Ep 58: Why Re-Parenting Inner Child is Hard

[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 In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too.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 back to Episode 58 and our Season 5 finale of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

In this episode, you and I are going to recap some key concepts of inner child re-parenting that we’ve been talking about since episode 50. Then, we’ll explore some reasons why the people closest to you might not be the most supportive of you when you choose your own healing and choose to break the family cycles. It might give you a new lens to understand people’s resistance to your healing. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started with our recap.

Recap

First, how you were raised shapes the way you’re raising your child. Your inner child’s need for protection often gets in the way of your actual child’s need for connection. And because of this, it’s important to get really clear about what your child needs from you in the moment. By healing the inner child wounds at the root of your parenting triggers, meeting your child’s needs …most of the time…becomes much more manageable. 

Second, healing your inner child wounds and breaking the generational cycles is lifelong work – work that isn’t valued in our white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. When you have to keep working to put food on the table, you might only have a little bandwidth left to do this healing work. So, instead of shaming yourself for being tired, anxious, or depressed, I invite you to name whether you’re in protection mode or connection mode and to recognize the value in both. Sometimes you do what you gotta do to get through the day in one piece and survive under this systemic oppression. But please remember to set this survival down, nourish your body and nervous system when it’s safe enough, so that you can show up fully as a caregiver in connection mode with your child. And with whatever bandwidth is left, let’s organize for things like child tax credits, paid parental leave, and affordable childcare. Your distress right here, right now is not a measure of how good of a caregiver you are. Rather, it’s a reflection of the systemic oppression we’re living under. 

Third, I humbly invite you to work with your present reactivity first before going back to your childhood and addressing the inner child wounds. The yelling, snapping, shutting down, and people pleasing aren’t the only available options when you’re triggered. It’s possible for you to add other responses to the menu so that you can pause when you get triggered, re-center yourself, and respond intentionally to your child, most of the time. And if you miss that window to respond right then, a repair and an accountable apology are solid options too. Once the trigger-react-revert-reduce cycle is more manageable, you’re likely to have much more ease unpacking your upbringing. To say it another way before we address our wound from the past, we need to address the reactivity in the present first.

Fourth, being guarded, independent, perfectionistic, or people pleasing is a survival strategy not personality. They’re the survival strategies you had to over learn and use over and over again to protect yourself from rejection, humiliation, abandonment, and other emotional pain. These adaptations are not our personalities because we’re so much more than what we had to do to survive. Maybe you’re extremely independent because no one was there for you to depend on and this abandonment is extremely painful. I’m saying this to say when people try to weaponize your own survival strategies against you, please know that these survival strategies are here because they protected you. You’re independent because you had to be. And…and…and…you’re not stuck in this survival mode. It’s possible to learn little by little to trust others, ask for their help, and accept their support. 

You adapted to survive but at the cost of abandoning those parts of yourself that were too much or not enough in your family. You contorted your body to conform to the family norms but at the cost of disconnecting from your authenticity.

Lastly, our intergenerational family healing goes both ways: with the future generations and the previous generations. We need both. However, in Western models of psychology, the focus is often on individualism and what you’re doing to break the generational cycle and give your child a different childhood. It’s important; yet incomplete. We also need to mend our connection with those who raised us and those who came before too. That doesn’t mean we need to talk to them or forgive them prematurely. It simply means we try to see where they came from and how their survival under white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy shaped the ways they raised you. And what you decide to do with this updated compassion is your adventure. I was facilitating an 8-week parenting support group for the Asian Mental Health Collective and this point came up in our discussion too. Seeing our own parents as people- who like us can cause hurt and harm- gives us this gift of compassion to remember that, in their own ways, they were breaking some of the generational cycles too while raising us. 

Speaking of adventures, episodes 50 to 57 embody these four concepts we just went over and I hope you choose your own adventure as you explore this politicized and decolonized version of inner child re-parenting. 

To summarize, re-parenting our younger selves is reclaiming those parts of ourselves we had to leave behind. The parts that were too much or not enough for those who raised us. Healing your wounds means reclaiming these parts so that you can show up fully for yourself, your family, and your community. And this is not a new concept -- many indigenous practices like timeline jumping, Akashic Record, face reading, soul retrieval, ancestral veneration, and others demonstrate this radical act of reclamation. 

Why Re-Parenting Inner Child is Hard

So when I say that this intergenerational family healing work is sacred, I mean it on every level. And it’s so hard to raise your child against the status quo.

I’m not sure how much you have experienced this. When you’re conscious about raising your child to be free, when you’re intentional about breaking the generational cycles, you risk being judged, misunderstood, or kicked out of the family group chat. 

In the face of confrontation and criticism- whether from that stranger at Target or from your own family- it feels tempting to collapse and go back to the business as usual of controlling, dominating, and policing your child. 

So, to close out this episode and our Season 5, I’d love to share one medicine that my Daoist and Classical Chinese Medicine teacher taught me a while ago. I hope this medicine gives you the strength you need to raise your inner child and your child your way when folks try to police and punish you into conforming to the status quo.

This medicine says: it’s common for those who are closest to you to resist your evolution. It’s common and necessary for them to push back and act out when you decide to choose yourself and your own healing. My teacher called them the gatekeepers. These gatekeepers’ job is to test your conviction to your healing and to test your commitment to your alignment with the values you hold. This quote unquote sabotage is actually born out of their love for you that got turned into fear. This fear wonders what would happen to your relationship with them now that you’re healing and changing. Will they be excluded? Will they be left behind? They’re afraid of losing you…or at least the version of you that they know. Or, they’re afraid of losing the comfort of your people pleasing, conformity, or other habits that have been keeping you small.

Does it mean we need to stop our own healing to take care of their comfort? Absolutely not. Just like we discussed in Episodes 17 and 18: Why It’s So Hard to Get Free Parts I and II, if these gatekeepers are truly your people, they’ll learn to love the new version of you too. 

How’s that landing so far? What do you think of this idea that opposition from these gatekeepers can be a powerful encouragement for you to stand in the light of your own truth? What if these gatekeepers are, in fact, our very best teachers to help us cultivate the tenacity and audacity to do what’s in our highest good even though we’re risking being judged and misunderstood? 

Alright, my dear co-conspirator, I hope this Season provides you with a lot of aligned information for you to D.I.Y. your inner child re-parenting practice. If you’d like to do this work with me and a small group of liberation-minded families, please check out our online parenting program called the In-Out-N-Through program. I’ll leave the link in the show notes for you. 

Thank you so much for reclaiming those parts of yourself you once had to disown, for embodying the fullness of yourself, and for raising our future generations to be well and be free.  

If you’ve been enjoying our podcast, please consider supporting our heart-centered work by leaving a review and rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Or by joining our Patreon. You can find all the details at comebacktocare.com/support. These actions really, truly help sustain our work in powerful ways. 

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next season, coming sometime in the fall, please take care.