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In our previous posts, we explored how family trauma can shape your parenting without you even knowing it, and then looked at six specific ways trauma shows up in your daily parenting.
Now comes the most important question: How do you actually break these patterns? Here are nine concrete steps you can take to interrupt these cycles and create healthier relationships with your kids.
1. Understand Your Triggers
Start by looking closely at what specifically sets off your sudden anger. When a child’s action triggers us, there’s usually a thread connecting it to something from our own childhood. Maybe their defiance reminds us of times we were punished for speaking up. Or their tears bring back memories of being told our emotions were “too much”.
This awareness doesn’t make the triggers disappear overnight. But when we understand why we’re reacting so strongly, we may be able to create space between the trigger and our response.
2. Understand Your Needs
Understanding your triggers is just the first step. You also want to understand what needs you’re trying to meet when you get triggered.
Often, we think we “need” our child to put on their shoes or brush their teeth, but these aren’t actually needs — they’re strategies. Your real needs might be for ease, collaboration, or connection.
When you can identify the need underneath your reaction, you open up many more ways to meet that need. If your need is for ease and your child won’t get dressed, maybe you can lay out clothes the night before or let them pick between two outfits. If your need is for connection and they’re pushing you away, maybe you can find a small way to connect that doesn’t involve the thing they’re resisting.
3. Process Your Own Story
Too much silence and too much sharing can both do harm. Aim for a middle ground, whether that’s with a therapist, a trusted friend, or in a journal, where you can tell your story in a way that helps you make meaning of it.
Trauma gets stored differently in our brains. When our fight-or-flight system is activated, the part of our brain that helps us organize and make sense of experiences gets shut down. Revisiting these experiences in a safe, supportive environment allows us to use our whole brain to process what happened.
4. Take a Breath
When you notice intense anger or other strong emotions, try taking one conscious breath before responding. This gives your brain’s thinking centers a chance to come back online and helps you respond more thoughtfully.
When we’re triggered, our body is responding to something it perceives as a threat — even when that threat is actually just our toddler asking for a snack for the fifth time.
You can also practice family-wide breathing. Parents can model these techniques for children: “We’re all having a hard time! Is it okay if we take a break to both take some deep breaths?”
5. Practice Self-Compassion
You won’t be able to do this perfectly every time. Sometimes you’ll still yell. Sometimes you’ll still react from your triggers before you can catch yourself.
When we mess up, we often beat ourselves up about it. We think things like “I’m a terrible parent” or “I should know better by now.” But this harsh self-criticism actually makes it harder to change our patterns.
Instead, try treating yourself with the same compassion you’d offer a dear friend. That same gentle approach with ourselves is much more likely to lead to actual change. When we’re kind to ourselves about our mistakes, we can learn from them without getting stuck in shame.
6. Be Thoughtful With Storytelling
If you choose to share aspects of your past with your child, keep their developmental stage in mind and let their questions guide how much you say. The goal is not to overwhelm them with details they can’t yet process.
Consider what you’re hoping to accomplish by sharing: What are the pros and cons of saying this to my child? How would I like to express this to them? What could their reaction be, and what is the purpose of telling them? How could this potentially benefit our family? What could it potentially hurt?
Intergenerational Trauma Essential Reads
There’s no universal right answer — just what works for your family. By sharing minimal information and then responding to their questions, you’re less likely to share information they aren’t ready for yet.
7. Keep the Focus on Your Child’s Needs
It’s understandable to want to “rewrite” our own childhoods through our parenting, but that can easily shift the focus from the child’s needs to our own unmet ones. Our children can’t heal our past — they can only live their own lives, with our support.
Dr. Rebecca Babcock Fenerci found something surprising in her research: mothers who reported “loving being mothers” sometimes had children with lower social-emotional well-being. Her hypothesis was that these mothers might be unconsciously using their children to meet their own emotional needs rather than focusing on what their kids actually needed.
8. Consider Asking for Support
Therapy can be an invaluable tool for uncovering unconscious patterns, making sense of big emotions, and practicing new ways of responding. If you ever consider revisiting the people or places connected to your trauma, having professional guidance can make that process safer and more productive.
You might also consider talking with your healthcare provider about your experiences. Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) shows that early trauma can affect not just our mental health, but our physical health too. People with four or more ACEs have twice the risk for heart disease and over 12 times the risk for thoughts of suicide.
9. Pay Attention to the Signals
Changes in your child’s mood or behavior, persistent conflicts, or experiences of depression, anxiety, or distress in yourself are all important signs. Sometimes the “problem” we see in our child is actually a sign that something deeper is going on in the family dynamic.
This doesn’t mean everything is your fault. Kids go through normal developmental phases, and plenty of challenges have nothing to do with our past trauma. But it’s worth asking: Could something that’s impacting me also be impacting my child?
Final Thoughts
Breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma is about becoming more aware of how your past experiences influence your present reactions, and gradually developing new ways of responding that serve both you and your children.
These steps aren’t meant to be followed in perfect order or mastered completely before moving on to the next. Healing happens in layers, and you might find yourself working on several of these areas at once.
Your awareness and intention to break these cycles is already a gift to your children, even when the work feels hard and the progress feels slow.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
