Redefining Trauma and Empowering Your Resilience

Debra Maldonado  01:36

We all went through a collective trauma together with the pandemic, how is that affecting us collectively? How can we be resilient in times when a community crisis that happens in our communities, this happens with natural disasters, volcano going off in Tonga, pandemics, how do we deal with difficult things in life, as a community, collectively as human beings, as we have our challenges just being on this earth. It’s going to be an interesting topic too. But today, we’re going to just give you an overview on trauma and the resilience model.

Robert Maldonado  02:17

How we define those terms, why the definitions are important.

Debra Maldonado  02:22

We want to invite you to our Facebook group. It’s called Discover Jungian Coaching with CreativeMind. You’ll be able to interact with us and our team of coaches. We told our members about the series, and we had some questions. We’re going to be answering questions on each episode. Today, we will start off with the first question. The question is “I would like to know how this works for continuous secondary trauma that social workers and first responders experience over the years? Does resilience ever weaken? Do people become hardened? And how does that relate to addiction?” That’s an excellent question. When we talk about resilience, is it possible for everyone or some people just hardened and unable to move beyond that? They have to shut down their feelings and deny what are the traumas they are experiencing and those experience in their work? What happens with that?

Robert Maldonado  03:26

That’s a big question. We’re going to be touching upon all those points throughout the series. But just to give you a short answer for now, and then as we go through the series, we’ll talk more about it, more in depth. It’s an individual experience, meaning some people are very resilient, they might go through very hard, difficult situations and bounce back, without much needing for extra support or therapy or coaching. Other people do not have those resources, either genetically or socially.

Debra Maldonado  04:13

I think socially is really important. You have people to talk about what happened and process.

Robert Maldonado  04:21

Psychologically and emotionally. Those experiences of observing, helping people in a hospital setting or a clinic setting or a trauma center, continuously weighs on them. Trauma does tend to have a cumulative effect, meaning they might be small experiences but because they’re many experiences over time—

Debra Maldonado  04:48

Like she was saying, continuous. Every day you’re dealing with car accidents and people dying in front of you. All those wonderful frontline workers in hospital for the past two years are getting exhausted from dealing with COVID.

Robert Maldonado  05:04

Their resiliency would tend to be overwhelmed. They themselves experience secondary trauma. They have absorbed a lot of those difficult situations into their own mind. They experienced depression, anxiety, drug addiction.

Debra Maldonado  05:24

A lot of them to have to be isolated because they’re working with infectious people. I’ve heard a lot of them stay away from their family, so they don’t affect their family. They’re isolated and dealing with this very intense work. They definitely need our help to cope and become resilient again, because this isn’t forever, but it definitely will have an impact on people.

Robert Maldonado  05:49

Self care, hospitals, clinics should be aware of this. People need self care, they need counselors to help them cope with difficult situations. Some do, of course.

Debra Maldonado  06:06

We’ll probably answer more your questions about resilience as we go through today. But let’s start off with how would you define trauma?

Robert Maldonado  06:15

Trauma, and this is a working definition, more for people that are nursery clinicians. It’s the individual’s coping mechanisms, or when the individual’s coping mechanisms are overwhelmed by circumstances.

Debra Maldonado  06:34

Everyone has a certain toleration point, I guess, where I can cope with this, someone’s upset with me, I can cope with it. But it’s something that rocks their system at a place, their coping system.

Robert Maldonado  06:51

We both had that feeling where we experienced something “I’m not ready to handle this, to deal with a situation.” That sense of overwhelm. We either fight, freeze, or runaway, that fight or flight response. But when we’re overwhelmed, we can’t make any of them. We feel like none of these coping strategies are going to work.

Debra Maldonado  07:25

If we don’t do anything, it doesn’t help. If we fight it, it doesn’t help. If we run away from it, it doesn’t help. We feel like “Where do I go from here?” A helpless feeling.

Robert Maldonado  07:35

There’s a period where people feel that overwhelm, their behavior is confused. They’re not acting in any particular way, they’re disorganized, they’re in shock. In that state of shock, the system is overwhelmed again and doesn’t know what to do with the situation.

Debra Maldonado  08:00

That confusion of not knowing what to do. What would be the resilience?

Robert Maldonado  08:10

Resilience is the opposite. It’s an individual’s ability to bounce back after experiencing difficult or traumatic situations. They’re able to get back to normal state of responding appropriately to situations.

Debra Maldonado  08:31

When you think of bounce back, the metaphor I think of is, if the ball is deflated, like a bouncy ball that we played as kids, if it’s deflated and hits some conflict, it doesn’t bounce, it just flattens, there’s no power in the ball to resist and work. Where a full powered ball that’s full of air and strong can bounce back easily, the cement doesn’t affect the ball, they’re able to bounce back. If we think about our inner power, in our code, our skills, our genetics, even the event itself, any human being sometimes, no matter how resilient you are, a traumatic event can— no one can cope with it, you have to be superhuman to do that. But there’s people that have terrible things happen, and they’re very resilient. Then there’s people that have little mini traumas, I guess, and it levels them. It’s really not the event itself, but how the person is able to cope with that event. A lot of it is not really in their control because a lot of this is genetic. A lot of this is passed on from generation to generation.

Robert Maldonado  09:49

The great thing about the resilience model is that it can be taught, we can expand, we can grow, we can cultivate the resilience factors.

Debra Maldonado  10:02

By default, people will have a certain level of resilience, low or high, but we can increase that resilience, fill them with their power, reclaim their power.

Robert Maldonado  10:18

That’s why resilience is such a powerful concept. It doesn’t get the traction and attention in the media. It’s not as sexy as trauma. We want to understand more about trauma and read about it. But resilience is such an important part. Especially if you have kids or young people in your life, you can help them understand how to deal and how to cope with life. Not only cope, but learn from it. We’ll talk about some of those things as we go along. Let’s talk about trauma again. It does impact individuals in a profound way, not only individuals, groups and societies and maybe even the whole planet. We have been experiencing these last couple years. What does it do to us as human beings?

Debra Maldonado  11:21

We had the pandemic, but I think 9/11 was for most of the people in the US, our whole sense of safety. Part of trauma is your sense of safety. We all felt this. I thought no one would attack us. There’s these words out there that we’re involved. I think it really knocked all of us in a sense of uncertainty, especially those first couple days, we felt really weird. I don’t know if you felt that way. We’re gonna talk about collective trauma, those big events that happen individually and then in a community.

Robert Maldonado  11:59

You can think about physical trauma, a car accident or some similar event, emotional trauma, being bullied and abused emotionally, people talking back to you in diminishing ways.

Debra Maldonado  12:20

Parents too, bullying the kids, highly critical. I guess most parents, you could perceive them as critical. We don’t want to make every person because your parent was critical to feel they’ve been traumatized.

Robert Maldonado  12:37

Again, it would depend on the individual, their level of resilience, because two people go through identical parenting, one says “It was great, no problem”, and the other one says “I got issues I need to think about, this impacted me deeply.” Those factors come in genetically, epigenetically. We’ll talk about epigenetics when we talk about the collective trauma. They’re inherited in us, they’re innate in us, our ability to bounce back and to respond to difficult situation is very much an individual experience that comes already with our body.

Debra Maldonado  13:21

But is it nature/nurture as well? Because if you have a parent that when you skinned your knee, the parent was there for you, you feel more safe than if you felt abandoned by the parent who wasn’t there when you skinned your knee or the kids teased you at school and you had no one to talk to about it? Wouldn’t it be the nurturing as well, I guess that would come not only genetically?

Robert Maldonado  13:47

The nurturing would often be the trauma. Because we’re not necessarily traumatized by our internal thoughts and imagination. We’re traumatized by our experience of the environment. That’s what we call nurturing. What’s going on in the environment is what we absorb. There’s a lot of factors that play into this, of course, the age that the trauma happens, a critical period in our development.

Debra Maldonado  14:22

What’s the worst age to have a trauma? I know they’re all bad, but that has a bigger impact. Is it before you’re eight years old?

Robert Maldonado  14:31

There’s pros and cons to that. When we’re young, we tend to be more flexible. Our brain is still flexible, has that bounce back neuroplasticity. It depends on the nature of the trauma. Does it overwhelm those neuroplasticity mechanisms? Or does it leave them intact where they can operate and help us bounce back?

Debra Maldonado  15:01

Maybe one event versus a series of multiple repeating events where they never have time to get resilient. One bad thing happened, a car accident, parent passes away, death of a parent trauma. But then if it’s something else where it’s continuous abuse or something very serious, that would be different? I guess it depends on the person.

Robert Maldonado  15:30

Let’s go through this list, then we’ll focus on some important ones, highlight what the mechanisms are. Trauma, whether it’s physical, psychological, emotional, natural disasters that we experience, illnesses that force us to go into the hospital, a lot of times it’s those experiences. What impact do they have on our system? What does the research show about that? Here’s some of the key ones, not all of them, but some of the key ones. They impact our sense of safety. We don’t feel as secure as we should or as we can in our world, in our society, in our relationships. We have difficulty after we experience traumatic impacts, we have difficulty regulating our self.

Debra Maldonado  16:34

Keep ourselves together in a way? I can’t control my emotions. I’m not controlling my thoughts.

Robert Maldonado  16:41

It means the ability to understand emotional experiences and adjust or manage emotions. That’s self regulation. We might have academic problems, especially as children if we’re being bullied, it impacts our self concept, what people used to call self esteem. It’s no longer popular, but obviously—

Debra Maldonado  17:10

Trauma’s more popular, codependency was from the 80s. Trauma’s the new thing people talk about. 

Robert Maldonado  17:18

Long term physical health issues.

Debra Maldonado  17:23

We found that a lot of people that have done our shadow work, that have had physical illnesses, things like autoimmune or even eating problems, obsessive eating and stuff like that, doing the emotional work through the coaching model, those things free up because they start to get that sense of self control again. If you feel out of control, your body’s in constant state of fear, it’s going to affect your physiology, it’s going to affect everything.

Robert Maldonado  18:01

There’s still more. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, but some of the key elements. Traumatic experiences can impact cognitive skills, our ability to solve problems, our concentration, we see this a lot in kids as well. Our abstract reasoning, which is our ability to think through things that we’re not seeing in front of us. If somebody says “Do you think that’s just what is going on in society, or what is going on in the city or in the news?” That’s our abstract reasoning, like critical thinking in a way. We’re able to put ourselves in different situations through our imagination and reach conclusions about what is right and wrong.

Debra Maldonado  19:01

Right now everything is so divided of what the truth is. Someone who has had trauma can’t really conceptualize or have critical thinking of “What I’m listening, is it true or not?” They would be more like sponges to take on an idea and not really question “Is this real?” They’re like, I don’t want to say cultish, but they can be more susceptible because they don’t know how to critically think their way through, maybe there’s another option. It’s like “This must be the option”, and not thinking things through.

Robert Maldonado  19:36

Emotional distress, such as depression or anxiety. If we’ve had traumatic experiences in our past, and especially if we haven’t dealt with them, therapy or through some other means, we’re more prone to get depressed and become anxious. Especially in stressful situations.

Debra Maldonado  19:58

If we have trauma, when it creates anger, frustration with that inability to fight back. If we don’t deal with it, that’s what depression is, it’s suppressed anger, we haven’t really processed the emotion around that event, and then feel powerless in life. It’s like another layer of resentment that comes into yourself, and even be mad at yourself for not bouncing back. Don’t you think a lot of people have that self judgment like “I should be stronger than this.”

Robert Maldonado  20:31

But people can become depressed and anxious for other reasons. So it’s not strictly due to trauma. It impacts interpersonal relationships and social skills. Your ability to feel comfortable in groups, parties, office meetings, it impacts that. You might experience aggression, hostility, and risk taking. I’ve seen this a lot in children, when they’re not treated and they’ve experienced trauma. They often appear to be kids that are rebellious, maybe even bullying other kids. But it’s essentially a cry for help, they’re saying “I need to attend to this problem but I don’t know how.”

Debra Maldonado  21:24

Do you think that it’s because children, if they’re troublemakers, it’s the way to get the parent. The teacher says “Johnny’s having trouble” and calls the parents. That way maybe the kids get attention from the parents in a negative way.

Robert Maldonado  21:37

It’s not deliberate.

Debra Maldonado  21:41

No, but I mean, they get a payoff from it. They are unconsciously acting out of that rebellious thing. Then risk taking too, I find people who’re afraid of the world if they’ve had a trauma, the world is a dangerous place.

Robert Maldonado  21:56

Risk taking means they act recklessly. But they’re doing it in a self destructive way, like driving real fast.

Debra Maldonado  22:08

Gambling, spending their life savings in Vegas, throwing their relationships away, running away from home.

Robert Maldonado  22:21

Simple agitation, and irritability. Often, people miss the signs of depression, especially in young people or children, because the kid is irritable, and it’s interpreted as this kid is a bad apple or difficult. When in reality, it’s more that it’s pointing toward depression and an unattended trauma. And then withdrawal, of course, which is the saddest one because then the person begins to cut themselves off from the people that could help them, they isolate themselves.

Debra Maldonado  23:04

They maybe don’t trust other people, they don’t trust themselves with the world. They would probably have a remote job where they don’t have to interact with other people or stay away from, maybe machines or something that they don’t have to cope with the emotional part of social interaction.

Robert Maldonado  23:29

It can impact us in so many different ways. There’s no one way of being traumatized. It can express itself in many different ways.

Debra Maldonado  23:47

Can I ask you a question? I think it is coming up a lot. In personal development, people are starting to realize that it’s not just about thinking positive and motivation, that there is the impact of childhood. Maybe instead of just saying it’s your inner child and all that, everyone’s talking about trauma because it is true that our childhood impacts us. Do you think that’s what they’re trying to get that with? I’m just thinking that it’s really helping people understand that your childhood and early life experiences have a big impact on shaping who you are. But I guess the danger is that everything is a trauma, and then it’s either underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed. How would you know, I guess the question goes back to what you said of the definition, does it overwhelm the system or is it just a thing that happened to us, but we’re able to cope with it, but it’s not like a deep, debilitating trauma. Does trauma come in a spectrum? That’s my question to you, doctor. Because it’s good for people to be aware that there’s some things, even things we forgot. A lot of people say “I forgot about this thing that happened to me.” You suppress it, and then you wonder why your life isn’t working. It’s good to discover and look at the past. But I think in a way it can lock you into the past and keep you stuck there. We have to balance it out in a way.

Robert Maldonado  25:29

This is my opinion, not the consensus of professionals in the mental health practices. My opinion is that we haven’t caught up with our understanding of emotions. We’re only beginning to really take emotion seriously, and how, when difficult things happen to us, our emotions are impacted. Because we’re so focused on cognition. Often we say, if cognition is working, person is good to go.

Debra Maldonado  26:13

They’re getting good grades, they’re making good money.

Robert Maldonado  26:17

They’re able to work. But the research is only starting to catch up as far as the understanding of the emotions, that it’s really the way we experience the world, through our emotions. It’s the way we gain meaning from our experiences. That sense of meaning is injured in a way or impacted when we experienced trauma. Whatever the sole source is, or whatever the manifestation of that is, we are left to deal with it on our own. It’s very prevalent, because most of us have had difficult emotional situations in our lives. Nobody is able to tell us, how do I work through this? How do I deal with this? What does this do to my mind? Just think positive, just carry on, stiff upper lip.

Debra Maldonado  27:28

We don’t ever ask how we feel. What are you going to do about your problem versus how do I feel about this problem, what’s going on underneath, what is the problem? Many times our problems in life are just a symptom of something else deeper, we have to figure out what that is. But no one seems to think that, it’s like “If I just move the furniture around and readjust everything on the outside, then I can find happiness somehow.”

Robert Maldonado  28:02

The conversation about trauma is good. Definitely it’s out there. Athletes and celebrities often talk about the importance of self care, and the importance of therapy, paying attention to your mind. That’s definitely a good step forward. The con in that is that often, because there is no alternative perspective on trauma except the medical model, the medicalization of emotions and experiences, people tend to fall into that idea that I’m damaged, I’m broken by my past experiences, it damaged something important in me, I will never recover that. They might not think in those terms. But often it’s implied in the way they’re approaching their understanding of trauma in their past. Often it’s reinforced by medical professionals, because that’s what they do.

Debra Maldonado  29:13

That’s what they do, they treat it just like in any kind of other medical situation, not psychological. They don’t really ask you “What are you going to do next?” It is more like “How do I get your body functioning at a typical level or your mind functioning at a typical level?” It’s all about that first level versus potential, versus what do I want to create? It’s more based on deficit model in the medical model.

Robert Maldonado  29:50

I worked under the medical model for many years. It has its beautiful parts of course, because it is intended to help people that are traumatized and in difficult situations. But like someone said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Debra Maldonado  30:15

I’ve been sensing a lot of “Everything’s trauma.” I treat trauma. You don’t have the love of your life, you must have trauma. You don’t make money, you don’t have enough money, you must have trauma. I think it’s okay that people talk about it, it’s great for people to look inside. But there’s over dependency on what trauma is, this powerless thing. Also with the medical model, I don’t know your opinion but in my experience, when people come to me and say they’ve had a trauma, they have this sense that they are weaker because of that experience, they’re broken. There’s so much potential in them, but because of this thing they’re very limited and have to be handled with kid gloves. They’re too afraid to step out. This implication that there’s something really weak about them because it happened. What I find is that many of them are probably the most courageous people I’ve ever met. When I start working with them, I start to see what they’ve created so far. This idea in their mind that they’re weak — look, you have this great job, you have this wonderful thing you’ve created with your life, maybe a purpose. They don’t even recognize that because they’re still hanging on to this heavy suitcase “But that happened to me. I have to drag it with me my whole life. I’m weaker, I would have been better if this thing never happened. I can only go to this level.” I learned a long time ago, I don’t remember where I heard this from but they were saying that when a woman would get the Cesarean, my mother had four C-sections, I think my mother actually told me that. Her first baby was emergency C-section, and then the rest of us were all C sections. Because at the time, in the 60s and 70s, the doctors thought if she went through regular childbirth, her wounds would break open. But now they’re realizing that actually the place of the wound is the strongest part of the skin. When we talk about resilience, what we’re really doing is saying you’re stronger than you think, you’re more courageous than you think, this thing doesn’t have to make you weak. I’m sure some therapists do that but the medical model has that implication there’s something broken we need to fix. It’s almost not consciously directed, but implied, and the client feels like a patient and feels that they’re being treated and weak in some way. I think they’re the strongest people that had tough lives and tough things. They’re so strong, I can’t believe some of the stories I hear. I don’t know if I could handle what they handled. It’s not looking at them as broken, but looking at them as resilient and the capacity to be even more resilient in their life.

Robert Maldonado  33:33

That’s where the resilience model comes in. It does come from positive psychology, Seligman back in the 80s did a white paper calling psychologists, mental health professionals to think about ways that say what we know about the mind, what we know about how humans behave, how we could help them understand they are powerful, they have the ability to bounce back, to persevere, not only survive but thrive in difficult situations. That’s a very different perspective than the medical model. The medical model does come from trauma, it came from the idea of physical injury. If you were traumatized, it meant something happened to your body. Certainly we shouldn’t get rid of it just because it does come from that medical model trauma. Some people are in a sense injured both physically and emotionally by their difficult experiences. They go through wars, they go through famines, through refugee situations, or even witnessing someone else getting injured that they love. Often those situations do require a medical approach because they might need supporting medication. Besides the psychotherapy or treatment that they get, the resilience model then is focused on what is powerful, what is strong about an individual, despite their difficulties, despite the difficulties of the world. Let’s start with four of these factors. We can say a person is resilient, meaning they’re able to bounce back, if they have active coping style. What that means is that if they assess themselves and say “This is a difficult situation for me, I don’t know if I can cope with what I know right now”, they actively seek help, they actively go to somebody that has more information and can help them deal with the situation in a better way.

Debra Maldonado  36:23

They’re always willing to ask for help, hire a coach, look for someone to talk to, get a therapists if they need to. Would inactive be rigid coping style where you’re stuck and don’t feel anyone can help you?

Robert Maldonado  36:40

Pretty much. Often, the trauma itself, because it puts people in that withdraw mode, these factors are important to understand as ways of educating our children, educating people before they get into the traumas, but also when they’ve experienced difficult situations, but don’t necessarily need therapy. They’re not really traumatized. They’ve had difficult experiences where it might have overwhelmed their coping skills, but they’re not necessarily needing that medical attention or medical model trauma.

Debra Maldonado  37:23

Do you think sometimes people do withdraw because of the stigma around it? You had a trauma, you must be broken in some way. You just feel like it’s shameful to even ask for help. But if you talk to a person who’s had an overwhelming situation, they’re not able to cope, and say “Do you know you have strength? Do you know you can overcome this?” versus “Let me treat the problem”, what’s feeding them, the potential that might draw someone out. I think there’s probably a lot of people that don’t seek help, that really need it, because of the stigma and the shame over what they experience and there’s something wrong with you. I had a friend of mine who was hypnotherapist, he had said that one of his clients, the last therapist they went through just kept regressing them back to the trauma over and over and over again. It was like “I couldn’t, it just was like debilitating me.” We don’t want to deny it. But we also can’t just stay stuck in it either.

Robert Maldonado  38:34

An active coping style is a protective factor, a resilience factor. Another one is cognitive flexibility, the ability to be flexible. If something is out of the ordinary, life throws you a curveball, you’re able to deal with it. You might not be happy, it might not be the best situation.

Debra Maldonado  39:08

But you’re going through it versus your emotions just take over and you shut down.

Robert Maldonado  39:15

I’d say the opposite trait would be someone who insists they’re entitled to have life give them what they need.

Debra Maldonado  39:29

Insist that the world is terrible, everyone’s terrible, it’s not safe to be in the world kind of thing.

Robert Maldonado  39:42

All those things because cognitive flexibility simply means you’re tolerant of different people’s styles, different situations. You’re not that judgmental, you’re not taking things personally. You understand, okay, people are a little bit nuts sometimes, that’s okay, that’s just part of the universe, part of the way people are, and you deal with it. Whereas when you have a rigid coping style, you say “I can only cope with it if I get my way, or if certain things are lining up in certain way.” Cognitive flexibility is a protective factor. This is a big one for us. As coaches, we often do this.

Debra Maldonado  40:32

When you say this, I always think of the locus.

Robert Maldonado  40:37

Locus simply means the place. The place of control, the locus of control is internal versus external.

Debra Maldonado  40:44

You have self efficacy, you can choose your life, you have the power to choose your response, you have the power to direct your life. No matter what happens to me, I can choose my experience. Like Viktor Frankl says, he was in the Holocaust in a camp, he had the locus of control that I could choose how I experience, the internal locus of control. Noticing that the guards there didn’t have a locus of control, because they were just doing what they were told and didn’t have any power, he said “They’re gonna really regret after this is over, they’re gonna have to live with themselves, and I get to be free, even though I’m in a prison, I get to be free, because my mind is free.” That’s the locus of control, you are not trapped by life, you’re free to choose how to respond.

Robert Maldonado  41:39

The opposite of this, of course, is the external locus of control where learned helplessness comes from. You feel that the external has so much more power than you do that it overwhelms your senses. Again, it overwhelms your capacity to deal with it. Internal locus of control says the opposite. Whatever is going on, whatever is happening, I might have a difficult time, but I will be able to deal with it. My internal locus of control is strong, I feel I can manage this somehow, I’ll get through it.

Debra Maldonado  42:18

And the last one as we wrap up?

Robert Maldonado  42:21

Spirituality, and this one is not often mentioned. Even in positive psychology, they do mention some of the research around people that have a religious faith perhaps have more protection against trauma because of their belief. But what we mean through spirituality is not necessarily religious, although that can be part of it. But a spiritual sense of yourself means you’re connected to something bigger than your individual mind experience. In modern human life, in 2022, many people have lost that connection.

Debra Maldonado  43:16

A lot of people are leaving their major religions they grew up with, then those people are having children and aren’t raising their kids in any structure, which is okay, but they’re not replacing it with anything. The Instagram religion is happening, if you get likes, there’s the divine smiling down on you. We need to define what that is. Now, because of everything online, there’s so many different spiritual beliefs and ideas that I think people are getting a mishmash of belief systems and theories, they don’t have a teacher to help them make sense of what they believe and follow one system. They’re digging a lot of shallow holes, not really sticking with one system, when one gets a little difficult, they move to the next one, “This one’s faster and nicer. I don’t have to face the difficulty.” Having a true spiritual life is really important, and a solid understanding of what your worldview is, what’s my philosophy?

Robert Maldonado  44:20

All of these factors protect you from those difficult experiences so that you’re not traumatized. You’re able to bounce back after you go through those experiences.

Debra Maldonado  44:34

Let’s talk about the next segment of our series, we’re going to talk about childhood trauma. We’re gonna go into the childhood and what happens when we’re kids. You’re the expert, you’re a child psychologist, what is really happening in the child’s mind, how they perceive reality, re-patterning of the brain and rewiring that happens at that time, the growth spurts, they’re open to more suggestions and also open for possibilities as well. I’m sure we’ll get a lot of questions about parenting and a lot of our clients will tell us “I wish I would have known this when my kids were young, I could have been different”, but we want to just educate you and hopefully you pass it on to your friends that have kids and as a child have a better understanding even your parents’ experience.

Robert Maldonado  45:40

Definitely the takeaway of this call is that you can develop these skills, you can help your kids develop these skills. We all have this capacity to learn new coping styles, new ways of doing our life, new ways of understanding even past events. As we develop these resilience skills, they can even help us cope with our past experiences and understand them in a better way.

Debra Maldonado  46:10

We will see you next week on Soul Sessions. If you haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channel, push the button below and get a notification every time we drop a new episode. Also, we’re on Spotify, iTunes and all the podcasts formats, please register, subscribe to our podcast as well. Also join our Facebook group, Discover Jungian Coaching with CreativeMind, and say hello to us, ask us questions, we’d love to interact with you. We’ll see you next week.

Robert Maldonado  46:45

Thanks for watching and listening. 

Debra Maldonado  46:48 

Take care. Bye bye.