Growing though a pandemic

Lockdown was coming. The news was thick with it, and rumors were rife that soon there would be an announcement. Our workshop bookings had all been canceled in anticipation, and at the last few events, many people hadn’t attended due to the fear of catching Covid. It was hard to believe this was really happening. I had been considering taking the workshops online, but this was all so new to me. I hadn’t done anything like this before. I had been working from my daughter’s old laptop and didn’t even know how to use Zoom. I spent some time practicing and familiarizing myself with how it worked. I set up a Zoom account and registered for a subscription. On our social media, I advertised an online Trauma-Informed Parenting Workshop. I shared it in any groups that would allow it. People started to sign up, and we had a good number. Still, I was nervous. This remote, online thing felt weird.

The family was all home. My youngest had come back from Uni after a frantic phone call from us, telling her to get back before anything happened. My eldest’s college had already closed in preparation for what was about to come, and both girls were hanging around the house. Steven was the only one still going out to work. I didn’t have an office, and we had only recently moved into our home—it was a real fixer-upper with no great spot to Zoom from. The best option was to do the workshop over two mornings at 10 a.m. and hope the girls would stay in their rooms until 12 p.m., as requested, allowing me to Zoom from the living room. People continued to sign up. Every time I practiced delivering on Zoom, I messed it up and forgot what I was saying. How was I going to manage this?

The day before the workshop, Boris Johnson came onto our screens as we all huddled around the TV in anticipation and told us to “Stay at Home.” It was so unreal. We knew it was coming, but it felt like we were in an apocalyptic movie. Messages started coming in from people saying they wouldn’t make it to the workshop due to getting things in order for lockdown. It was to be expected. The world was spinning into fear and panic.

On the day of the workshop, four people turned up. There were five, but one couldn’t get their connection to work—two adoptive parents, a foster carer, and a nursery teacher. It was a small group, but they were all lovely. Both mornings, they sat on Zoom with me while I delivered the workshop online for the first time. Once the session started and I got into the flow, it was fine. I forgot about my nerves. It seemed to go okay. We had lots of discussions and chat, which was lovely. I organized another date, and this time it booked up even more. Many teachers signed on as they were all now sitting at home. Over 20 attended this time, and the feedback was brilliant. My phone and email were blowing up with messages from attendees telling me how much they had gotten from it. This was so exciting! But I had to come up with a better plan.

The family was hanging around in their bedrooms, waiting to get into the kitchen. They had been great about not disturbing me, but hogging the main living space in the house all morning wasn’t going to last. My youngest was horrified by what I was doing. She could see me on social media sharing posts about TIP workshops. At 19, this was mortifying. “Mum, please don’t go live on Facebook, and do not go onto TikTok,” she begged. “You’ll get slaughtered.” I assured her I had no plans to go live online.

As the lockdown passed, I offered one workshop a month. I found a small acceptance corner in my bedroom to zoom from, with boxes piled up on the bed to hold the laptop. We offered a workshop for birth parents, as I had seen the difference in my own child with this approach, and the feedback was amazing. People were messaging, telling me about the difference they were seeing. I shared it on many of the forums I followed for parents with autistic or ADHD children, and on forums for carers and adopters. Some groups deleted my posts; others didn’t. I messaged and emailed organizations supporting families, telling them what we were doing. The workshops grew bigger and bigger. Sometimes too big—it could be a bit overwhelming at times. We started charging for tickets, but when parents messaged me, saying they really wanted to attend but couldn’t afford it this month, it broke my heart. The information was too important. People needed it.

All these forums were full of posts about families in crisis, managing huge behaviors that were only escalating due to the stress and fear in the world. The decision was made to offer the workshops for free. At this point, all it was costing me was the monthly Zoom fee. I was sitting at home doing nothing anyway. If this could help people, I had to do it.

We were invited to deliver a workshop for Adoption Scotland by a lovely man called Kevin. SWIS Foster Care also asked us to deliver an online session. A few familiar faces were there from those early in-person workshops, like Sharon, who had hung back and encouraged me to keep up the work and offered to help if I ever needed advice on being a charity. Kevin and Sharon would years later become a big part of the TIP board. The workshops grew larger each month. Twenty or thirty would sign up, and around 10 to 15 would attend. The Facebook group was growing, and people were asking questions and interacting with the content. We created another private group for those who had attended the workshop as a safe place to support each other. People joined, but there wasn’t much interaction yet.

TIP committee meetings continued via Zoom. A friend of ours, Stuart, had kindly offered to become a trustee. His wife, Julie, was already on the board. However, the more we learned, the more we realized that having married couples on a charity board wasn’t really appropriate. So, Julie and Steven stepped off the board. Stuart became TIP’s Chairperson, Pamela the Secretary, and Barbara the Treasurer. Steven was gutted to step down, as he was my biggest supporter. He was always coming up with great ideas behind the scenes and was my sounding board. It felt unfair that he couldn’t be part of it, but if I hoped to eventually secure funding and become an employee of TIP, he couldn’t be on the board due to a conflict of interest. It was all so new to us, learning as we went.

I joined some networking groups to promote the charity and became a member of BNI. They were offering a free spot in each group to a charity. Steven was already a member and had been for many years through his work, so I was familiar with how it worked. I loved it. I met so many people and built some solid connections. Barbara, a lawyer, went on to become a trustee. Adrian, a mental health nurse and life coach who worked in a charity, offered to mentor me and taught me so much about running a charity. Vera a photographer who gave her time to photograph our workshop. A magazine editor did an interview on our work. A copy writer offered to help with the website. Many times, the members rallied together and took part in charity walks to raise money for TIP. The support and camaraderie I found there were much needed, especially since remote working can be such a lonely role.

By the time lockdown eased, TIP was reaching further than ever. Offering the workshops online had expanded our reach, with people attending and joining the groups from far and wide—not just the UK, but also from America, Australia, India, and Germany. I hadn’t expected this. The Corra Foundation had given out funding during the lockdown to charities—£2,000—our first ever funding. We started applying for small community grants to offer six online workshops for different local areas. Some councils were more open to it than others. In Stirling, West Dunbartonshire, North Lanarkshire, and East Dunbartonshire, our applications had been successful. We also received a small grant from the Bellahouston Bequest Fund to cover six workshops across Glasgow.

When the world kicked back into gear, I didn’t return to the part-time swimming teaching job I had been working in. I was still cutting hair on Saturdays for my long-standing clients, but the rest of the week I was now working for TIP for a meager part-time wage, while putting in long full-time hours. But I was delighted—I loved it. We were even beginning to deliver some in-person workshops again.

The reach was growing, the need was growing, and The Facebook group was growing rapidly. What had started as a simple advert for our work had evolved beyond anything we could have imagined. Thousands of people were joining, and the membership count rose by the day. I decided to turn it into a closed group, hoping it would make things easier to manage.

read more-Choose Love in moments of tension

Breaking Free from the Parenting Matrix

I was so excited and nervous to start this new parenting program. 28 days seemed like a long time, though. Would I manage to keep up with the work that might be set? What should I expect? It seemed like Bryan was building a community, an army even, of "Posties," he called us. He was being goofy about it and even had a picture of himself in the black coat and glasses from *The Matrix* movie, asking if we wanted the blue pill or the red pill before signing up.

He posted videos on his Facebook and hyped it up. As people signed up, we were all added to a new Facebook group called "The Post Lovalution." I was buzzing with anticipation.

Each morning, Bryan went live in the group. He made short videos with tasks. At first, he told us to spend a day reflecting on our own parents' experiences of parenting and our grandparents' experiences. Then he told us to curl up in the fetal position on our bed and try to remember anything we could about our own in-utero experience. Another time, we were to sit in our child's bedroom while they were out and imagine their internal world. These tasks seemed odd. Not what I had expected at all. They were focused on me, not my child. Some mornings I could watch them live and even get a chance to interact with Bryan; other times I would watch the replay. The more I worked through this daily, the more lightbulbs went off in my brain.

Then the tasks shifted more toward our relationship with the child. We were to list 20 different ways we could respond in those worst moments. Then, we were to purposely mess up and cause a drama. It was madness at times, but so incredibly effective. He told us to go three times each day and just sit beside our child and breathe. We could message Bryan with our sticking points, and he would get back to us with his feedback. It was brilliant. In the group, others were sharing how they were finding it. A community was forming. He asked us to memorize his stress model, video ourselves saying it, and post it. It took me ages to memorize this:

"All behaviors arise from a state of stress and fear. In between the behavior and the stress is the presence of a primary emotion. There are only two primary emotions: love and fear. So, it’s all coming from fear. It’s through expressing, processing, and understanding the fear that we calm the stress and diminish the behavior."

But in doing this, a deeper understanding of what these words really meant emerged. I had no idea at this stage that I would one day be saying this over and over each week during workshops I would deliver.

The program transformed our home. Steven started to see that there was something to this. Each day, I reported the details of the session and what I was learning. He could see that things in our home were changing. Meltdowns were reducing, not just with my wee guy, but even my autistic child's meltdowns had stopped. My own meltdowns weren’t happening either. Within our marriage, things had changed. We were learning to see each other’s fear, to come back, repair, and hold space to listen. The more I validated Steven’s fear, the more he started to see that he didn’t need to jump in and fix everything. He began supporting me so that I could support them. He wasn’t always great at staying calm or seeing the fear in the moment, but he was able to reflect afterward and recognize when he had been triggered.

Even when I told him about the regressed state—after I had first offered to hold and soothe my wee guy like a baby—and we witnessed how healing this could be. I suggested that I might even offer him a bottle. Steven was horrified. Surely I wasn’t serious. That was just too far. We had some harsh words over it. I was so frustrated at his shutdown of this idea as we had come so far. But later that evening, he came to me with an apology. He had spent some time googling it, obviously expecting validation for his belief that this was messed up, and learning that, actually, it was a thing? It did work. He apologized for his reaction and owned that it had freaked him out and seemed really wrong. Big changes were taking place in our home.

These changes were taking place in me most of all. In these worst moments, I was becoming aware of my triggers. In reflection afterward, I could see the moments from my own past that were coming up for me. Like wormholes in time, I was being sucked back into them—there were so many. I became acutely, painfully aware of how our parenting had affected our children through the years. In my mind’s eye, I could see flashes of my children as infants, toddlers, even babies, and recognize all of these moments filled with overwhelming stress and fear. It was horrific to start to recognize this. So much trauma. But I hadn’t known. I hadn’t understood. No one had told me there was another way.

Looking back, I feel so fortunate to have been part of those live sessions with Bryan. The content is still available through The Post Institute via the recordings, but no other group got to experience it live with access to Bryan in that way. It feels like fate put me there, exactly in the right place at the right time.

Social work could also see the difference. They agreed to cover the cost of the monthly subscription for two months. I had noticed on the website there were other courses. Part of signing up meant that I could work through these and become certified in Bryan’s model. "Why not?" I thought. I had no idea what use it might ever be to me.

No idea that this was about to become my call to arms.

The Post Institute-Parenting Matrix/ lovaolution Programme

https://www.newparentingloveolution.com/loveolution-program-review24717065

Read my next blog post-Finding my voice

From Chaos to Calm: My Parenting Breakthrough with Bryan Post

After discovering the work of Bryan Post, I couldn’t get enough of it. Every day, while driving in my car or working around the house, I was listening to his teachings. There were so many short videos on his Facebook and longer videos on his YouTube. My brain was on fire with all of this new information. It was like nothing I had ever heard before.

Was this man talking about me? Not my child. He was telling me that I had to calm down, that I was making the situation worse with my own stress, and that my child was not choosing these behaviors. The odd thing was, it was making sense. Somehow, it just felt right. Could it really be as simple as this? He was telling me to do nothing. To stop and breath and not make things worse.

I showed this to Steven. He was skeptical. It sounded too "airy-fairy." Too good to be true. Every new thing I learned, I would relay back to him. He was interested but not convinced.

The more I learned, the more curious I became. Bryan was teaching me about the brain and what happens when it goes into a fear state and how we all feed off each other's energy. I found myself having to pull my car over and put my head in my hands many times while listening, as my brain was blown by how much I could see myself in this information. I would shout in agreement at my phone as more information sparked moments of realisation. Lightbulb after lightbulb going off in my head.

But the real test was in those big moments with my child. He gave me plenty of opportunities to try this out. One evening, while he was melting down in his room, Steven and I waited it out downstairs. Bryan’s mantras ran through my head:

“All behaviors arise from stress and fear.”

“They cannot choose behaviors in this state.”

“Their thinking is confused and distorted.”

“They are regressed back into the trauma in these moments.”

I reminded Steven of these; he was still unconvinced. But I kept repeating them, trying to convince myself as much as him. “Okay,” I said, “I’m gonna try this.” Up I went.

My wee guy was in a rage, his room was wrecked. His face was red, and his body tense. He was on the bed, his body curled into a ball, refusing to look my way. The anger was emanating from him, palpable.

I asked if I could come in, and he grudgingly nodded. I sat on the floor. For a while, I said nothing. Bryan’s words echoed in my head again: “Just breath.” So I did. I wish I could remember all of that interaction from that day, but I can’t. I just know that things went very differently. I remember him moving closer and eventually cuddling in beside me. I mostly remember coming back down in awe to tell Steven about it, replaying it to him in disbelief. I remember calm was restored, and breakthroughs were made. My wee guy had been able to talk to me, and we had reflected together on what had led to him feeling and behaving this way. When I understood his experience, I felt very differently. Where there had previously been frustration and disappointment, there was now compassion and empathy. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.

Of course, I worried this was a fluke, a one-off. But as the days went on and I kept seeing the fear, kept seeing the regressed, stressed child underneath, the repair got easier and quicker. He started to expect that I would come to him in this way, and secure in the knowledge that we could have these moments afterwards. He started meeting me in the hallway, on the stairs, waiting. This was actually making a difference. And every time, I would go back to Steven, and we would marvel at what we were seeing. He was still resistant, but he couldn’t deny that there was something to this.

The more I learned, the more change we saw. I started offering ways for him to express his emotions through drawing, screaming, jumping, and even allowing a safe space for him to swear and get it all out. The meltdowns became less frequent and much shorter. I wasn’t perfect. I made many many mistakes. But I always came back to repair and afterwards, reflect, so that I could learn about what I could do differently.

So, when Bryan Post announced that he was offering a new parenting program, I had to sign up. He called it the ‘Parenting Matrix.’ It would last 28 days, and he would talk to us each day, delivering a short session with work for us to do daily. This was like the Matrix movie; he said that if we did this, we would be leaving the old parenting paradigm behind us and that there was no going back.

I was all in.

Read the next blog -Breaking free from the parenting Matrix

My First Blog Post: The Beginning of a Life-Changing Journey

I've been asked often if I have a blog. So, I’m going to give it a try. As a dyslexic human, this is no small task, so please be kind!

When I walked into the ACE Aware Nation seminar back in 2018, with a free ticket offered by my supervising social worker, I had no idea it would transform my life in every way imaginable. My foster child’s amazing social worker had already piqued my interest in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and introduced me to a fab Facebook group called "Connecting the Dots to ACEs." I had learned so much from this group and had already seen small changes in my child. Still, I was nervous. Should I even be here? Was I qualified for this? After all, I was just a hairdresser from Glasgow who had been fostering for six years—not exactly a professional.

As I parked and headed to the Armadillo building, I saw the others attending, all gathered outside. The queue was growing, and the rain was smirring down—typical Scottish weather, of course. Umbrellas were bumping. The doors were late in opening, and people were eager to get inside. A few folks started chatting: a social worker whose train had been running late and was thankful for the delayed and an early years worker who wasn’t sure what to expect from the event. We were eventually diverted to another building, only to be turned back again to the original building to finally get in. In the rush for seats, I managed to slip unnoticed to the very back, where I hid, feeling all of my insecurities bubble up as the empty seat beside me remained unclaimed.

Just as I was convincing myself I didn’t belong, a woman sat down next to me. We waited and waited some more. The event was running extremely late. Apologies were made, but the crowd stayed patient. A friendly conversation started between me and my neighbour, a social worker who had lost track of her colleagues somewhere in the audience. We talked about our hopes for the day, and through our conversation, I realized I knew a lot more about ACEs than I had given myself credit for. I shared links, groups, and info, and she was glad to take it.

Finally, two hours behind schedule, the lights dimmed, and the seminar began. To this day, I wonder if the delay was intentional—to spark those important conversations and connections.

It was wonderful. I sat in awe, listening to people whose names I had never heard before but who would soon become my beacons of hope and guidance: John Carnochan, Nicki Murray, James Docherty, Nadine Burke Harris. The information blew my mind. This was why I was the way I was. This was why my autistic child had trauma. I could now understand why my foster children couldn’t just stop certain behaviors. No wonder NO WONDER!!!!

I was gutted to miss Suzanne Zeedyk’s talk at the end due to the long delay. I had to get home—Steven was holding down the fort, and rush-hour traffic awaited me. I left with a heavy heart, carrying a bag of pamphlets and my programme.

Later that night, after the dinner, baths, and bedtime routines were done, I tried to relay bits of what I had learned to Steven. Flicking through the leaflets and programme, I wondered how we could change things. It was fascinating to understand ACEs and the reasons behind our behaviors, but how do we change them? I wanted more.

Then, as I scanned the back of the programme, I saw a name: BRYAN POST -THE POST INSTITUTE. He hadn’t been mentioned at the event, but I was curious. Despite being exhausted, I pulled out my phone and Googled him. Videos of Bryan came alive on my screen—his presence was glorious, and he was passionate about this parenting paradigm. His content was free and abundant. He mentioned something about "The Post Daily Dose, the best 10-minute parenting show on the internet," but I was too tired to explore more that night. I saved the links and promised myself to check them out the next day.

I went to bed, my mind swimming with everything I had heard that day. I felt hopeful but had no idea that my life was about to change in ways I could never have imagined. I was on the verge of a journey of self-discovery and healing. My family was about to transform from a battleground of meltdowns and yelling to a place of compassion and learning. More than that, I was about to find my life’s purpose. Everything my family and I had gone through had been leading to this moment, and it was all for a reason.

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This is just the beginning. There’s so much more I want to share about my journey into ACEs, trauma informed parenting, and how this knowledge has reshaped everything in my life. Stay tuned for more, and thank you for reading!

Check out my next blog post -From Chaos to Calm