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 In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too.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 23 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. 

In this episode, you and I are going to roll up our sleeves and dig into how to build a parenting support system. We’ll explore what social justice actions like pod mapping, building mutual aid networks, and nonviolent conflict resolution can teach us about how to build a parenting support system that’s based on trust, reciprocity, and interdependence. We’ll also unpack how inner child wounds can sometimes make this interdependence and community building work so uncomfortable and challenging. 

What’s a support system?

When I talk about a support system, I’m referring to a group of people whom you trust. You trust them enough to share the burden of surviving under systemic oppression with them. That means you meet one another’s basic needs while recognizing that you are all in a system that’s not built to support you. You show up for one another in solidarity, not pity.  You hold space for one another to be accountable to do what you said you were going to do how you said you were going to do it. You support one another as you grow and heal together. 

This support system isn’t just something nice to have -- it’s a necessity. It’s not a friend group who goes to a Sunday brunch together – a support system is a group of people who help you stay alive. 

Covid has corroded the public’s illusion of individualism and shed light on the limitations of “doing it all by myself.” 

But this idea of surviving and thriving in a community is not a new idea in many under-resourced or underestimated communities -- communities that society forces to the margins. 

Many of us know that society’s systems aren’t built for us, let alone to keep us safe. So we have to meet one another’s needs creatively outside of these systems and institutions. 

Dean Spade, a lawyer, writer, and trans activist shared some examples of how people have been showing up for one another in mutual aid. He wrote quote “putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, or raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them” end quote.  

These efforts show what it looks like when survival is rooted in solidarity and connection.

And in our context of parenting, many parents in the US don’t have systemic support like paid parental leave or universal childcare. So I know you’re not new to nanny sharing or bribing the grandparents to look after your child. 

Many parents told me that getting support around parenting is a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” sort of situation…where individualism makes you feel like you’re failing by asking for help and capitalism shames you when you can’t afford the help. 

And on top of that many of us have been running on adrenaline for years now. Our cup has been dry which makes it hard to even begin to figure out where to turn for support and how to ask for the just-right support. 

To say it differently, factors like your intersecting identities, your upbringing, and cultural norms around being independent can make building your support system far from being intuitive.

So… true to our style at Come Back to Care, let’s intersect social justice action with decolonized mental health and explore how the way you were raised and the resulting inner child wounds can make community building more complicated that you might like. 

Inner Child Wounds Can Make Community Building Challenging

Instead of pathologizing your anxiety around reaching out to people or your fear of rejection when you ask for help, let’s put all of those feelings in their context, specifically your upbringing. So we can contextualize not pathologize. 

We know in theory that we just need to do it. We just need to reach out to other parents. We just need to ask them if they want to go get coffee and have a playdate. We just need to start a conversation. When we can’t do it, we often shame ourselves and society pathologizes us for being socially awkward or introverted. 

But when we put this relationship pattern in the context of our upbringing, reaching out and asking for connection could feel somewhere on the spectrum of “this is life-or-death” to “this is so uncomfortable” and to “oh yes I know I can reach out to people, I trust that people are trustworthy, and the world is a relatively safe place for me.” All of this depends on how much those who raised you were emotionally present for you when you were little.  

Let’s say when you were little, the people who raised you were available and present emotionally most of the time. The emphasis again is most of the time. When you cried, they were there to soothe you and help you problem solve and navigate intense feelings. So, you learned early on that “oh, if I can’t cope by myself, I can reach out to the adults I trust and they’ll likely help me.” You might be the kind of student who could go up to your teacher and ask for help. Similarly, when you’re excited and happy, those who raised you delighted in you. They reflected back that same joy and even named that beaming smile on your face by saying “oh, you’re happy!” So, you learned early on that your feelings are real, your needs are valid, and, most important of all, that you matter. Or, when those who raised you made mistakes and lost their cool, they showed you in their own ways that they didn’t mean to do that and they tried again next time. You learned that “oh, I’m wanted in this world enough for this powerful grownup to own up to their slip ups.”

And as you grow up, you carry this fundamental belief that the world is a safe enough place and you can expect people who love you to help you when you lean on them… even though you’ve learned along the way that because of the body you’re in, society sees you as a threat because you’re not racialized as white, gendered as cisgender, presented as heteronormative middle class, abled body, and so on. That fundamental trust in yourself and in relationships with others is baked in. There’s a sense of ease when you reach out to others, ask them for help, and receive that support given to you. It’s like if you’re going to do a trust fall, you know that someone will catch you. 

You are probably guessing that if your upbringing was nothing like what I just described, attempting a trust fall or reaching out to others for help might be the most absurd idea. It’s almost like asking for help is asking for people to disappoint you. Before I get into more details, let me just say that I’m in the same boat. 

And that simply means you and I have some unlearning of these inner child wounds to do together. So that, in safe and trustworthy relationships, we can relearn that missing piece of trust in ourselves and others. Even though we didn’t learn that growing up, we are neither defective nor destined to doom. 

Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell, two leading child development experts wrote quote “We are not destined to repeat the patterns of the past because we can earn our security as an adult by making sense of our life experience. In this way, those of us who have had difficult early life experiences can create coherence by making sense of the past and understanding its impact on the present and how it shapes our interactions with our children.” End quote

And I know you heard me say this many times but I’ll say it again: a wound that happened in a relationship has to be healed in a relationship. No individualism where you go buy a self-help book and improve your quote unquote mindset alone in the living room. 

Or as bell hooks wrote in All About Love back in 1999 quote “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” End quote. 

So if those who raised you weren’t available and present for you emotionally for whatever reason (we’re not here to shame and blame our caregivers just contextualize them a bit), you might feel resistance when it comes to noticing your needs, asking for support, receiving that support, and relaxing into that support according to the late somatic psychologist Ron Kurtz.

For example, the thought of reaching out to another parent to set up a playdate for your child might stir up your childhood memories of emptiness and aloneness because no one was there for you. Or memories of profound heartbreak because those who were supposed to protect you ended up humiliating you, criticizing you, or rejecting you. Dr. Pauline Boss, an expert on loss and family stress, coined the term “ambiguous loss” back in the 70’s to explicitly name this lack of having someone there attuning to you and being there for you. 

By nature of the ambiguous loss, people don’t talk about it which makes this loss even more painful. No wonder why a seemingly common thing like building a community can be so complicated for some people. Sometimes it’s simply because we don’t know where to start and how to do it. Or, there’s a social norm of “this is how to start a club” and a part of you that’s neurodivergent doesn’t operate that way or a part of you that’s experiencing depression has no energy to do it. Or, we’re reminded of these old wounds of rejection, humiliation, criticism, and abandonment from our childhood and the pain keeps us from asking for the support we need. 

So the thought of reaching out to another family may make you doubt your self-worth. You might ask “how can I ask for help when I don’t have anything good enough to offer you in return?”

Or it might stir up feelings of being needy. You might say “oh it’s not polite to impose or it’s not nice to be needy.” Which makes sense if growing up you had to learn to be invisible and small…you might not see your needs as valid and taking up space could feel risky. You might forget that having needs is human, especially basic needs around safety, predictability, belonging, protection, and being seen and loved. 

Or you ask for help and now you have people showing up and giving you the support but you have no clue what to do with the support. Receiving help is also a skill that needs to be learned. I remember a mom who told me that they finally asked their friend for help. Their friend was coming over in about half an hour to help this parent clean the house. And I said to them “Max, what are you doing I thought your friend’s coming over to clean the house?” And they replied “I’m pre-cleaning.” So even once we’ve asked for help, letting people in and receiving help isn’t always comfortable sometimes due to our fear of abandonment, rejection, or humiliation we experienced as a child. 

To recap, by understanding our inner child wounds or our upbringing, we contextualize- instead of pathologize. We contextualize our discomfort or resistance around reaching out to people, asking them for help, receiving it, and relaxing into that support. This discomfort is giving us some information that there might be unhealed inner child wounds underneath that we can tend to when we’re ready. 

If you’re curious about How to Start Healing Inner Child Wounds & Practicing Decolonized Parenting, I invite you to check out episode 14 after you finish this one. I’ll leave the link of that episode and of all the references and resources mentioned in this episode in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/episode-23. 

Three Ways to Build Your Parenting Support System Rooted in Social Justice Action

Alright now that we’ve discussed how our upbringing and inner child wounds can complicate community building, let’s explore what pod mapping can teach us about building our support system; what mutual aid networks can teach us about managing the support system; and lastly what nonviolent conflict resolution can teach us about deepening the relationships within our support system. 

So build the support system, manage it, and deepen it with social justice actions in mind. 

And just like anything parenting-related that we cover in our podcast: there’s no one right way to do things. That’s why I want to talk about pod mapping, mutual aid networks, and nonviolent conflict resolution so you can explore what aligns with your values and styles. Because the right way is the just-right way that you experiment with and adapt to fit you, your child, your culture, and your values. 

I love how Mia Birdsong puts it in her beautiful book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. She wrote quote “As with all things centered on people and relationship, nothing we create together with our whole selves, our baggage and damage, our dreams and passions, is going to be clear, static, or definitive. Not only are there not limited ways of creating family and community, but there are not limited ways of staying family and community. It’s all mutable and evolving.” End quote. 

Building Your Support System with Pod Mapping in Mind

Shall we begin with some ways to find the just-right people and to invite them to be a part of your support system?

Colonialism has conditioned many of us to extract resources from land and labor. In relationships this can look like dominating, coercing, and controlling the other person without regards to their boundaries. Or, it could look like grasping onto that person so tightly without regards to their needs for space, room to breathe, and agency. To rub salt in this internalized oppression wound, capitalism has conditioned many of us to be more transactional than relational. In a relationship, that can look like automatically asking a stranger “what do you do?” Or, basing your decision making on “what do I get out of this? How do I get the most bang for my buck? Or How do I come out on top?”

Because of these conditionings from colonialism and capitalism, many of us are unskillful at building relationships based on trust, consent, and reciprocity. And the good news is that just like any other skill, building relationships can be learned and practiced.

That’s why I believe the practice of “pod mapping” from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective has rich wisdom that we can learn from. Before we dive in, I want to quickly highlight pod mapping’s root in abolishing sexual and relational violence. Because even though we’re applying some of its elements to building our parenting support system, we can honor its roots in transformative justice and abolition instead of co-opting it and extracting only the parts we can apply to parenting. 

Mia Mingus, a writer, educator and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice, explains that quote “your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm, or abuse happened to you.” End quote. The quality of your relationship with your pod people…the care, trust, vulnerability, and accountability that are mutual makes your pod a direct response to violence prevention and intervention. 

Pod mapping is a way to figure out who your people are. Imagine there’re 3 rings around you. The people in the closest ring to you are your pod people. The people in the next ring are those with potential. And in the outer most ring are your local groups and communities. 

I’ll leave a link to the pod mapping template by Mia Mingus for you in the episode show notes at comebacktocare.com/episode-23. 

I know you already have some ideas in mind of which names go where. Beautiful. Now let’s get specific to our context: parenting support system. The beauty of pod mapping is you can have multiple maps, one for each purpose. For example, you have a pod for playdates, another one for school pickup and drop off, another one for meal trains, and another one for (as one mom taught me) COO. C.O.O. which stands for come on over. This mom, let’s call her Ange, came up with this acronym COO when she worked with me. Ange was a single mom with a premature newborn. She would simply send COO in her pod people’s group chat. Then, any pod person who had the capacity to come on over would show up and be with Ange. No questions asked. Isn’t it fabulous?

I think the most important action step in identifying your pod people is talking about agreements with these beautiful humans you trust. The conversation can start with “Hey I’m so grateful for you and our relationship over the pandemic. I wonder if you’d be okay being my go-to person I can reach out to when I need help with babysitting.” If your person agrees then you can get nitty gritty about the details, you might say “I’ll reach out via a voice message when my cup is about to be really dry so that I don’t lose it and lose my cool with my baby. And when you come over, you can take care of the baby for an hour for me to take a nap. If you can help me out with this twice a month, that would be amazing. How do you feel?” And once you and your pod person have the agreement and consent, then set up a reminder for a check-in meeting to see if the agreement is still going okay or if it needs to be updated. 

For those people who have potential to be your pod people but who you still need to grow your relationship with, these people are so special to me. I actually cried tears of relief when I first learned that I didn’t need to have all of my pod people beautifully laid out because I could plant some seeds of relationships and nurture them over time. When I moved to Illinois from Thailand, it was me, myself, and I. As an immigrant who spoke English as a second language and who was fresh off the boat in a new culture, I had to build my pod from zero. In the beginning my only pod person was a Thai bus driver in town. I remember feeling a slight sense of isolation and shame for having so few people I could call for help. But when I learned about pod mapping, all the shame faded away because I had my college advisor and chefs from my favorite Thai restaurant in town as my potential pod people. 

So you may have people you really like and who you want to cultivate trust and a relationship with over time too. Pods change and evolve just like relationships. These potentials can become your pod people. And your original pod people can step back and become your potential people too. 

Which elements of pod mapping resonates with you and inspires you to build trust and relationship with consent and reciprocity in mind? I hope the mapping process gives your inner child who wants connection but is afraid of intimacy some reassurance and structure that building relationship is messy but possible. You might gather all of your pod people from your childcare pod in one support system. Or, your support system might be a combination of one friend from your meal train pod and another person from the child care pod, and another person who’s your neighbor, and one more person whom you met in a new parent support group when your child was a newborn that you’re still hanging out with.  

Managing the Support System with Mutual Aid Networks in Mind

Now that you’re building your support system, let’s explore ways to manage it and nurture it. 

Many of us have been conditioned (from school to the workplace) to think in terms of binary of either-or choices, for example that a person can be either a leader or a follower. When we see hierarchies like a classroom leader or student president or a corporate manager, the situation seems like business as usual. Or, we might think this is what a stable and efficient group should be like. We tend not to question this pattern of domination, control, and power-over (at least until we unionize…yay). 

That’s why I think we have so much to learn from mutual aid, specifically how a decision-making process in a group can be transparent, shared, and participatory. Just saying those three words out loud feels so refreshing to me.

Let’s begin with a definition of mutual aid. 

Dean Spade defines it in his book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next) by writing quote “Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” End quote.

I want to highlight that members of mutual aid networks come together with a shared value in surviving together in solidarity. They also share an analysis of the unjust system they’re in. Because of this shared understanding, many mutual aid networks make decisions together instead of waiting for those at the top to do it. 

A lot of times when we’re in a group, we rely on hierarchies and organizational charts to tell us who plays what roles. Perhaps we see a similar pattern in a parent committee at school where a few people at the top make the call. Organizing groups this way assumes that when we know who’s the boss and who are just pawns, the group is just going to automatically gel. But knowing who plays what role alone doesn’t automatically make us feel like we belong in a group. 

I think one lesson mutual aid can teach us is to replace hierarchies with structures. Dean Spade explains that “Clear structures help us stick to our values under pressure.” He then adds quote “Groups are more effective and efficient when participants know how to raise concerns, how to propose ideas, when a decision has been made and by whom, and how to put that decision into practice. People who have gotten to participate in decision-making and feel co-ownership of the project stick around and do the work. People who feel unclear about whether their opinion matters or how to be part of making decisions tend to drift away.” End quote.

Making sure each parent in your support system knows how to show up fully to the group and bring their best-ish self to the table and shine requires a bit of slowing down…enough for the group to work together and hear one another out. This process may make decision making a bit longer but it certainly deepens group trust. After all, we can only move at the speed of trust, right? Just like adrienne maree brown wrote quote “focus on critical connections more than critical mass- build the resilience by building the relationships.” End quote.

Slowing things down might be a slight adjustment to some parents. Because I know as a parent you’re so used to your fast-paced planning, delegating, and making multiple decisions so you can get to the outcomes as soon as possible so you can move to the next thing on your to-do list. While this type of decision making is needed for you to get through the day in one piece aka it’s very adaptive and valid, it might not be as adaptive in your support system. Because you may risk repeating the norms of hierarchy-based, perfectionist decision making at the expense of trust and relationship. In your support system, just like in a mutual aid network, it’s possible to shift from solo decision making to a shared, participatory, and transparent decision making.

It’s worth having a group discussion about how the group makes decisions together, what the group will do when some members disagree with a decision, or how the group runs a meeting so each member is heard, and so on. Having a clear yet flexible structure around decision making is an important container so people can do what they do best in a group.  

So that’s managing your support system with the wisdom from mutual aid networks. 

Next let’s explore how to deepen the trust and nurture the quality of the relationships in your support system. 

And it’s not just about bringing homemade cookies to every gathering. While that’s lovely and delicious, what I want to discuss with you is conflict resolution. Hello discomfort.

Deepening the Support System with Nonviolent Conflict Resolution in Mind. 

My first invitation for deepening trust in your parenting support system is to expect and embrace conflict. I know, bear with me.

Being conflict-free isn’t a benchmark of success for any group. I know we tend to want groups to run smoothly and everyone’s getting along but there’s a fine line between perfectionism and group cohesion, right? According to Tema Okun perfectionism and fear of conflict are two traits of white supremacy. 

So, if you’d like, I want to invite you and your discomfort to join me and my discomfort as we’re relearning or remembering that conflict is actually another opportunity to build trust and strengthen relationships. 

Malidoma Some said it so beautifully: quote “conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.” End quote. 

I often use this teaching as a reminder when I notice that judgment is arising in me and I’m ready to either blame the person or fix the problem. I can get into my fight or fix survival mode pretty quickly and miss a juicy opportunity to pause and see how the spirit of the relationship is asking itself to deepen.

Speaking of judgment, I often find that the more I know about social justice the more judgmental I can be, especially when I’m tired, hangry, or just simply being human. I might default to “Intent isn’t impact” and judge the other person even before hearing them out. Do you resonate with this too?

But nonviolent conflict resolution has been teaching me not to let my political analysis remove the humanity from the person in front of me, especially if they just caused hurt and/or harm. 

Also we spent a chunk of time earlier in this episode talking about our inner child wounds, right? When conflict happens, our nervous system detects a threat in the possibility of being cut off from a group and losing that belonging. 

When there’s a threat, the nervous system doesn’t care if we practice abolition or read about the solidarity economy last night. The nervous system reacts and reverts back to your go-to survival strategy (your fight, flight, freeze, people please mode) to protect you from re-experiencing the abandonment or criticism or rejection you might have felt when you were little. So of course it makes sense when conflict happens we blow our anger through the other person to make sure we’re seen and heard. Or, we run away from it and intellectualize the conflict instead of connecting with the other person. Or, we over apologize and gift them a 5-year subscription to Disney Plus to people please. 

Conflict is an opportunity for transformation. And that transformation begins with us. 

My invitation is for us to free ourselves from the good-bad binary or the nice ally-terrible ally binary. Because this good-bad binary often comes packaged together with a violent, shameful self-attack. You know, the terrible things we say to ourselves in our mind. Dr. King’s nonviolence teaching also talks about decreasing the violence we inflict on ourselves. So you might soothe your nervous system by saying “You know what I made a mistake. It’s a human thing to do. Many people make mistakes. Now how do I want to own my oops in ways that align with my values?” This way you start with self-compassion and let discernment guide your conflict resolution instead of having your fight-flight-freeze-people please survival strategies do the conflict resolution. 

Then we can bring this transformation to our support system. It can be as straightforward as having a plan for how the group will handle conflict. In one parenting playgroup I facilitated a while back, we played with this structure called accountability and action. When a conflict happened, we used accountability to make room for hearing both parties out without rushing into cancelling one another. We made room to address when a parent moved with urgency instead of collaboration or when they gave unsolicited advice instead of listening. We also agreed to name it kindly but firmly when we noticed parents checking out, numbing out, and shutting down, or being overly agreeable to people please at the expense of their authenticity. We checked in with one another. Then, we moved into an action plan where both parties agreed to try to repair any rupture in the relationship. Just being clear about this accountability and action plan really helped us normalize the fact that at some point we would step on each other’s foot because we were learning one another’s rhythm and style. I could see that desire for parents to appear proper and perfect melted away. 

That’s one way we can handle conflict with care and compassion. 

To wrap up this episode, I just want to say that trust takes time. Support systems start small. Your support system will grow, shrink, and shift as relationships change. Despite systemic and intergenerational violence, Deb Dana, a clinician specializes in polyvagal theory, wrote quote “our nervous system looks for, and longs for, connection.” 

I know that both you and I give care to others a lot. It’s okay for us to receive care and let love in too, even if it’s 5% at a time. And I’m here for your support too. 

You can find all the links to the references and resources mentioned in this episode and the transcript when you go to comebacktocare.com/episode-23. 

Thank you for building community and shifting culture together. 

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