Episode 3: Three Tools to Use When Your Inner Child Gets in the Way of Your Best-ish Parenting Intentions
[EPISODE]
[00:00:15] NV: Sawasdee 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, a dot 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 the 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. Come curious and come as you are. Let’s move at the speed of care and let’s do this.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:41] NV: Welcome to the third episode of the Come Back to Care Podcast. Our work is about getting free, free from the patterns that keep us stuck in place and away from the kind of parent we want to be. Free from those patterns, whether they come from our family lineage across generations, or from inequitable and oppressive social norms. Free from the invisible roadblocks to decolonized, embodied and intergenerational family building. But where do we start? That’s the question we’re going to unpack today.
In this episode, we’re going to explore how self-reflection, storytelling and somatic community practice or body-based practices done in a community work together to free us from the patterns that keep us stuck. These are the tools I’ve been playing with for the past decade, with the families I’ve had the honor of working with. I found that they work together so well, for caregivers who want to practice parenting for social change, and reparenting their inner child for intergenerational family healing. Before we dive in to discuss self-reflection, storytelling and somatic community practice, let’s quickly recap on what I mean by intergenerational family trauma and internalized oppression.
The ways most of us practice parenting are influenced by norms and patterns from our small family, by which I mean, our blood, our chosen family across generations and our big family, by which I mean, our larger societal family. There are these unspoken rules of parenting that are codified as parenting common sense written by our society and then they trickle down into our small family that shape how we raise our kids. For example, capitalism and patriarchy lead us to believe that to be successful in society, we have to be independent, assertive, get on top, get ahead, grind, crush, hustle and dominate. I felt tired just saying those words out loud.
These rules or norms feed into how families raised their children. If you think of your own dinner table conversation growing up, if you and your family have dinners together, you might remember family rules like closed mouth, don’t get fed, or things like squeaky wheel gets the grease. As you can see, these families work hard to teach their children to be successful members of society. Being successful members of society means many different things based on your intersecting identities. It could mean you’re teaching your kids to thrive in that society, or you’re teaching your kids to survive in it instead.
Let’s think of another family but under the same capitalist, patriarchal and white supremacist society. Given this family’s intergenerational families need to survive racial and class violets, to be as successful member of society, their children must learn how to navigate immigration, policing and welfare systems. The dinner table conversations might revolve around rules like, “Don’t be too much”, “Just follow the rules and you’ll be fine”. Or “The nail that stands out gets hammered down”. No matter what big family or small family rules of parenting you play by, tension happens when you want to break away from those rules and write your own parenting playbook. Well, it’s true, that the rule of “Don’t be too much” has been how your family has raised children across generations and it was very adaptive back then, when your immigrant ancestors for example, needed to blend in and assimilate to survive.
You might want to raise your child a bit differently, so that they can be who they are, express themselves freely while learning to be street smart and coat switch when they’re outside. But when you’re bogged down by systemic oppression that shows up in daily things, like living in a food desert, or as a general lack of resources in your neighborhood, or having to take public transportation to multiple jobs to put food at the table, you are exhausted. It’s 4:00 PM and you haven’t had lunch yet. You get home, your toddler is full of excitement and energy, you might slip snap and scream at them for, well, you guessed it, for being too much. And the patterns get repeated when you’re off centered. It’s as if these patterns are invisible roadblocks of intergenerational family trauma, and internalized oppression were sitting in the dark corners of your mind, they’re are ready to jump out and spook you when you’re too tired or overwhelmed, to be intentional and present with yourself. That’s when you often have moments like, “Oh shoot! I sounded exactly just like my mom.” These dark corners actually make sense when we think about how these patterns are formed, and passed down to us under our conscious awareness’ radar.
Here’s the science for this attachment/inner child or systemic oppression injuries. The wounding usually happens when we’re so young, before we even develop language skills to describe what happens, or the intensity of the hurt or the harm is too overwhelming for the young brain and nervous system to handle. These wounds and the ways we adapt and cope as a child are remembered not with words, but in images and sensations in the body.
To put it in a different way, these early childhood memories are remembered in implicit memory, not explicit memory. I love Diane Poole Heller’s description of this implicit memory of what she referred to as, not conscious yet memory. She said that your body as a child was like an ongoing tape recorder that recorded everything, but didn’t have a way to play the recording back just yet to make sense of the experiences, because it’s happening at such a young age. That’s why we can’t recall a vivid story with words that goes something like, “Oh! Because Dad didn’t like it when I was being too soft. I had to learn to be a perfectionist and get straight A’s at school” and “Ah! That’s why I can’t stand it when people are so over the top of their feelings. I would have barf every time people say self-care or self-compassion. They don’t pay bills” And, “Oh! I can see why I keep telling my toddler to tone it down when they’re being too much, like singing, playing doing silly, imaginary play. That’s cute and all, but let’s get back to books and flashcards.”
Right. If only it were that easy. We can’t recall that kind of detailed story with words, but we get bits and pieces of images, flashbacks or vibes, sensations in the body that kind of come out of nowhere, and our thinking brain or the neocortex doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s why it’s so hard to think your way out of these patterns when your brain doesn’t even know what it’s dealing with, and if I may complicate things a tad bit more. Let’s look at these family patterns and internalized oppression patterns through History.
Dr. Joy DeGruy talked about post traumatic slave syndrome in black families in the US. She gives an example where many black families raised their kids by “denigrating” them to protect them. A bad mother might say things like, “Oh, my son. Well, he’s alright. Always gets on my nerves.” When in fact, she’s really, really proud of her son. This parenting strategy is an adaptation and adaptive survival response that has its origin story way back in the plantation days. Dr. DeGruy shared that a black mother on a plantation respond to a white plantation owner, when he praised her son by saying things like, “Oh, he’s not smart, he’s stupid.” She did this to protect her son from being sold and exploited further. This strategy might have been adaptive, then. But the work is to decide and discern, is it adaptive now or is it outdated? Otherwise, many parents would go on autopilot and parent their children the ways they were parented, without knowing fully why their parenting the way they do.
Resmaa Menakem said, “Trauma decontextualized in a person, looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in people looks like culture.” So not only do these invisible roadblocks of intergenerational family trauma, and internalized oppression hide in the dark corners of our minds in the present. We also don’t even know when they started and where they came from. We lose the context and it becomes, “Oh! That’s just how the Smiths roll.” Or “Oh! It just runs in the family.”
To address these unconscious patterns, we can’t start with conscious tool like our thoughts. We have to meet the unconscious where the unconscious is at, which is in the implicit memory and in the body. Then, I think that we can integrate it into our consciousness. It’s like when your toddler is scared of the monster under their bed, you don’t fight that magical thinking with logical thinking, right? That’s why at Come Back to Care, we do both/and. We both/and our healing modalities. We honor both the brain and the body or at the top-down and bottom-up approaches when we do self-reflection and body-based practices. We also value individual work and community work, when we write the journal and play with the body-based exercises, both individually and in a group.
Let’s look at each component and break it down. Self-reflection means going inside ourselves. That’s why we nicknamed it in, in the in out and through framework. You reflect on how internalized oppression and intergenerational family trauma influence the ways you practice parenting. With that awareness, you have an option to break free from those patterns and rewrite your family stories, which is the storytelling component of the framework. It basically means writing the stories out. Hence, the nickname “Out”. To write out what your ancestors could not so that you can be the author and editor of your family’s ongoing story. When your life story makes more sense to you, you understand yourself with more clarity and compassion, then you can connect with your child in a much more attuned way.
Then we have the final component, the body-based practices that are done in the community. You use your body’s cues to inform your parenting decisions. Instead of being paralyzed by fear, shame, or pain from the past generations and systemic oppression, you step through that discomfort into action that’s aligned with your values. The nickname is “Through”. A lot of fun fact, it’s in, our and through framework, the name, because Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching, “The way out is in” popped into my mind when it was at my altar designing the program. Thank you, ancestors. There you have it, the in, out and through framework. It’s sincere, it’s simple because parenting is hard enough.
We want a framework to be something clear, that will support you in uninstalling outdated survival programming, whether they ran in the family or you accidentally downloaded them from a purse of social norms, so that you can upgrade this programming into something more adaptive. We do this hard work of self-reflection or in, storytelling or out, somatic or body-based community practice or through so that we can love our children from our scar and not from our wound. When you can name the nameless that you’ve been holding on to outside your conscious awareness, you can begin to grieve it and shed away the weight it’s been putting on you.
Next, let’s dive into how the three components; in, out and through work together. Parents in the in, out and through program share a lot of stories about when their buttons get pushed. Lots of verbal narratives. We pause and slow down together a lot to drop that elevator from our thinking brain down to our body. For example, one parent who didn’t have a lot of control of her situation and boundaries when she was little coped throughout her life, by always being in charge in order to have a sense of control. When her baby became a toddler, his need to be independent really clashed with her need for control. In her body, she noticed her chest puffing up, her stomach tightening, her breathing getting shallow, and the back of her neck getting hot. She knew that what usually followed was her yelling at her toddler, followed by him crying and then the interaction would become a screaming match. We all know how that goes. I do that too, to those I love sometimes.
This mom used the heat of the back of her neck as a reminder to pause, reset her nervous system in the moment and pivot to another coping behavior that might be more adaptive for her and her toddler. When we deepen our awareness of how the parenting triggers or inner child wounds unfold in our body, it’s as if we pointed our flashlight into those dark corners in the room. We make those unconscious habits and patterns conscious. With this consciousness, you are no longer hijacked unknowingly by your past when you say, “Oh, crap! I sounded just like my mom.” You’re more conscious and intentional about how you show up as the parent you know you can be most of the time.
This body awareness, which is the in, out and through program is what’s called the bottom-up healing approach. It becomes much more impactful when it’s paired with the cognitive awareness via self-reflection and storytelling, which are the in and out components of the framework, not the burger joint. This cognitive awareness is otherwise known as a top-down healing approach. Remember, we both/and the bottom-up and top-down healing approach.
Okay. Back to the mom in the example previously. Mom previously and safely unpacked her experiences growing up in a household that didn’t respect her boundaries and her needs. She reflected on how that experience shaped her beliefs about her self-worth, about how much she deserved and how it shaped the ways she had to interact with others to feel secure in her boundaries. That reflection is the in component. She rewrote her story about how she is as a mother. She has this belief that’s filled with shame. What kind of mom yells at her toddler? Now, she understands that her anger is her nervous system’s attempt to protect her and give her some sense of control over the situation or to give her that sense of boundaries that she didn’t have growing up. It’s not that she’s a shitty mom. When that shame gets softened, it’s so much easier for her to hold herself accountable to pick a new and perhaps more adaptive strategy that gives her a sense of control, but without squashing her toddler’s emerging sense of self and autonomy.
When your life stories are hard to make sense of because they’re fragmented by early childhood rules or systemic oppression, it’s important to tell these stories in order to integrate those fragmented parts into a wholesome coherent story. Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell wrote, “The most powerful predictor of a child’s attachment is the coherence of the parents’ life narrative.” We’re not destined to repeat the patterns of the past, because we can earn our security as an adult by making sense of our 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.
With that said, I wholeheartedly believe that as your neurons can rewire and form new connections, you can rewrite your life story. To connect these three dots, the body-based awareness shines a flashlight into the unconscious habits, then the storytelling and self-reflection put words to the unconscious and even have highlighter on top of it to, making this unconscious, conscious and shiny. That’s why, in my humble opinion, breaking free from these unconscious patterns from our families, and in society’s oppressive norms, and breaking through the invisible roadblocks of intergenerational family trauma and internalized oppression, need all three elements. In or self-reflection, out or storytelling and through or body-based practice done in a community.
This way, your parenting can go beyond the what of parenting and arrive at your how and why, so that you can transcend parenting knowledge, where you only implement parenting strategies flawlessly. And instead, embody parenting wisdom, which emerges from your own wraps of practice, stakes, repairs, and U-turns. All of this inner work that we do as caregivers will then support us in loving our children from our scars and not from our wounds. I’m not integrating these three components of in, out and through to unnecessarily complicate our healing journey. I just want to decolonize it a little bit. I’ve used all three modalities in my clinical work, whether it’s in home visits, early childhood centers, therapy treatment rooms or in virtual treatment rooms. And also, in my own personal life.
I’d love to briefly share with you how I put the in, out and through elements together when I was doing my own intergenerational family healing work with my own mother, aka, when I took my
own medicine. To reparent myself and my inner child, I set myself on a mission to ask my parents about our ancestors, their childhood, their pregnancy with me and my birth. It was a mission, because I was raised to not ask questions, especially ones that potentially disrupted the family harmony. Plus, as a working-class family, we didn’t have the privilege to sit down together and talk about our deepest yearnings for the world and that’s why I became a therapist.
I remembered selling leather bags and accessories with my mom and dad at a night market in Bangkok during my preschool years. We were amazing at working together, but talking, not so much.
It took me three video calls over a month just to learn from my mom that I was a C-section baby. The hardest part though, was sitting through my parents’ emotional defenses, all the huffing and puffing, flat out, getting hung up on sarcasm and the worst of all, the Asian parent death stare of shame. It was quite an experience to see both pain and pride unfold as my parents recounted their childhood stories. I saw my parents the mighty figures that I love and respect, as my grandparents’ adult children. I saw my parents’ inner children yearning with the same need for love and authentic expression that I too long for.
On one call with my mom, we finally talked about the first moment she found out she was pregnant with me, and you could see how hard it was for her to tell me how scared she was at 19. She was so worried about having to spend money to raise me and about losing her identity in motherhood. Interestingly, this is the exact same phrasing I used when I told my partner about my fear of having children. Then, I learned from my mom’s sister that my grandmother had a similar experience too. Whoa! Epigenetics, they have quite a sense of humor.
Seeing my mom as a woman with rich life experiences, made me love her in ways that I didn’t know I could before. It was my turn to hang up the phone on my mom so that I could cry. Through this discovery, via family storytelling, the love for my parents has transformed. I love them as their daughter and respect them as their adult daughter. It’s the combination of self-reflection and storytelling, it deepened the connection I have with my parents. The transformation transcends our Thai-Chinese family norms, and especially, that Asian parent death stare of shame.
That’s why I created Come Back to Care and this podcast to build a community of liberation-minded families like you, working together under solidarity towards healing the intergenerational family trauma and breaking free from systems of oppression. When you transform, the IGFT or your intergenerational family trauma to your intergenerational family gift (G-I-F-T) that’s full of resilience, you pass on a legacy of love, and kindness and presence to your child. When our whole community transforms together, we cocreate a culture of compassion and liberation we call home.
Before I hit that stop recording button to go FaceTime with my mom, as always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.
[OUTRO]
[00:27:33] NV: Before we jump off here, who needs to hear this episode? I invite you to think about the people in your life that are also looking to align their parenting with social justice values and share this with them. It might be just the thing they’re needing to here today. This helps us get the word out about the show, but my hope is to really support as many people as possible to transform from autopilot to bold, conscious and decolonized family building. You already know, it does take a village. With your help, together, we can make that happen.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, and have the energy to share with another person you love, I appreciate you so much. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. You can find all the resources, links and complete show notes over at comebacktocare.com/podcast. If there’s something you want to check out, you can find it at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
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