Episode 14: How to Start Healing Inner Child Wounds & Practicing Decolonized Parenting

You and I are going to go back to the basics, back to the whys, the foundation, the heart and soul of decolonized parenting and intergenerational family healing.

 

Episode Summary:

This episode is a starter kit for decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting, and I hope that it helps you experiment with healing your inner child wounds and unlearning white capitalist conditioning in your parenting. That means I have some questions, frameworks, and invitations for you to play with as you’re loving up on your inner child while practicing social justice through your daily parenting. So that you can break the family cycles you don’t want to pass down, honor the ones you do, and align your parenting practice with your values.

Full episode transcript here.

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Humans’ need for survival has been strong throughout evolution/history.

  • Children unconsciously adapt to keep their caregivers available for their survival.

  • How inner child wounds develop because of that unconscious attachment adaptation.

  • Nat’s inner child wounds of perfectionism and overworking from growing up in an immigrant working class family.

  • The survival strategies I used aren’t good or bad; just outdated or adaptive.

  • Adults adapt to systemic oppression like capitalism to have food and housing for our survival.

  • We then unconsciously train our children to adapt the systemic oppression to survive.

  • When we aren’t centered, parenting can look like a survival bootcamp instead of a balance where our children learn to survive AND thrive.

  • Decolonization means unlearning all of these oppressive scripts written by patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism and relearning reciprocity, interdependence, and power-with.

  • Decolonized parents ask “who’s raising my child? My values? Or capitalism?”

    While advocating for policy changes around the prison industrial complex is important, abolishing the prison in your head by decolonizing your parenting is even more critical.

  • Three self-reflection questions to begin decolonizing your parenting practice: Why? How old? And who?

  • “Why” as such a powerful way to realign your action with your values.

  • “How old” puts parenting triggers in their historical context

  • By naming how old this wound is, you’ll know if you’re responding to your actual child in front of you or if you’re reacting to your inner child from the past.

  • “Who” invites you to be all of who you are when it’s safe to do so and to remember systemic oppression’s coercion and punishment when you don’t conform to capitalism and white supremacy.

  • Intergenerational family and inner child wound healing are about putting your caregivers in their context.

  • Two invitations to start inner child wound healing are reparenting yourself and growing up your view of your caregivers.

  • Reparenting yourself means giving yourself the love you wish you received from your caregivers when you were little as much as you can. And for whatever self-love you cannot give to yourself, find what you lack in those you trust whether they’re your partners, close friends, or chosen family.

  • Intergenerational family healing is about you being in the right relationship with yourself first so you can be in the right relationship with your caregivers, elders, ancestors, land, community, and the future generations.

  • Intergenerational family healing is both passing down a legacy of compassion and liberation to your child and doing the healing work your ancestors couldn’t.

  • Growing up your view of your caregivers mean trying to understand how their survival impacted the ways they raised you without prematurely forgiving them or condoning their (in)action.

  • Intergenerational family healing is also remembering your people’s strengths and resilience they cultivated.

 
 

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