If they did try to latch onto me being trans as a way to push buttons, I’d just try my best to positively engage with them to figure out why they’re lashing out and what we could do to make it better and once they’d calmed down, try to have a conversation about why what they said was mean even if they didn’t mean or want to upset me.
Its funny. I would have said something similar pre-adoption about the more tricky aspects of being a family. It’s a perfectly good, practically textbook response that is balanced and measured. I also think it’s how we would like to respond, all things being equal.
Having lived adoption for some years now, my answer would be different. The way that our emotions, vulnerabilities and weakness combine to utterly undermine our ability to be ever measured and balanced cannot be underestimated. I went through years of therapy to address childhood trauma, and at the time of assessment could hand on heart say it didn’t impact me day by day, and I had well established strategies for those times it did creep in.
Enter two deeply traumatised children and all bets were off. When children have been neglected and abused, they very quickly and instinctively learn your own vulnerabilities because that instinct was needed to help them survive. They don’t so much press your buttons as jump all over them. And when they aren’t pressing your buttons your own experiences come to the fore, either really wanting to give your child a better experience of being parented than you had or, being honest. making you question yourself and wonder if your parents were right.
By way of example, my parents were very “spare the rod, spoil the child”, they were very physically violent to each other and to me and my siblings.
I have never agreed with physical punishment, would never hit my kids but when I was in the weeds dealing with two very challenging children I found myself wondering if my parents weren’t right and whether I was such a difficult child they needed to be violent (which is a complete headfuck). Worse still, I started wondering if my kids just needed “a good hiding”, because I knew how to behave so my parents got it right?
In those moments I was so angry, and hurt, and confused that there was no way I could positively engage with my kids. I was fighting my own survival instincts and trying to connect was impossible. I needed to diffuse things, create safe space between me and them until I was more regulated, sometimes I needed to apologise for my reaction to them.
It was a sign I needed more support, needed to go back into therapy and needed to step back and remember why my kids weee struggling with their behaviour, ie they were behaving “in front of me” but not towards me, it wasn’t personal.
It’s important to have the textbook answer, but it’s also important to know who you really are under stress, or when feeling deeply hurt, or when your own trauma is triggered otherwise you’ll not build in safety valves and will find yourself wondering why you can’t respond in the measured, caring way that you thought you would.
Absolutely nothing will bring up old trauma than your own kids, I know to look for it now especially as my DD reaches an age where I was especially vulnerable.
Now, with years of dealing with my own triggers I’m more likely to say “I don’t know how I’ll deal with X, I hope I can respond with my child’s best interests at heart, I will always avoid acting my own stuff out on them but I might need time and space and support to figure out what to do in this circumstance”.
You can’t draw on experience you don’t have yet, which is why folk are making the suggestions they are, some will be helpful and some not.