Ep 30: Integrating Lessons from Season 3
[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 In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too.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]
Welcome to episode 30 and the final episode of Season 3 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
In this episode, you and I are going to look back and reflect on season 3 together. We’ll zoom out to remind ourselves why we’re doing this hard and heart work of social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting. And from this big-picture perspective, we’ll see what adult developmental skills are important for your healing and raising your child. Then, we’ll zoom in a bit to explore three main themes from the season so that when guilt, perfectionism, and urgency arise, you’re ready to acknowledge them and let them go. Lastly, we’ll zoom in a little closer to review one highlight from each episode in this season so you can see which topic might be something nourishing you need or something caring to share with your beloved community.
You and I have been learning and practicing decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational family building together this season since November of 2022. So much of our work is pausing to catch ourselves repeating oppressive patterns of white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy in both our allyship and in our parenting. So that we can pivot and show up in ways that are more aligned with our values…most of the time. And I want this season finale episode to reflect this intentionality. So we’re going to pause, reflect, review, rest, and digest before we continue our liberatory journey together in Season 4 which will begin mid-May.
Raising Ourselves: Adult Developmental Skills
If you’ve been listening to our podcast for a while (thank you so much…that means a lot), you might have already noticed that we’re not emphasizing parenting tips and hacks here. I don’t focus so much on telling you what to do or say to your child.
I know that sometimes when you’re in survival mode, you just want an expert in air quotes to tell you to say these five things to your toddler about gun violence or to try these three hacks to have a smoother morning routine. There’re many other podcasts for these tips and strategies. If they meet your needs and fit with your child’s development, amazing. Telling you what to do simply isn’t my ministry. Because a) I don’t know your child’s development like you do and giving you one-size-fits-all scripts and tips, to me, that doesn’t respect your child’s development or your expertise as a parent and b) I don’t want you to practice the Nat method. I’d rather you practice YOUR method. White colonial capitalist patriarchy has already been disenfranchising parents and disempowering caregivers. Why would I want to be complicit in that? So when you ask me what to do or say to your child, I prefer sharing developmentally informed and liberation-centered frameworks that you can plug and play as you’re writing your own parenting playbook. On our website, you can access two frameworks at no cost. One for tantrums and meltdowns so you can design what to do before, during, and after the meltdowns in ways that fit with your child’s development. The other one is for talking to your child about race and racism. The links to these resources will be in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
My dear friend Caren uses this beautiful analogy: sometimes parents want tips and hacks like they want to snack. At Come Back to Care, we serve it Thai style which is full-course meals full of frameworks, self-reflections, and nuances.
Aside from developmentally informed frameworks for your child, you might have also noticed that our work together focuses on YOU and your adult developmental skills. Yes, those skills that support you in practicing social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting so that you can raise your child according to your values and heal your wounds as you get free.
These adult developmental skills include making mistakes and being accountable; setting boundaries; knowing when to armor up and when to take that armor off; asking for help without shame; receiving compassion from others; being in discomfort and moving through it with grace; and defining who you are for yourself aka self-determination.
Each episode in this season blossoms from one of these adult developmental skills. For example, episode 23: Three Social Justice Actions to Build Your Parenting Support System is all about how we learn to ask for help and receive compassion from others guided by social justice concepts like reciprocity, interdependence, and mutual aid networks. Asking for help can be challenging if you carry an inner child wound that came from being criticized, humiliated, or rejected when you asked for help when you were little. And when you shy away from asking for help and building a support system in this hyper individualistic culture, it’s almost impossible to juggle all the responsibilities by yourself all the time. And you may feel like you’re failing when, in fact, the systems are failing you. With support systems that are built with reciprocity and interdependence, you are in a much more caring space to show up for your family fully. Another example is episode 25: Bridging the Gap between Intention & Action for Your 2023 Parenting Goals which is all about being in your discomfort long enough to move through your growing pains and do what you need to do to become whole again. Without all the repeated experience of being in your discomfort, our nervous systems react automatically to get rid of the discomfort. But when we react automatically, we risk reacting to our triggers instead of responding intentionally to them. When we react, we revert back to old habits we’re trying to break.
Maybe in social justice advocacy, you make a mistake. You freak out and react to get rid of the discomfort by reverting to hiding behind intellectualizing, theorizing, and debating in a book club rather than owning your oops and making an accountability plan for the future. Similarly, in parenting you might react to your child’s not listening to you by reverting back to punishment like taking their toys away. However, if you work through your discomfort and find your anchor again, you’d be able to pause, meet your child where they’re at, and teach them consequences in ways that aren’t punitive.
With these adult developmental skills, you slowly unfurl into the fullness of your whole self so you can stand in your dignity and in the light of your own truth as you are raising your child. And your child can get to know the whole you. They can witness your unfolding, your growth, your humanity and love you for all the facets of who you are. It gives them permission to unfold and unfurl into who they are as well.
So that’s how each episode came to be. Each episode is a building block for one of the adult developmental skills we need to heal our wounds and practice decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational family building. I hope the episodes in this season are nourishing and generative to you.
[MIDROLL]
If you’d like to support my work and sustain our free and accessible psychoeducation and political education on this podcast, please visit comebacktocare.com/support to make a one-time or ongoing financial redistribution. Or, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcast or a rating on Spotify. Your rating and review will help more social justice curious families like you find this podcast. So we can all do this decolonized parenting and inner child re-parenting work together. Visit comebacktocare.com/support for more information.
Alright back to the episode.
[EPISODE]
Season Highlights:
Now let’s talk about 3 main themes from the season so you can integrate them into your daily parenting.
1.Guilt
The first theme is guilt. I’m not sure how much you resonate with this. Many parents have told me over the years that when they learn anything new about parenting, what follows that awareness is either excitement at learning new information or guilt from not knowing that information to begin with.
Unlearning the business as usual of the dominant norms can be unsettling. It’s common to reevaluate your past actions and cringe. But that discomfort can just be discomfort without turning into self-shaming. Thoughts like “Oh I should have known this or done that when my child was younger…” can bring up a lot of guilt and pressure you to punish yourself by reducing all of your complexity into a pass-fail binary. The supremacist culture loves this binary. But guilt doesn’t have to turn into a judgment of failure. We can hold our guilt gently and place it on a learning curve that we’re all in together instead of that limiting pass-fail binary. So we can use guilt as a fuel we need to realign our actions with our values.
When I slammed the door on my parents’ faces after our fight that I shared in episode 22, I felt very guilty. That guilt could have easily morphed into shame, which would have made me apologize to my parents and call it a day. Instead, I decided to use that guilt to hold myself accountable and speak up to my parents about some of our family cycles that drove a wedge in our relationships. And because of that we began to heal together as a family and break these family cycles together.
So I say “May our compassion alchemize guilt into growth. May our nonlinear growth be our resistance to white supremacist conditioning of perfectionism and capitalist conditioning of linear progression.”
2.Individualism
The second theme of the season is individualism. I find that when we understand the root cause of our pain- in our context that would be our unhealed inner child wounds and internalized oppression wounds- there’s usually an exhale of relief that says “Now I can finally pinpoint what hasn’t been clicking” and a burst of energy that says “Now I can finally do something about it.” In my case, I would read as many books as I can on say attachment injuries of abandonment and emotional neglect. Plus, I would definitely take courses, programs, webinars… you name it… on this topic too. So much so that healing these wounds becomes a solo assignment…and individualism prevails. Not only that… I’m still stuck in the same patterns and triggers.
The thing is your inner child wounds took place between you and those who raised you. Your internalized oppression wounds took place between you and others in your social context. Whether they’re inner child wounds or internalized oppression wounds, they are relationship wounds. And a wound that happens in a relationship has to be healed in a relationship.
Clinically speaking, attachment wounds or inner child wounds are usually healed when we find ourselves in a relationship where the partners, pets, plants, ancestors, or land consistently show up for us and help us find that balance between intimacy and independence.
Or as bell hooks wrote in All About Love quote “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” End quote
That’s why I don’t usually ask you WHAT else you are going to do to heal or be the parent you want to be. Rather, in most of the episodes, I ask WHO are you going to do this deep and messy work with? Who can hold space for you to fall apart and then put those pieces back together with you in solidarity and kindness? Who can celebrate with you when you make a hard choice of going against the grain to do what’s aligned with your values?
It's interdependence, not individualism, that’s essential in our liberatory work.
You might have already noticed that when we talked about resilience in our children in episode 27 titled Why Your Child’s Resilience Needs Your Parenting Mistakes…
Children best learn how to navigate life’s curve balls when they work through stress and challenges with their caregivers.
Or you might have noticed it in episode 28 What Parents Can Learn About Boundary Setting From Black and Asian Solidarity. Boundary setting is undeniably one of the most important skills for relationships to thrive. And we can learn from how Black and Asian communities have mobilized, organized, and thrived together despite white supremacy’s best efforts to pit them against each other.
We can’t simply read about resilience or boundary setting or allyship by ourselves on our couch and check those good parenting or good allyship boxes and call it a day.
These skills need to be cultivated and practiced in safe-enough and trusting relationships.
3.Regulation
The final theme is regulation. Regulation here at Come Back to Care doesn’t mean being calm, keeping your cool, or reducing stress so that you can go back to work the next day to grind even harder. Regulation is more about being present with what you’re feeling and thinking, and moving through those feelings and thoughts without blowing your pain through the person in front of you or numbing out and shutting down.
Regulation is now very popular on social media where you might have seen reels of people doing different movements like a butterfly hug and gestures like placing both hands on the chest area to soothe an activated nervous system. I have no issues with these body-based practices as long as we remember that regulation isn’t a solo assignment and that if you’re not regulated all the time because you’re in your survival mode, it doesn’t mean you’re flawed or defective. If we stop trading in our labor for money, we’d lose food and shelter. So being in survival mode or dysregulation makes perfect sense in a system that’s not serving everyone equitably. Dr. Pauline Boss, an expert on Ambiguous Loss, wrote quote: “We cannot pathologize normal reactions to a pathological situation.” End quote.
Regulation is the pre-requisite for collective care in the community and decolonized parenting in the home. For example, if you’re enraged by say Cop City in Atlanta, regulation isn’t about breathing your rage away to be calm and quote unquote peaceful. Regulation in this case would be staying with your rage instead of stuffing it down. You might share how you’re feeling with your child, what makes you feel this way (briefly), and what you’re going to do to metabolize this rage. Maybe you’ll rock your body, listen to music, take a walk, or do the dishes. Not to get rid of this rage but to again alchemize it into action that feels aligned with your values and your capacity at the moment. Maybe you contribute resources to the Brown Cat Mutual Aid Network to support their supply drive. Perhaps, you Call or email the deputy director of the Dekalb County Office of Planning and Sustainability, to deny the Atlanta Police Foundation’s permits for tree clearing. I’ll leave these resource links in the episode show notes for you.
We regulate so that we can act according to our values as a caregiver and as an advocate in the face of oppression and at the same time delight in a sense of community, connection, and belonging too.
In social justice advocacy, when you’re regulated, you’re likely to join movements in your community a little less reactive, less triggered and more whole so you can stay in the discomfort of uncertainty, so you can make mistakes, own your oops, and act from a place of accountability instead of getting stuck in shame. At the same time, when you’re regulated, you’re likely to be present and fully delight in the joy of mobilizing with others, in that vitality of doing this liberation work with others who share similar values, in that connection to something larger than yourself, and in being in alignment which is doing what you said you were going to do. And because of this, your advocacy is no longer driven by the need to prove that you’re one of the good ones, rather it’s driven by your values. Your action is no longer about being a good or nice ally.
In parenting, when you’re regulated, you’re present with your own needs and your child’s needs even though you’re stressed and exhausted. You’re still getting things done and going through your to-do list but you’re present enough and anchored enough to not revert back to dominating, controlling, or coercing your child. In episode 21 Surviving and Thriving in Uncertainty and Oppression Without Toxic Positivity, we talked about when you’re regulated, you know when you need to be in survival mode and do what you need to do. But when you feel safe enough, you remember to take the armor of protection off to connect with your child. When you’re regulated, you balance surviving and thriving so that raising your child doesn’t look like a survival bootcamp all the time or, on the other hand, toxic positivity all the time. And in that moment when you take the armor off to connect with your child, you can delight in who your child is instead of who you need them to be. You can take in that sense of joy and pride too.
In both examples, it’s not about regulating our nervous system so we can keep performing the oppressive scripts of perfectionism, productivity, urgency, and domination.
One of the questions I get asked a lot is How to Practice Social Justice Parenting and Inner Child Re-Parenting? And it starts with regulation which I went into more depth in episode 26 Answering Your Questions About Decolonized Parenting & Inner Child Re-Parenting.
Episode Recap
Before we close out the season, let’s zoom all the way in and do a quick recap of each episode and review how it’s connected to your day-to-day decolonized parenting.
If you’re curious about how you’re going to get through the exhaustion and burnout from being in survival mode so you react less to your triggers and respond more intentionally to your child, I’d love to share one very concrete and tiny practice with you that you can use to soothe and nourish of your nervous system. It’s called sip, savor, and share and it’s in Episode 21: Surviving and Thriving in Uncertainty and Oppression Without Toxic Positivity.
If your inner child wounds keep getting triggered when you see your own caregivers or those who raised you and you’re wondering “am I the only one?” I share my personal examples of how my parents and I began to heal our relationships and re-parent ourselves together in Episode 22: How My Parents & I Are Breaking Our Family Cycles Together. You’re not alone and we’re doing this lifelong work of inner child re-parenting together so we’re not passing our pain down to future generations.
If reaching out for help and receiving compassion from others are challenging for you, Episode 23: Three Social Justice Actions to Build Your Parenting Support System can help you explore the unhealed inner child wounds that might be getting in the way. Plus, you’ll practice building your parenting support system with equity in mind by learning from transformative justice’s pod mapping, mutual aid networks, and nonviolent conflict resolution.
If your inner critics are being really loud and have you believing that you’re not doing enough for your child, Ep 24: A Love Letter to Parents might be that firm yet compassionate pep talk you’re looking for. You’ll hear affirming messages from other fellow decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational caregivers too.
If you’re thinking of your 2023 parenting goals and feeling like you haven’t checked all the boxes, I wonder if you’d like to review what kind of fear might be getting in the way. Perhaps it’s fear of losing your social status, losing certainty, losing autonomy, losing relationship, or losing a sense of fairness. Episode 25: Bridging the Gap between Intention & Action for Your 2023 Parenting Goals got you covered. So that you can work smarter, not harder.
If you’re wondering “okay, what’s decolonized parenting again? What does inner child re-parenting have to do with me? Or, where do I begin?” Episode 26: Answering Your Questions About Decolonized Parenting & Inner Child Re-Parenting has some of the information that meets your curiosity.
If you’re still wondering if you ruined your child’s development forever because you accidentally snapped at them yesterday, Episode 27: Why Your Child’s Resilience Needs Your Parenting Mistakes has all the attachment and child development science to soothe that worry. Your mistakes and mismatches are literally teachable moments for your child to learn regulation, problem solving, and important life skills with you.
If setting boundaries is challenging and that complicates how you take up space and how you show up for others in solidarity, Episode 28: What Parents Can Learn About Boundary Setting From Black and Asian Solidarity has a quick self-reflection exercise for you to get curious about how your childhood upbringing or inner child wounds can get in the way. So that you can re-parent your inner child and begin experimenting with this self-love practice of boundary setting.
And finally getting free is also about you naming yourself and defining who you are for yourself. So that you’re not mistaking those social identity scripts for all of who you are. When you see yourself through your own eyes as diviner Dayna Nuckolls put it, you’ll love your child for all of who they are now and who they’re blossoming to be. Episode 29: How to Support Trans Rights, Reproductive Justice & Disability Justice As A Decolonized Parent has self-reflection questions on self-determination for you.
[CLOSING]
Well, that’s a wrap for season 3. The decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational family building work we’re doing is heart work and soul work. You’re healing as you’re getting free while building a family. That’s no small feat at all. It makes me think of another medicine from bell hooks, quote “true resistance begins with people confronting pain…and wanting to do something to change it.” End quote. That’s why supporting you and being a tiny part of your village is my highest honor.
Putting this season together has certainly been enriching. How humbling to share with you, on one hand, the wisdom from different social justice movements and, on the other hand, research-based information from Western psychology and other decolonized healing modalities. And I get to do all of it with joy and integrity.
Thank you for shifting our culture to be rooted in dignity, humanity, and compassion and for creating a legacy for our future generations. Thank you for taking this journey back home to your lineage, your body, and the goodness within. Thank you for coming back to care…together.
I’ll be in Thailand for April and I’ll see you back here in May for Season 4. You can always email me at nat@comebacktocare.com with questions or connections.
As always, in solidarity and sass. Until May, please take care.