Ep 22: How My Parents & I Are Breaking Our Family Cycles Together
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:00] Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.
[EPISODE]
Welcome to Episode 22 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
In this episode, you and I are going to explore what it looks like to put your parents or caregivers in their contexts to break your family’s intergenerational cycles. I’ll share my own story…specifically the story of when I slammed the door in my parents’ faces last month. To start, I’ll unpack how my mother and I got to the root of our family rule to “always be nice, polite, and grateful”. Then we’ll reflect together on how you are teaching gratitude to your child and nurturing their emotional literacy. Next I’ll share how my father and I had an honest conversation about his survival strategy that he projects onto me. And then we’ll pause to reflect so that you can identify your parental figures’ survival strategies that might be hidden behind your own family rules or patterns. As always, after each section, I’ll share some reflective questions so that you can take a moment to apply what we’re talking about to yourself, your caregivers this holiday season or your child.
Family gatherings often bring up old, unhealed wounds. And healing these wounds is a lifelong journey and I’m right there doing this healing work next to you.
Let’s rewind and go back to the moment I slammed the door in my parents’ faces last month.
So, yes, I lost my cool. My inner child wound got triggered by what my parents said.
My throat closed up, my stomach tightened, my face got heated… three seconds later… I slammed the door.
Last month I was in California to see my parents who flew from Thailand to visit me. We hadn’t seen one another in three years.
I was excited to see my parents. I also dreaded the visit. I knew the visit wouldn’t exactly be a “vacation” for me.
My body was too familiar with this feeling of being torn. On one hand, I definitely wanted to take care of my parents because I love them. On the other hand, I was anxious about having to be the “parentified” child who had to anticipate and meet my parents’ every need.
If you’re experiencing a mixed bag of feelings as you’re planning to see your family, please know you’re not alone. Those feelings are information not character flaws.
In my case, I felt duty-bound to make sure everyone was content and the family dynamic was peaceful (no feathers ruffled).
Welp, with my grand exit followed by a dramatic door slam, I think it’s safe to say some feathers got ruffled…big time.
In the past though, my parents would use their old survival strategies like using the silent treatment or becoming passive aggressive. And I would use my old survival strategy of people pleasing to “stuff my feelings down, suck it up, and smile.”
But the door slam (along with my personal inner child healing work over the past seven years) became a grand slam.
The door wasn’t exactly slammed shut. It was slammed and left ajar. There was room for me to heal my inner child wounds and cultivate intergenerational family healing with my parents.
I talked WITH (not “to” not “at”)… WITH my parents about the reactivity each of us had and how to react less and respond more compassionately to one another.
(If you’re a child of immigrants like me, I know you might appreciate the depth of having a real conversation about feelings with your own caregivers.)
I’d love to share two different ways that I put my parents in their contexts, worked to understand them from where they came from, and then invited them to do this intergenerational family healing with me.
Grounding our caregivers in their contexts gives us the information we need to both be compassionate towards them and to set the just-right kind of boundaries, when necessary.
Let’s start with how my mother and I decolonized our family rule of “always be nice, polite, and grateful.”
From “Nice” to “Honest”
After I slammed the door, I felt really guilty and mortified three seconds later. So I went for a quick walk to metabolize that excess activation in my sympathetic nervous system (or my fight self-protection mode).
Once I was more present, I talked to my mom and apologized to her for snapping. She lectured me about how a lady should be nice and proper. And spoiler alert: expressing feelings too passionately and slamming doors wouldn’t count as nice and proper in my family.
So my mom repeated her rule about a lady must be nice, polite, and proper that I’ve heard over and over again since I was little. And for a split second, I felt a sense of déjà vu and could see myself doing my usual nod, smile, and people please by saying “yes, Mom…” which I’ve done over and over again since I was little. It would have been easier to repeat this little skit that my mom and I are used to performing for each other.
But because of my personal commitment to heal my inner child wounds and break outdated family cycles like this one… I remember putting a firm pause on my neck and head that were ready to nod in agreement and another firm pause on my face that was ready to grin and bear it to not ruffle any feathers. I quickly checked in with myself and saw that yes, my cup wasn’t empty. I had the bandwidth to maybe disrupt this outdated script my mom and I use. I read the room and my mom was present.
So I jumped on this opportunity to do my own decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational family healing with my mom aka I took my own medicine that I keep sharing with you.
We ended up having an honest talk about where her teaching of “nice and proper” came from and why it was personally important to her.
We both landed on the same answer: patriarchy. My mom shared that she survived capitalism and kept her jobs because she played the game, smiled, and nodded….being “nice and proper” to keep close proximity to patriarchy.
Now that she is retired, I proposed that “nice and proper to people please the patriarchy” was an outdated survival strategy. I wondered with her if she wanted to upgrade “nice and proper” to “real, raw, and honest.”
Because I wanted to connect with her emotion to emotion in a “real, raw, and honest” way.
It turns out my mom actually would like that too.
Having this heart-to-heart conversation with my mom was so liberating for me.
I felt free from the old dynamic where I was my mom’s baby (or what she calls me gaogia) and where mom, to me, is MOM...capitalized M-O-M-exclamation point. I could shift the dynamic to be an adult child talking to my mom…adult to adult.
I felt free from the old script that I wrote about my mother where she’s flawed and couldn’t love me in the ways I wanted to be loved. By putting her in her social-political context, I can see that she’s parenting me by the parenting playbook written by patriarchy. Similarly, by putting her in her historical context, I can see that she’s a byproduct of those who came before her.
By seeing my mother and the scripts she’s performing to survive systemic oppression, I could say to her, “mom, with the time you have left with me on Earth, let’s get free from these outdated survival strategies.”
I was “growing up my relationship with my mom” to paraphrase Dr. Mona Fishbane, a clinical psychologist who’s an expert in neurobiology.
I’m excited to get to know my mom better and love all parts of who she is.
A moment of reflection: family rules
Okay your turn.
If those who raised you have already joined the ancestors or there’s no room to engage them in a reparative conversation like I had with my mother, I honor that. I wholeheartedly honor the boundaries you’ve set with those who raised you.
My invitation is for you to take a moment, if you’d like, to reflect on which of your child’s behaviors you tend to praise and encourage and which of their behaviors you tend to criticize and discourage. How do these patterns connect to the family rules that get passed down across generations and that you grew up with? Many parents told me that this quick assessment is a non-shaming way to check if they’re unintentionally repeating the same family cycles or patterns they’re trying to break.
I’ll repeat the reflective questions again:
Which of your child’s behaviors do you tend to praise and encourage and which of their behaviors do you tend to criticize and discourage?
How do these patterns connect to the intergenerational family rules that you grew up with?
The hidden cost of gratitude
Speaking of family rules, another family rule that my mother and I unpacked together is this rule around always having to be grateful. My mom would say quote “stop complaining, go meditate, and be grateful” end quote… as a response to almost every family interaction that involves anger, sadness, or disappointment.
Please don’t get me wrong I truly love my parents. I know that my mother grew up in a family that didn’t talk about feelings either. It’s how she was raised and also her survival strategy. While understanding that opens more space for compassion for her, I can question this family rule and wonder if it’s aligned with my values. This process of discernment is one of the adult developmental skills many of us at some point cultivate. This non-shaming process of discernment is the work of growing up my view of my parents and healing our intergenerational family wounds.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, first of all, thank you so much. Second of all, you already know that I love gratitude and mindfulness. But the kind of gratitude that is in my family rule is forced gratitude.
It’s like when you cook pasta in boiling water and the boiling water is bubbling up really fast. It’s about to overflow. Emotions are bubbling up. And my mother uses this family rule of “stop complaining, go meditate, and be grateful” to put a lid on top of the feelings pot.
When gratitude is a default for every emotion, it cuts short the exploration and curiosity of other feelings you’re experiencing. For example, one parent said to me that he was heartbroken about the war in Ukraine but he’s grateful to still have a home and his children with him. And we had to take a moment to lift that layer of gratitude up to see what other feelings could be underneath.
Because this parent and I trust each other enough, we can look at the rage underneath, the utter heartbreak, both of which co-exist with the gratitude he’s expressing.
I’m saying that to say when an experience is overwhelming and you’re in full survival mode, you only have so much neurological bandwidth to be reflective or even to feel your feelings like we discussed in the previous episode. So you might just need to do what you gotta do and say you’re grateful to get through the day. There’s absolutely no shame in that.
And perhaps when you have a moment to feel safe enough, alive enough, and connected enough, you can go back to that moment that you said you were grateful and explore what other feelings were there too. This is one way we can build our capacity to shift in and out of surviving into thriving.
I’ll leave the link to the previous episode along with references and transcript in the show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/episode-22.
When gratitude is used as a rigid survival strategy, gratitude can become a tool that silences my body’s needs and my feelings.
A moment of reflection: family rules
Alright, your turn again, if you’d like to deepen your gratitude practice in your family with me… I have 2 invitations for you to experiment with.
First, I invite you to play with the concept of both-and when it comes to gratitude. Perhaps, when you share with your child that you feel grateful for the dinner on the table, you might add other feelings that are bubbling up for you too. For example, you might say “I’m so grateful for the food we’re about to eat, the farmers who took care of the vegetables, and the land. And I’m feeling joy that we’re sitting here together after a long day to share this meal.” In this example, you’re modeling and normalizing that gratitude and joy can co-exist.
If your child has been communicating their feelings for a while…whether verbally or nonverbally, they’re likely to understand this both-and so you can deepen their emotional literacy this way.
Second, I invite you to explore ways to make gratitude grounded in the body. If it feels right for you, ask your child this follow-up question after you talk about gratitude: how is your body telling you you’re feeling grateful/happy/silly/peaceful?
Then, you might engage in a quick body scan with your child if you’d like (i.e., do you feel it in your head, shoulders, neck, chest, stomach, legs, and so on?)
I remember one spunky 4-year-old friend of mine told me that she could tell she was happy because she felt “a wiggle in her toes and a thump in her tummy.”
Her 12-year-old sibling joined the conversation. They said “[It] made me want to ‘floss’ and feel sunshine on my face.”
Or my other 3-year-old pal with cerebral palsy would turn his head to his left side and vocalize, which his dad called his “happy dance.”
Whether your child responds to that follow up question with words, gestures, assisted communication devices, or vocalizations…
I hope that their connection with their body can spark a moment of curiosity for you.
So that you can dive a bit deeper in your gratitude practice and make those items you listed in your gratitude journal come alive in your body.
To quickly recap, we just discussed one way to put our caregivers in their contexts and grow up our view of our caregivers. You also have some reflective questions to think about the family rules in your family and the ways you’re teaching gratitude to your child.
Now I’d love to share another example of what putting our caregivers in their contexts can look like in action. This time I’ll share what my father and I talked about during my parents’ visit in California.
From “Protect & Prepare” to be “Present”
In addition to getting curious about where your family values or family rules come from, there’s another pattern that emerges when you put those who raised you in their contexts and grow up your view of them.
That pattern is an automatic habit to prepare and protect that tends to hijack our ability to be present with our children’s needs. For example, you might feel pressured to teach your child to be independent as early as possible because you need to return to work and you need to prepare your child to be okay without you at a daycare. This need to prepare your child is real. So you might try to use a schedule so your baby feeds and sleeps on a schedule. There’s nothing wrong with that. I honor your decision to do this prep work. But the pressure to prepare and protect becomes challenging when it overrides your ability to be present with your child and discern what your child is needing in that moment. Perhaps, playtime is when your child needs to feel connected with you instead of practicing their independence. So, during playtime, you might set aside the pressure to quote unquote train your child to play independently so that you can be present with them, play together, and meet their needs for connection.
When parents are stuck in survival, they’re stuck in “prepare and protect” mode (which is real and valid because capitalism is here and we want our kids to be able to pay bills and racism is real and we want our kids to know how to be as safe as they can outside of our homes). Stuck in prepare and protect, parenting can unintentionally look like a survival bootcamp 100 percent of the time. And there’s not a lot of room for your child to learn that they matter and that they’re loved. In that survival bootcamp, there’s not a lot of room for your child to practice other skills like compassion, resilience, empathy, and vulnerability. So, the decolonized parenting work here is to balance that real pressure to prepare and protect with moments when you can be present and connected with your child too.
Now let’s dive a bit deeper and explore my father’s version of prepare and protect.
My father loves a good “money talk.” Thirty minutes into a conversation, I can safely expect him to ask me about how I earn money and to tell me how I need to earn more money faster.
You already know me… you know that I’m trying to get free from capitalism. My way of doing so is to not exploit anyone’s labor for me to hoard all the profits.
The money talk usually had me nodding, smiling, and not ruffling feathers. But this visit was different.
Instead of using my go-to people pleasing, I reflected on the contexts my dad was coming from. I asked myself: “What made my dad want to prepare and protect me to survive capitalism?”
I could see that he was gendered into a role where he needed to provide for the family. That meant he needed to do what he could to move our family from working class to middle class.
With this understanding in mind, I can stay anchored in my anti-capitalist values and at the same time stay compassionate towards my dad’s urge to “prepare and protect” me.
I acknowledged how moving up the class ladder was his way of ensuring that I would never have to struggle like he did.
And I asked him to sit in his discomfort with me for a bit longer to be “present” with me and my values… to see that my truth that I’m embodying mattered as much as his. That climbing up this socio-economic ladder to be in the middle class is his version of how he got free from class oppression. And that’s not my definition of liberation.
That the path I’m walking on might be foreign to the path he walked…and that’s okay.
Seeing my father in his contexts grounded me in both compassion and action, and that helped me connect with my dad wholeheartedly instead of hiding my own truths to people-please.
Having this heart-to-heart conversation with my father was extremely difficult but also liberating for me.
I felt free from the invisible burden to carry my father’s outdated survival strategy and use that to guide how I want to show up in the world.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst said quote “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” End quote.
I can honor my father’s unlived life or outdated survival strategy that he’s unintentionally projecting onto me when he’s trying to prepare and protect me. And I can still live my truths and values. To me that’s liberation.
Rooted in my own values and dignity, I don’t have to people please. I know that I can be a disappointment to my father and can still stand in the light of my own truth.
The hidden cost of perseverance
So if I were to continue the same dynamic or the same skit my father and I always perform, I would people please, smile, nod, and tell him “I’d try harder next time to earn more money faster.”
And growing up in an immigrant family, this perseverance, hard work, diligence is highly valued and of course rewarded by capitalism. That’s how intergenerational family cycles often intersect with systemic oppression.
When I really slow down and get radically honest about my persistence and perseverance, both traits that I really value in myself, I see that my “I’m never going to give up and I’m going to try harder” is actually driven by fear of rejection and abandonment. I can see that “I’m never going to give up” is another flavor of survival strategy of people pleasing.
A moment of reflection: productivity
Okay your turn. If you catch yourself praising and favoring persistence and perseverance in your child, how are you balancing that by making room for quote unquote unproductive things like rest, play, creativity, silliness, and joy?
Again, it’s not about not teaching persistence and perseverance. Rather, it’s about finding a balance, especially in our culture where productivity and perseverance are more important than connection. And doing is more important than being.
Family healing is unique to you.
To wrap up this episode, I want to say that intergenerational family healing is a spectrum. Whether you’d like to repair your relationship with those who raised you like the examples I shared in this episode, or you’d like to focus on unlearning outdated family cycles that got passed down to you across generations with your child and leave those who raised you on the other side of the boundaries you’ve set, this work is messy and lifelong. And oftentimes when we touch on intergenerational family wounds, grief accompanies this healing work.
One of my teachers, Linda Thai, said to me that you can only move as fast as the slowest part of you is ready to move.
Wherever you are right now in your intergenerational family healing journey, please know that there’s no one right way to heal.
Thank you so much for hearing my stories so we can unlearn outdated family patterns and heal our inner child wounds together.
You can find all the links to references and resources mentioned in this episode and the transcript when you go to comebacktocare.com/episode-22.
As always, in solidarity and sass (and hopefully without any more slammed doors). Until next time, please take care.