Ep 26: Answering Your Questions About Decolonized Parenting & Inner Child Re-Parenting

[INTRODUCTION]

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 In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too.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

Instead of automatically reacting to our children from a place of survival, we want to anchor in regulation so that we can intentionally respond to our children like in scenario one. You still get things done and stress is still there. But instead of staying stuck in stress and survival, you can come back to your bandwidth where you’re connected, compassionate and curious enough to ask: “okay my child’s wanting attention and it’s so irritating. What’s their unmet need so I can meet them where they’re at instead of repeating the cycles of yelling?” When you’re regulated, you have the capacity to hold both-and. Both what you’re feeling and what your child is feeling. Both what you need to get through the to-do list and what your child is needing from you.

Before we begin our episode, I just want to tell you from my heart, my bones, and my soul how grateful I am for you. You’re raising your child in a pandemic. On top of that you’re healing your wounds from your childhood while incorporating social justice actions into your parenting. With each tiny act of resistance, together we can radically shift our culture to be more equitable and liberatory…a place where our children can be exactly who they are without being punished or harmed by the state. And hopefully where they’ll never have to attend a diversity, equity, and inclusion training because they are already woven into that future. I’m grateful you’re here.

Before I start crying, shall we officially dive into this episode? Alright…welcome to episode 26 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

In this episode, you and I are going to go back to the fundamentals and explore these six questions together: what is an inner child wound? Why is it so important to heal inner child wounds or re-parent your inner child? What’s decolonized parenting? How can you begin practicing decolonized parenting? Why do we address both inner child wounds and internalized oppression wounds together? And lastly where do we begin this complex & lifelong work?

These questions came from our wonderful and curious communities of podcast listeners like you and my newsletter subscribers. Thank you so much for emailing me at nat@comebacktocare.com with your questions and kind words. It’s so nourishing for me to learn about you and engage with you when you email me. My introverted self just melts into a puddle of joy.

I think of this episode as a Q&E or question and exploration instead of a Q&A or question and answer. Because my responses to these questions are growing and evolving just like equity and liberation.

If you’re new to our podcast, welcome. I hope that in understanding these definitions you can discern what gifts and strengths you bring to our liberation work and what areas require unlearning and relearning. If you’ve been listening to me for a while, thank you. I know that going back to the foundation of our work can often bring new insights and clarity too. In either case, repetition is an important part of any learning curve.

Let’s begin with our first question.

What is an inner child wound?

Inner child wounds come from what you had to do to be the child your parents wanted you to be. As a child, you unconsciously adapted how you behaved to fit in with your family rules, to blend in and belong. You unconsciously adapted your behaviors to meet your parents’ expectations, to make sure you got their approval, acceptance, and availability so you were taken care of. Or, in child development language, you did what you had to do to make sure your relational needs were met.

Relational needs are a child’s need to be seen, heard, loved, and validated. Because being seen, heard, loved, and validated is how you learn that you matter and your needs are real and valid… enough for you to ask for what you need and set boundaries or say no to things you don’t need down the line.

Relational needs are also a child’s need to be emotionally held, cued-in, or attuned to. Because that’s how you learn that when you’re smiling, it’s called happy and when you’re crying, it’s called sad…so you can be with your feelings and navigate them which are the foundation for emotional awareness and literacy.

Lastly, relational needs are a child’s need to be delighted in. Because it’s how you learn that you have an impact on the world around you. You are real and you can take up space.

As you can see relational needs are as important as physical needs like food and shelter. The types of relational needs that were met or weren’t met in your childhood shape how you interact with others as an adult. They affect how comfortably we can say “no, thank you” to others and set boundaries without having to be afraid that the other person’s going to abandon us. Or how comfortable we are being real, imperfect, and authentic without having to be afraid that the other person’s going to reject us, criticize us, or humiliate us.

When you grew up in an environment where relational needs were conditional, you adapted to those conditions to blend in and belong.

When you contort yourself to conform to your parents’ expectations, you end up leaving the parts of yourself that aren’t accepted in the family behind to avoid experiencing rejection, humiliation, criticism, and abandonment…you abandon those parts of yourself to survive. Contorting your body over and over again to survive by meeting external expectations leaves a wound.

[Unmet relational needs -> Survival Strategies: Contorting to Conform -> Inner Child Wounds]

For example, if you grew up in a family that values hard work, you might not be as skilled when it comes to rest, play, or anything quote unquote “unproductive.” To blend in and belong in the family- which for a child is a matter of survival, you had to over-learn productivity and perfectionism and under-learn rest and relaxation.

Identifying inner child wounds doesn’t mean pathologizing your unskillfulness aka your survival strategies. As a child you simply had to over-learn what was valued in the family and under-learn what wasn’t. Similarly, identifying inner child wounds isn’t about shaming your parents or justifying their actions or inaction either.

So that’s what an inner child wound is. Now let’s unpack our next question: Why is it important to heal inner child wounds or re-parent your inner child?

Re-parenting your inner child means meeting those relational needs that didn’t get met for you as a child.

Re-parenting your inner child is an important milestone in your parental development for two reasons.

First, unhealed inner child wounds often become parenting triggers.

The pain from your past often hijacks your behaviors in the present. You may find yourself reacting to a situation way out of proportion.

When you’re stressed, it’s common to react emotionally and unintentionally revert back to old relationship patterns. These patterns include yelling, shutting down, checking out, people pleasing, being a perfectionist, and blaming others. When these patterns seem to come out of nowhere, it’s so easy to lose the context and label yourself as “too soft,” “not strong enough,” “too pushy,” or “not disciplined enough.” When you forget that these patterns must come from somewhere, you might reduce yourself to these labels. You might blame yourself as a way to motivate yourself to not lose your cool with your child like that again in the future. This cycle of react-revert-reduce often keeps many of us stuck in survival mode or stuck using the same survival strategies we had to over-learn when we were little.

This self-blame can also lead you down a rabbit hole where you find new band-aids, like a new gratitude journal or a new meditation app to help you quote unquote “be more disciplined” aka to cover your unhealed inner child wounds. Instead of covering the wounds, you can heal your inner child wounds underneath those parenting triggers.

And here’s the second reason why healing our inner child wounds is important: unhealed inner child wounds often become barriers to your child’s relational needs. It’s really hard to meet your child’s relational needs when your own inner child’s relational needs weren’t met. It’s like you don’t get what you didn’t get.

To meet your child’s relational needs by attuning to them, you need to know what it feels like to be attuned to. And to hold space for your child to be who they are fully, you need to know what it feels like to take up space without any fear of losing your parents’ approval, acceptance, and availability.

But when your parents’ love was conditional on your performance and productivity, it’s really hard to know what those feelings feel like. Again, it’s hard to meet your child’s relational needs when your own inner child’s relational needs weren’t met.

In parenting, we tend to unconsciously validate, appreciate, and approve of our children’s behaviors when those behaviors closely match those we had to adapt to. For example, if you had to be quiet and invisible as a child to stay physically safe and emotionally seen, you might tend to praise your child when they play quietly and independently. You might also unconsciously discourage them from “being too much” when they’re playful, assertive, or curious.

This process is unconscious and done out of love. I repeat it’s unconscious and done out of love. You love your child and, of course, you want them to adopt the same survival strategies you adapted. This is one reason why an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

What’s not transformed gets transmitted. The unhealed wounds and their survival adaptations get passed down across generations.

Preparing and protecting your child makes sense. However, if you’re stuck in survival mode and trying to raise your child when your inner child is triggered, preparing your child to be the same as you isn’t quite the same as being present with who they actually are. When raising your child is preparing them and protecting them to survive 100 percent of the time, your parenting might look like a copy and paste version of your childhood, even though you’re trying to break those family cycles and give your child a different childhood from the one you had.

And I’m not dismissing the real need for us to prepare and protect our children from reality. But the work here is balance.

When you give yourself what you didn’t get or re-parent your inner child, it’s much easier to both-and. It’s much more manageable to have a balance between protecting your child from the pain you experienced growing up and being present with who they are right now.

And when you can’t meet those missing relational needs by yourself, build meaningful relationships with those you trust who can hold space for you to take up, who can witness you and love you when you can’t love yourself, or who can validate your feelings when they feel too silly or too much. We cover this topic in much more depth in episode 23: Three Social Justice Actions to Build Your Parenting Support System.

But the example I’d love to share here is: if being delighted in was conditional based on how many A pluses you got on the school report card, you might fill that gap by delighting in yourself and celebrating your efforts (not outcomes) in finishing half the puzzle or trying out a new recipe and adding new spices to it or doing anything imperfectly for fun. Yes, fun. Or, when celebrating these quote unquote C minus efforts feels like a waste of time, you have a trusting accountability partner who can delight in you…with you.

At the end of the day, re-parenting your inner child is an act of radical self-love. You love all parts of you, including those parts that you had to shame away and hide to blend in and belong. When the fragments of you become whole again, you do the healing work your ancestors couldn’t and model this radical self-love to your child. It’s possible to be the parent you know you can be.

Before we move on to the next question, I’d like to invite a moment of reflection. If it feels generative to you, how did you know when your relational needs were met when you were little? Were love, acceptance, and approval conditional on performance and productivity? If so, how is that shaping the ways you form meaningful relationships with your adult friends and partners?

Question number 3:

What is decolonized parenting?

Parenting comes with many expectations from society that trickle down into your home. These expectations come from oppressive social norms like white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. It’s like parenting is a role with “good parenting” scripts we’re forced to perform written by social norms.

Decolonization means unlearning all of these oppressive scripts of urgency, domination, extraction, coercion, control, either-or binary, and perfectionism written by colonialism and upheld by patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. So that we can relearn liberatory scripts like accountability, solidarity, reciprocity, interdependence, and power-with.

Decolonized parenting invites you to do four things:

First, raise your child according to your own parenting playbook that you’re writing instead of the playbook pre-written by those oppressive social norms.

Second, balance the need to prepare & protect your child to survive under systemic oppression with the need to be present with your child and raise them according to your values.

Third, practice social justice actions in your daily parenting while advocating for policy changes. Because what we do in our homes with our children has to match the advocacy we’re doing in the community.

And lastly, do all of the above in a community, because as bell hooks wrote quote “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” End quote

While we know that these norms are violent and inequitable, we also know the dire consequences when we don’t conform to the scripts assigned to us based on our identities, even when conforming requires us to contort ourselves to fit inside each tiny box in the demographic form. We contort our bodies to conform and perform according to scripts like “A good immigrant must…” or “A good Asian woman must…” or “A good trans woman must…” because otherwise we risk losing our jobs and then access to food, housing, and medical care. To survive this “Hunger Game” of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, we’ve conditioned ourselves to perform for the oppressors so we’re not perceived as a threat to the status quo.

As a parent, you love your child and absolutely want to prepare them for the same Hunger Game of oppression you’re trying to survive and to protect them from the same dire consequences of nonconformity. But in trying to prepare and protect them you might unintentionally over-nurture the seeds of coercion, control, extraction, and domination and under-nurture the seeds of care, compassion, connection, rest, joy, and wonder. For example, you might be extra tough on your child because the world out there is tough. You might train your child to work hard and never give up because that’s how you go to a good school and get a good job. You might see this survival training as a form of love. I mean how is it not love when your parents showed love to you by teaching you and preparing you for the world? But when we default to raising our children by the business-as-usual (or autopilot parenting instead of decolonized parenting), we risk reenacting the same oppression with our children.

To stop perpetuating intergenerational oppression, I invite you to interrogate the “good parenting” scripts and write your own parenting playbook. So that you can raise your child according to your values. This discernment is the heart of decolonized parenting.

Decolonized parenting helps you do the real and necessary work of preparing for and protecting your child from the violence of systemic oppression. But it balances the need to prepare and protect with the need to be present with your child.

Alright question number four

How to begin practicing decolonized parenting?

To decolonize parenting, first discern then do.

First, discern “who’s raising my child?” Is it my own values? Is it my in-laws’ beliefs? Is it white colonial capitalist norms of dominance, control, coercion, and extraction? This discernment de-tangles the knots of oppressive social norms so you can align your parenting with your values. Without it, you risk unintentionally practicing autopilot parenting where you “perform” parenting according to white, colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal scripts. Discernment helps you “practice” parenting and raise your child according to your own values.

And if you’re feeling some guilt or shame coming up right now about autopilot parenting, please know that it’s not because you lack the skills or the motivation to practice liberation at home. Rather, when you lack structural support like paid parental leave and universal childcare, sometimes at the end of the day all you have the energy left to do is to “play by the book” to get to bedtime in one piece. If there’s one thing you’d like to carry with you from this episode, I hope it’s this: Struggling on the road to liberation is never an individual flaw -- it’s a systemic issue. Liberation is a group project not a solo assignment.

Once you’ve discerned who’s raising your child, then you “do”. You align your daily parenting with your social justice values. For example, you can let your values of nonviolence and abolition guide your parenting decision on how you’d like to set limits during meltdowns. Or, you can let your value of solidarity guide your parenting decision on how you would like to navigate your triggers before meeting your child where they’re at. Not only do these social justice actions offer you rich opportunities to walk the walk, they also promote your child’s brain and social-emotional development at the same time too.

Alright, this is a sweet spot to pause and reflect together. If you’d like, please reflect on the values you want to share with your child. For example, kindness, community building, or reciprocity. Then, get curious about the urgency to prepare and protect your child that often undermines your efforts to instill those values in your child. For example, you want to model to your child how you share resources with those who need them in a mutual aid network. But your efforts keep bumping up against capitalism’s conditioning of scarcity that teaches many of us to hoard resources rather than share them. Often our discomfort and resistance come from some where and knowing their origin stories can help us not get tangled up in them so we can consciously work with them.

Thank you for reflecting together. Moving on to question number five.

Why do we address both inner child wounds and internalized oppression wounds together?

At Come Back to Care we address both inner child wounds and internalized oppression wounds together because they are connected to each other. They’re also connected to liberation.

These two types of wounds are similar in that they stem from a survival need to contort, conform, and perform to fit into someone’s expectations. A child needs to adapt to fit with their parents’ expectations. Similarly, parents need to adapt to fit with society’s expectations. In both cases, contorting your body over and over again to survive by meeting external expectations leaves a wound.

When these wounds aren’t healed, they get scratched every time your parenting trigger gets pushed. In parenting, this is usually when you might react and unintentionally repeat the things your parents said to you when you were little that you promised yourself to never say to your child. In social justice advocacy, this is usually when you might react and unintentionally repeat power-over, urgency, or other traits of white supremacy that you’re trying to unlearn.

Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American civil rights and labor activist and author, wrote “transform yourself to transform the world.”

When we heal our wounds- inner child and/or internalized oppression wounds, we put fragmented pieces of ourselves together to show up to both parenting and community organizing with our whole selves.

Whatever healing work we do at home reflects the alignment we bring to our social justice advocacy in the community. That’s why liberation starts at home.

Doing this healing work at the intersection of intergenerational healing and communal liberation builds a liberated world for your child and future generations.

Last question

Where do we begin this complex & lifelong work?

I know that your schedule is already too full to add anything else, especially deep, messy healing work like inner child re-parenting or social justice advocacy.

But I also know that you want to raise your child by your own values. So how do we start?

We begin this liberation and healing work by coming back home to our bodies, coming back to our lineages, and coming back to care. To say it with neuroscience, we begin this healing work by learning to be emotionally regulated. We come back to that space in our nervous system where we’re not in fight-flight-freeze-people-please self-protection mode but instead we’re in that space where we have the bandwidth to care…to connect with ourselves, the land, our ancestors, and others… to be curious and courageous… and to be compassionate. Siegel and Ogden, two leading researchers and clinicians, called this space the Window of Tolerance. I prefer the Window of Capacity, or you’ll sometimes hear me refer to it as your “bandwidth”. Inside this bandwidth is where we’re regulated.

When your child is regulated, they’re alert, curious, and present. They’re so ready to connect with you and play with you. As you can see it’s the best place for your child to learn. When we talk about child development, we often see development sliced into pieces like cognitive development, language development, social and emotional development, and so on. Like slices of pie. When, in fact, development is more like a layered cake. The bottom layer or the foundation of this entire cake is regulation. The other layers of developmental domains are stacked on top of regulation. So, it’s safe to say that without regulation, it’s hard to learn. That’s why it’s so hard to teach our toddler not to bite their friends when they’re already crying and in full meltdown—when they’re completely dysregulated emotionally.

For the layered cake of child development, the base layer or the foundation is regulation. The layers on top are cognition, motor, language, and social-emotional development.

For our layered cake of parental development- yes we grownups are still developing- the base layer is the same. Because when we’re regulated, we have the bandwidth we need to practice other adult developmental skills like boundary setting, accountability, and nonviolent communication.

Applying that to our context of parenting, to be the parent you know you can be…the caring, compassionate, curious parent… you need to come back inside your neurological bandwidth, come back to your homebase.

This is a perfect place to clarify that being regulated doesn’t mean stress free, or seeing rainbows and cupcakes. Regulation doesn’t mean calm either. Regulation means connected. You’re connected with yourself enough to be present with what you’re thinking, feeling, and going through without going into fight-flight-freeze-people please mode. Maybe you’re in a meeting and people are talking about the weather and it’s so boring. You’re likely not going to be too bored that you check out or shut down or fall asleep, right? You might take a sip of water or play with your hair or doodle to stay alert and stay present and, you know it, stay regulated.

In our context of parenting, you’re juggling deadlines and competing parenting demands…the to-do list keeps getting longer. To say you’re feeling stressed is an understatement. And to get through the to-do list and accomplish what you need to, a little stress is needed to give you the push you need to get through the day. Now I’d love to walk you through 2 different scenarios.

In the first scenario, you’re really stressed and really focused on the task at hand. Your child keeps asking you to play with them and oh, how they can be really persistent. When you’re regulated, you’re able to stay anchored while getting things done. You hear your child saying “play with me, play with me, play with me.” You also feel your irritation rising. You catch that irritation before it bubbles over into a screaming match. You take a breath, sigh, and do it again and this time feeling your feet on the floor. You’re resetting that activation in your nervous system so that you don’t have to go into your fight mode. Then, you turn around and tell you child “I know waiting is hard. I need to finish cooking. Why don’t you have some snacks right here so you can still watch me? Would you like crackers or apples?”

The second scenario is similar. You catch your irritation but it’s too late to make a u-turn now. You snapped at your child so that they will give you some quiet time to finish cooking so you can go play with them. But now they’re upset that you yelled. You also feel terrible for yelling because it’s an inner child wound pattern you’re trying to break too. In this second scenario, you lost your regulation. Your parenting button got pushed and then you automatically reacted to your child using an old coping strategy you’ve over-learned which was yelling. Remember? When we react, we revert back to our old habits. To say it differently, when we react, we react as if the pain from the past were happening right here, right now. That’s why when we react, we’re no longer in our bandwidth where we’re curious, connected, compassionate and caring because we’re in fight, flight, freeze, people please self-protection mode. In this survival mode, there’s no time to reflect, decolonize, or strategize. That’s why you revert back to your old strategies like controlling or coercing your child, or checking out, or cutting off. Even though your brain knows that these things aren’t so great in parenting, in survival mode your nervous system is very either-or: either fight or be overwhelmed. Either control your child or be controlled. Either numb out or feel incompetent.

Regulation is where we shift from automatically reacting out of old habits to intentionally responding based on our values.

Regulation is where we start our healing and liberation work.

It’s certainly one of the most important adult developmental skills in your development as a parent.

From this space of regulation, as a parent, you can decide how you’d like to raise your child using liberatory concepts like solidarity, power-with, accountability, harm reduction, and so on to guide you. You can use a combination of liberation values and child development science to design your own parenting playbook that fits with your style, your child’s development, and your culture.

From this space of regulation, as a social justice advocate, you can show up in social justice advocacy ready to take risks, make mistakes, take up space when you take a stand, or step back and hold space for others instead of reverting back to urgency, perfectionism, and other oppressive behaviors.

Becoming the parent you want to be starts with addressing unhealed inner child and internalized oppression wounds. And that healing work starts with strengthening the adult developmental skill of regulation.

If you’d like to cultivate your regulation skills and work with your triggers so you can practice decolonized parenting and inner child re-parenting, I'd love to invite you to join a community of decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational families in the In-Out-N-Through® Program. An online 7-week, cohort-based social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting program. Please visit comebacktocare.com/learn for more information and registration. It's comebacktocare.com/learn.

Closing:

I know this work can seem overwhelming. The beauty of equity and liberation work is you can start where you are and start with the smallest action. In your next breath, right before you engage your child, you don’t have to repeat those automatic habits you’re trying to break. Because you can let social justice values like solidarity or accountability guide you. And even when you miss that window and slip back to old habits, there’s always that next breath where you can try again.

As my classical Chinese medicine teacher, Lillian Pearl Bridges, said quote "The Purpose of Life is to be yourself as much as you can be, by combining your innate talents and abilities with the wisdom from your life experience and merging them with your intrinsic spirit. Then give yourself back to the world as a gift." End quote.

You are shifting our culture. You are doing the healing work your ancestors couldn’t. You are the future ancestors.

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