Episode 122: Decoding Trauma, Building Resilience: A Conversation with Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

In this episode, Dr. Almitra Berry welcomes Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, a nationally recognized expert in childhood trauma and resilience. Dr. Robyn Koslowitz shares her personal story of overcoming trauma and developing PTSD as a child, and how it motivated her to empower parents to transform their own traumas into resilience for the benefit of their children. The discussion covers practical strategies for recognizing and addressing trauma in the classroom, as well as techniques for parents to create safe spaces for their children to open up about their experiences. Dr. Koslowitz emphasizes the importance of building "fortitude" over mere "resilience" and provides insights on how educators and parents can support children in developing the psychological capacity to handle life's challenges.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:03

If you're a parent, teacher or school leader and you're sick and tired of the frustration, anger and unfair treatment of children at high risk in our public schools, then perhaps it's time for all of us to do something about it. In this podcast, Dr amitra Berry brings you tips, tools, strategies and tactics to build successful solutions while touching, moving and inspiring all of us to transform our schools so that every child thrives. Here's your host. Dr Berry,

Dr Almitra Berry: 0:42

hey, there equity warriors today, I welcome. Dr K Robin kosowitz, Robin, I forgot, did I pronounce your last name properly? You did Correct? Okay, all right, so, Edward, starting over, starting over in 543, hey, there equity warriors today, I welcome Dr Robin kosowitz, a nationally recognized expert in childhood trauma and resilience, with her forthcoming book post traumatic parenting. Dr K empowers parents to transform their own traumas into resilience, benefiting their children, having positively impacted over 2400 families, her insights are invaluable. So stay tuned today for some practical strategies to decode trauma, build resilience and foster effective communication, a common theme we've talked about here on the through you podcast, you will not want to miss one word of today's conversation. Dr K, thanks for joining me. Thank you

Unknown: 1:40

so much for having me. Dr Barry, I'm very excited to have this conversation. Well, I

Dr Almitra Berry: 1:44

am too, because I think I shared with you in our pre call I was a child of trauma. So you know, anytime I can get as an adult, more information to help pass on to other parents who can can intercept. I'm excited to be able to share that. I always ask folks to give us your version of your bio a pivotal moment in your life, what has shaped you to what you are and what you do today. Anything you want to share that I didn't read in that that abbreviated bio.

Unknown: 2:12

So, like you, I was a child of trauma, and I think my story is somewhat hard to hear. So for people who don't need that energy, just know that it's a little difficult to hear. So I actually lost my father when I was a young child. My father had very severe heart disease, so I witnessed many heart attacks, many emergencies. When I was 16, I actually performed CPR on my father, and he did not make it so and when I was 16, it was way before anyone was talking about trauma, so I developed PTSD. But I had no idea that there was anything called PTSD, so I thought I was mentally ill. I thought that I was hearing, you know, hearing voices that no one could hear, and seeing things no one else could see. Not a good sign for your mental health, even when you're not a mental health professional. You kind of know that as a kid, yes. So I was sort of suffering in silence with my PTSD, but on the surface, I looked fine as a kid. I was getting great grades. I was involved in extracurriculars, you know, in college, I was, you know, I was holding down a job while going to college. And, you know, dual majoring looked fine, but I knew that I had PTSD, and then I became a mom, and I realized that my trauma is going like my damage is going to damage my kids unless I do something about it. Yeah, that's what became the

Dr Almitra Berry: 3:34

book, wow, wow. You know, I recently read, well, I guess that's recently. Now it's been a couple of years, a book called my grandmother's hands. I don't know if you've heard it before, but it was where I was introduced to understanding that trauma is literally transmitted through the womb and passed down from generation to generation. And the studies that were done on descendants of Holocaust victims, on African Americans who are descended from from enslaved peoples, and how that trauma, even though it may not have happened to us specifically, but our responses to it have been transmitted. So it just, you know, I, I one, I, I applaud and feel your story. My childhood trauma was also with my father, but, you know, slightly different, but I think, much like you and I didn't become a therapist, but I understood at some point in time that that was messing with my head in ways that I didn't understand. And you know, like you an excellent student and doing well. I was partying a lot in college, but I managed to finish on time. Still. It's like, had a lot of fun, but I still finished on time High School. I was a great student.

Unknown: 4:52

Oh, 21 again, right?

Dr Almitra Berry: 4:54

Well, only if I also have the knowledge about life in the world that I do. Now what I want to be 21 again, yeah, 21 but with with with wisdom would be great. I want to talk about understanding childhood trauma in terms of how it impacts or affects a developing mind and maybe some impacts on behavior, either short term or long term. What can you share?

Unknown: 5:20

So first of all, trauma is any experience that's too big for your brain to metabolize, because people very often get hung up on like, what is the technical definition? Is that traumatic? If your brain couldn't metabolize it, then that was trauma. And I think it's important to know that, because very often trauma is not necessarily what happened to you. It's what didn't happen for you, and for me, for example, being having a very ill father made me different than the other children in my class, and it made me very dissociated. It made me very cerebral, and that made me a target for bullies, right? And when my father was very ill, the other children didn't know how to talk to me. They didn't they were uncomfortable. And when kids are uncomfortable, they just kind of edit you out of existence, which makes you a bigger target for bullies. And I can't say necessarily that losing my father was more or less traumatic than being bullied, right? They both were traumatic. They opened the door to each other in many ways. So it's important, because sometimes people talk about this myth of, like, big T versus little T trauma, and I think that that's a that's such a fallacy to think about if something was too big for you to metabolize or traumatized, I would rather think of like ACS, right, adverse childhood experiences, the famous study where we talk about like, having a parent be incarcerated, having a parent die, you know, having living in poverty, living in a dangerous neighborhood, and then there's secret ACSs, the things that people might not know about you or your family, being parented by a functional alcoholic, being parented very harshly, living in a home where there's food insecurity, but they're kind of making it on the surface right, where no one would know Right. No one knows right, right,

Dr Almitra Berry: 7:05

unless you

Unknown: 7:06

tell until, yeah, wow.

Dr Almitra Berry: 7:10

I love your definition. I want to state that again, trauma is anything that your brain cannot metabolize. Yeah. I think that that so simplifies something that I never really you know, it's like I understood I was traumatized, but I didn't understand that until I was an adult. But I couldn't tell you what that meant, other than to know that there were things that were said when I was a child, I mean, and so I mean such minor things that people probably didn't think anything about, and they weren't microaggressions. But if someone would ask me, so what does your father do? Right? Then you have a father, you know, and that that, while that's much more common in the 2000s in the current century, I can tell you that in ninth in the 1970s I was really abnormal, right? Everybody had two parents at home, but I didn't, and why? You know that someone would ask that question, and I would just cry right there. I just, I couldn't do it. I couldn't go to a funeral until I was 40 something again, right? So processing, thank you. It's like I've had a free therapy session. I love it, even though I've had plenty of therapy and as an adult, in coming to grips with what all of that was. So when our kids it could be something that's very minor, right? That traumatized could just because their brains can't handle it,

Unknown: 8:38

yeah, and that's important, because it's not necessarily what happens, right? It's who it happens to and how it lands that really matters.

Dr Almitra Berry: 8:47

Yeah. And it's because some people are much more resilient that the same event at the same age as their peer has may not impact them the same way. Yeah. But

Unknown: 8:59

resilience, to me, is a little bit of a tricky word. I know we use it a lot with the book, because sometimes you can be skin deep resilient, right? Like I was, at any measure a resilient kid. I call it being a duck. You know, like over the surface, the duck is floating serenely, but under the surface you're paddling madly to keep up. Because I like to look beyond resilience to fortitude, because resilience is just, you bounce back, right? And, like, you know, like, okay, so this happened, and the kid seems fine, and you'd be surprised. Kids can go through horrific things and show up in school, and you wouldn't necessarily know, right? You look at their faces and they're all like, smiling in second grade, and they just look like regular kids. You don't know it's not written on their face. That's sort of what we look at as resilience, but I like to look at fortitude, the idea that you have the real psychological capacity to handle what life throws your way, because you can repair resilient. On the surface, I feel like I've had a lot of friends and a lot of post traumatic parenting community members who come in and people will praise. Resilience and like, well, you're so resilient, you know, you immigrated to this country and you had no money and you were discriminated against, like, you had all these experiences, and then you made yourself, you know, and that's like, very much the 1980s like, you know, saga, but we lost you, right? Yeah, yeah. Fortitude is what we build with wisdom in adulthood.

Dr Almitra Berry: 10:21

I like that I'm learning a lot. I like it when I'm learning a lot. This is

Unknown: 10:26

for me, you know, this was my life. This was my my life's journey and my life's work, you know, and it always bothered me when I would work in schools. I consult in a lot of schools, and we do a lot of, like, anti bullying curricula. We do a lot of, I do a lot of helping teachers deal with kids who we know are traumatized in the classroom. And a lot of times people will be like, but she's so resilient. Like, okay, so she bounced back, and how do we get her moving forward? Yeah, right,

Dr Almitra Berry: 10:52

yeah. You have me thinking, although, you know, even though I've been out of the classroom for years, this I've been out of the classroom. Now for 2020, 21, years as a classroom teacher, I think about some kids who you know, I could see sometimes that there was something wrong my my population of children that were all we were. My school was located adjacent to and sort of in depending on which side you were on a federal housing project. So all my kids were children, children of low income. Many of them were immigrant and migrant children. All of them always say, with one exception, one year, were black, they were Latina, they were Southeast Asian. They were a marginalized group of children to begin with, I did not even though this was the, you know, the the town I grew up in, it was not the neighborhood I grew up in. And I did not understand until I stayed at work really late one day, and my custodian came in and said, You have to leave. And I was like, but I still have work to do. And he said, No, things are going to change around here. I'm going to walk you to your car. You have to go. I did not consider the lived experiences of my children being in a neighborhood where, once the sun went down, that bullets were flying, that it wasn't safe for them to come out. And as a you know, even I just I didn't know how to how do I take that into what I do with them while they're in my classroom? How is this impacting the way they receive instruction? What they're taking away from from that classroom experience? Now, I had sixth graders, but I'm wondering if you can can share with us, or are there signs that we can look for that might tell us that a child is experiencing trauma? So

Unknown: 14:22

here's the thing, it's not looking for the signs of trauma, because trauma very often doesn't happen in the past. It happens in the future. Sometimes the impact of something hits years later. You know, you you're teaching about the cardiovascular system. And there's a kid who's whose dad was shot through the heart, right, or who had a heart attack and suddenly it hits right? You don't know. So what I'd rather do, rather than looking for the signs of trauma, and some of us, by the way, especially traumatized kids like myself, are very good at hiding it, because we know that people don't want to really know, or we think we're crazy and we don't want anyone to know that. Instead, what I like to do is give mechanisms for kids to talk to us, to tell us that you know what that was triggering. And this is like, right in the world, there's all these like thoughts of like trigger warnings, as though we're raising snowflakes and like, this is the worst thing ever, as opposed to a trigger warning simply being be prepared. We're about to talk about something that some that may make some of you get catapulted back into a state of fight or flight. You might be very scared, or you might be frozen. So if you give yourself a moment to gather up your fortitude, you're going to be fine. So I'm going to give you that trigger warning, and for the child to be able to communicate that to us like I am working in a classroom right now, consulting with a teacher, and the teacher has kind of an old school mentality, and there are some traumatized kids in the classroom. And I told her about the idea of having a safe space for kids to go if they're feeling overwhelmed, but she was worried kids would abuse it. So I said, What if we made a system? We're we're in her class. We're calling it 911811711, she chose that metaphor. You there's many metaphors that you can use, but the idea is emergency. I must talk to you teacher right now. Versus, gotta talk to you within the, you know, two hour period of today, like before recess or after recess or whatever. Versus by the end of the week, I need to tell you something, and the kids have the signal system. So now there's one child in particular who was very traumatized by something that happened in her own life, and the most unpredictable things trigger her, but when she has a 911, and she could raise like that, one finger versus a two. Fingers, whatever the teacher is doing to be able to tell the teacher like, I'm really sad right now, it's golden, because it takes a second the teacher acknowledges that she can go to the back of the room, compose herself, and come back there's no disruption to the lesson. And think of the fortitude she's building. I The tears are rising. I'm about to cry. So when I came into this classroom. Day one, she was sitting in class with tears just silently falling down her face, third grader, humiliated because everyone's staring at her, because she is so traumatized and so upset about something. But her parents have this philosophy that she needs to be in school and tough it out and figure it out, and they're like, not really understanding that that might cause more harm than good. So here we have this little girl sitting there crying all day, and the teacher first saying to me, like, oh, that sounds like we're creating snowflakes or whatever, versus now where, and she needs to cry. She can go. She can take a break. She can calm down. She comes back to her free couple of minutes later, and very often. Now it's 811, she'll raise two fingers, and then when she goes to the teacher, she says, you know, this is making me think of the person. I don't want to break anybody's confidentiality, so this is making me think of the person who died whatever the teacher said. And this is why. And then the teacher can be like, yeah, that was sad. That's hard. I'm proud of you for calming yourself down and coming back, and the kid feels so free. And we went from tears all day to the occasional tears to the occasional break, and we're only like a couple of weeks into school, like it's September. We started second week of September. We're like, and we're and this is fortitude, right? This kid, we're not creating a snowflake. This is a kid who respects her body signals, can manage them. And went from crying every day to a couple of tears because she's managing it and she's processing it right. So there's such a progression here. Yeah,

Dr Almitra Berry: 18:27

I just you know that something, gosh, and I wish I had that information when I wrote my last book, plus I would have inserted that in there as one of the things that we can do in classrooms, and making our our classrooms safe spaces. But I think, you know, as an adult, we, you know, typically, I don't know, maybe it's not typically, but we recognize when we feel things, but we have the ability, often, to escape where children are, for lack of a better term, basically held hostage in a classroom. They cannot just get up and walk away. They can't say can't, excuse me, I need to go to the restroom and walk out of a meeting, or I have to take this phone call, whatever it is excuse we might make up to escape from a situation our children are locked into their seats, and they don't have that freedom. What you shared, I think, is something that every teacher who hears this episode can take and implement in their classroom to some degree, just to for kids to recognize when they need that time and space. And very often, educators do. If it's a child that's on an IEP or a 504 plan, it's something that's written in there. But what about the vast majority of kids who don't have the protections of a 504, or an IEP, and I think also doc, about in black and brown communities how mental health is still sort of poo pooed, right? You know, we don't need that. So for educators to be able to do something is very helpful. Is that system something that parents could use at home. In some ways, there an adaptation for that. So my adaptation for that is that parents, you can't always, you know, get

Unknown: 20:07

a kid to open up, right? Everyone's like, how do I get my kid to open up? What you can do is schedule times when you're available, when you and the kid are doing something sort of low engagement, but soothing, like, let's say, every day, or every few days, where if something's gonna come up, that's when it's gonna come up. Maybe you take a walk together. Maybe you do the weekly shopping together. Maybe you do a puzzle together. You cook together, like a shoulder to shoulder activity where the child knows, and during that time, you're not listening to a show and you're not on the phone with somebody else, so the child has in their head, oh, that's when my mom or dad is available. That's the time to bring this up. And very often they'll bring it up, like, at the very last leg of that walk, right, or just as you're leaving the store right. And that you have to more than like, how will I know? How will I get my child to open up? It's like, the open up happened, catch it, right?

Dr Almitra Berry: 21:02

Yeah, I had mom. Okay, let's talk. Yeah, it always comes at the most inopportune time, right? I had a guest on recently, a few episodes, but probably about 10 episodes back now, who talked about having you time, right? And it was just that time for each child that you designate, that you know, even if you're just like you said, playing a card game or watching TV or doing a puzzle or whatever, that that child knows, that's their time. And it may be that, if you know, if you incorporate something like that from, from you know, his recommendations, you. And it's just during that you time, if it's the last 10 seconds of you time, you extend that time until the child has the opportunity. I love this, by

Unknown: 21:45

the way. You can also say to a child, I've actually taught my kids, it's because of like, the nature of me sometimes associating, everyone in my family knows to say, Are you available? So sometimes I might say, at the end, I call it special time, but at the end of special time, I might say, you know, this sounds like an important conversation, but I also have to, like sort of respect my own body and my own needs. If, let's say it's my bedtime, and I don't want to do this right now because I don't have my full brain, you're not getting the best of me. You're getting the rest of me. This sounds important. Let's write an appointment card for when we're going to discuss it. I don't want to give you like a real fast yes or no, this sounds like something I want my full brain to listen to. So tomorrow, right when you come home from school, let's table it till then, and then we're going to talk about it. Then the kid feels like, Wow, you really want to hear what I have to say without me pretending. But really, I'm dissociating. Really, I'm half asleep, like my full brain is not there. And I get that I've got to listen with my whole entire body right now. So you can also honor your own neurology and say, totally get that we have to talk about this. Here's when we're going to do that.

Dr Almitra Berry: 22:53

That is awesome. And I'm assuming that these are all tips that come from your book post traumatic parenting. Yes, and already make sure that that book, that there's a link to that book in the notes for this episode. Because I think even if you are not a parent, if you're not parenting post a known trauma, so to speak, that it's just good parenting information to have. I think there are some books that, as you know, you have to get a license, you have to study to drive a car, but nobody makes you study to become a parent. Yeah. So one of those books that should be on the bookshelf of everyone about to become a parent, or that is a parent. So you work with schools,

Unknown: 23:31

yeah,

Dr Almitra Berry: 23:32

you work with families.

Unknown: 23:35

Really, what I tried to do, very much, is I tried to be the adult I would have needed when I was a kid. So yeah, we work with, I work with post traumatic parents, helping them not allow their damage to damage their kids. And I always say, like after COVID, we're all post traumatic parents to a certain extent. I don't think anyone comes into adulthood unscathed. I certainly, and I treat children directly at this point. At this point, I work more with parents than with kids like I have a lot of associates in my practice who actually treat children unless children are very trauma.