How Tori & Chris Dance to a New Rhythm in their Co-Parenting when They Step In, Out, & Through the Family Patterns They Grew Up with

“I had thought I did a lot of that self-reflection, a lot of looking at my own parenting, a lot of healing and understanding myself. And it was like, there was a hidden room in my house that I didn't know it’s there. And I got to find it, and it's filled with treasures.”
- Tori Graham

From Autopilot to Bold, Conscious, & Decolonized Family Building…

Most of the Time

“I find myself shaming myself or my parenting partner when we get it wrong, because I'm supposed to know how to do this.” Tori explained (a full-time mom and a full-time worker with a life-loving toddler).

“And I think that there's a lack of self-compassion and maybe a lack of knowing that parenting is so much more about figuring it out than it is about knowing what you're doing.”

Tori and Chris are raising their two-year-old daughter, Joy, while navigating the effects of their inner child wounds. Tori shared that “the maladaptive moments of my childhood tend to shine brighter. And I felt very worried about bringing those things into my parenting.”

Through body-based practices, Tori noticed in her mind not just what her daughter does to trigger her inner child wounds, but also what she felt unfolding in her body when her daughter pushed her buttons.

With this awareness, Tori was able to intentionally respond to Joy’s behavior instead of reacting to it based on her past inner child wounds. Tori commented:

“I can really slow myself down and then it doesn't mean (my 2-year-old daughter) can just do whatever she wants, but I have a different perspective on what is a non-negotiable and what is negotiable… Now I understand something different about my triggers. I don't have to look at everything that bugs me as dangerous… I might have a day where I can't tolerate (my daughter’s behavior that triggers me) again, because I'm back in that old space. Fine. But now I see, I can enter these moments in our relationship differently, even if I miss it sometimes like there's possibilities that I didn't even really realize.”

“The possibilities” that Tori mentioned here are what I hope to convey when I talk about re-parenting our inner child so that we can “love our children from our scar and not from our wounds.”

Tori’s understanding of her parenting triggers and inner child wounds goes deeper than knowing them in her mind, at the cognitive level.

Instead, she understands them at the somatic or body-based level. Through each week’s body-based exploration, Tori unpacked how her body reacts to her past inner child wounds so that she can pause, re-center her nervous system, and make a conscious choice of how to respond to her daughter.

I invite you to notice Tori’s compassion towards herself and her inner child in her remark:

“I admit that in 35 years, it did not click for me until this moment that I have control over my own nervous system beyond just grounding [myself] or taking a breath. And when I can help Little Tori know this is a typical human response. This is the way you're used to protecting yourself. However, it's not the only way… When I could believe it, that that little person has some control in there, I have been able to truly look at conflict and dangerous moments… which is life changing to me… Taking a look at my responses and realizing I can change my response is not an experience I've ever had in my life before this (program).”

Knowing deep in your bones that, with enough support and a ton of practice, you can choose to align your action with your intention… or align your parenting practice with your values of compassion and equity. Isn’t that liberation? Liberation that starts in your body?

Having been partners for 13 years, Tori and Chris participated in the program together. As each of them came to understand their partner’s upbringing and social conditioning better, they each discovered new ways to communicate and  support each other and share their family building journey. Tori shares:

“I think he can see when I am inching toward rigidity and can kind of- we're still negotiating how we communicate this to each other- like, ‘do you need a break?’ Or like, ‘do you need to just kind of like leave and let it settle?’ This (program), let us FEEL something together and it's really showing up, like in how we handle feeling frustrated or differences of parenting opinion or just a regular day that goes a little sour. Something about this has been really anchoring to us parenting together. I’m really glad we did it.”

Tori and Chris worked hard to understand their inner children, themselves, and each other as partners and parents of Joy.

Then, they extended this grace and awareness to others as they redefined their parenting and transformed from Autopilot to Bold, Conscious, & Decolonized parenting…most of the time:

“Trusting that I'm trusted and that I trust others, including my child, including my partner enough that we can really make hard mistakes. We can really have hard moments. We can say something painful. We can say something ridiculous. And know that there that reparative process is there. [Something] I took so deeply from the course [is] applying that same thing to my own parents, to my sister, to my ancestors, to my grandma was still alive.”