Reddit reviews The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

I don't have kids but I found that reading some parenting books has helped me to understand both about myself and things that my parents did wrong, and how normal healthy parents respond to their kids. "The Conscious Parent" is an amazing book for this. It is to teach parents how to respond to their kids in a healthy way while being conscious of their own reactions and feelings and how to NOT put your issues on your kid. It's a great book. I love what the author is doing in trying to teach parents how to respond to their kids lovingly and not as a reaction /due to their own issues.

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Parent-Transforming-Ourselves-Empowering/dp/1897238452

This STEP parenting series is also good about how to talk to kids and what consequences are supposed to be like. (not crazy insane screaming punishments and 6 month groundings, like happened at my house) There's a different book for each age range.

https://www.amazon.com/Parents-Handbook-Systematic-Effective-Parenting/dp/0979554209/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504368293&sr=1-1&keywords=step+parenting+systematic

The fact that you are concerned about how to best respond to your potential child and how it will make them feel means you are already far ahead of your parents. N parents don't think about this stuff.

I want to encourage you and say your CPTSD won’t affecting your parenting and you providing her with love and security is enough, but I also don’t want to delude you into a false sense of security. To answer your question as to how I do it: Firstly, I put in a massive amount of effort everyday to keep myself grounded and mindful and conscious of how I’m acting/reacting towards my child. On top of that, I never let myself slip into depressive states. On top of that, I have learned to manage and control all of my triggers so that my emotional states never negatively affect my child.


One major element of CPTSD is that it is an attachment disorder. This attachment disorder WILL affect your ability to provide a consistent sense of safety and security to your little one unless you learn how to manage and counteract those insecurities. Another element of CPTSD is that it causes you to develop a distrust/distaste for humans, and a desire to avoid human interaction. This will be absolutely detrimental to your child as he/she ages. All children rely on their parents to provide them with safe, healthy and consistent family and friends. It’s a very tiring and very difficult job, but it creates a ‘safety net’ of security on which your child can lean. How you interact with and value others will turn into how your child interacts with and values others. You will have to spend lots of time around other moms, letting your child play with their child. It’s a strain on you emotionally and mentally, but it’s necessary for healthy child development.


The best advice I can give you as a fellow parent with CPTSD is to start searching for a trauma psychologist and get an appointment scheduled ASAP. Of course anyone can recover from CPTSD without the aid of a psychologist, but when you add a child to the mix, quality and speed of recovery becomes a very important factor. Getting a psychologist to help you process your trauma and learn newer and better ways to do things will save you a lot of time and heartache. A psychologist will also teach you the importance of obtaining and maintaining friendships, and how to better manage all the triggers that parenting will bring up for you.

In the meantime, here is a short list of my all-time favorite parenting books. I’ve read probably hundreds of parenting books at this point: most are bad, a few are great. These are the best, most knowledgeable books I’ve found for ‘people like us’, at least in my opinion:

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering our Children

ParentSpeak: What's Wrong with How We Talk to Our Children--and What to Say Instead

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind


Feel free to PM me anytime :)

Read this book. It is great. It will really help come to terms with that.


The Conscious Parent