Project Parenthood

Why does my kid always push my buttons?

Episode Summary

812. In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor explains how unresolved relational trauma can fuel a parent's reactive anger, and how understanding your own nervous system can help you respond to your child in more connected, calm, and intentional ways.

Episode Notes

Sources:

https://cptsdfoundation.org/what-is-complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-cptsd/

Related Project Parenthood Episodes:

How to Manage Your Anger and Frustration as a Parent

5 Steps to Becoming a Cycle Breaking Parent

What is Respectful Parenting?

Dr. Coor’s Related Blog:

Supporting Your Child’s Self-Worth: A Daily Practice of Acceptance

Find a transcript here.

Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.

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Episode Transcription

It’s that sudden, white-hot surge of rage when your young child spills milk for the third time, or the icy fury you feel when your tween talks back, or the uncomfortable irritation you experience when your teenager spends hours behind their closed bedroom door, that can make your whole body clench. You might be flooded with thoughts like, “Why are they doing this to me?” or “Why do they always push me to yell at them like this?” Those feelings of frustration, disconnection and shame are more common for parents than you might think. It’s in these moments that you often repeat patterns you swore you’d break, which can leave you feeling like a failure.

Welcome back to Project Parenthood, I’m your host, Dr. Nanika Coor. Each week I’ll help you raise kids in ways that are compassionate, respectful, anti-oppressive, and grounded in connection and community. Today, I’m unpacking an unseen force that can drive these painful parenting moments: unresolved relational trauma - how it manifests for you, and in your parent-child relationship, and how you can start to heal.

Before I jump in, I invite you to take a moment to settle into your body. Just notice what’s coming up for you right now as you’re listening. Is there a tightening in your chest? A quickening of your breath? A sudden wave of defensiveness? There’s no need to judge or change these involuntary and automatic reactions. Simply turn toward them with the friendly interest and open curiosity of just…noticing.

Let’s get into it.

The Struggle

You might look at a challenging moment with your child—a refusal to cooperate, a massive tantrum, or a tearful protest—and immediately think, “My child is the problem.” You have thoughts like, "Why can't they just do as they’re told without pushback?" or you might find yourself saying things like, “You’re so ungrateful!” or “You have no respect!” You want to teach them responsibility, manners, and gratitude, but it sometimes feels like they’re deliberately trying to make you lose it.

In those moments, your body goes into overdrive. You might feel your pulse thundering in your ears, your jaw lock tight, your mind starts racing with thoughts like, “How dare they talk to me like that!” And instead of staying curious about your child’s needs or feelings, you find yourself criticizing, lecturing, or even name-calling your child in moments of stress. You might physically freeze up when your child comes to you for comfort, or dismiss their genuine pain because it feels too overwhelming to witness. These relationship conflicts become the visible drama of your parenting life.

For parents navigating racism, ableism, classism, or other systemic pressures, there’s an added layer of exhaustion. The world already tells you that your child better behave “right” if they want to stay safe, or that you have to parent “better” to prove your worth. That pressure can turn ordinary parenting moments into high-stakes tests of survival. Your reactive anger, whether it looks like yelling, the ‘silent treatment’, or withholding empathy and comfort, ultimately erodes the felt sense of safety and connection your child needs to thrive in the world. The toll on both of you: feeling misunderstood, unsafe, and disconnected - just isn’t sustainable.

Contributing Factors

This pattern of relationship conflict between you and your child is being driven by something much deeper than repetitive child defiance and parental exasperation. It’s being driven by the invisible, underlying architecture of unresolved relational trauma. Lots of parents today are struggling with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and don't even know it. This isn't just leftover feelings from a single traumatic event; it’s the result of ongoing, repeated and pervasive experiences of emotional neglect, emotional or physical abuse, or emotional misattunement from your earliest caregivers. A repetitive pattern of harsh criticism, humiliation, or control that left you feeling unseen, unheard and unworthy. The cumulative pain of thousands of relational-trauma-paper-cuts.

CPTSD can also result from larger social contexts. Parents from marginalized communities may be coping with ongoing (sometimes lifelong) systemic trauma—policing, medical bias, economic precarity, microaggressions, social exclusion. That means your body may rarely get to rest in safety. When safety is scarce, self-regulation becomes that much harder.

If you’re parenting with CPTSD, when you were a child, your nervous system adapted to a relational environment that was one or more of the following:

Chronically unsafe: early caregivers physically and/or emotionally and/or psychologically hurt you (or didn’t prevent you from being hurt in these ways) on a regular basis.
Unpredictable: early caregivers were warm and attentive sometimes and cold, rejecting and physically or emotionally unavailable sometimes, but you couldn’t predict when either would occur.
Conditional: caregiver love, warmth, and attention had to be "earned" through your compliance with your caregiver’s expectations, such as good grades or suppressing your anger, and were withheld when you didn’t meet those standards.

When you’ve experienced this kind of relational trauma, especially as a child, your nervous system learns to survive by over-responding to what it perceives as threatening. And when you’re a parent, that same system, which is still vigilant and still scanning for danger, can interpret your child’s frustration, non-compliance, pushes for autonomy and privacy, or even their expressions of sadness - as an attack.

Instead of feeling compassion, you feel defensive. Instead of staying curious, you shut down, withdraw, dismiss or lash out. To cope during your childhood you developed survival strategies that are now automatic, and they can make your child’s developmentally normal behaviors—like saying “no,” expressing big feelings, or needing privacy or needing to be heard—feel intolerable, often leaving your nervous system in a state of hyperarousal (fight/flight) or hypoarousal (freeze/fawn).

Here's how this shows up between you and your child:

Hyperarousal (Fight/Flight): This is when you’re dealing with an internal alarm system that’s constantly firing. When your child’s behavior - pushback on a limit you’ve set, their demands for comfort and understanding, or their frustration or sadness - reminds you, usually unconsciously, of your own childhood unmet needs or a painful person or interaction from your past, you can instantly flip into “fight” mode. This is when the yelling, the put-downs, the shaming, the blaming and intense criticisms from you occur. You’re suddenly not just dealing with your child - you’re face-to-face with every person who ever made you feel small, unheard, or powerless. You're seeing a ghost from your past, and you’re reacting to that historical threat. “Flight” mode can look like you trying to ‘escape’ your child’s expressions of anger, sadness, or fear by sending them away (i.e. to their room), storming away from them or dismissing/shutting down/negating their perspectives.
Hypoarousal (Freeze/Fawn): “Freeze” is the emotional shutdown. You may become withdrawn, rigid, or unable to tolerate your child's big emotions. Your child's crying or distress feels too much like your own uncomforted pain, so you pull away, refuse to hear them out, or become emotionally cold. The "fawn" response, on the other hand, might look like you instantly rushing to appease or over-fix the situation, giving in to demands or distracting your child just to stop the crying and silence the difficult emotion.This is your nervous system’s attempt to stay safe by minimizing the expression of emotions, but disconnection is the result.

It’s important that you understand that the parenting behaviors I’m describing here aren’t the moral failings of a terrible parent who isn’t using enough willpower; these are trauma responses. Children are born with immature nervous systems that rely on yours to regulate. When you can’t soothe yourself, your child can’t anchor to you for comfort. They become dysregulated, you react to their dysregulation, and a cycle of fear and disconnection forms.

The cycle of disconnection you experienced yourself in childhood gets passed down to your child via your trauma-infused parent-child relationship, not because you’re a bad parent, but because your nervous system is stuck in the past. The good news is that this cycle doesn’t have to be permanent. The same brain that learned to protect itself through hypervigilance can also learn to feel safe again—through awareness, compassion, and new relational experiences that tell your body the danger has passed.

Your Parenting Toolkit

The work of breaking the cycle is about slowly, consistently re-wiring your nervous system and moving from reactivity to intentionality.

How can you start that crucial inner work? Here are a few tools to start you on a path to healing:

Map Your Triggers to Your History: The next time you feel that surge of rage or the urge to shut down, pause. Instead of focusing on your child’s unwanted behaviors, turn your awareness inward. Ask yourself: What thought am I having about my child that feels familiar and urgent? Does this feeling I’m having right now remind me of how I felt when I was little and my own caregivers yelled at me? Are my child’s words, or their tone, or the situation we’re in conflict about reminding me of an experience or a conflict I had with someone in childhood? When you recognize that your reaction belongs to your past and not your present, your compassion can start to re-enter the room.
Mindfully ‘Catch’ Your Reactivity: When the activation hits, your primary task is to down-regulate yourself. Slow the whole interaction down. You don’t have to solve the problem immediately. Take a pause:
- Name it: Internally say, "I’m activated. My heart is racing. I’m yelling. This is a trauma response." This creates a small gap between you and your reactivity. In that gap, you can choose an intentional response.
- Engage Senses: Deliberately stimulate your senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing or sight in a very noticeable and soothing way. Do a yoga pose, drink a very cold or very warm liquid, smell a citrus fruit, listen to soothing music or go stand in the sunshine and notice the warmth on your skin. All of these things bring you into the present moment, out of the past.
- Slow Exhales: Use an extended exhale to signal safety to your system. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six to eight counts. This isn’t a strategy for your child; it’s a self-care intervention for you. If your brain can control the rhythm of your breath, it can control the next words that come out of your mouth. Autopilot-mode is disengaged.
Repair as an Act of Revolutionary Love: When you do inevitably slip into a reactive pattern (you will, and that's okay), the most powerful tool you have is repair. Don't wait. Approach your child when both of you are calm and take responsibility for your actions. Say something like, “I yelled unkind things at you earlier, and that wasn’t okay. I was overwhelmed, I took it out on you, and I can imagine that was scary. That was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I love you, and you don’t deserve to be spoken to like that by anyone - not even me.” This models (and teaches!) taking accountability and making amends, it validates their experience, and re-establishes safety and trust in your relationship.
Embrace Your Fallible Humanity: When you notice you’re being hypercritical of yourself and self-shaming for treating your child in ways you aren’t proud of, remind yourself that all humans suffer (having your words/behaviors hijacked by unacknowledged, unresolved, untreated CPTSD is suffering), and all parents make mistakes. Use self-kindness: instead of calling yourself a horrible parent, talk to yourself the way a kind, wise friend would. "Parenting with trauma is hard. I messed up, but I'm learning, and I can try again. I’m not alone in this struggle." This act of self-compassion increases your resilience and prevents you from slipping back into the shame that fuels reactive cycles.
Seek spaces that support your healing. You don’t have to face this alone. A therapist trained in trauma, a trusted friend who can hold your truth, a support group for parents working on reactivity - all of these can offer co-regulation, which is the nervous system’s way of learning safety through relationships.

Small shifts practiced again and again: understanding your triggers, de-escalating yourself, repairing, and self-compassion, are how you start to rewire your relational patterns. Your nervous system learns through repetition that relationships can feel safe, even when emotions run high.

Reflection

Now that you’ve learned a little about relational trauma, how are you feeling in your body right now? Is there tension? Is there a flicker of curiosity, maybe even relief? If you feel that familiar defensiveness, simply accept it. It’s important information about how your system reacts to this kind of topic all on its own. There’s real liberation in observing and truly accepting your automatic reactions without trying to fix or change them (or behave from them), because it acknowledges the real, historical pain you carry.

Listen, you can't pass on something you don't possess. If you were never offered deep comfort and love that didn’t come with conditions, you won't automatically know how to give it. But healing yourself is the most profound act of social justice parenting you can undertake. It is a radical unlearning and a choice to stay with the trouble of your own pain so that you can create an anti-oppressive reality for your child that centers unconditional parental respect, collaboration, and compassion. This can help you step out of the reactive past and into a potentially connected present, supporting emotional regulation and new relational pathways for both you and for your child.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: your over-reactivity doesn’t make you a bad parent. It’s just evidence that you’ve survived things that required enormous strength. Your task now is to bring that same strength to intentionally healing yourself, so your child doesn’t inherit your pain as their normal. Every time you choose curiosity over control, you’re breaking the cycle. Healing is slow, but it’s contagious - it ripples through generations.

If you’ve found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend who might be struggling with intense parent-child conflicts. Remember that you’re not the only one—parenting isn’t meant to be a solo project happening isolated-from-each-other homes. Your fellow listeners are all learning, unlearning, and reimagining how to break generational patterns and lean into collective care, building communities where both children and parents get to grow in wholeness.

How is your awareness of your own hyperactivation changing how you respond to your child? Let me know! You can contact me via Instagram @bkparents, or via my email at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. If you’re feeling alone in your parenting journey, head to my website at brooklynparenttherapy.com, where you can join my newsletter to learn about upcoming community parent events. I’m Dr. Nanika Coor. Thanks for listening. I’ll catch you next week.

Project Parenthood is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team: audio-engineer Dan Feierabend; Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts; advertising operations specialist Morgan Christianson; marketing manager, Rebekah Sebastian and thanks also to our contractor, Nat Hoopes.