Surviving and Thriving: Parenting Through Festive Seasons and Family Trauma

Ever wondered how to navigate the difficult terrain of parenting during the festive season while breaking free from the chains of family trauma and shame? This heartening episode of Lift the Shame is your guiding compass. Equipped with insights from a recent parenting conference and personal experiences, we tackle the high-pressure responsibilities that come with holidays and the compulsion to overcompensate. We stress on the necessity of self-care and the courage to keep your mental health at the forefront. Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a secure bonding with your children and build a nurturing environment. 

The second part of our discussion meanders towards the seldom-addressed issue of grieving and its link to parenting. We unfold the significance of the grieving process, its individuality, and the indispensable need for supportive companions. We illuminate different facets of grieving and introduce the concept of re-parenting oneself. It’s a journey of self-discovery and growth, not a destination. Be kind, forgive, and allow yourself to grieve for what you didn't have. This empowers you to move forward and provide your children with a healing touch. This episode is a gentle nudge towards self-acceptance and creating a safe space for your emotional health.

Questions about today's episode or do you have topic requests for future episodes? Please send your feedback via email to hello@crystalkarges.com or connect with Crystal on Instagram.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey there, mama, you're listening to the Lift the Shame podcast. I'm your host, crystal, mama of Five and your family's intuitive eating dietitian, here to help you cut through the diet culture clutter so you can enjoy freedom with food as a family. I'm on a mission to help you end the generational legacy of diet culture in your home so you can experience motherhood free from food guilt and body shame. Listen in weekly for guidance on how you can ditch diet culture, heal your relationship with food in your body and confidently raise intuitive eaters. Let's dive in and live the shame together. Hey, mama, welcome back to the show. As always, I so appreciate you tuning in and taking some time to hang out with me, and we are shifting gears here on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Over the last few weeks we took a deeper dive into some different topics related to sweets and sugar and our kids, and I hope you found those helpful, and we are very much going into this holiday season. I feel like Halloween is just the start and you can definitely feel the energy and the air in terms of the pace is picking up and that holiday pressure, so to say as I would describe it pressure to do all the things and be all the things, especially for our kiddos. I definitely have some holiday related podcasts coming for you on the show over the next few weeks, but I thought I would take today to just speak some encouragement to you, because I know that the holiday season can be fraught with so many different emotions, especially in our times today. There's so much happening around us in our country and our world, and I know that you are here because you are a cycle breaker. You want to do things differently for your family, for your children. You want to leave your children a legacy that isn't tainted by diet, culture or food guilt or body shame, and I love that about you and I share that desire with you. And I also know that with that comes a lot of pressure and we put a lot on our shoulders as we try to blaze a path for our children that we've never walked before. And so, before we dive into all these different topics related to the holidays, which we will in the upcoming weeks, I just wanted to share some encouragement for you, my friend, and I guess where this is coming from I recently had an opportunity to be part of a parenting conference that was all about building a secure attachment with our children, and I loved it so much.

Speaker 1: 2:35

I have a notebook full of notes and I'm hoping that I can share some of those insights with you over the upcoming months. It was absolutely fantastic, and also there was so much that I took away from that conference. That just reminds me of the importance of reconnecting to ourselves and our values and the things that are important to us, especially as we move through seasons of our life where you may feel like there are certain expectations put on you, either by yourself or by other people, and certainly the holiday season can be one of those times, and so I wanted to share just a few tidbits of encouragement that I received from this parenting conference and put my own little spin on it for you. And these are things to consider not just during this holiday season, although I do feel that pressures and responsibilities often weigh heavier on us during holiday seasons and again, there's so much that can come up during the holidays that can bring up so many different mixed emotions. It can cause past trauma to resurface I mean there's a lot that can happen during the holiday season but also just in thinking about your parenting journey at large, like the broader context of parenting specifically as a cycle breaker, meaning you are actively working to break generational cycles of trauma and shame and are trying to do things differently with your kids. And this is hard. It's a hard process and it's something that requires a lot of care and attention to yourself and your needs and learning to do things differently, especially things that weren't necessarily modeled to us as parents, and so I just wanted to speak some of that encouragement to you.

Speaker 1: 4:18

One thing about the holidays that I've certainly noticed about myself over the years and have been trying to work through and I also notice in other people as well, especially cycle breakers is that sometimes, in effort to do things differently with our children, we tend to overcompensate for maybe things that we didn't have or maybe things that we weren't capable of giving our children when they were younger. And this can really rear its head during the holiday season, when we want to make things memorable and magical for our children and perhaps give them an experience around the holidays that maybe we didn't necessarily have growing up. Problem is that in our effort to do that, it can be easy to overcompensate, which often looks like excessive attention or monitoring or hovering over our kids, sometimes in attempt to remedy our own deficiencies that we had in our upbringing, and this can come at the expense of our mental health and well-being and in actually building a secure attachment with our own children. On the other side, we can also be so scared of messing up or doing the wrong thing that it makes us more permissive or passive as a parent, which again can make it difficult to build a healthy and strong relationship with our children. And this can be hard because often it stems from our own upbringing, from our own experiences, but also in our attempt to correct the deficiencies that many of us had growing up and with our own families, whether it was food or a body image or discipline. There are so many areas that we are trying to write the ship with with our own parents, and that process of correcting can sometimes lead to those sides of the extreme, whether it's either overcompensating or passivity. Permissiveness with our children.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Sometimes, as cycle breakers, we are so focused on just getting it right, on doing right by our children, whether it's with food or how we're connecting or engaging with them, or body image. We just want to get it right, and I know this from conversations that I've had with parents like yourself that we don't want our children to suffer with the same things that we went through, and I get that. I feel that at my core. And yet I think sometimes we lose sight of ourselves. In this process of focusing on our children and focusing on creating this new legacy for them, we sometimes can become disconnected from ourselves and what we really need, and that can often compound problems that we're dealing with.

Speaker 1: 6:50

I know this expression is super cliche, but you've heard it said that you can't pour from an empty cup, and the more I think about that in light of parenting and being a cycle breaker, the more I understand that it's very difficult to give our children what we haven't given to ourselves yet or learn to give ourselves. And we can to some degree, and I think many of us sometimes are motivated by being able to do something for our children. But I've also learned that it is important to learn how to nurture ourselves and rediscover our needs and learn to attend to our needs in a gentle, caring way, rather than just always moving towards the next thing and often sideline being ourselves and the things that we legitimately need as well, and when we can learn to care for ourselves and even just acknowledge there's maybe many deficits that we had growing up in different ways. However, when we can acknowledge those things and learn to attend to ourselves and learn to give ourselves the things that we needed but maybe didn't have growing up, it pivots the way that we approach parenting and the way we are bringing up our children, where it's not this overcompensation like I have to make up for all the things that I didn't have or that I didn't do right versus I'm extending to you my child, who I love an overflow of what I have learned and received for myself, which is a really hard thing to do. I realize that this is much easier said than done, and again I noticed that during the holiday season in particular is when we tend to overextend ourselves as parents in so many ways, and so I just wanted to talk through three different things that you can be thinking about as you consider yourself in this equation, because your needs, you, my friend, you matter and the work that you're doing is so important.

Speaker 1: 8:46

And in order to sustain this work that you're doing in terms of being a cycle breaker and doing things differently with your children, it has to start with you. It has to start with how you're taking care of yourself, and I understand that as we wrap up this year and think about wrapping up this year, it can just feel like a complete burnout, like I just have to make it through and cross the finish line, and I just want you to be thinking about some of these things in terms of caring for yourself, because I know that your kids mean everything to you. You want them to be able to have a different experience and a different upbringing than maybe you had, and that is a beautiful thing, and it's also important to take the time that you need to fill up that cup for yourself, because you are also deserving of those things, and this is something that many of us are doing. We are re-parenting ourselves as we're parenting our own children in many different facets, when it comes to how we're approaching food and how we're approaching parties and meal times and all the things. So here are some things that I just want to encourage you with to think about.

Speaker 1: 9:48

Number one is give yourself grace, but, more specifically, another way to think about this is to forgive yourself. This is something that has been really hard for me and something that I'm continuing to work through, and I think many of us, as parents, can internalize shame, or this shameful narrative that's constantly running through our heads that we're not good enough or we're not doing it right or we're not doing enough, and that is where that overcompensation can often fester from. And so I just want to speak this encouragement to you, and that is to just forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for what you didn't know or what you didn't have, or what resources that you didn't have.

Speaker 1: 10:26

It can be easy to blame yourself for things that didn't go the way that you wanted them to, whether it's for your children or how you grew up, and we can't parent our children from a place of wholeness if we are holding ourselves hostage to shame and all the things that we regret or maybe wanted to do differently. There's so much that we're learning, there's so many things that we're doing differently, and we have to realize that we are doing the best that we can with the resources and the information that we had at the time. You are doing the best that you can, and the parent that is present today is not the same parent that was showing up for your children years ago, depending on where you're in your parenting journey, but just realizing that we're constantly growing and learning and evolving and we can't hold it against ourselves for things that we didn't know in the earlier parts of our parenting journey. This is something that, again, I am working through myself. After my first three children, I went through an intense struggle with postpartum depression and it still grieves me to this day for the ways that I couldn't show up for my children, the ways that I wasn't present for them emotionally, and it has taken significant work on my part to be able to forgive myself for that. And they're growing up and there's so much about their childhood that I feel like I missed out on because I was struggling. And I also have to look at myself from a compassionate lens and realize that it wasn't my fault, that I was struggling and that I was doing the best that I could with the resources that I had in my life at the time. And I share that, because I think this is a common thread that many of us struggle with. We regret or shame ourselves for the ways that we couldn't show up for our children or the things that we wish we could have done different. And wherever you are at on your parenting journey, I just want to encourage you with that Learn to forgive yourself, to give yourself compassion for what you didn't know or what you couldn't do or where you were at at the time and knowing that you truly were doing the best that you could.

Speaker 1: 12:29

It's difficult to be a parent in this day and age. Many of us are parenting with very little support, and that is even harder to do when you're trying to be a cycle breaker. Maybe you've had to cut off some relationships in some capacity because you realize that they were toxic or not healthy for you or your family and that can feel very isolating, and you don't want to make yourself even more isolated by living in shame about yourself or how you parent or how you're mothering your children. So when I say, give yourself grace, be able to extend yourself forgiveness in the same way that you would to your children or to your partner, that this is part of being human is learning and growing and realizing that we just can't get it right all the time and we can't be expected to live to this arbitrary standard of perfection. This is something that I do see characteristic of many cycle breakers Like we're so eager to do things differently that we hold ourselves to such a high standard that it's almost impossible and you don't want to put that over yourself, because there's no such thing as perfect.

Speaker 1: 13:33

There is beauty in being able to repair with our children and being able to apologize to them and let them see our humanness and that it's okay that we mess up, and how to ask for forgiveness, how to make things right when things happen, how to give ourselves grace, so that our children can learn to do that for themselves too, because that's what we want for our kids, right, and so it has to start with us being able to extend that to ourselves. So that's the first thing I want to share with you. The second thing that, again, is very hard. All of these things are very hard, easier said than done, also important to think about. But the second thing here is to grieve. Allow yourself to grieve what you didn't have, what you needed, and maybe what you're still needing and not getting, and understanding that grief is a process. This is very hard.

Speaker 1: 14:21

I think this step is very easy to gloss over or step over because it's so uncomfortable. Grief is hard to sit in, and I definitely want to encourage you to perhaps consider doing this with a safe person or a loved, trusted person in your life, so that you're not alone in your grief. But I really feel like this is a necessary step in order for us to move forward and caring for ourselves and our children in a life giving way and to avoid the trap of overcompensation. What I have learned from my own journey is that when I've allowed myself to grieve, that it really does help release that pain and shame from my body, so that it's not holding my nervous system hostage, because when we are internalizing all of that, it can just bubble up inside of us with nowhere to go. So many of us are living our lives and trying to parent while also holding on to grief, either because we don't know how to grieve, or we don't feel safe to grieve, or we don't have support to help us grieve. All of these things are valid reasons why you might not be able to grieve, and I just want to encourage you to think about what that might look like and what is it that you may need to grieve and give yourself space to grieve. And again, I would highly encourage you to do this in the presence of a loved one, a trusted person, a safe person, a counselor, a therapist, someone that can maybe help you walk through this, because the last thing you want is to walk through your grief alone. Sometimes it can feel like you're opening the floodgates and it's too much at once, and that can feel overwhelming and sometimes even be further traumatizing to your body and your nervous system.

Speaker 1: 15:59

I also think there are different ways in which we grieve. Sometimes we need to sit in the emotion and release it from our body in the form of crying or tears, whatever that might look like. Other times it's journaling or being able to materialize the things that we find ourselves thinking about but just never really allow ourselves to fully process or think through. Sometimes it's external processing, like being able to talk it out with somebody else. That can be all very healing ways in which we process our grief.

Speaker 1: 16:29

And just to give you examples from my own journey for myself, my grief and parenting has been layered and complex. I'll say there has been grief grieving what I didn't have growing up as a child, what I needed from my caregivers but didn't receive. And then there is also grief, again as a parent, of not being able to show up for my children in the ways that I wanted to, and I shared a little bit of that about dealing with postpartum depression and just not being able to give my children or show up for them in ways that they needed. There are so many different layers to grief, and the ways that it impacts you as a parent are going to be different and very individual, which is why I just want to encourage you to go gently with yourself and just consider what are some things that I need to grieve that I haven't allowed myself to think about or process or feel, and also just being compassionate with yourself, knowing that these things are hard to feel, they're hard and painful, and especially if they're deep, deep-rooted griefs that go back to our childhood. This is hard stuff, and I would also say don't put a timeline on it either. This is what I've noticed about grief is.

Speaker 1: 17:38

Sometimes grief shows up in unexpected ways and this is something that I definitely see and experience during the holidays when something can unexpectedly trigger that grief in you and, rather than fighting it or shoving it down, just noticing it, getting curious about it and giving yourself permission to grieve what was lost, what you didn't have, what you needed. All of those things are so valid and realizing that this is a process, too that, as much as we wish we could just do it and be done with it and get it over with. It doesn't work like that, and when we can give ourselves permission to allow it to be what it needs to be, we can move through it in a much more healing way, and that really truly does allow us to show up for our kids from our healed parts, not our broken parts, not the parts of us that are still wounded, and that is the long-term goal. So something to think about, and even just as a journal prompt for you to consider, is writing down or processing what are some things that you want to grieve or want to process in more depth, either from your childhood, from your parenting journey, or there are things that you needed, that never got or wished you could have done differently. Those can be some clues as to where you need to grieve and be able to release that pain and shame from your body. So when we can do the work of forgiving ourselves and allowing ourselves to grieve, I believe it really opens it up. Up for the last step or tidbit of encouragement I want to give you, which is growing and realizing that this journey of growing and discovery, self-discovery as a person, as a parent, is an ongoing process and when we have done that hard work, of being able to forgive ourselves, of being able to grieve what we didn't have, what we needed. I really believe that that opens up the possibility for us to grow in a healing way, where we can learn to nurture ourselves and start to give ourselves the things that we needed the re-parenting journey.

Speaker 1: 19:41

It's really hard to do this, to grow and move forward, if you find yourself stuck in the past, which is why I believe it's really important to think about or move through those first two steps, because so often, as cycle breakers, we are learning the strategies. We're learning the positive parenting strategies. We're learning the scripts. We're learning the more beneficial ways to engage with and talk with our children. We're learning all the things.

Speaker 1: 20:05

I know you, mama, I know that you're learning everything that you can to do things differently with your children, and sometimes it's easy to forget that it's hard to implement those things in the present when we're still stuck in our past, and that is why, again, it is so important and necessary in order to be able to not just talk, to talk, but actually walk the walk with our children, we have to be able to move through those things. We have to be able to forgive ourselves, give ourselves, grace and grieve, what we didn't have, what we needed before we can actually truly implement these things for our children. This is where I can see how we are allowed to give ourselves that permission to be a good enough parent, because there's no such thing as a perfect parent. But we can be good enough. We can be what and who our children need without self-sacrificing what we ourselves need as parents. It allows for genuine connection and secure attachment with our children, versus coming at it from a place of guilt or shame.

Speaker 1: 21:09

And that is just my words of encouragement to you, my friend, before you jump into the busyness of this holiday season and thinking about all the things that everybody else needs, just remembering that your needs are just as valid. You are equally deserving of the love and attention and care and nurturing that you're pouring into your children. And, in fact, when you learn to give those things to yourself first, it becomes easier to extend that to your children, naturally, versus forcing it in a way that may come across as ingenuine. So I hope this gives you some encouragement, just some things to think about as you're going through and moving through this holiday season. I know it can be stressful and bring up so many different things, but just know how loved you are. Just know that I'm here for you and would always love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 21:55

If you have any questions or topic requests as we go through this holiday season, feel free to connect with me and share your thoughts and just give yourself permission to be a good enough parent and know that that my friend is enough. So, as always, I'm sending you so much love and look forward to connecting with you next week. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Lift the Shame podcast. For more tips and guidance on your mother-her journey, come connect with me on Instagram at CrystalCarGaze. Until next week, mama, I'll be cheering you on. Bye for now.