What is it like to feel like you’re drowning?
Jennifer Reid, a Community Parent
What is it like to feel like you’re drowning? It is slow and fast at the same time. It is surreal, almost like you can see outside yourself and know what is happening to you, yet you have little control over it. Your internal dialogue consists of trying to convince yourself that if you could calm yourself or if you could start swimming, you could get to safer waters. You know how to swim, you tell yourself all the steps to get out of the danger but nothing you do seems to work.
In fact, doing anything seems to drag you further down. To scream for help only invites more water into your already exhausted lungs. Motioning for help feels like it draws away energy you need to stay above water. Despite any signal the people on shore may see, they don’t understand you are struggling; it does not look like trouble from shore. When someone does see you, and starts their own swim out to help, you worry they may not make it in time. In your mind you fear for their lives knowing they could be swimming toward their own danger, though without their help you may not make it back to shore.
This is not a metaphor for walking a hard path… and it is. I truly did have a terrifying experience of near drowning in a lake one summer. I am ever grateful for two of my teenagers and my sister-in-law who saw my quiet calls for help and swam to support me back to shore. Without their courage and love I may not have been able to stay above the water for much longer. We will all be affected for a long time. At the same time, those feelings fit so closely to what I have experienced as the parent of a child with relational trauma (early neglect and disrupted attachments).
Knowing how to parent from a place of security and understanding may keep a parent above water longer—but even the most skilled swimmer gets exhausted. You can be taken by surprise to find you have drifted into deep waters. What once seemed manageable because feet could find the bottom after each wave suddenly becomes a struggle when you have lost that stability. Catching your breath after each wave is no longer an option. Sometimes you are left holding your breath knowing the next wave is coming quicker than you can recover. Parenting a child who is unable to regulate their emotions, a child who rages or shuts down, a child who pushes you away or clings so tight they can’t let go, is very much like trying to stay afloat in rough waters.
It is easy to think that all children face these issues at times, and most likely they do. Parenting any child comes with its challenges. Imagine though that your child pushes you away at almost every turn. These are not the irritating kind of behaviours that make us want to not parent sometimes; they are true rejection. Create a picture of living with near constant opposition and defiance, violent outbursts, verbal and physical, that seem to be triggered by random things like not wanting the snack you prepared that they had asked for moments before Live in a world where your child seems to challenge you to believe about them what they believe and fear about themselves. They are worthless.
Parenting a child who pushes you to your outmost edge of patience, pushes you off the edge, and then turns to you in such dire and desperate need for your love and empathy in the exact moment that you feel ready to give up, requires so much of parents. They cling to you when you feel like you have already given your very last drop of energy, and then you go through it all again an hour later. Like coming close to drowning, parenting a child with a trauma history can be something you have to experience to really get it. Supporting people, professionals, family members can educate themselves, they can witness and be there to hold your hand or give you new suggestions. They can watch from the shore or even be wading in the water waiting to help you but they cannot do it for you. And as solid as their advice is, or as reasonable as their strategies may seem, trying to employ them while you are gasping for breath each and every day is wearying.
Like the moment I knew that I had found my footing and was not going to drown in the lake that day, I have also found it in my life as a parent. The help and support I needed to get to shore is the same as the people I needed to take hold of me in the moments I wanted to give up and did not believe I had what my child needed. It was the friends who could only hold space for my pain, the family who took over when I had nothing left to give, the professionals who saw, helped me see and didn’t give up. And most of all, it was the other parents like me who were in the thick of it or gave me hope with stories of the light that can come.