On navigating relationships, and getting to know your “adaptive child.”
Trauma is a thorny subject. Why wouldn’t it be? Big and small traumas affect and change almost all of us, especially during our formative years: It’s very rare for a person to emerge from adolescence totally unscathed. Trauma shapes our sense of self, our parenting styles, and — so often — the way we relate to our partners.
To gain a better understanding of trauma’s impacts, Katie talked with family therapist, speaker, and author Terry Real, who you may know from his close affiliation with Gwyneth Paltrow or his New York Times bestselling book, Us. Real dove deep into the different types of trauma, how the body carries past pain, and how much of what happened to us in the past is our responsibility in the present.
Real also explained how to differentiate between your inner “adaptive child” and your inner “wise adult.” Plus, he expounded on how you can avoid carrying trauma into your marriage, while also giving yourself the permission to even feel “a little” hatred towards your partner — without lapsing into total toxicity. Read their fascinating convo, and watch the full video of their chat, below.
Katie Couric: What are the differences between “big-T” and “little-T” trauma?
Terry Real: In the field, we talk about big-T trauma — catastrophes, floods, combat. But we also talk about little-T trauma. I talk about relational trauma and think about water on a rock. This is not one catastrophic thing that happens to you. This is the demeaning, controlling, or neglectful things that are smaller, but they happen every day over and over throughout your entire developing childhood. I show a tape to my students of a man who was sexually molested by his aunt at seven. But the trauma that got activated in his marriage was the abandonment of having no one to tell that his mom was a drug addict. His father was irresponsible. Even though we normally think of trauma as a sexual abuse — which it is — it was also about what happened in this young boy’s life the other 364 days of the year.
What’s the “adaptive child?”
This is the core idea of the book. What I call the wise adult part of us is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is the most mature. It develops last in us, not until we’re 26 years old. It’s the part of us that’s able to stop, think, deliberate, observe, and make mature decisions. Unfortunately, that’s not the only part of us.
This comes up all the time as a couple’s therapist. My first question is,”Which part of you am I speaking to? Am I speaking to this wise adult, or am I speaking to an immature part of you that’s been triggered by trauma?” The wounded child part is very young and very reactive. The part of you that just received the abuse or neglect tends to be wounded. When I do imaginative work with clients and they get into the wounded child, they want to crawl up on someone’s lap and cry for about a thousand years.
The adaptive child is the part of you that adapted and learned to do whatever made the most sense to you growing up in the face of emotional neglect or another violation. We think of this as our adult self, but it’s really a kid’s version of what an adult looks like.
How does childhood trauma manifest in adults?
To understand this, you have to understand the nature of trauma. There’s no such thing as trauma memory: That’s a lie, that’s a misnomer. You don’t remember trauma, you relive it. The combat vet who’s walking down Main Street hears a car backfire and spins around like he’s got a gun — he’s not thinking, ‘I’m walking down Main Street, remembering combat.’ Main Street is gone. His body is back in combat. There’s a superimposition of past and present that leaves you fundamentally confused. You’re back there. You respond with these automatic knee-jerk responses, which are characteristic of the adaptive child. It’s automatic.
You talk about how over-parenting, and putting a child on a pedestal can also have a very negative effect when it comes to self-esteem.
Self-esteem comes from the inside-out. You have worth because you’re here, you’re a human being, and you’re no better or worse than anybody else. This is what democracy is. We’re equal. We mistakenly think of self-esteem as confidence and learning to master something. That has its place, but that’s got nothing to do with self-esteem, which is unconditional.
There are two forms of self-esteem disorder. Shame — feeling inferior — has been a preoccupation for psychology and self-help for 50 years. I also deal with the other self-esteem disorder, grandiosity — too much superiority, being contemptuous, being above the rules.
Being grandiose in your relationship can do a lot of damage: Yelling, screaming, demanding sex, being entitled, being irresponsible, being above the rules. We all think somebody’s grandiose because they’re escaping insecurity. But there’s an interesting study: Half of narcissists are escaping insecurity, while the other half just think they’re better than you or me. That comes from false empowerment, from pumping up a child.
Some people think that people who do bad things use it as an excuse and say, “It’s not my fault — it’s because of the way I was parented.” So how do you balance acknowledging being set up to behave a certain way, but also taking responsibility?
You are not responsible for the way you were raised. You were a kid. Arbitrarily, between zero and 18, whatever they did to you is not your fault. From 18 on, what you do with that damage is your responsibility. I’ve been in therapy for over 30 years. I’ve been meditating for over 50 years.
I have a saying that I repeat often: I am the son of a depressed, angry father. He was the son of a depressed, angry father. I have two boys — they do not say that about me, and neither will their children. That is the greatest achievement of my life. It’s my responsibility to change the legacy.
You also say that “marital hatred” will always show up, even in the happiest of marriages. So are you saying that it’s okay to hate your spouse every once in a while?
There’s a therapy trick: We teach people to say “A part of me hates a part of you.” That goes down a little better than “‘I hate your guts.” There are moments when — after 37 years — my wife Belinda is annoying to me and I hate her. And she hates me. That’s fine. For over 30 years now, I’ve been running around the world talking about normal marital hatred. Not one person has ever come backstage and said, “What do you mean by that?”
In our English Germanic culture, we try to control our behavior by controlling our feelings. Don’t legislate your feelings. Let yourself feel whatever you feel, but don’t act it out. That’s what’s critical. I can allow myself to feel rage toward Belinda at times, because I’m confident I’m not going to yell, scream, and throw plates. Feelings are natural. Let them come. But it’s your responsibility to be civilized.
How to open the lines of communication
We can all turn toward the adaptive child part of us and get to know it. In my work, I have people write letters to their adaptive child. I talk about the losing strategies that are the hallmark of your adaptive child, so you can ask yourself, “What is your losing strategy profile?” Being right? Controlling your partner? Unbridled self-expression? Retaliation? These are the hallmarks of your adaptive child. Get to know them. And next time you have an automatic impulse to act them out, take a breath or a break. I’m a big fan of breaks. Take a walk around the block, get back into your adult mind, and then go back to your partner, to interrupt the automatic pattern.
What is generational trauma?
“When my father was violent and being physical, on the receiving end of that rage was a little boy. I was disempowered, which leads to issues of shame. I felt unworthy. I felt somehow defective.
But he was also modeling for me — particularly as the same- sex parent. He was giving me the message, “‘This is what a grown man looks like when he gets angry. This is okay.”’ In my early years, I had to do healing work to get that out of my system. I’m not responsible for the modeling that I internalized. I am responsible for healing it and not inflicting it on the next generation.
There’s more research about the physical ramifications of trauma in mice, for example. It literally changes the structure of your DNA, which means that you have to compensate for that even more in your parenting. There’s also been a lot of research on children of Holocaust survivors, too. More evidence is piling up that generational trauma gets passed along, not just emotionally, but physically through our bodies. That makes it even more imperative that we parents do the work of our own recovery. The best gift you can give your kids is your own healing.”
And to learn even more, watch Terry’s full interview with Katie right here:
