Show notes
Kids who expect to be rejected find a way to get rejected. It isn’t manipulation. It’s prediction.
Robyn Gobbel is a children’s mental health expert, host of The Baffling Behavior Show, and author of Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors and its new companion guided journal. Before she moved into training professionals, she spent years as a play therapist for kids with complex trauma, including one child she saw nearly every week from age six until he was eighteen. This is a conversation about why kids do things that make no sense, and why the parents raising them so often feel like every next move will be wrong.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Disorganized Attachment in Kids - What happens when the person a child runs to for safety is also the source of danger, and why that no-way-out experience shows up as the most baffling behavior of all.
▪️ When Parents Feel Stuck Too - How parents of dysregulated kids end up feeling like every next move will make things worse, and how that reaction can reenact the very experience their child is trying to heal from.
▪️ Overreacting to Your Kid - How to trace why a lie about homework sets off a life-or-death reaction in your body, using a “what would be bad about that?” chain to find the fear actually driving the moment.
▪️ Where Parents Get Repair Wrong - The three ways it goes sideways: processing every rupture until it feels perfectly clean, avoiding repair for fear of setting things off again, and never noticing the rupture at all.
▪️ Siblings of a Struggling Kid - Why the goal isn’t keeping siblings from being impacted, and how shared family language helps them make sense of their own resentment without blaming themselves.
▪️ Grieving Your Family’s Story - The grief of realizing this isn’t the family you pictured, and why being honest about the impact helps more than trying to fix everything.
🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️Ep 101 | The Neuroscience of Toxic Shame w/ Robyn Gobbel
▪️Ep 203 | The Nervous System Side of Attachment: Understanding Anxiety, Avoidance & Safety Through the Body w/ Heidi Priebe
▪️Ep 208 | When Each Parent Leaves a Different Scar: From Attachment Wounds to Parenting Triggers, Rage & Repair w/ Amber Trejo
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