Episode 14: How to Start Healing Inner Child Wounds & Practicing Decolonized Parenting

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. 

If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.

[EPISODE]

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. 

In this episode, you and I are going to go back to the basics, back to the whys, the foundation, the heart and soul of decolonized parenting and intergenerational family healing. This episode is a starter kit for decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting, and I hope that it helps you experiment with healing your inner child wounds and unlearning white capitalist conditioning in your parenting. That means I have some questions, frameworks, and invitations for you to play with as you’re loving up on your inner child while practicing social justice through your daily parenting. So that you can break the family cycles you don’t want to pass down, honor the ones you do, and align your parenting practice with your values. If that sounds generative, let’s do this. 

To start off, let’s talk about survival. Humans are and always have been survivors. Beyonce, Kelly, and Michelle sang about how they’re a survivor, they’re not gonna give up, they’re not gonna stop back in 2001. Way before that, Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest. And way, way, way before that about 400 million years ago, our nervous system developed the fight-flight-freeze stress responses that we now know about, thanks to the Polyvagal Theory. 

Our survival needs are so strong. Unlike baby giraffes who can walk independently right after birth, human babies depend solely on their adult caregivers for survival, caregivers who feed them, groom them, and develop an emotional connection or attachment relationship with them.  

To keep their caregivers available, close by, and happy, children unconsciously adapt their behaviors to please their caregivers. They even shame parts of themselves that their caregivers don’t like or don’t approve of to keep earning love and acceptance…to survive. Parts of themselves that are too much or not enough are gone, banished into exile to use the language of the Internal Family Systems theory. 

This is how inner child wounds develop: children twist themselves to contort, conform, and perform for their caregivers and this creates inner child wounds of rejection, abandonment, unworthiness, perfectionism, and the list goes on. 

My inner child wound of perfectionism comes from growing up in an immigrant working class family where I had to perform the role of the child who always works hard and over-delivers. I had to anticipate what each family member wanted and give it to them before they even opened their mouth to ask. If you watched Encanto, I’m Luisa through and through. I had to perform working hard and being perfect to earn love and belonging. I had to perform the script of the good, diligent child over and over and over again so much so that I literally contorted my body to fit in this shape. When I sit my spine is as straight as if I were wearing a corset. It’s because I was always literally leaning my spine forward anticipating what people wanted before they even know it. My back hardly touches the back rest of my chair. Laying on the couch to rest, never. 

The survival strategies I used aren’t good or bad. I did what I had to do to feel loved and to belong. And the same is true for whatever strategies you used. Our work here is to discern which strategy is adaptive and which one is outdated when it comes to you raising your child. 

When we take a step back to zoom out a bit, we—grownups-- do the same kind of shape shifting too but we do it to earn security and acceptance from society -- a society that’s built on white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. We contort, conform, and perform to these oppressors to survive, meaning to have access to food, housing, and employment…literally to survive.  

We have to talk and dress a certain way to be professional so we can keep pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We have to disconnect from our bodies and contort our posture in order to maximize our productivity and efficiency.  

We have been trained our whole lives to come out on top in the system that exploits us. So much so that I think we all have a Ph.D in White Supremacist, Colonial, Capitalist, and Patriarchal Studies certified and indoctrinated by the M-E-E-L-P Institute (Media, Economics, Education, Law, and Politics). 

And because we love our children, of course we train them to contort, conform, and perform for the oppressors too…to survive. Many decolonized parents told me that they want their kids to grow up and practice equity…yes…and still be able to come home and have roofs over their heads. So out of real and legitimate fear, parenting becomes 100 percent a training ground for our children to learn how to be efficient and effective when they sell their labor, how to exploit land and others to come out on top or to get ahead. Out of love and a desire to protect, parenting becomes a survival bootcamp for our children instead of a balance between teaching them to survive and holding space for them to thrive, live fully, and be all of who they are when it’s safe to do so. 

Decolonization means unlearning all of these oppressive scripts written by patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism and relearning reciprocity, interdependence, and power-with. 

As a decolonized parent, you start by detangling the knots of systemic oppression from your parenting practice. So that you can name whose voice you hear telling you to raise your child this way and that way. Is it your own voice that reflects your values of equity and compassion? Or is it capitalism’s voice that’s telling you to fill your child’s schedule with extracurricular activities to train them early on to be an efficient cog in the machine of capitalism?

With this awareness of how systemic oppression is shaping your parenting decisions, you can begin to see that your humanity, dignity, and worthiness have nothing to do with the wealth capitalism tells you to accumulate or the power over others that colonialism teaches you to acquire. 

With this awareness, you can (re)write the parenting playbook so you show up as the parent you want to be and raise your child by your values. As you unsubscribe from the conditioning of oppressive norms that are telling you how to act and how to love, you can uproot, upend, and unhook the oppression from your head and in your home. 

While advocating for policy changes around the prison industrial complex is important, abolishing the prison in your head by decolonizing your parenting is even more critical. 

If this all sounds good but you’re wondering where to start, I got you. I have three questions I invite you to play with. They are three questions that you can ask yourself to strengthen your discernment muscles as you engage in self-reflection and cultivate self-trust. These three questions are: Why? How old? And who?

Let’s unpack the first question. Why? “Why” is such a powerful way to realign your action with your values. Why am I feeling so frazzled when I can’t get my toddler to follow the sleep schedules? Why am I feeling the pressure to yell at my crying child to get them to stop crying and to show who’s in charge here? Asking “Why?” lets us reevaluate if we’re abolishing oppression in our parenting or recreating it, either with our children through punishment and coercion or with ourselves through self-shaming. 

When I doubt myself and shame myself for not having all the answers and all the plans, I ask myself “Why? Why am I trading places with my oppressors and being so unkind to myself?” This usually snaps me out of that shame spiral and reminds me to send this shame back to the sender. So that’s my first invitation for decolonized parenting practice: ask why.

The second question is “how old?” When your child pushes your parenting buttons and you feel angry because your child disrespected you, how old is this feeling of not being respected? Is it reminding you of when you were little or of the inner child wound of not being seen and heard? Or is it even older, ancestral and historical, reminding you of a similar kind of invisibility and invalidation but from society’s racism, ableism, and so on? By asking “how old,” you put your reaction in a historical context and understand it better. I often lift up two quotes from Resmaa Menakem. The first one is quote “what’s hysterical is historical.” End quote. For example, when your toddler is walking away and refusing to eat the dinner you made, you feel like your child’s rejecting or refusing you. This reaction might be historical where it rubs against your inner child wound of feeling rejected by your caregivers when you were little. The second teaching from Resmaa is quote “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.” End quote. 

By naming how old this wound is, you’ll know if you’re responding to your actual child in front of you or if you’re reacting to your inner child from the past.

More importantly, asking “How old?” will help us avoid projecting pain from the past onto our children. Your child will never be the ideal mother or father or parental figure you yearned for as a child. So accountability for a decolonized parent looks like knowing who needs your attention right now: your inner child from the past or your actual child in the present. Because once you know that, you can continue healing your inner child while raising your child. That’s our second question: how old?   

The third question is “who.” Who are you outside of these social roles, scripts, expectations and identities? When you look in the mirror, who do you see? Do you see yourself? Or do you see the projections the oppressors smeared on your skin? Without the scripts called race, class, ability, or gender to guide you how to act, how to love, how to be, can you trust your own inner knowing enough to look in the mirror and see yourself and take up space as YOU…not as Mary the accountant, LaKeisha a Black single mom of three, or Lex a disabled, transgender community organizer. No matter how rad or radical these scripts are, I think what matters more is you as a human, as Mary period, as Lakeisha period, as Lex period.  

Decolonized parenting is knowing that the identities assigned to you are not your life’s assignment. All of the shoulds and musts based on race, gender, and class aren’t your identity. 

Decolonized parenting is shedding away these layers of socially constructed expectations and unsubscribing from this oppressive social conditioning while you’re trying to survive the system.

Some of us can’t “unsubscribe” so to speak because there are bills to pay or it’s not safe for you to be quote unquote authentic at work so you have to keep codeswitching…that’s okay. Please do what you need to do to survive. I think even if you just awaken to see the water you’re swimming in, that’s liberation…because you’re freeing yourself from the habit of automatically shaming yourself for not being enough for the oppressors. Liberation is knowing that you’re not conforming for fun…you’re coerced to conform. Because if you stop playing that game that is capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy there’s a real material consequence of no food and housing.

Decolonized parenting is replacing the convenience of having the answers or following someone else’s 5-step hacks with listening to your discernment and trusting your inner voice. 

That’s the heart of the work: to play by your own parenting playbook not by outdated family programming and oppressive social conditioning. It’s for you to be all of who you are as a parent, leaving behind the comfort of conforming to the oppressors and the illusion of security from surviving but not fully living. 

The soul of the work, however, is extending the same level of compassion to those who raised you and those who came before you. They were probably fighting the same demons but with much less awareness and fewer coping resources than you have now. Putting your caregivers in their social, political, and cultural context is the core of intergenerational family healing work. It’s not just about breaking the cycle or writing a love letter to your inner 3-year-old and calling it a day…. 

I have two invitations to share with you to start inner child wound healing and intergenerational family healing. 

The first invitation is love yourself like you’re re-parenting yourself. Reparenting yourself means giving yourself the love you wish you received from your caregivers when you were little as much as you can. And for whatever self-love you cannot give to yourself, find what you lack in those you trust whether they’re your partners, close friends, or chosen family. Because I invite you to unsubscribe from the myth of individualism. You can’t be everything for everyone and you alone can’t be the sole solution for your suffering. This suffering is systemic, so this suffering has to be shared and held communally. 

Intergenerational family healing is about you being in the right relationship with yourself first so you can be in the right relationship with your caregivers, elders, ancestors, land, community, and the future generations.

Intergenerational family healing is both passing down a legacy of compassion and liberation to your child and doing the healing work your ancestors couldn’t. 

To weave the past, present, and future together, begins with you putting your mask on first and filling your cup first. When your cup is full from you re-parenting yourself and building a community of those you love and trust, then you can discern which family patterns to throw away in a recycle bin and which ones to regift to the next generations. 

The second invitation is to grow up your view of your caregivers to use Dr. Fishbane’s words. It begins with you bringing curiosity to the context your caregivers were in. This doesn’t mean prematurely forgiving your caregivers or condoning their action or inaction. I’ll leave that kind of boundary setting to you. What we’re doing here is simply planting the seeds of change by being curious. You can ask: how did my caregivers contort, conform, and perform for white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy to pay bills, have a roof over their heads, and put food on the dinner table? Which parts of themselves did they have to sacrifice or shame away to survive the systemic and historical oppression? And, how did their survival shape how available and present they were to you as a child? How did it affect the ways they expressed love and care to you?  

These questions are an invitation to go a step beyond just accepting that “oh they did the best they could.” It’s both-and. Yes, they did the best they could and that really hurt me as a child and now I know the context that they were in and where they were coming from. 

With this awareness and understanding, you can see your parents as your grandparents’ children to paraphrase the late Michael Kerr. 

Another important point I want to make is that intergenerational family healing isn’t just about you doing the work that your ancestors couldn’t. It’s also about reclaiming the resilience that your people, your ancestors have cultivated. Your family inheritance isn’t just about pain and wounds. It’s also about gifts, resilience, and strengths. This has saved me over and over again. When I honor my ancestors and connect with them, I’m plugged into something bigger than me and I know I’m not alone. The depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome I’m feeling, some of the ancestors went through it too. So I could ask not just where do we go from here? But also how did you, elevated ancestors, get through the oppression and violence so I, too, can overcome and endure?

Maya Angelou wrote in her poem Our Grandmothers quote "I go forth alone, I stand as ten thousand." End quote. 

I think that sums up the power of intergenerational family healing so eloquently. 

I know that the intergenerational transmission of trauma and historical oppression can seem so big, so old, and so out of control as we’re both advocating for policy changes and doing the inner healing work. While we’re waiting for policies and systems to change, what we can do now is get free from the outdated family patterns and oppressive social norms in whatever we do, and especially in the ways we’re raising our children. What we can do now is to rewire our overworked and hypervigilant nervous system that’s been co-opted by capitalism and whiteness and shift towards safety, wellbeing, and groundedness even if it’s for 10 seconds. What we can do now is untwist our body out of the contortion and conformity as we’re stepping into our own power, dignity, and humanity…in a community.  

That is how we address both inner child and internalized oppression wounds at the same time. That is how we practice both intergenerational family healing and social justice at the same time. And that is how we become decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parents…together.

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.