1KHO 852: Parenting Is Supposed to Be Fun | Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, Post-Traumatic Parenting

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ginny Yurich** (0:30)
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I write a fantastic book. I learned so much from this book. It is called Post-Traumatic Parenting. Break the cycle and become the parent. You always wanted to be the author who has her own podcast.
It is called Post-Traumatic Parenting, just like the title of the book, Dr. Robyn Koslowitz. Welcome.

**Robyn Koslowitz** (0:52)
Thanks so much for having me. I love being on podcasts that I actually listen to because it feels like, yeah, I finally get to talk to this person.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:59)
Oh, I love that. I love your book. I've got so many notes here and I learned a tremendous amount. And I feel this is probably the book of our times, which is like dealing with like, we all want to be good parents, but then we all have some baggage from our past. You're like, well, how?
There was a question in here that was so deep. Like, how do you give your kids a normal childhood if you didn't have one? So you tell you your story in this book about your four parts of trauma, but you use this phrase, I've never heard it, Robyn, the trauma of absence. Can you talk about what that is? And maybe a little bit of how you experience that in your life? Because I never heard of this.

**Robyn Koslowitz** (1:42)
So the trauma of absence, which is not my term, I learned it, I think, first from Dr. Deborah Korn, is the idea of all the things that didn't happen for you, possibly because of what did happen to you, or possibly because of what did happen to your parents. So it's things like coming home from school and there was no one there to tell about something upsetting that happened that day, or not having a normative childhood experience that everybody else has.
There's no one there, right? So, because there are so many things where we sort of expect there to be a parent there, there to be a supportive figure there. And when those things don't happen for you, I've met young, especially young moms who will talk about like, I don't know how to teach my kid how to ride a bike. No one ever taught me how to ride a bike, so I don't know how you do that. Or, no one ever took me for routine dental care, so I don't know how you talk a kid through being nervous at the dentist's office, because I never had that. I'm still dealing with my own teeth and the horrible health things that can sometimes happen when you don't get routine medical care. So I'm still dealing with that, and now I'm supposed to take my kid. I don't know how you do that. How do you take your kid to the dentist? How often are you supposed to go? Like, all the things that just didn't happen for you, that you sometimes don't even know about until you're an adult, and you tell someone about your childhood maybe, and they say like, oh, or you realize what you don't know. You realize the gaps you have when you're giving it to your own kid, and you're like, wait, no one ever did that for me.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:20)
Yeah. Yeah. And then you talk about even the things that just sort of happen in life. Like in your personal story, there was just medical stuff.
You had a dad who had medical issues. And so then that really affects you as a young child. And then obviously as a teen, you lose your dad and that's like an incredibly traumatic experience. But I really had never considered about the situations where the word being used is, trauma isn't only what happened to you, it's also about what didn't happen for you. Like, did you not get to go play with friends or did you always kind of feel on edge because someone had a heart condition or a health condition and everyone's just preoccupied with that. So one of the stories that you told that was so heart-wrenching, and so many of them were, but you're like trying to do your schoolwork in an ambulance. And then the teacher's like, this handwriting is sloppy.