Excerpt from Healing Connections: A Community Approach to Childhood Trauma and Attachment, Chapter 14. Excerpt taken from pages 261-2, 265-7, 278-9

Caring for Yourself through Rest and Respite: Moving Beyond the Usual Ideas about Self-Care

by Sue Badeau in collaboration with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith (Bio at the end of Excerpt)

Caring for children with attachment challenges and/or trauma histories is exhausting. Have you ever noticed that even when you can get a good night of sleep, you often wake up and still feel sluggish, drained, and unrested? That is because sleep and rest are not the same thing. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith has identified 7 types of rest that are crucial for well-being (Dalton-Smith, 2019). Many of us, as caregivers, are depleted in more than one of these types of rest, and as a result, we cannot bring our best selves to parenting the children in our care.

When flight attendants on airplanes provide safety instructions, they always include the reminder to “put your own oxygen mask on first” when traveling with a child or anyone who might need your help. Put your own oxygen mask on first. You cannot be there to care for others if you cannot breathe yourself. Simple, but not easy.

Caregivers always want to reach out and help others first. It is in our blood. Taking time for “self-care” seems indulgent, unnecessary, or simply impossible, until the day we find we cannot breathe. This experience is sometimes referred to as “secondary traumatic stress.” As we see and hear daily the grief, loss, trauma, and pain of our children, we can become overwhelmed, numbed out and drained.

Taking time for “self-care” is not indulgent, it is essential. But it should not be experienced as a burden. This is why many cultures are beginning to redefine self-care in ways that include self-determination and community care (see definitions below). Caring for oneself by connecting to our own care needs, rest deficits and strengths as well as by connecting to one another in community are the hallmarks of a truly trauma-informed and healing approach to rest, restoration and self-care. How, then, do we make it a priority?

First, it is critical to understand that self-care cannot occur within a vacuum. Therefore, the term itself can be misleading, so we invite you to go beyond the usual construct of “self-care” to include principles of community care, described below and more fully discussed in Chapter 13. This chapter will describe a model for both self and community care, as outlined by Miller et al. (2019) in their article Foster parent self-care: A conceptual model. Additionally, it will focus on one specific core element of self-care—rest—drawing on Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s concept of the 7 types of rest. (Dalton-Smith, 2019). This simple yet powerful framework equips both caregivers and professionals in developing their own self and community care plan that will refill, renew, and restore us rather than continuing to deplete us. As Dr. Dalton-Smith says, “The goal of rest is restoration.”

….. Consider the example of Tracy:

Tracy was always exhausted. Her days began before the sun came up, starting the tube feeding for one of her foster children, then waking up the other three (including 2 teens) so they could get ready for school. Mornings were always a battle trying to get 4 children with a range of attachment and trauma histories to eat, dress, gather their belongings and get out the door on time. Although she started her first cup of coffee before engaging with the children, it was often only after she got back home from driving them to their 3 different schools that she was able to re-heat the cold sludge it had become and eat a piece of toast. Her day was full of school and agency meetings, work-from-home Zoom sessions and an endless avalanche of emails. She rarely took time for lunch and before she could breathe, it was time to start picking the children up and shuttling them to their various after-school activities, therapy appointments and sporting events. Since Covid, nearly all her adult interactions took place on Zoom, and she rarely spent time with another adult before her husband Cedric arrived home after 6 PM each day.

Frazzled and exhausted but craving adult company, she immediately tried to engage Cedric in conversation when he arrived at home. But she was often quickly frustrated, as he held off conversation until he had changed his clothes and headed outside to walk the dog alone. After the next 3 chaotic hours of dinner, homework and managing each of the children’s needs and behavior, Cedric was ready to talk about the day, play a game of cards, or watch a movie together, while Tracy felt like she couldn’t string two coherent words together to save her life. They were each frequently frustrated with the other’s seeming disinterest in the conversations or activities they were most interested in, and often went to bed irritated with one another. Tracy found herself eating lots of snacks at night and falling into bed bone-tired but with her monkey brain racing, unable to turn it off and settle into a restful sleep. Cedric often stayed in front of the computer and TV 2 to 3 hours after Tracy went to bed and slept like a rock until the alarm went off re-starting the entire cycle.

Although she rarely talked to others about her life or feelings, on the rare times when she complained about being over-tired or irritable or at the end of her rope in conversation with the children’s caseworker or her best friend, they often had the same three suggestions – focus on self-care, get more sleep, get away (get some respite) for a few days. Tracy tried these ideas but found that even after several days of extra sleep she still felt as tired, or more tired than usual and frustrated at the self-care recommendations. Recently she lashed out at the caseworker, “I wish everyone would STOP telling me to get more self-care. I don’t have time for it, and I feel like you are just adding more impossible items to my to-do list and blaming me for not being able to meet everyone’s needs including my own. I don’t need another bubble bath in my life! That’s not going to make up for worrying about my daughter who runs away or handling my son who kicks and bites me daily or paying the bills for all these therapy sessions that insurance doesn’t cover. Do you really think a pedicure will make that better?”

As you read this chapter, consider how you might use the information, strategies and tools described to assist Tracy and Cedric in building self and community care plans that would help them to feel restored and renewed rather than depleted and overwhelmed. Creating a self and community plan for Tracy and Cedric may help you imagine how to create such a plan for yourself. ….

For the purpose of this newsletter excerpt, we offer one example related to Emotional Rest:

Emotional:

Another area in which caregivers may often be depleted is emotional rest. Emotional rest can be defined as the freedom to authentically express feelings and eliminate people-pleasing behavior. Dr Dalton-Smith likens emotional rest to creating an “emotional raft”, an emotionally safe space that we can rest on while navigating the tumultuous waters of caring for our children. Caregivers of children with trauma histories and challenging behavior may not often feel that they can authentically and safely share their own feelings. We live in a world of hyper-vigilance about our child’s emotional needs and often submerge our own. It takes a lot of energy to keep a smile on our faces or maintain professional affect in meetings about our children. Sometimes we are required by the demands of our job or the systems we must engage with on our children’s behalf, to spend time with people who emotionally drain us and who we might even consider toxic to our well-being. Be sure to create time and space, especially before and after such encounters, to breathe, and be your authentic self with someone. Who is the person you can call when you need to “let your hair down”? For some of us, journaling or prayer are other ways to build our “emotional raft.” Additional self-care strategies to increase our emotional rest include:

1. Practice saying no. When we were raising our children, many times the school, church, or community groups such as the Little League association would ask my husband and I to assume leadership roles because they knew we were “good with kids”. Sometimes we felt pressured to do these things so that our children could participate. But sometimes, to care for your own emotional well-being you need to be able to “Just say no.”
2. Laugh and cry. Do not be ashamed to cry when you need to release some pent-up feelings and similarly, find something that makes you laugh every day. Humor is emotionally restorative.
3. Build a practice such as “roses and thorns” into your daily routine. My daughter does this with her children after school, others do it at the dinner table. Take a few moments to reflect – what was my “rose” – my high point for today and what was my “thorn” or most difficult part of the day? Some have added a “bud” to the conversation – What is something “budding” – something I am looking forward to for tomorrow? This addition of the “bud” increases hope and optimism which is connected to the next form of rest and self-care: spiritual.