Grounded
Parenting with Complex PTSD
You are not the people who hurt you. And your past does not get the final word.
If you carry Complex PTSD from a childhood that hurt you, you know the fear that wakes you at night: that the trauma will reach your children the way it reached you. That a flashback will turn you, for a moment, into someone you swore you'd never be.
Grounded says something truer, and it says it from the inside. Written from lived experience, it names the hard parts no one talks about, the emotional flashbacks, the hypervigilance, the cruel inner critic, the freezing and the rage, and hands you a real, practical toolkit for each.
You don't have to be healed to be a good parent. You only have to keep coming back, and this book shows you, gently and practically, how.
Available now in Kindle eBook and paperback on Amazon UK and Amazon US. Part of The Steady Series by Esme Hartley.
A real toolkit, not platitudes.
Grounded names the hard parts honestly, then walks you through the practical skills that actually help, written by someone who has used every one of them.
- Catch an emotional flashback, and come back to the present
- Grounding: the skill that brings you home to now
- Repair, your most powerful tool after a hard moment
- Build the felt safety you never had, for the children you love
- Break the cycle, so they inherit your love, not your wounds
Chapter 1, The Cereal Aisle
The first pages of Grounded. Read it, and see if the voice is one you trust.
It was the cereal aisle that undid me.
My son was four. We were halfway round the weekly shop, the trolley already full, and he wanted the cereal with the cartoon tiger on it, the expensive one, the one that's ninety per cent sugar and a free plastic toy. I said no. He asked again, louder. I said no again. And then he did what four-year-olds do: he dropped to the supermarket floor, arched his back, and began to scream. Full siren. The kind that makes other shoppers slow down to look.
And something happened to me that I had no words for at the time.
The fluorescent lights seemed to brighten and tunnel. The sound of his screaming went strangely far away and strangely huge at the same time. My heart was suddenly slamming, my hands had gone cold and tingling, and I felt, this is the part that's hard to explain, I felt small. Not metaphorically. I felt, in my body, about six years old. My adult self, the one pushing the trolley, simply wasn't there anymore. In her place was a terrified child in a thirty-something body, standing over her own screaming son with absolutely no idea how to be the grown-up, because every cell in her body believed she was the child.
I don't remember deciding to do it. I remember my hand gripping his arm too hard, and my voice coming out in a low, vicious hiss I didn't recognise, a voice from my own childhood, my mother's voice, saying "Get UP. Stop it. You're embarrassing me." And his face. His startled, frightened, betrayed little face, looking up at the person who was supposed to be his safe place and finding, instead, someone scary.
We left the trolley. I got him to the car. And then I sat in the driver's seat, shaking, and I thought the thought that had haunted me since the day he was born: I'm doing it. I swore I never would, and I'm doing it. I'm becoming her.
If you know that feeling, the feeling of your own past reaching up through your hands and out of your mouth toward your child, then this book is for you, and I want to tell you the thing that took me years and a lot of help to understand:
That wasn't bad parenting. That was a flashback.
The story continues in Grounded.
A note on care. Grounded is written from lived experience and is not a substitute for professional assessment or treatment. It includes UK and international support resources throughout. If you are struggling, you deserve real support, please see the Resources page, where help is gathered in one place.
Grounded, frequently asked
Can you be a good parent with complex PTSD?
Absolutely. Complex PTSD makes parenting harder, emotional flashbacks, hypervigilance, a cruel inner critic, but none of those make you unfit. With grounding skills and repair, you can give your children the felt safety you may never have had yourself.
What is an emotional flashback?
An emotional flashback is a sudden return of the feelings of past trauma, fear, shame, helplessness, usually without any visual memory. It can feel like being a frightened child again. Grounded teaches you to recognise one and come back to the present.
Will my childhood trauma affect my children?
Unhealed trauma can pass down, but it doesn't have to. Recognising your triggers, grounding yourself, and repairing after hard moments are exactly how the cycle gets broken, and that work is what this book is about.
What's the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD?
PTSD usually follows a single traumatic event; complex PTSD (C-PTSD) develops from prolonged, repeated trauma, often in childhood. C-PTSD adds difficulties with emotional regulation, self-worth, and relationships, all of which Grounded addresses for parents.
