Breaking Toxic Parenting Patterns and Healing Generational Trauma with Katherine Sellery

Parenting feels like the hardest job (sometimes even on the good days). Maximum effort, minimum (tangible) reward.

Of course, we love our kids SO much but how do we balance everyone's seemingly never-ending needs with our own self care?  

In this episode, I’m joined by Katherine Sellery, CEO and founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution, to talk about how the patterns we inherited—often without even realizing it—can show up in our parenting today.

A lot of what we think of as “discipline” or “normal” behavior…
is actually coming from old blueprints.

And over time, those patterns can either build connection—
or create distance—not just with young kids, but even with adult children.

We talk about:

• Why control-based discipline often leads to retaliation, rebellion, and resistance
• The fundamental role of nervous system safety in parent-child relationships
• What happens when kids don’t feel seen, heard, or understood
• Parenting adult children and why disconnection can surface years later
• The difference between permissive, authoritarian, and connection-based parenting
• The emotional weight of being a caregiver—and why it’s so hard to “turn off”
• Self-criticism, guilt, and the patterns we can become emotionally attached to
• Personal growth and emotional healing through parenting
• How to begin healing generational patterns instead of passing them on
• How repair and self-compassion actually strengthen relationships

This isn’t about being a perfect parent.

It’s about understanding your nervous system…
becoming aware of what you’ve inherited…
and allowing parenting to become a space for emotional healing—
so you can choose what gets carried forward—and what doesn’t.

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Transcript

Ryann 1:03

Welcome back to the show. This is Ryan, your host. I'm so happy you're here and really excited to dive into this conversation. It's got me thinking about every time my kids say no to me and why some of us as adults aren't that great at saying no. So we might be thinking of like the people pleasers or the codependents or the perfectionists right now. And if you relate to any of those labels, I'm with you. I totally get that. And I think so many of us here right now are consciously leading in our lives, whether that's at work, at home, or anywhere in between, with a different consciousness. And that's really what the heart of this conversation is today with Catherine Celery. Catherine is CEO and founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution. She's spent over 20 years helping parents and educators shift out of control-based dynamics and into connection, cooperation, and real psychological safety in relationships. Yes, please. This conversation dives headfirst right into the heart of the matter. Of course, last week I said that that was the most important parenting conversation we've ever had on the show. Well, guess what? We're having another one of those. This is profound wisdom for guiding the next generation with presence, purpose, and patience. Hi, Catherine. Welcome to the Raising Wild Hearts podcast. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. You're so welcome. And I am thrilled to get into this conversation. Many of us here today, we're 150 plus episodes in on this Raising Wild Hearts journey. And we have explored conscious parenting before. And we know mostly that it has to do with us, right? And it relies heavily on connection and repair. And it's basically this foundation for our relationships. Like we, we know that on a logical level, yet it's still some days, right? Or some seasons even doesn't seem any easier. And I mean, my husband's out of town right now as we're recording this. I've got three kids, 11 and under. And he called this morning, like, how's everything going? And I'm like, everything's fine. Like, it's fine. You know, this parenting is just so hard. I said to him. And he's like, Yep. So, you know, I just want to say something that we're not allowed to say out loud, which is parenting sucks sometimes. And so we know this and we're conscious. So, what do we do with that? Like, why is parenting the hardest place to stay calm? It seems like the most effort, but yet least rewarding. So, how can we frame this in a different mindset, maybe a different feeling around it to make it feel just a bit lighter?

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, so good, so good, so good. And so true. I can't I think for, you know, I worked throughout raising kids and but I always had flexibility because I work for myself. So I could take my calls from home. I had a little office. And I think it's, it's, I mean, but we never stop having that feeling of responsibility no matter where we are. So I don't think it's a job you get to leave, right? That's the big difference. It didn't really matter if I'd gone to my office that was in the city or if I was home working from the home office. And this was before home offices were popular, um, or, you know, common as a result of our experiences with COVID, and that whole thing became somewhat normalized, even though I know, you know, there's a shift out of that at the moment. But nevertheless, the point is that we never stop our job. And the one that we work for, usually, again, you know, it can be that everybody brings those problems home with them. But a lot of times when you walk out of the door, you close it and you leave it behind and you start to decompress as a result. And then you come back the next day and you start to tackle all the same stuff that was on your plate, but you got the break. I don't know if we ever really get that break, right? I don't think we ever really do. Cause even if we're leaving our kids with a trusted babysitter or a family member, we're still worried. Totally. I don't think we ever get to stop worrying, you know. Oh, will they remember this or will they remember that? Or, you know, I don't really know her very well. Are you sure it's okay? You know, all the stuff. All the stuff. So as much as, you know, sometimes we want to strangle our kids, at the same time, we never stop worrying about them. And it's always coming from that deep place of love, compassion, understanding. And yet we're so frazzled from all of the stuff on our plates that it really comes back to what you said. I mean, care for the caregiver. How do we care for ourselves? How do the caregivers in the world who no, no, not only, not only do they do caregiving at home, they do it professionally, right? So now they're just constantly being pulled on to provide love and compassion and empathy and understanding and support without taking the time to do the same thing to themselves. And so I guess that's the message. The message is, you know, the whole proverbial oxygen mass on self first, so that you're well cared for, so that you can keep doing all the stuff you do to take care of all the things in your world. But if you don't prioritize self and taking care of self, then you can't be there for all the people that you really want to be there for in the way you want to be there. So let's pretend you haven't done that. And then you do something like you're snappy, and then what happens after that? Oftentimes what happens is it goes you know, it's just it's just the opportunity for self-criticism.

Ryann 7:12

Wow, I really suck today.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

I barked at my kids, or, you know, I barked at somebody at work, and ah. And and and that's, I guess, the skill that we can bring today is to just recognize there's opportunities to take the break during the day and, you know, metaphorically just put the oxygen mask on self with loving compassion and really begin to practice self-compassion. You know, that I don't feel good about the way I handle that. And, you know, there's a part of me that just wants to make me wrong and make me bad. And I'm gonna be with that part of me that's the criticizer. And I, because I'm bigger than what's bugging me and I stay rooted in my higher sense of self, I can be present to all of these different parts of me, the part of me that is, you know, self-critical, the part of me that's always judging me for not having handled everything beautifully, um, everything about all of my humanness, as long as I'm practicing staying firmly rooted in the part, or not the part, but the big overwhelming sense of I'm bigger than all of it, I can turn toward everything in me with compassion and love.

Ryann 8:25

Love this. So even, might I add, the part of the part of us that almost enjoys screwing up again. It's almost like, oh, look, I screwed up again. I knew you're gonna do that, right? This self-fulfilling prophecy that we put on ourselves. You know, we kind of become addicted emotionally to feeling the guilt or the shame or the not good enough, whatever that flavor is for you, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

So that's an interesting way of looking at it. Um, and I I think it's a great touchstone for us to go back to this because I'm sure it resonates with a lot of people, right? Because I mean, we are human, which means that every single day we can just bank on the fact that there's gonna be a mistake. There's just gonna be a mistake coming down the pike. I I loved something that was at my kids' school. They had a big staircase, and over the staircase there was a banner that said, um, if you didn't make a mistake today, you're not learning. And so I would recommend, I still do to clients, say, you know, put that on your refrigerator. Like put it on a notebook for your kids, put it somewhere where everybody can see it so that we no longer have to think of that as a problem. Um, it's actually like, oh, good, I just made a mistake, I can check it off my list. It's like, oh, great, you know, brush your teeth, make a mistake, and just normalize making mistakes so that everybody can just be okay with mistakes happening every day. Inside of you, something that wants to make that wrong or bad, I mean, that's a part that, you know, it learned it somewhere. And, you know, it's conditioned, I call it transgenerational trauma. It probably came through the family line or both sides, or you know, it's so normal to have this mindset around perfection and that instead of thinking of making mistakes as normal, making mistakes as learning opportunities, making mistakes as something you can just bank on. Um, when they happen, it's like, oh my God, there's been a mistake. Like, you know, why it wasn't perfect. So it gives us and it gives the people in our world the opportunity to experience somebody who's like, oh yeah, that was a mistake. You know, hey, give me a high five. You know, if you grow up in that experience, even if you have that something in you that continues to want to make it wrong or bad, you can turn again from that higher sense of self. You can turn toward it and just be with it, like with an arm around it. You know, hey, I'm here with you. Gosh, you know, it must be so hard to go with that perspective. And, you know, it's okay. You can hang on to that for as long as you want to. You don't need to shame that part. You don't need to make that part bad. You can just be with it in a way in which it feels seen, heard, and understood from its perspective. Cool. Like it's riding in the car with it. It's great for as long as you need to be. And if you need to shift or if this doesn't work anymore, that's okay too. It gives the psychological safety and the psychological space to not have been perfect. Ah, safety.

Ryann 11:23

Safety. So this is a big piece as far as I'm concerned in parenting, that feeling of we are safe. Our kids are safe. And I think it starts out biologically when a newborn or, you know, a baby is like crying in the bassinet or crying because they're hungry. It gives, I can speak from my experience, I don't know the science behind it, but there is some science behind it. It gave me this little surge of like cortisol or adrenaline of like, ugh, okay, time to feed the baby, right? And that's a necessity because we need to have the drive and the urge to care for our young ones. But it's funny because how that manifests when the kids are nine and eleven and they're like, mom, can I have this? Mom, mom, mom, I need this, mom, mom. And I still have that like, you know, sense of like lying coming at me. It's it's a problem. It's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

It is a problem. And um I again, I think it's it is part of, you know, there's a right reason for it. So there is a place where there, I we don't want to get rid of it, but yet we need to be a little bit more discerning and how and and being how when it arises, how how do we be with it? So, because I was, you know, like you, I think everybody probably goes, Yeah, I yeah, I've been I've done that too. Uh, and a friend of mine, I can remember, we were at the Disneyland Hotel in Hong Kong, which is where, you know, I raised my kids, and my friend as well. And we would take, I think it was my daughter and um, and usually there were like seven or eight of them girls, and then her son, they were best friends, and he would bring seven or eight guys. And so it would be like this pile of kids. And um, and we would go there and we'd take some rooms, and the mom's horse, she and my friend, we would be spending as much time as possible in the spa. We would have some helpers helping us with managing just where everybody was. And even though everything was quote, handled, there would still be the, oh my God, is anybody, you know, who's at the pool? You know, oh are we, you know, like you're you're kind you're supposed to be enjoying the spa and having a treatment, and there you are, freak it out. And my girlfriend would say to me, Okay, you need to tune in. Is this tuning into something that we need to get up off the table and really go address? Or is this just, you know, just freak out? Is it act on it, freak out? Or is it, no, no, it's just that something that gets freaked out if I'm not myself personally with eyeballs on everyone. So that is how I started to manage this was to be able to take a really deep breath and be, you know, ready to do whatever was needed. Like if it meant getting up and running out, okay, let's go. Or if it meant, no, that's that's not what's needed right now. You're just an overdrive, then you need to get really good about discernment here so that we're not an overdrive all the time, draining you, so that when you do need to get up and run out, you're not going to be able to. So that was just like, I don't know if that's helpful for anybody to just start taking that pause and really sensing into with a deep breath, okay, I need to really get clear about this because I I believe in intuition. I know we all have a really, you know, everybody on the planet has an intuition. The question is, how connected to it are we? And how how clear are the channels of communication between that intuitive part of me that that's available that knows and has available to it information that my mind doesn't, that's going to tune into more than just my mind can actually pick up on. It's, you know, extra sensory, if you want to look at it that way. And I hope that makes sense to people who are listening and they don't think I'm crazy.

Ryann 16:17

It does make sense. Yes. We are all about intuition here, and we are subscribing to that uh same thought process. And I think it's important, you know, I always picture like between my third eye or where our intuition lives and like my solar plexus or my heart, kind of this infinity loop because we we need to remember that we're this integrated system and not rely too heavily on this like mental aspect or not rely too heavily on this like gut feeling or the heart, like to marry them both essentially. Yes. Yes. Really tune in. Yeah. Yeah. There's power in that pause I've I've found. There's power in just that half of a second. What is this? What's happening? A mantra I love recently is this is not an emergency. You know, my kids might be hitting each other or getting in a little scuffle, or you know, I love it. Somebody fall, you know, falls in the pool, whatever it is, but still, yeah, this is not an emergency. It's not an emergency.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

It's so funny. This is so funny. Yeah, it's really good. It's, I guess it's bandwidth when we come right down to it. It's how how healthy is your nervous system? Is it fried? Is it on edge? Or do you have a nervous system that's really well healed, that has the bandwidth for day-to-day imperfection? Um, or are you wound up so tight that the minute you encounter anything that's a little off, you go off. And so we're back to you and you're back to self-care because how well we keep us cared for. Well, A, it's great modeling for your children so that they see and value themselves and recognize that this is going to command this beingness is going to command the response to everything that's going on. So that when you're living life, absolutely every step of the way, you're tuning into whether or not this is something you get to start making more choices, I think. If you're just so fried, you're not really making choices. It's all reactivity. And so everything is getting a reaction. Think of it as a bank of energy. And you've got this bank of energy that can go toward healing, um, healing self and, you know, through you healing others and supporting, whether it's a healing conversation or a loving conversation or something else. Um, just being present, you know, but if it's so tapped out and on such thin ice, you just end up losing out on those opportunities for precious connection. And you don't even know it sometimes, right? Exactly. And that's where, and if you do and you blow it, then we go back to self-compassion. Um, and and then, you know, sometimes you do need to have a conversation and you need to say something along the lines of, I just been reflecting on our conversation or thinking about what happened earlier today. And I can't seem to shake the fact that I wish I'd shown up differently. I wanted to take this time to let you know that, you know, that wasn't who I want to be. You know, there are so many ways to go back and clean it up so that it doesn't become a thing. And it's just done, you know, and again, it's such great modeling for we all screw up, we all make mistakes. And then when somebody else in your life makes a mistake, if it's a little person or a big person, and they've seen you model having made a mistake and coming back and being able to clean it up, and then experience the fact that when we do that, it's kind of like you did close the loop, everything's fine. There's no residual. There's no residual resentment flow. And, you know, a lot of the work I do is really around the three Rs, retaliation, rebellion, and resistance, that are developed around controlling forms of discipline. And so over time, what happens is the resentment flows are either addressed and disappeared and there aren't any, or they're still hanging on. And they can be very long and very old resentment flows that have developed over time, but you didn't know they were there because the people involved didn't feel safe enough to actually reveal what they were really feeling. And so they covered it up because that's what they learned to do was that it's not okay to reveal how I really feel about what's going on right now or what you said to me or how you treated me or any of that stuff. And and so I won't, but it's not that it's not there. It's just that they are on their own yet and capable of being able to stand on their own two feet yet. I have a client right now where the child's, you know, mid-20s. And I think that resentment flow is just beginning to show up. It's not that it just developed overnight, it's been there forever. It's just that this is a person who's now kind of, you know, well established enough in their own field that they can begin to demonstrate that, no, I don't feel as close as you think I should. And there's reasons for that. And you don't even want to know them.

Ryann 21:16

That's fascinating because I know we've talked to a couple of people on this podcast who have 20-something year old kids. In fact, last episode, Cara at the end said, Yes, I have grown 20-something kids. No, it does not make it any easier. And she is a parenting expert, been doing this work for years and years and years. And that is fascinating. I also know some listeners who have 20-something kids. I also am a 40-something-year-old kid of parents who have not really um known the truth of my experience or have it's been too hard for them to hear. And what you're talking about, it just makes me think of leadership. This is, you know, when we can frame it like that of being good, capable, communicative leaders, it takes like the emotional charge out of it. So, how with kids of any age are we modeling that good leadership and that discussion?

SPEAKER_01 22:16

I yeah, I love it. I love the count. Yeah, I love the framework of realm, I think of it as leadership too. I mean, I actually run a leadership effectiveness training in corporations. So it is an a leadership communication. I mean, they're all just skills, let's be honest. Anyone can learn them. So it's not like there's some mystery out there. It's really just skill acquisition. It's like mastering your tennis game or mastering, you know, that new language you want to learn. Well, this is a new language. And, you know, I come out of the NBC world, so it's nonviolent communication. How can I say this in a way in which I'm responsible for what I'm feeling and not blaming you as the catalyst for my experience? But if I blame you as the catalyst for my experience, because I'm having an experience, then I want to make you change in order for me to feel better. And all of the emphasis is always on getting the other to change their behavior so I can feel better, because that most important step of recognizing that the catalyst is not the cause of my experience. That step was never embedded in consciousness in the person who's going through it. No fault of their own, right? They grew up in a family system in which blame was the currency. I have an experience based on what happened, and then I blame you for my experiences if you caused it. And then you learn that other people make you feel. And you grow up thinking that the world is basically causing you to have experiences, and therefore you are disempowered and forever thinking that it's about changing externals in order to be okay. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth. And that's the most, you know, disempowering perspective. And yet it's the most common. Very common. Yeah. So again, I'm back to, you know, I was on the phone with another client the other day, and it's a husband wife thing, and where, you know, she's actually very much a the person who sees. The falling apart behaviors that their children are having as the tragic expression of an unmet need, which is totally in alignment. So, you know, a little person, a big person, any person falling apart has lost a grip. And is it nice to be around? Nope. Um, is it easy to go into judgment about the falling apart behaviors? So easy. And is it a triggering event? For a lot of people, it's very triggering. No matter what the age of the person is, they should be polite and they should know better. So then the should list comes in. It in old school parenting, and this is where, you know, I think a lot of times what people have is even though they may not think of themselves as old school, they could actually have what I'm gonna say, a blueprint that they're not even aware of that's running them that is old school, which does sound something like, you know, I asked you to do this already, and you still haven't done it, you know. And these are the words that are going through their nervous system. Don't disrespect. So because those are the words that arise from their blueprint that they didn't even realize was being blueprinted inside of them. And this is where, through no harm of their own, they've ended up with these operating systems, we all have, which we're working with. And and what happens is we get really mad when our kids don't do as we're told, as if that is an unacceptable, disrespectful thing. Well, not to say we don't want cooperation around here. God knows we all want cooperation around here. But when we encounter the lack of it, there are a lot of things that can go, there are a lot of things that can go on from here. One one is we yell louder. And that is going to be ineffective in all circumstances. For everyone in the spirit in the experience, for the person who's doing the yelling at a higher amplitude, they're not having a good time, right? They're actually out of control. For the child who's now crying even more and was already dysregulated for whatever reason, which we don't even know what it was, but they're dysregulated. Now they're so dysregulated, like there's no chancy, right? Like the psychological safety thing is nowhere close, nowhere in the room whatsoever. So we now have two drowning people. We have an older drowning person in the form of, in this case, it could be the mother, but it happened to be the father, who is obviously working from a blueprint around you do as you're told. And so that was, I'm sure, the environment of that growing up experience for the adult in the room, who's in their three-year-old, by the way. And they're trying to protect this child because they know from their own like blueprint that lack of obedience and compliance is dangerous because it was dangerous for him. So out of protection energy, to be quite honest, they're protecting somebody from getting in bigger trouble, which I'm imagining could have been in this person's, you know, childhood more like a spanking or worse, right? Um, and so there's everything about this adult nervous system that's freaking out. Because it's important to pass on this obedience and compliance chip in order to avoid having gone through what could potentially become worse. So we need a complete override here without shaming the one who's in the process, by the way, because that will never work. And so, I mean, if that's not an important message, let's make it one. Because I think that's that's what needs to happen for us to have compassion and understanding for the person who is really just doing everything they can out of their blueprint. We know that the blueprint that they're working from will cause harm. It'll cause harm to the relationship, it'll cause harm to the next generation, it'll just be transgenerational trauma recreated. And yet they don't know that. They don't know it yet. So then you have the 20-something understand themselves. Right.

Ryann 29:21

So then you have the 20-something year old kid or 30-something year old kid or 40-something year old kid saying, I'm actually not that close to you, and I'm actually not that connected to you, and you have no idea why. Is that like the the end game here?

SPEAKER_01 29:38

That's a lot of the game. In fact, I mean, that's exactly what's going on with, you know, with so many of the people that I see is that I end up coaching the kids. I, you know, ultimately I end, I mean, I coach everybody, but a lot of it is about I had one kid in their mid-20s say to me the other day, Oh my God, I mean, after three hours, I just have to get off the phone. And I said, So when people keep going on and on and on and on and on, it's because they don't feel seen, heard and understood from their perspective. So if you want this conversation with your, in this case, mom, to end faster, then what I I'm gonna teach you is how to be able to just, because I have a feeling you understood what her perspective was in the first like minute or two, and you still understood it after, you know, hour one, two, or three. But she kept going on and on and on and on and on because she didn't know that you did. So mom's in her three-year-old, still trying to be seen, heard, and understood from her perspective because when she was three, she wasn't. So she didn't feel seen, heard, and understood from her perspective as a little one. So then she repeated the pattern, transgenerational pattern of not seeing, hearing, and understood her child. Now her child is pulls away so far that, you know, mom's in freak out, and consequently trying desperately to pull the one, this person closer and doing it in all the ways that are almost guaranteed not to, right? So that's unfortunate, but it's true. So that's and that's so common, is that we go about trying to create an outcome that the way in which we're going about it is pretty much guaranteed not to create that outcome. So it's about as ineffective as possible. And so I said, if you could just say back to her, you know, I get it. You're so worried about blah, blah, blah, mom. You just, you're so concerned, a little, that you really want me to understand a little, and this is what you're seeing and hearing, this is how you'd look at it. If you can just recap and give it back to her, then she'll go, oh, okay, you did get me. And the conversation can end in a lot shorter period of time. So how do we communicate back to the adult that raised us that, you know, I didn't have the psychological safety at the time. And you could say this, anybody could, you know, anybody in the audience who might be experiencing this at the time to be able to say that, you know, even though I'm small and little, I still have feelings and needs. And that even though you felt my response always had to be, you know, yes, or okay, or I'll do it your way because I don't matter, I did matter. And I did have an alternative way that wasn't harmful to you or me and would have worked. And I felt as though I could never do it my way. It was all, it was never a win-win. It was always all about you. And um, can I say that now? Yeah, absolutely you can say that now. Will you find that the other person goes into, I don't know, maybe try to make you wrong or bad for their feelings of discomfort? More than likely, because that's what they live in. They live in the world, it's the external locus of causality. It is generated and caused by blame, victim blame consciousness, where you you've never learned that you have feelings that arise when you're in conflict and that the other person didn't make you feel that way. That is so fundamental to the truth, but yet it is so everybody's living a lie. Let me put it like blatant. Everyone is living a lie when they believe that my feeling is generated by this circumstance. The circumstance was a catalyst for the feelings that arose that have been there forever. These feelings are not brand new. They're old. These feelings happened ages ago. They're being activated by this person in this conversation. And if you begin to really embody this knowledge, you understand that them now coming up again is my opportunity as a more conscious, capable, older human to be able to work with what's arising inside of me. And I could almost say to the person that evoked that, thank you for bringing all of my garbage up. Thank you for bringing it all up because now I'm I'm more capable of handling it in a way in which I can see the truth of what occurred, what's present in me, and I can deal with it. I can now be that loving, compassionate, understanding, internal energy that's wrapping an arm around my little one who wasn't seen, heard, and understood from her perspective at a time when it would have made all the difference. And so you're gonna be doing both now as adults in their 20s, 30s, 40s onwards. And it is an onwards thing. I can remember at 50, thinking about my own mother who was dying, and I thought to myself, oh my God, I never separated and individuated. I still feel responsible for how you feel. I still feel like your pain is something I need to manage.

unknown 34:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

I feel like I'm your oxygen mask. And I was. Wow. And that's because she never learned to separate and individuate, because it was forbidden. And so she couldn't teach something she didn't know. So I never felt like I could separate or individuate. I continued to feel responsible and overly responsible, like a good codependent does, right? So that's the problem, is that this mindset does create a generation of codependents. And the codependents then need to learn that to be responsible for everyone's feelings in a room is firstly irresponsible. Um, and it's also robbing them of the opportunity to develop maturity on their own, which they were robbed of. So it's never blame, it's always compassion and understanding. And it's also recognizing that true healing is only going to come through conflict. The healing nature of conflict, it's honestly the only way we heal. And um, I mean, it's probably not the only way, but it sure does seem like it, you know. I don't know. It seems like an attest to that.

Ryann 35:27

Yeah. Yeah, I can attest to that. When you were saying that it's, you know, thanking the other person for bringing this stuff up for you. I think maybe that's why parenting sucks so bad for me sometimes, is that my three kids bring those things up for me. And so I'm like, thank you. They don't know it, you know, they don't, they don't really know I'm doing this work. One day they will, or maybe they won't. Maybe they won't care, maybe they won't be interested. But so much of my reparenting and repatterning work does get catalyzed because of the three of those little munchkins. And so, yeah, it it's beautiful. It it and it's alchemical. Yeah, and it doesn't make it easy. You know, it's not, it's not easy. And this brings me to these transgenerational patterns that you call them. And we've got some grandparents in the room, we've got some boomers out there. I'm a millennial, and you know, the boomers are all just going like, oh my God, you're just letting your kids run amok. And so sometimes we carry these patterns with us and we realize that they're no longer serving us, they're really outdated, we identify them. And my question is surrounding how do we ensure that we're not swinging the pendulum too far and becoming permissive? There was a time when I had my first child. This is embarrassing, when I decided not to say the word no because it was too harsh and too, you know, limiting. And, you know, spoiler alert, that didn't work out, right? It was more learning to set boundaries. So how do we make sure we're not becoming permissive and just swinging like too far? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

I, you know, it's so funny. You would, this is such a hot topic. It really is. Um, I was a keynote at an event recently, and um, they were all doctors in the room. And I was talking about the um concept that children are people too, and that children are deserving of um understanding and compassion and so forth. And if you say that to certain groups of people, they hear permissive. And I triggered somebody in the audience so much. Um, and it was really interesting. And I I looked at her, you know, there are a thousand people in the room, and I looked at her and I said, I think you think I'm saying that it's okay to be permissive. And that actually is where where the rub is. And um, and I said, I can appreciate your response being so strong because permissiveness is actually, if we had to choose between the paradigm of authoritarian versus permissive, the research actually shows that permissive is more damaging than an authoritarian. Okay. Yeah, which is so interesting. So interesting. Which is very interesting. Because permissiveness feels like um, I don't care enough to actually, you know, put my stake in the ground and cause the problems that are going to come from my no. But like neglect. It doesn't matter. It feels like neglect. It's experience as neglect. So from the research, we know that kids who grew up in permissive families did actually feel like their parents were so checked out or into whatever they were so otherwise invested in that they weren't, they didn't care enough. That's how it feels. A permissive parent lands in a child as you don't care about me, which is so ironic. Because I think from the permissive parent's perspective, it's probably something along the lines of, I care so much about you, I'm gonna let you do whatever you want. Well, that's not love. That's really not love because you don't actually, you're probably not neutral to everything that's going on. So it's not authentic. So authentic, you know, so really, I mean, authoritative is not the same as permissive or authoritarian. So, like, my my work is called the guidance approach. And, you know, if we were to reframe it into one of these three buckets, it would be authoritative parenting. It's the ability to have the sense of like, it's really not okay with me. And, you know, maybe it's okay with other people on the planet, maybe Johnny's mom's okay with it, whatever. Maybe even your dad's okay with it. I don't know. I'm not. And I'm being authentic about what's my yes and no. So, you know, Marshall Rosenberg used to say, I can't say yes to you until I'm absolutely certain that I can also say no. So it's creating relationships in which you can be truthful. If you can create a dynamic where I can say yes or no, then everything I hear is a request and not a demand. If I can't say yes or no, then everything I'm hearing is actually demand. It's not even a request. Even if you dress it up with pleases and all the rest of it, would you mind please? La la la. If I say, no, I don't think so, then your head blows up, then I realize, oh, it wasn't really a request in the first place. You might as well just go around saying, do it now, right? Because that's what it really is. Energetically, it's obedience and compliance energy. Now, obedience and compliance is very dangerous. If you're teaching obedience and compliance to your children, and the only possible answer to everything is, okay, yes, ma'am, how how how high do you want me to do? But you know, if that's the only thing that's okay, or they get in trouble or you label it disrespectful, then again, somebody could hear this and say, well, there it is, there's permissiveness again, letting them do whatever they want. No, that's not true. It's saying really clearly, actually, bedtime is not negotiable. Bathtime is not negotiable. Brushing your teeth is not negotiable. These are non-negotiables. So, however, when you're gonna go to bed potentially could be different on every night of the week, depending on if we're on summer vacation, if we're on Easter vacation, if we're at the summer house, if they're whatever. Yes, there's room where we eat dinner every night. You know, yeah, I could see how some nights eating in the living room at the coffee table, maybe it's not completely off, it's not completely off the table, although I wouldn't see it happening very often. So, in other words, there are other perspectives in the room, even coming from little people. And the more that we see resistance and no as a yes to something inside of themselves, the more often we get curious rather than angry. The more that we can be curious about the no and encouraging of them to continue to give us the no when that's what's coming up for them, is our chance to be able to engage with what's going on that's getting in the way of cooperation. So the more that we can get curious about the no, it gives us that sense of, okay, first of all, I'm gonna continue to see you beautiful. I'm gonna see you beautiful whether you give me a yes or a no. I'm not gonna let myself go into brat, selfish, all the labels and the judgments that can get in the way of me seeing your no is beautiful. First of all, I just want to call that out because that's what we usually do. When the other person gives us the no or resistance, we go into making them bad or wrong. And so I'm not gonna make you bad or wrong. I mean, obviously I have my preference, and the fact that you're putting up any resistance makes me want to, you know, all right, maybe I want to kill you right now. But anyway, I'm gonna put that aside. And instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get curious and say, okay, what's coming up for you? And um, and that gives that child voice. And when we listen to what's coming up for them, sometimes we're just so shocked that it's not inconsiderate, it's not selfish or mean, it's just that there is actually something that's arising that we hadn't thought about. And we get to pause and we get to practice whether we want to be considerate of what they're telling us and how we can work together with them around getting to maybe even a shared outcome. It changes the whole thing. It changes the whole thing. I and we can take it into adulthood. Um, I can think of so many recent examples in my life where there was something happening and there was a group of us doing it, and somebody, somebody said something that I had not expected about like, well, can we include this person? And I thought, oh my God, why? Why? We're already a group of 10. For the love of God, do we really need to bring one more person along? Can we ever just have like a sacred circle? And then I paused and I just went, I have no idea what's right or wrong. You know what? I'm not gonna make this choice. Why don't we just see if there are enough hotel rooms to add one more person? And so that's where I went. And then it turned out we did. And then it was like, okay, so yeah, we got hotel rooms. Find out if they want to come. And it turned out to be such a great addition to the trip. So it gave me a great opportunity to learn, even as an adult. Sometimes my first response is no, because it just seemed like so much work to make it a yes. Um permissiveness is not okay, and authoritarian is not okay, because what really works is connection. And connection doesn't happen in either one of those circumstances. What happens is resentment. Inevitably, in both circumstances, whether I, as the permissive parent, become eventually resentful of the fact that everybody's walking all over me without being responsible for the fact that I let them, or the authoritarian who always gets their way because everybody's so terrified of them they couldn't speak up and say no, because all that does is land them in some kind of corner or some hellish place without privileges. So they've learned to say yes when they mean no. That's not healthy. What we want is we don't want people ever to do things out of obedience and compliance. We want them to be doing things because they feel like they understand the other person, that they hear it as a request, not a demand, that they have the ability to say no when they mean no, yes when they mean yes, and that the family system has more value on authenticity than it does on just blind obedience.

Ryann 45:04

Amen. So good. To me, this work is about creating that foundation of the house for this lifelong relationship that let's be honest, all of us want with our kids. You know, I oftentimes like think of like being a grandma. And whether I am a grandma or not a grandma in the future, I'm like, I just can't wait for my grandma era. And I, you know, the only way you get to a grandma era when being connected with your grandbabies and your kids is by doing this foundational work now. And you said what we're doing essentially is creating relationships that are truthful. And if that's not the most important thing, I don't know what is. Catherine, your work is absolutely phenomenal. You are brilliant. You are forced to be reckoned with. Your website, just parentingrevolution.com. It's beautiful. It's so rich in resources. You've got an ebook on there, you've got so many things. I'm gonna link it down in the description so people can find you and follow the brilliant work you're doing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Ryan.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

It's so fun to be here. I love who you are, your stand in the world. I feel like we're sisters in the work, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here so much.