re going to talk about something most parents never get to think about out loud, which is your own childhood, and how it shapes this word, and what your brain does when you hear it. We’re going to talk about what you actually do next.

Tina Gosney  02:40

So let’s get started. Let’s talk first about why this word lands differently than other words, because of all the words that your adult child could reach for, trauma, that might just be the one that feels the most like an accusation, even though technically it isn’t one at all. If your child said something like that hurt me, there’s still room in that sentence for you to have been a good parent that occasionally got some things wrong. But when they use the word trauma, that sounds really clinical. It sounds permanent. It sounds like there’s something broken in your child, and you are the one that broke it. When that word lands with you, it can be really hurtful, and it can be very confusing. And for that reason, I’m going to normalize something right away. It is completely human for your whole body to brace when you hear that word trauma.

Tina Gosney  03:37

Some parents feel this wave of shame and start replaying decades of events, you know, just trying to find something, this moment or this time that they failed. Some parents feel this flash of anger because the word feels so disconnected from how hard they tried. Some parents feel this wave of grief, mourning this version of their child’s story that they always thought was true, the story of their family’s life that they always thought was true. All of this is a normal response to hearing that that person that you raised experienced pain in your home. Here’s the distinction I want you to hold on to, though: trauma describes an impact on your child. It is not, on its own, a statement about your intentions, your love, or your worth as a parent.

Tina Gosney  04:33

Every single parent that has ever lived, including the most attentive, attuned, gentle parent that you can imagine has had moments that their child experienced as painful. So this is not something that is unique to you or your child or your home. This is just what it means to raise a person who has their own nervous system, their own perceptions, their own inner life, and all of those are separate from yours. Doesn’t make this more comfortable to hear, but it does give us some understanding around it. It does mean that there’s something here that’s worth your attention and worth understanding, rather than something you try to argue away.

Tina Gosney  05:13

So let’s talk about where this word comes from and how it often gets oversized, because I think that really helps you to understand this language of this landscape language that your child is speaking from. Trauma, in its clinical origins, describes this experience that an experience that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope, and that experience and their inability to cope can reshape how their nervous system responds to stress long after that original event has passed. Well, that’s real. It’s very well researched, and it can have lasting effects on the brain and on the body and a person’s sense of safety in the world.

Tina Gosney  06:00

Like so much mental health language today, this word, trauma, has moved out of the clinical offices and into everyday conversations, and it did it pretty fast. Contributing to that were therapists, social media, books, podcasts-all of that gave your child a vocabulary that simply didn’t exist. In the same way, when you were their age, and and when you were raising them, a lot of that vocabulary that has moved into everyday language is genuinely useful because it gives people, you know, it gives them words for experiences that they couldn’t previously name. But clinicians have started drawing a really useful distinction around trauma, and and I think this can help take some of the fear out of that word, because many therapists now are talking about something called big T trauma and little T trauma.

Tina Gosney  06:58

So big T trauma refers to the kind of event that most of us think of when we hear the word trauma. Something life threatening happened. Something that was severely destabilizing. There was abuse. There was violence. There maybe there was a serious accident. Maybe there was a sudden loss of someone close. These are all events that overwhelm anyone’s ability to cope in that moment, and they can leave really lasting marks on how a person responds then to the world. Little t trauma refers to something different. It’s the accumulation over weeks, months, and years of experiences that, on their own, are not not they’re not life-threatening. Something like being frequently criticized, feeling unheard, walking on eggshells around a parent’s mood, not having room for their feelings.

Tina Gosney  07:56

Those things can still shape a person’s sense of safety and their sense of self-worth when they happen again and again and again during childhood, and here’s the part that really surprises a lot of parents: is that researchers have found that repeated exposure to these small chronic experiences can sometimes cause as much emotional harm as that one big single traumatic event, that big T trauma, precisely because they’re ongoing and they often go unrecognized and they aren’t really used viewed as something that’s worth naming at all. And I want to be really clear about what this means for you. When your child uses the word trauma, it does not automatically mean they are describing abuse or a big T event.

Tina Gosney  08:49

Far more often, in the families that I work with, it means they’re describing the accumulation of small little T trauma moments, an atmosphere in the home, a repeated pattern that build up over years into something that now feels large enough to use a large word to describe it. Well, that distinction matters enormously because the response that helps is completely different depending on which one your child is describing. But your job in the first conversation is not to sort that out on the spot, is to get curious about what they actually mean, rather than just to assume that they are trying to describe an extreme version of baked tea trauma, and then you dismiss it as them being overexaggerating or being too dramatic. It’s important that we look at why this matters in the bigger picture.

Tina Gosney  09:45

Decades of research into what are called adverse childhood experiences, which we often shorten to ACEs, has shown a clear pattern. The more stressful or painful experiences. That a child accumulates, especially when they don’t have a steady, supportive adult to help them process those experiences, the more likely they are to carry those effects into adulthood. That shows up in their physical health, their mental health, and in their relationships. This research is not about handing blame out to parents, it’s about understanding how childhood experiences shape adult lives. Here’s the piece of the research that gets left out of the conversation a lot, but I think it’s really genuinely hopeful: is that same body of research consistently shows that protective factors, and one of the biggest is a strong, secure relationship with at least one caregiver. That can significantly buffer the impact of hard childhood experiences.

Tina Gosney  10:53

A parent doesn’t have to have been perfect for that protection to count. The parent just has to be present. They have to be responsive, and they have to be willing to repair when things go wrong. This is what this means for you. The conversation that you’re having with your adult child right now, this exact conversation, is one of those protective factors available to them.

Tina Gosney  11:18

That means if you meet this word trauma with defensiveness, you’re going to close the door. You’re going to risk confirming that very thing that they are trying to describe-that their experience is not taken seriously with you or in your family. But if you meet that word with steadiness and real curiosity, then you become right now in this very conversation a protective factor for them. It helps them to heal from whatever they’re carrying. This is the moment. It doesn’t matter what word they’re using, but what you mat what does matter is what you do with it and how you respond.

Tina Gosney  11:59

Let’s get really practical, and when your adult child says that they were traumatized by their childhood, let’s talk about what they might actually be saying. There’s a few things that they could be pointing to, so let’s just walk through them in a real plain way. Sometimes they mean, okay, something happened or it kept happening, and I didn’t have the word for it at the time because you know kids don’t have vocabulary, and they don’t have the developed brain enough to to know what’s actually happening, and it’s only when they become adults and they can look back on what happened with this new language or a different perspective that they can finally describe a pattern clearly.

Tina Gosney  12:44

This is not an attack on the child that they were or the parent that you were. This is them just having the distance and the space to finally put words to something that they lived through. Sometimes they mean they didn’t feel safe enough growing up to fully be their authentic selves, maybe there are certain emotions that were not welcome in your home. Maybe conflict felt really scary and it was shut down, or maybe it escalated and was really big. Maybe your mood or your partner’s mood set the temperature and the atmosphere for the whole household, and everybody else had to learn how to adjust around it. If this is what they mean, they’re telling you that they were managing something internally, even when you couldn’t see it from the outside.

Tina Gosney  13:32

Something else they might mean, and you know this is just the biggest word that they have for something that they’re still carrying. Trauma for them might be less of a diagnosis and more just a word that’s a container that’s large enough to hold the years of accumulated experience. And if this is what they mean, they’re telling you, “Hey, this is heavier than you think it is, and I need for you to take it seriously. Sometimes, more often than you would expect, they mean I need for you to hear this without it costing us their relationship, and because so many kids carry this, many adult children will sit on these types of sharing these types of situations with their parents for many years because they’re afraid that it’s going to end the relationship with a parent who can’t handle hearing it. So the fact that they’re telling you at all is a sign of trust. This is not an attack.

Tina Gosney  14:31

They’re telling you, “I want to stay close, but this is what is part of staying close requires now. None of this means that you set out to harm your child, and overwhelmingly, the majority of parents that I work and talk with never did. But it just means there’s a gap between what they needed and what they experienced, and that gap is workable. It’s also pretty universal. What do we do with this word? Now, they’ve used this word, so let’s talk about this in a few steps. First, you want to let it land, and before you respond, and you want to set your defenses down. That word, when you hear it, can feel like a gut punch or can hit you just like a wave, especially because it feels like it’s questioning your entire life’s effort and all the sacrifice that you’ve given.

Tina Gosney  15:20

So, give yourself a breath. You might say, “This is important, and I want to hear it, but I need a second to gather myself. Your instinct underneath that pause might be to tell them everything that you did right, all the things that you sacrificed for them, how much you love them, all the years of showing up that you did, and I understand that instinct completely. None of those things are untrue, but when you lead with your effort in this moment, that tells your child that your record, your your experience matters more than their experience does. There’s going to be time for your experience later. This is not the right moment.

Tina Gosney  16:04

Second, get curious about their experience and acknowledge the impact it had on them. Try something like, “I want to understand how that felt for you. Can you help me see what you’re carrying? And then, as they share, hopefully they share, acknowledge what you’re hearing rather than just trying to jump to explain your side. This might sound something like, “It sounds like there were things that happened for you that I didn’t fully see at the time, and I’m sorry that you carried that alone. So neither of these sentences requires you to accept every detail or agree to a diagnosis. Both of those simply signal that their experience is allowed to exist as their experience.

Tina Gosney  16:48

Third, ask carefully when they use the word trauma, whether they mean one big thing or many things over time. Once some of that emotional charge has settled. It’s okay and fair to ask that with real curiosity. Was there one specific thing, or was it more the overall feeling of things in our house? This isn’t fact-checking their pain. It’s helping both of you understand whether you’re talking about a single hard event or an accumulated pattern, because that shapes what the conversation and what healing looks like from here.

Tina Gosney  17:26

And then fourth, let your changed behavior do the talking. If your child tells you they need more emotional room, or more listening, or less minimizing, the relationship heals in the months, in the months, and the years that you actually do things differently, not in one conversation where that word came up. Now let’s talk a little bit more about big T trauma, little T trauma, and how this applies to your own childhood.

Tina Gosney  17:55

I want to spend some time here because this is the part that changes a lot of things for most parents, we’re going to talk honestly about something that really no parent wants to hear, but every parent needs to hear. You cannot protect your child from every difficult experience in life, nor should you try to. Disappointment, failure, conflict, loss, boredom, being told no, these are not parenting failures in themselves. They are the raw material a child needs in order to grow into a capable and resilient adult.

Tina Gosney  18:34

Research on resilience consistently shows that people don’t develop the ability to cope with hardship by avoiding all hardship, they develop it by facing manageable amounts of it with a steady adult nearby who helps them to make sense of it. Some researchers even describe this as something we call post-traumatic growth. This is the finding that people can, and they often do, come through genuinely hard experiences with more strength, more empathy, and more clarity about what matters to them-not despite the hardship, but by working through it. So, if your child had a hard childhood, in the sense that childhood is sometimes simply hard.

Tina Gosney  19:22

That is not on its own evidence that you have failed. It may be evidence that they were a person growing up in a family, which is inherently difficult in 1000 small ways for absolutely everybody. This is where the big T trauma and the little T trauma distinction becomes really useful for you as a parent, not just as therapy vocabulary. If your child is describing something that sounds like an accumulated pattern of little T trauma experiences, then feeling unheard, walking on eggshells, not having room for their feelings. That is worth taking every bit as seriously as a big single event, because again, research shows these patterns can add up to just as much impact. But it also means the path forward usually isn’t about one dramatic reckoning.

Tina Gosney  20:18

It’s about the pattern changing in small, repeated ways going forward, if what they’re describing sounds closer to a single big T trauma event, something frightening, something that felt life threatening, something that was deeply destabilizing to them at the time, that deserves its own focused attention too, and likely the benefits from professional support beyond your conversation can can help them work through that. Now, I want to bring in something that I think gets left out of almost every conversation about this word, and that’s your own childhood, because your own childhood has shaped the way that you see things, including your own child. This is something to sit with.

Tina Gosney  21:05

If your child grew up with access to language like trauma, and boundaries, and emotional safety, you probably didn’t. Which means whatever hard things happened in your childhood, and something hard happens in everyone’s childhood, you didn’t have a word for it. You may have simply called it, like said something like, “This is the way things are. You might have learned the way that most people of your generation did, that you’re fine, that you’re resilient, that your kids are resilient, and this is what just what growing up is. This is just what it looks like. This is not a criticism of you. It’s an explanation for something that could be happening right now without you realizing it.

Tina Gosney  21:49

When your child uses a word that you never had access to, for an experience that your own parents also never had access to either, it can feel like they’re speaking this foreign language about something that’s super universal and ordinary, and your own nervous system might be doing something really quietly in the background, which is comparing what they’re describing to you and what you you experienced, and you decide to call it normal. If your childhood involved things that would now be named trauma, and you were taught to call it fine. Part of what makes this word so hard to hear from your child may be that it’s quietly asking you to reconsider your own story too, not just theirs.

Tina Gosney  22:36

Now you you don’t have to resolve any of that in this conversation, but it can be enormously helpful to just notice it. Your child is not necessarily saying that their childhood was harder than yours, or that you failed where your parents succeeded. They are saying that they have language that you didn’t, and they’re going to use it. It’s not a competition about whose childhood was worse. It’s simply two different generations having two sets of vocabulary, trying to talk about the same universal thing, and that is what it costs to grow up in any family at any time. Now, how do we move to see this in a different way? How do we move from being defensive to growing through this situation, because most parents I talk with are defensive when their child uses the word trauma, and that makes sense to me.

Tina Gosney  23:31

If that parent who’s feeling defensive and doesn’t have the chance to have that word be heard and have their story to be heard and help breaking it down, it tends to create these negative feelings that just are the undercurrent between them and their relationship with their child, and it can further damage their relationship with their adult child. I want to tell you though, there is a path through it, and it’s not about winning the argument, and it’s not about really knowing if that word technically applies.

Tina Gosney  24:04

This word trauma, if it’s technically accurate, it’s about becoming someone who can hold hard truth about impact without destroying your sense of who you are as a parent, and without needing your child to apologize or to take the word back before you can move forward, and I’m going to be totally honest with you, doing this well in real time with your child about your actual history is so genuinely hard to do alone. And most parents that I work with don’t struggle because they lack those good intentions. They struggle because they’re trying to figure out this. They they they were struggling because they were trying to figure this out by themselves. Usually late at night, sleepless nights, replaying conversations, no one there to help them to see what’s actually happening or what they’re supposed to try next.

Tina Gosney  24:54

That’s exactly why I built Bridge to Connection. It’s this is what it helps with. This my hybrid coaching program, which means you get three things together, not just one. There are online lessons that teach you what you were never taught. There are actual skills and understanding for having conversations just like this one. There’s group coaching where you get to see other parents working through that exact same moment, so you stop feeling like you’re the only one who has an adult child who has said something like this to them, and then there’s one-on-one coaching with me where we go deep on your specific family, your specific history, your specific child, because no podcast episode, no matter how detailed I could get in here, is going to fully account for the particular way that your relationship works.

Tina Gosney  25:41

If today’s episode is resonating with you, and you find yourself wishing that you had more than just what this one conversation to go on, that’s worth listening to. That’s exactly what Bridge to Connection is there for. But right here today, right in this podcast, right now, let’s do this. Let that word land without letting it define you. Get curious about what is underneath it. Hold your own history with the same compassion you’re being asked to extend to your child’s.

Tina Gosney  26:13

Want to go into some of the common mistakes and how to handle those. I see that parents do these things all the time, so let’s go into these mistakes. Naming them can help you avoid them. Mistake number one is to respond with, “Hey, I had it so much worse than you, and I turned out fine. Well, even if that’s true, it teaches your child that their pain only counts if it’s bigger than theirs. That rarely opens a conversation; it usually ends one.

Tina Gosney  26:42

Mistake number two: treating that word like it’s a permanent verdict and giving up on the relationship. Now, this word, as heavy as it is, is far more a door opening rather than a door closing.

Tina Gosney  26:58

Mistake three: needing a clinical diagnosis before you’re going to take your child seriously, waiting for them to prove that they meet some technical bar keeps both of you stuck. We can take that feeling seriously long before you’ve sorted out exactly which word describes it the best.

Tina Gosney  27:19

Mistake number four: letting your own triggers and your own grief about this conversation become bigger than theirs. So grieving the story you believed about your child’s happy childhood is real and valid, but if your child ends up comforting you about how hard this is to hear, the roles are reversed, and they’re going to stop bringing hard things to you. When your child brings something difficult for them, and then they end up taking care of you, this is energy flowing in the wrong direction. Energy should flow downward from parent to child, not upward from child to parent.

Tina Gosney  28:02

Here’s what I want you to take with you today: the word trauma is heavy, and it’s allowed to hurt when you hear it, but it is not automatically a verdict on your worth as a person or as a parent. Often, it’s just your child’s attempt to describe something real using the biggest, most available word they have for it right now, and it’s a word that you likely never had access to in your own story. You do not have to have failed for your child to struggle. You don’t have to erase your own hard childhood to make room for theirs.

Tina Gosney  28:38

You just need to stay in the room, get curious about what’s underneath the word, and let your steadiness over time become the answer. And the fact that you’re here tells me that you’re already doing a lot of that. That you really care. You’re willing to look at hard things, and that matters so much. So take a breath and stay steady. Make room for their story and for yours. I want to thank you for being here with me today. Remember, you don’t have to do this whole thing perfectly. Nobody does. Just keep working on how you’re showing up, because when one person in a family becomes more grounded and steady, the whole relationship system can begin to heal. This is coaching your family relationships, and I’m Tina Gosney.

Tina Gosney  29:23

If this episode gave you something useful today, and you’re ready to start working on this, then let’s talk. Set up a free connection call with me to see if we’re a good fit to work together. You’ll find a link in the show notes.