What It Really Means To Be A Cycle-Breaker

"We see you, cycle-breakers."

I encounter this phrase regularly on TikTok and Instagram and I am, without a doubt, the target audience.

Like so much modern-day online parenting content, at its best the term inspires solidarity and a shared vulnerability. Coming from actual mental health professionals, the term is useful. And the work is difficult. After enough use, though, the meaning gets warped. The term is inevitably flattened. Now, when I see influencers or parenting gurus touting their appreciation for cycle-breakers, I’m not so sure I feel seen as much as marketed to.

It will still be cloaked in “refreshingly honest” sentiment, but underneath, what you're ultimately receiving is a sales pitch. A course, a PDF, a membership, a workshop, all available at the link in bio. You could almost forget that the "cycle" we're trying to break here is the cycle of abuse.

Internet pandering aside, we know that adverse childhood experiences can indeed be passed along from one generation to the next, behaviorally and perhaps even biologically. And research shows that parents who were exposed to trauma as children themselves process the daily challenges of parenting very, very differently than those without adverse childhood experiences.

Cycle-breaking is the idea that we, as parents who experienced trauma, are doing the hard work of healing so future generations don't have to. Parents with PTSD (or in my case, C-PTSD) might find their flight-or-flight responses activated by their own kid’s behavior (check); might grapple with painful or scary memories unexpectedly resurfacing during otherwise mundane moments (check); might struggle to connect with and stay present with their kids (check). Might even feel a very confusing and bizarre strain of envy in watching their partners or themselves give to their children what they, as kids, deserved but never received. (Big check. My husband’s an awesome dad, and also, it’s super weird to feel jealous of my kids on that front.) As one resource succinctly puts it, trauma “does not preclude us as parents from experiencing the love and joy associated with parenting, but may create a more complicated journey.”

But in the context of the pop parenting psych lexicon, where talk of attachment styles, boundaries, nervous system regulation, and dysregulation have become common playground vernacular, “cycle-breaking” is no longer just about the kind of trauma we’d consider adverse childhood experiences. As with so much language that has escaped therapists’ couches and trickled into the mainstream dialect (don’t gaslight me!), its meaning has shifted and expanded and can sometimes mean whatever you need it to mean in order to fit your identity.

Go poking around online parenting spaces, and you’ll find plenty of resources to help you break those cycles — some free, many not. But how many of these address what these parents actually need, beyond hyper-individualized self-care? The reality of healing is messy, lonely, expensive and time-consuming in a way that can’t possibly be captured with Canva or distilled in an Instagram caption. No amount of gratitude journaling or mindfulness mantras will get my insurance to cover EMDR.

Decades before it was a hashtag, the idea of disrupting harmful multigenerational patterns emerged from Murray Bowen’s theory of family systems, which he developed in the mid-20th century. Bowen spent decades studying families closely (and I do mean closely — entire families lived on-site in the NIMH research ward for one of his projects).

The theory he developed in his work there, and later at Georgetown, was a radical departure from the Freudian psychoanalysis that dominated the field at the time: rather than focus on one individual psyche, Bowen theory sees individuals as components in an interlocking system (the family) — a system that inherits and repeats behavioral patterns from preceding generations. Disrupting those patterns requires “differentiation of self,” or learning to act autonomously, rather than continuing to be an unintentional participant in whatever behavioral bullshit you inherited from your parents, and their parents before them.

Nowadays, depending on who you ask, the cycles worth breaking could be anything one might deem “toxic." Sometimes this means you grew up with abuse, and you’re working hard not to repeat that. Sometimes this simply means you’re trying to improve upon the previous generation, something hopefully most of us are doing anyway. Lumping these two very different efforts together into the same catchy term risks trivializing recovery from abuse and overdramatizing the human tendency toward progress.

It’s so tempting to believe there is a magic bullet for any parenting challenge, just behind the paywall: This book will potty-train your child in three days! This script will stop a tantrum in its tracks! This sleep consultant will teach your infant to sleep through the night! But when it comes to the daily work of disrupting multiple generations of harmful patterns? To imply this can possibly be distilled into a $99 virtual course feels cheap and misleading.

Prentis Hemphill is a therapist and author who also has a traumatic past. Hemphill remembers holding their newborn and instinctively wanting to hide from their baby’s unflinching gaze. “‘This kind of intimacy is dangerous,’ was the fear that I had," they told me. To stay present with their child rather than withdraw, Hemphill tells me they learned to use somatic exercises like breathwork (a practice of paying close attention to your breathing).

“Instead of disconnecting from her, and laying the foundation for disconnection when she wanted closeness,” says Hemphill, “I actually stayed there and created this other kind of connection that [at the same time] repaired something in my own past with my parents."

Strategies and workshops abound, but maybe sometimes it’s as simple as staying in the moment with your kid when they’re looking at you. Or, as Hemphill very succinctly put it: “Presence over perfection, every single time.” (Parenting, and reparenting, is a beautiful, multi-dimensional time-warp in that way: each time I give my kids what they need in the moment, the kid in me gets a little bit, too.)

Whatever the answer ends up being for me, I doubt it will be something I can buy.

Celebrity parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy mentions cycle-breakers often, and promotes a Reparenting Ourselves workshop on her paid membership platform, Good Inside. I asked her why she thought the terminology was suddenly so widespread. “To be honest, I'm not exactly sure why this concept has taken off,” she responded via voice note (very Dr. Becky of her!). “I think if this generation of parents is very invested in their mental health, and their kids' mental health, and they understand that these are processes, not single moments, then those terms being more popularized makes sense.”

When I asked Kennedy what cycle-breakers really need in order to thrive, she mentioned things like self-discovery, self-care, self-compassion, self-awareness — skills that might be gleaned from therapy, or meditation, bodywork, or reading — whatever works. Regardless of the method, she says, the goal is deep introspection. “Being a cycle-breaker means you're willing to look at the things you probably always needed, and didn't get,” she said. “And that's not a process of blaming others as much as it's a process of figuring out how to empower yourself, and get the things you always needed.”

While I’d like to think my own parenting style is more nuanced and thoughtful than simply reacting to whatever my parents did, there are harmful aspects of my childhood I refuse to pass along: hitting children, chasing them, scaring them, screaming at them, getting wasted in front of them. In the heat of one of my kid’s meltdowns, it’s tempting to revert to dealing with conflict the same way it was modeled for me as a kid.

These first few years of motherhood have brought challenges well beyond the scope of “What to Expect.” The screaming, kicking, biting, and thrashing of a tantrum can kick my nervous system into high gear. Admittedly, meltdowns aren’t exactly chill for anyone, but I can sometimes feel myself frozen and zapped back in time to the scarier moments of childhood (in a way one might describe as “triggered,” if that word hadn’t been mostly stripped of its clinical meaning).

Sometimes this manifests as a lightning bolt of rage over which, for a few frightening seconds, it feels like I cannot control: a small seed of my dad’s explosive anger that so frequently blossomed into cruelty. Other times, I numb out and shut down, hiding the same way I did as a kid being hit with a switch or having her mouth washed out with dish soap. And every (completely developmentally normal, albeit unpleasant) “No Mama!” or “I don’t like you!” rejection cuts to the bone: it’s all too tempting to see these moments as living (kicking, screaming, biting) proof of all the shame and negative self-beliefs I carry around with me — a referendum on my parenting, and on my personhood. Like it’s not just the body keeping the score, but my own damn kid.

In some of these moments, my higher parenting self is working in overdrive to be conscientious; to teach my kids that which I was never taught about appropriate expressions of feelings; to be a safe place for him. But it’s extremely hard to do any of that while simultaneously inhabiting my own 7-year-old self hiding under the bed from my dad.

I’m still working on getting out from under that bed. And what works for me won’t work for everyone else. As far as what cycle-breakers actually deserve? Affordable mental health care comes to mind. Trauma-informed practices and policies in the workplace, in schools, in health care, in communities. Systems in place to support parents and their children, not just tolerate them. Conversations about building the kind of interdependent, intergenerational communities — those mythical “villages” — that hold and nurture a family, not just with practical support but with solidarity and care. As Hemphill puts it, "I think there's this big element around the social piece that gets missed too often. We don't live in a culture that actually supports people having those kinds of relationships with their kids, or even supports kids being in the world at all anymore.”

Whatever the answer ends up being for me, I doubt it will be something I can buy. And I’m almost positive it’s not something I can do by myself, in the glow of my screen.

Gray Chapman is a freelance writer who has written about motherhood and maternal health for The Guardian, Atlanta Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, and other outlets. Follow her work on Substack and Instagram.