It’s Not Too Late to Stop Yelling or Spanking (with Lavinia Brown)

Transcript of “It’s Not Too Late to Stop Yelling or Spanking (with Lavinia Brown)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today my guest is inner child healing expert Lavinia Brown. She and her partner Andrew Lynn joined me for what was one of the most popular recent episodes of Unruffled, “Becoming Untriggered.” In that episode, they shared their personal stories and described the work that they now do with adults and why it can be life-changing.

Lavinia’s work focuses on parents. And that’s very personal for her because when she became a mom, she realized that she was unconsciously repeating the disruptive, physically punitive methods her parents had used, and it was negatively affecting her children and her relationship with them. Forced to confront her past unresolved trauma, Lavinia eventually learned how to recognize her triggers and heal from within, to become the parent and partner she wanted to be. Most of the time.

One of the many parents who identified with that episode wrote to me just recently and she said, “I felt like Lavinia was speaking directly to me when she described parents who feel out of control and even volatile while in conflict with their children.” This parent is desperately afraid that even though she recognizes her own negative reactions and behaviors and is taking conscious steps to correct them, that it may be too late for her to mend her relationship with her son, who she’s noticing feels unsafe. She’s also struggling to get her partner on board. I could think of no one better than Lavinia to respond to this parent’s questions, and I’m very grateful she was willing to join me today.

Hi there, Lavinia, welcome.

Lavinia Brown: It’s so good to be here again.

Janet Lansbury: Great to have you back. And as I told you, I love that you’re willing to speak to a question that I received that is actually really about your work. So her subject line is: “Is it too late? From a desperate mom with lots of inner child trauma.” And she says:

I came upon your podcast a little late in the game and I’m hoping it’s not too late. I have a very spirited three-year-old boy and a two-and-a-half-month-old baby boy. I found out about your work because a dear friend who heard about my struggles and follows you sent me the episode with Lavinia Brown called “Becoming Untriggered.” I felt like Lavinia was speaking directly to me when she described moms who feel out of control and even volatile when in conflict with their children. That is how I had been feeling with my son.

My parents were definitely authoritarian in their approach to parenting. Getting a spanking was the expectation when I disobeyed and feelings were not respected or encouraged. Fast forward to my parenting. There’s so much chatter about gentle parenting on the internet, but it all seemed very nebulous and even inconsistent before I found your work. All I knew was that I wanted to parent differently than I was parented, but there was no clear way for me to do that, and I often resorted to the same methods my parents used.

My son has a huge personality and is extremely willful and passionate. Even as a newborn, he never slept as the other newborns did. People called him alert and busy from the beginning. It seemed sometimes during times of discipline that he would only ever respond to me when I resorted to screaming at him. He would cry in fear and I would feel awful.

What makes it worse is that my husband is from a family and culture which still thinks that the last resort should be a spanking when a child is acting as defiantly as my son often does. He also has children from before we met and is of the mind that none of the “old school” methods of parenting were hurtful to his older children.

I’m now convinced that spanking should never be an option. Seems obvious to some, but remember, I am fairly new to this research. I’m also seeing that all of these terrible parenting techniques are not working with my son. If anything, he has learned that it is acceptable to vent his frustrations by trying to hit me, kick me, or scratch me.

Now there’s a new baby in the mix, and of course there’s a fresh wave of testing every boundary on his part. I realized that things needed to change, and fast, when I noticed him flinch as I got up quickly once to stop him from pushing his brother’s stroller aggressively because he was upset. He even asked me, “Am I going to get a pow pow now?” “Pow pow” is what my husband calls a spanking. It broke my heart.

I can tell that there’s a fear there in him of us under all of his little boy bravado. I’m trying to change tactics and devour your content as quickly as I can, but he does not feel safe to express the bigger feelings to me. I’ve tried to sit with him through them and ask specific questions to try to help him name his emotions, but he will often deflect and start doing something physical like flip or make frustrated sounds instead of admit his feelings. I could name specific examples, but I feel this email is already so long and I want to respect your time.

My questions are these: Is it too late? The way we have parented has made him fearful of us on some level, unwilling to trust that it’s okay to express negative emotions, especially regarding his brother. He screams and yells and hits when upset and sometimes even knocks things over. Is repair possible at this point? Also, how do you recommend I get my husband on the same page, committed to this respectful approach? My husband is trying to respect my change in parenting out of respect for me, but I can tell he is not 100% sold. And in the heat of the moment he still threatens pow pow, even though I told him we will not be doing that again. We will need to be a unified front to withstand pressure from both sets of grandparents, who still are confident in their methods of parenting.

Thank you so much for all you do, for making the hazy term “respectful parenting” fall within some more specific guidelines, and for even reading this far. Really, for everything.

I feel that you are the perfect person to respond to this not only because she mentioned you, but because you also have had to navigate not only your own parenting, but the team that you and your partner are. I would love to know, what do you think? Do you think this is too late? Do you think there are some things that she can do, and where would she begin at this point?

Lavinia Brown: Yeah. Well obviously you are the parenting expert, Janet. I’m not. What I do is help people understand where challenges in parenting might be linked to their childhoods and to challenges that they haven’t yet overcome, feelings that they haven’t yet processed and released. And perhaps you want to answer the bit about how to get your husband on the same page, I’m sure something that you must get asked a million times a day.

But in terms of, is repair possible? I think it’s always possible. It’s never too late, never too late. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are glossing over everything and saying, oh, it’s absolutely fine. You can do whatever you want and then kind of rub it out. I don’t believe that repair rubs anything out. It makes things better and it improves things moving forwards. But we also have to take a good, hard look at what we’ve done and really take on board that we need to change. That would be, I think, the most important repair that we can do, and that is changing. Changing for our children. And maybe I can talk a little bit more about that later.

But for me, I see repair in different stages. As you know, because you talk about this, repair happens straight after rupture. So we can say sorry, that we didn’t intend to react in that way, that that way that we reacted was wrong, that it wasn’t our child’s fault that we weren’t able to get ahold of our emotions before they came out in their raw, unprocessed form. And that can make things better in the moment. But I know what a lot of my clients say to me is that that’s all very well, but I keep doing the same thing and I keep apologizing and it feels like the apologies are getting really hollow and I think my children are just going, Yeah, whatever. It’s devalued the whole notion of repair. So we’ve got to be careful. That’s why I talk about change.

Janet Lansbury: That’s so hard!

Lavinia Brown: It’s really, really hard. And that’s what I do: help people to change by going back to their childhoods. Because in my perspective, you only want to parent differently from your parents, and that’s what this woman says. She said, “I wanted to parent differently,” but then she also said, “I often resorted to the same methods my parents used.” And this is absolutely classic. So whilst I said you have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, I also want this lady to know, and everyone else who ends up reacting in disproportionate ways, that it isn’t fully your fault.

I’ve said this before a million times, but it’s so important to understand that when you go into a trauma response, the front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is concerned with logic, rationale, reasoning, the consequences of your actions, that goes offline. So all of the parenting podcasts, all of the mantras, all of the books that you’ve read, it all flies out the window. You’re not able to grasp onto that knowledge the way that you know you want to to show up for your kids. And what kicks in is a much older part of your brain, because you are reacting to what feels like a threat. It’s a perceived threat. Obviously it’s not, your child is not a saber-toothed tiger, your child is not a car coming at you at full speed.

But if you had a childhood where the environment that you grew up in wasn’t always predictable, where you were often stressed, where the people around you weren’t able to control their emotions so it was perhaps emotionally chaotic or volatile, where your parents didn’t let you express your authentic self, your big feelings. If you experienced a childhood that wasn’t safe and predictable and calm, then it’s much easier for you to go into that kind of red zone, as I call it, and react from that trauma place. Because your child is reminding you of that unsafe experience.

So whilst this woman says, “I don’t want to parent like my parents,” that’s what happens. When we are very triggered and we react disproportionately, often it’s because we are ending up doing what our parents did to us, even though we don’t want to, because that prefrontal cortex isn’t online. So repair is possible a hundred percent, but we also need to do that work to heal the experiences that occurred to us at an age that we couldn’t process them.

I guess what I was underlining is that it is your fault. You did what you did, we have to take responsibility. And it’s also not your fault. You are a product of your parents and you are a product of your past. And people often don’t realize that until they become a mom, because that’s when it all comes up.

Janet Lansbury: So the work that you do is about helping parents get in touch with that?

Lavinia Brown: Yeah. And one of the ways you are being shown that your past is not in the past is through triggers. When you feel triggered by something, by children’s behavior, by the way someone talks to you, by their defiance, by their fighting, by their disobedience, by their ungratefulness, by their noise, whatever it is, if you notice that that reaction is disproportionate and that you are feeling often a visceral feeling inside your body, then that is telling you that it’s not so much about what your child or your partner or whoever is doing or saying. It’s that that thing is reminding you of an unprocessed memory that you didn’t have the space, you didn’t have the safety, that your parents didn’t co-regulate you through. And because that experience is still alive in your body, it’s being stirred up again and you end up reacting, like I said, either like your parents did or you react from a much younger part of you. So you might react from that four-year-old place or that ten-year-old place, which is the age that you were when it happened.

And we know this, because we end up acting like a toddler. We have a temper tantrum, we want to hit, we want to scream, we want to throw something, break something, we want to freeze. It depends on your trauma response. But that’s how we know that we need to get in touch with this younger part of us, because it’s still not healed. It’s coming out at the wrong times in the wrong way.

Janet Lansbury: Do you think it mostly boils down to fear? Even all the aggressive behavior and everything? When we get in touch with that child in us and we have angry parents, these people that are so god-like to us, and they’re angry, the gods are angry and maybe they’re going to hurt us physically, spanking or whatever, doesn’t most of this come from that fear that we had as children of that experience?

Lavinia Brown: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think underneath the anger, underneath the sadness, it’s fear. And that’s why you go into a trauma response. A trauma response is a response to a perceived threat. And what do you feel when you’re threatened? Fear. But the problem is with parents that display this kind of behavior, authoritarian, disciplinarian parents who acted through coercion, they coerced us into doing things because they didn’t have the emotional maturity themselves to hold space for our big feelings, to manage them. It triggered them. The problem is that you then have this figure not only of authority, but the figure of safety. You’re a child, your parents represent safety. So if you’ve got this awful situation where the person that’s meant to be creating safety for you and love is also the source of unsafety and fear, that’s what causes the trauma that gets held in your body.

Janet Lansbury: And it almost seems like, imagining this as the parent, it’s like the fear place that we maybe go into, connecting with that child in us that was so afraid, isn’t that really assertive, maybe even aggressive-seeming, response of yelling at you, I’m going to hit you, isn’t it kind of us trying to control and get on top of that fear?

Lavinia Brown: I think so. If you have a fight trauma response, which I certainly do, so I would throw things, break things, I want to hit something, I want to use the adrenaline, basically, the stress hormones that build up in you when you go into trauma response, adrenaline, cortisol, I wanted to get rid of them. So that’s my go-to response. And it’s interesting for people to kind of think, What is my go-to response when my child is being defiant or rude or loud or whatever it is? Some people, though, they’re going to freeze. Again, that’s fear. But that’s not necessarily, I think, wanting to gain control, that’s them feeling so out of control that they go into a powerless, helpless state.

Janet Lansbury: Right, a coping thing.

Lavinia Brown: Or they can’t cope, so they want to kind of pretend it’s not there. Or flight, obviously, you are retaining control by escaping. Depends on the person, but I guess the authoritarian, disciplinarian parents, the ones that used violence as a tool, yeah, they are trying to get control. I think it’s all about power play, it certainly was for my parents. And I recognize that in me. When I feel out of control and I feel my children have the power because they might be saying, “No, I’m not doing that.” And in my head I’m thinking, “Oh shit, now what do I do?” That’s the time that I resort to, well, I make silly threats or I say mean things I really don’t mean because I feel out of control. So yeah, I think fear, not being in control, because you feel you should be in control.

It doesn’t all come from a bad place. I think definitely our generation, we’re trying so hard and there’s so much conflicting advice sometimes and we’re all overwhelmed and stressed a lot of the time. And kids are a lot more emotionally mature than we perhaps are. I believe that every generation that comes along is more emotionally mature, or literate at least, than the one before. We are trying so hard, and when our children are defiant or rude or whatever the trigger is, despite all of this effort, that can be really triggering. And that’s because that’s the inner child part of you that is desperate to be seen in her effort. She wants that reward, she wants that gold star, to be seen in how hard she’s trying. But kids don’t care, they don’t care how hard we’re trying.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And I was in no way insinuating that it’s coming from a negative place when parents are being what you’d call violent in their parenting methods or using that kind of authoritarian style. I totally do think it’s, I’m overwhelmed and I’m just trying to get control however I can in that moment, not thinking it through. This parent, for example, has a lot of consciousness about what’s going on. I mean, she’s very clear. Everything she says, everything she notices in her child, she’s so clear about it. And so it’s exactly what you said. She knows everything, she knows what’s going on, she knows the effect, she knows that she doesn’t want to do that. But she’s still doing it.

Lavinia Brown: The title is aware: “from a desperate mom with lots of inner child trauma.” She’s already recognized that the way that she is reacting is her inner child, which is fantastic, because that’s what it is. Your adult self doesn’t care what your children do. I mean, of course they care, but your adult self doesn’t get triggered because your adult self feels safe and grounded and believes in herself as capable and confident. And it’s only when we feel triggered into a place of unsafety and fear, like you said, and lack of control and powerlessness, that we know that we are being taken back to our childhoods.

Janet Lansbury: How old were your children, if you don’t mind talking about it, when you realized that you needed to change? Or are you still lashing out at them sometimes, just verbally?

Lavinia Brown: Yeah, that’s a great question. I started this work, specifically inner child work, when my kids were one, three, and five. So my five-year-old has definitely received the brunt of my unhealed self. That said, going back to this lady’s question, is it too late? We’ve got to start somewhere.

And it’s often not until you become a mother that you realize that any of this stuff is unhealed, because life’s not that triggering really. I mean, you might get triggered here and there, but it’s not until you become a mother and you’re spending time with these little people who are very good at asking for their needs to be met in whatever way they express it, their big feelings, their big actions. And we haven’t often felt that kind of pressure before. Everything else we can walk away from. You can walk away from a boyfriend that doesn’t feel supportive or a partner that isn’t kind to you or speaks to you rudely. You can move house, you can move country, you can leave your job. It’s not often until we become parents and we’re stuck. I mean, obviously some people leave, but I think it’s quite uncommon for mothers to do that. We’re stuck with these people that are pushing our buttons over and over and over again.

And that’s when I realized I had to change, because I was parenting like my parents and I was slapping. And I remembered, and your listener mentions this, she said that she noticed her son flinch. I used to flinch all the time. I would cover my head with my hands whenever anyone kind of came near me, actually. But I’d totally forgotten that. And it wasn’t until I think I was really angry with the children and I maybe slapped one of them and Andrew, my partner, said to me, “You do realize you can’t tell the children to not hit by hitting, don’t you?” And I hadn’t. I was like, ooh. . . And it made so much sense. But because, as I said, my prefrontal cortex wasn’t engaged when I was doing it, I hadn’t actually clocked that what I was doing didn’t make any sense.

Janet Lansbury: And how did you begin your journey to getting help?

Lavinia Brown: Quite indirectly, actually. First of all, I did a course on the sacred feminine, which was a year-long course, and that was very much about learning how to feel your feelings, how to understand and connect with your body and what your body’s trying to tell you. So that was the first breakthrough for me because I hadn’t cried in 30 years, and that course helped me to cry. It was a group of women, I think we were 16 women, and to be seen by other women and accepted and loved in my emotions was just revolutionary for me. So I was able to then cry. 

Talking of spanking again, I shut down, I stopped crying when I was about nine because for me, even at that age, I knew that this was power play and I felt that I would win against my father if I didn’t show him that what he was doing was hurting me. That was my childlike logic. So I never cried again. So yeah, that was the first stage.

And then from there, I then moved into more of the mother wound, and that was just mind-bogglingly crazy for me. I’d never thought about my childhood before, I just never put two and two together. But to see just how clearly I was reenacting what had happened to me and how my parents—I mean, they must have loved me, I think all parents love their children on one level. They just didn’t show it in brilliant ways, they were both wounded in their own separate ways. And I’d never realized that they’d made me who I was, the way I saw the world, the way I viewed myself, the way I was able to connect with others, which was pretty poorly.

And I’m still working on that, to be honest. I know that I have quite avoidant attachment and that’s definitely my parents. And poor Andrew gets the brunt of that. And I think my kids still get a bit of it. I hate being needed, I hate being needed. Even though I have three children that I love to death, I don’t like being needed. And so obviously this stuff takes time, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Janet Lansbury: Was there a particular person or book for the mother wound that you worked with?

Lavinia Brown: I worked with Bethany Webster.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, I was going to say.

Lavinia Brown: She’s written a book and I guess she’s the front runner, the forerunner in this field. That was amazing, I worked with her privately. And now I do the same, but obviously I bring the father in because I think that’s just as important. I call it the mother imprint, father imprint, but also there’s sibling imprint. A lot of my clients sometimes say, oh, I had a sibling that was really angry or they had special needs, or basically they took up a lot of space. So that’s difficult. There’s all sorts of imprints. I think the mother imprint is a great one to start with, but obviously there are other imprints as well. And all of these imprints from childhood affect how you show up.

Janet Lansbury: So this worked. It wasn’t just snap your fingers and figure it out. You’re talking about years of working on unraveling what was going on with you and what you were facing and the hurdles that you had to be able to be the kind of parent you want to be.

Lavinia Brown: Absolutely. However, having said that, if you are committed and you want to change and you’re going to put in the work—and the work means facing painful truths and feeling sad and feeling angry and allowing yourself to learn how to receive love again—then it’s actually quite quick. Once you are committed and you realize this is what is needed, it’s not years. I took years because I was going from one person to another person and adding tools to my box and looking at different bits of my childhood.

Janet Lansbury: Now there’s someone like you that has all of that, that you can give someone.

Lavinia Brown: Yeah. So the minimum is three months, honestly. If you are going to put in the work and you are ready to go there, you can heal the mother imprint, the father imprint, which is what I see as the foundation of your healing journey, that can be done in, I’d say, average four months. Which is quite something, really.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah.

Lavinia Brown: But then, we are motivated. Mothers are amazing. Mothers are so motivated because we’ve got these beautiful little people that are looking up to us. We love them. And I think mothers really feel this sense of duty that we chose to have children, or maybe you didn’t consciously, but you’ve got them, so no one else can do the work apart from you. And no one wants to pass on their baggage. I think that’s the good thing about this generation, we are more clued in to what we’re passing down. I think when you’re committed, and I think our generation is, and mothers in particular are, it can be done quite quickly.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, we will have no better motivation to change anything in our life than this one, I feel, this lifetime commitment that we all want so much. Because as you know now with your children older, they just give and give more back as they get older. It’s not that it’s always easy and it’s always perfect, it’s always great. Sometimes they are draining you still, but first it becomes sort of more equal and then it almost becomes like they’re giving more, I feel, even than I’m giving back.

Lavinia Brown: But also let’s not forget that when we do this work to be a better parent, we’re also becoming a better human, a better partner. I mean, your inner child goes everywhere with you. It’s not like she only shows up in your parenting. She shows up in imposter syndrome. She shows up in people pleasing. She shows up in catastrophizing, in black and white thinking. In all these adaptive behaviors that we’ve taken on board because that was the way that we could get our needs met, our needs for affection and love and validation. So when you do the work, you become happier, your partner becomes happier, family life becomes more harmonious. You are probably going to be more successful, more efficient at work, you’re going to sleep better.

So while maybe the hook for doing this work is, Oh my God, I’m turning into my parents. I want to stop hitting, yelling, whatever it is, actually, everything improves.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And our feelings about ourself improve. I mean, one of the saddest things that I hear from parents, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything about spanking, but whenever I did, there would always be lots of comments that would say, “Well, maybe all kids don’t need it, but I did. I needed it.” And what a sad thing that is to grow up feeling that you were bad, that you were this child that needed physical punishment to straighten you out. And that is what happens a lot of the time. I mean, they’re not all like this parent who knows she wanted to do it differently. Sometimes they’re still going through, Well, some kids need this and I certainly did, and maybe my kid seems to need it too. So she’s already way ahead of the game, in my opinion.

But also, just on the child’s end, the hard part with children is yes, it’s definitely not too late, though, as you said, there are consequences to the ways that we’ve interacted with them. And the consequence is that there is a lot of fear that’s built up in our child probably, and it’s going to come out as more lashing out, more of what can seem like overreactions and fragile emotions. And that’s the process that we want to try to, as we’re healing, try to understand so that we can not see that as more of a sign that we’re doing something wrong, but actually what’s supposed to happen. Actually something really positive that’s happening, which is now our child is really releasing a lot of their fear that we may have contributed to. To be able to see that as a good sign instead of a negative sign, I think is really important. And just a big part of it not being too late is that, no, it’s not too late, but there are residual feelings that children carry that they need to be able to share.

Lavinia Brown: I completely agree. And also it’s showing how important our role is as role models. And she sees that, like you said, she’s very aware. She says he’s learned that it’s acceptable to vent his frustrations by trying to hit me. Well yeah, because that’s how he was treated. But conversely, if you are able to forgive yourself for what you’ve done, see yourself with love and kindness and compassion and patience and tolerance, and if you embody that—which you will if you do your own healing work—then you are going to role model all of these things as well. So he’s just role modeling what was role modeled in the past. If you change, he’s going to then pick up on what you’re role modeling now. Children are so quick to learn and change. However late you start this process, it will have an immediate effect and that child will start to repair straight away.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, but the way they repair won’t be, “Sorry I’ve been doing all these things.” It’ll be the opposite. The way that they find their center back again is being able to safely share. Because when a child vents through hitting and stuff, it doesn’t help the feelings get processed out. It adds in more fear because now we have a reaction of our parent that’s not making this a safe way to vent. So it’s not a safe way to vent unless we are co-regulating at that time, still holding our boundaries, all of that. But just seeing this as like, Oh, this is a great, healthy part of their process. I know it’s hard to get to that point, all the way there, but more in that direction, so we’re like, Okay, they need to do this and I’m not going to see this as a problem I have to react to. We’re allowing them to find better ways to vent.

One thing that stuck out to me in this note is when she says, “I can tell there’s a fear there in him of us under all his little boy bravado.” And yes, it’s like you deciding not to cry. It’s kind of like that, See? I’m going to be strong. But really it’s a fear of being vulnerable. It doesn’t feel good to have that bravado. It doesn’t feel good to never cry. She says, “I’m trying to change tactics and devour your content, but he does not feel safe to express the bigger feelings to me. I’ve tried to sit with him through them and ask specific questions to try to help him name his emotions.” Right there, I feel like she’s expecting way too much of herself and him, that you’re not there yet. The emotions have to come out. There’s no way he can name what’s going on right now. It’s just not possible for a child this age, usually, anyway.

But we don’t have to get to this let’s talk about the emotions and how you’re feeling in words. It just has to come out the way that it comes out, as safely as possible, us keeping him safe and us safe. She says, “he will often deflect and start doing something physical like flip or make frustrated sounds.” Yeah, this is him trying to share it in the way that he can. But that’s a trap that we can fall into as parents where we think that if we ask them the right questions, they’re going to tell us, “Yes, I’m very afraid,” or “I’m angry.” It’s just not going to happen at this stage.

Lavinia Brown: You are so good at reminding people of that, Janet. My kids are a bit older now, but it’s so relevant to whatever age, because as children get older, they just express those big feelings in different ways. Maybe more verbal, as you said, when they’re older. But it still can feel very hurtful unless you feel safe and grounded enough in yourself not to take it personally.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, because also at the end of that she says, “flip or make frustrated sounds instead of admit his feelings.” So even if he could objectively understand his feeling, analyze what his feeling is, then to admit it when you’re in defensive mode, when you’re in that acting out mode or holding it in with bravado? Even if I knew what I was feeling, admitting I’m sad or I’m scared, I mean, it would be hard for us, much less a young child. But that can add to our sense of failure as parents if we’re thinking, Oh, I read in a book or I saw that we’re supposed to help them name their feelings. That process takes a lot more time and comes very gradually in stages as a child matures and then also feels safer at the same time. Two things have to happen there: he has to get older and he has to feel consistently a little safer.

Lavinia Brown: Also, do you find there are certain types of children, some are more emotionally literate verbally and some aren’t? I know one of my children doesn’t ever want to talk about feelings. She’ll take a hug but doesn’t want to talk about it. Whereas another one is very happy to talk at length about feelings. Do you find that some children, when they’re obviously old enough to do so, are more or less open to talking about feelings?

Janet Lansbury: Yes. There are definitely different temperaments in children, with different styles of expressing themselves.

Lavinia Brown: I think parents often feel they need to ask their children to talk about it, and that’s the way that you connect with your child, but that doesn’t have to happen. And so we don’t need to get upset or worried that we’re doing it wrong if our child doesn’t want to talk about their feelings because maybe that child just doesn’t want to, they’re not that kind of person.

Janet Lansbury: I think trying to get children to report to us at a very young age, or ever really, doesn’t work. They will when they’re ready to or if they want to or if that’s important to them, but maybe it’s not something we have to just dissect. And I don’t think that’s helping us have an open attitude towards, Yeah, I want you to be able to share anything with me. It’s like, I want you to be able to share it, but I want it now and in this way. We’ve got to put this structure on it and make sure you tell me exactly.

Lavinia Brown: I think you have to also think about, who am I doing this for? I don’t know if you’ve heard of human design, it’s a little bit like astrology, but I was having real, real problems connecting with one of my children. I was so desperate I was like, right, let’s get a human design of their chart and my chart and see if there’s anything that I should be aware of. And this person said to me, “This child doesn’t want to talk about feelings.” And I said, “Okay, fine. So what do I do if I’m trying to put in the repair?” And they said, “Just say sorry and move on. Just go, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that.'” I said, “But that’s not enough. I want to say, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. And it was because of this and I felt this.'” He was like, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s terrifying for this child. All they need is, ‘I’m sorry.'” And then I thought, Oh my God, that’s so interesting. I’d been kind of looking at repair as something that was beneficial to me as well, because it feels good for me to go into the pain of why I did it and I feel bad and all that, and actually that’s the opposite of what this child needed. So it was really interesting for me to go, okay, when I’m doing repair, who am I doing it for and how does that child need that repair to come across? I think that’s an important point about repair as well.

Janet Lansbury: Right. Yes, what you’re talking about is saying, I need you to validate me. I need you to tell me the words of your feelings. I need you to tell me. And like you said, it becomes about us more than we want it to be. But again, there’s all this education now of, Make sure they tell their feelings! and They’ve got to know their feelings! It’s one more thing on our job description list that we have to do, but we actually don’t have to do it. And maybe it’s more appropriate for us to do that with ourselves, here are all the things I felt. Maybe that’s really constructive. But to try to put that on our child to where they have to do this with us, it makes the repair painful, like you said.

Lavinia Brown: The biggest shock for me when I had my second was, What? They’re not the same? They don’t have the same needs? I can’t parent in the same way? I don’t know, I just thought that all children were the same. So that was just a really big learning curve for me, having to adapt not only all this learning about how to be a better parent and heal, but also adapt to each individual child because they will each need different approaches.

Janet Lansbury: But you can do that with openness. I don’t think we have to master each child. We just have to be open to them and listen more than we talk and be present more than we’re trying to engage and fix. Just that openness, that’s where attunement comes in. We will naturally be able to be or more readily be able to be what that child needs, because we’re allowing them to show us and tell us what they need, instead of trial and error trying to figure it out. It’ll come from them. That’s the way I see it and experience it. It doesn’t have to come from you figuring something out.

Lavinia Brown: I love that. Thank you. Yes, you’re right. And it goes back to healing again. The more grounded and safe you feel, the more able you are going to be to hold space and not impose yourself on the situation.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. One more thing I wanted to talk about, especially because this parent asked about it, is about the partner thing. And I know you said that maybe I know more about this than you, but you and Andrew have this incredible podcast, and I’m so flattered you wanted to call it Becoming Untriggered, which was my name for our episode that we did together. And you two talk about this stuff all the time. And it sounds like from what you’ve been saying today, that he was the one more ready than you were at first, or maybe he never did these things like spanking.

Lavinia Brown: Yeah, he’s got his own trauma from different things, his dad left when he was quite young. But no, he’s very level-headed, doesn’t really lose his temper. He is much more stable than I am.

Janet Lansbury: I mean, I know a lot of times the mother feels more responsibility, but what did you get from him that made it feel safe for you to have your own journey? I mean, it sounds like he did the perfect thing, he just kind of pointed something out to you without getting on your case, You know, by the way, that probably doesn’t work.

Lavinia Brown: I think there were times in our relationship where he did think, This isn’t the kind of mom that I envisaged for my children, so it got worse. But he’s not one to openly criticize and judge, I do more of that. So yeah, he was always more understanding. And he knows my parents, so he understood where it was coming from.

But in terms of this woman, I think this is quite common. I have clients that come to me, and obviously I work with moms, and they often say the same thing to me: I’m not sure my partner’s fully on board. And I’ve heard you say this, I think you agree, you can’t control anyone else. In the end, you can’t. It’s impossible.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And again, that’s too much for your job description. We want to pare this job duty thing down for parents, not add more stuff. It actually sounds like this partner or husband is very open to trying to follow her lead, so that’s incredible.

Lavinia Brown: Absolutely. And I think actually when he said none of the “old school” methods of parenting were hurtful to his older children. I mean, it depends how old his children are, but most people don’t do this inner work and aren’t capable of it until they’re at least 22, 23. I don’t work with women that are younger than 23 because you are too close to your childhood to be able to disentangle who you were in that moment and who you are now and who your parents are. It’s just too entangled. So I don’t know how old his children are, but they may not be at the age where they can express that it was hurtful. I mean, to be honest, it’s impossible that physical punishment is not damaging because of what we said earlier. Your parents are meant to be the source of safety, they can’t also be the source of fear. That is going to cause problems. Whether that challenge or wound remains repressed or not is a different thing.

But I would argue that anyone that feels that they have to resort to physical punishment is displaying precisely that repressed anger that comes from their childhood. If it wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have to resort to that kind of coercion. So the fact that he’s saying it wasn’t hurtful to him, well, the fact that he feels called, she says at the end, in the heat of the moment (i.e., trauma response!) he still threatens pow. Right, he threatens it because he’s still got repressed anger from his childhood. So it’s there.

In terms of how do you get a partner on side? My personal opinion, I don’t know if you agree with this, I would say that relationships are a moving feast. You are going to have some things that you disagree on and you’ve got to pick your battles. I say to my clients, write a list of things that you feel are absolutely non-negotiable. You feel so strongly about them that you are not going to budge an inch, that this is really important to the core of who you are and how you want to show up in the world. And then you’ve got the other stuff, which is gray. I mean, no one wants their kid on a screen all the time or eating sweets all the time, but maybe you are willing to let that go sometimes and maybe corporal or physical punishment is your non-negotiable or whatever it is. But if it’s something that’s on your non-negotiable list, then you kind of work with the other stuff.

And I think it’s easier for partners to kind of have one thing they have to work with that they know that they can respect, because they’re also going to have a non-negotiable, rather than expecting your partner to be on the same page with you about everything.

Janet Lansbury: I do agree with that. But I also think that what I would say to her is keep the focus on yourself, because as we said, you don’t control that. And everybody has their own journey. Modeling is such a profound way of teaching. Like you said, you become a happier person when you are doing this work on yourself. And being a happier person means she’ll be enjoying being a parent more. All of that will be exuded from her.

And then the next thing I would do is to share her own journey with him when she can, because this is also a very unobtrusive way to teach. Like, Oh, I realized I was having such a hard time with this and when I started to do this work, or I saw something in him, or I saw how he has this bravado, let’s say, and I realized that that’s a put-on thing and that underneath that is this sad little boy. And today I saw the sad little boy that seemed kind of scared and sad. Whatever her journey is of discovery, that she shares that, because it’s a way of modeling and it’s a way of giving helpful stories that aren’t saying, You shouldn’t do this and you shouldn’t do that!, but are saying, Here’s the good progress I’m making, that I’m feeling good about, what I’m noticing. I feel like that’s one of the best ways.

And just modeling in front of our partner what we’re doing and how we’re getting more comfortable with ourselves in this role. Because sometimes what I’ve noticed, especially when I’ve consulted with both parents, is that the partner who seems to have the bad attitude or whatever, they’re trying to counteract the overwhelm that they see in that other parent. They’re not comfortable with what’s going on with the other parent, so then they’re kind of going too far the other way. I’m not saying that’s the case in this, but that often there’s a place in between them that’s actually the healthier place.

So I would just be open to all of those things. First, that it’s not your job to try to do his journey, but that you can do yours and you can share it with him. And that when he sees that you’re feeling better and more confident in what you’re doing, that will give him more confidence to do what you’re doing.

Lavinia Brown: And also their son will change and be happier and more grounded. Not at first obviously, because when they’re able to show their big emotions, it might seem like they’re worse. But he will probably see a difference in the son’s behavior and want to emulate what she’s doing.

Janet Lansbury: He totally will. And he’ll probably see a closeness in their relationship, which is what we’re all really going for in this parenting thing. And maybe he’ll even want that, and she can help him get that by sharing what she’s doing either just through modeling or talking to him about it.

Like you said, there is a result of the spanking and it’s in the safety in the relationship. And this is the part that’s going to last us a lifetime, right? The deep comfort we feel with someone. I mean, parents say to me, I get along with my parents and they’re fine and they spanked me and I needed it and all that. But do you really feel like you can be yourself with your parents? Do you feel like they’re unconditionally accepting of you? Are they the person you can let down all your guards with, be safe with?

Lavinia Brown: I mean, in the end, this work isn’t parent-bashing. You go towards the negative and the stress and the challenges because that’s what needs healing and processing and releasing from your body because your body holds onto it. But the end result is always a more meaningful and more authentic connection with your parents. That’s what we’re aiming for. It’s just that the route to get there means focusing on the negative. It’s not because we’re saying they’re the world’s worst parents. Not at all. Like I said, they probably loved you. It’s just that we all have faults, we’re all flawed human beings. But the healing lies in the wound and the pain, so that’s where you have to go.

Janet Lansbury: Right, because that’s the part we haven’t looked at. We could have been defending our parent or seeing them as like, well, that’s what parents are, that’s the only one I have. And that’s the part we don’t see. But yeah, you’re right. It’s not a negative thing that we’re putting the microscope on that for a while. It’s the process of healing that makes that necessary.

Lavinia Brown: Absolutely. And to get my clients to check whether we’ve completed the imprint that we’re working on, I sometimes say, Imagine a basket of balls. That basket represents the person that you’ve been processing feelings around. Each ball represents a different emotion. There is love, because however badly they treated you, you can’t just cut off the love that you have as a daughter. There is love. There may also be a ball in there that is disappointment. Why didn’t you get the support that you needed to be that parent that I needed? There might be compassion. I see that you were trying your best because of the childhood that you had and the tools that you had available. There might also be anger. You didn’t show up for me in the way that I needed, and it’s affected me and I’m angry about that. And you could go on and on and on. But where we want to be is that no one ball is bigger than the others. All of these balls, conflicting as they are, coexist. And to me, when you get to that place, that symbolizes mature, adult acceptance of your parent as the flawed human being that they are, just as you are a flawed human being. You are no longer that inner child that needs your parent to be a certain way for them to feel safe.

Janet Lansbury: I love that. I’m still processing my own journey as a child, and that really helped me to think of it as all those different balls of feelings and that they’re all okay.

Lavinia Brown: Yeah. We’re not looking to be best friends with our parents because that’s maybe not attainable, but you want to have this acceptance. That means that you’ve healed your past. You’ve accepted what happened, it can’t be changed. And this is where this lady’s coming from. She wants to be in that place, for her son to be able to accept what happened and love her and respect her and have a meaningful, deep relationship with her, whatever she did.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And she absolutely can.

Lavinia Brown: Yeah, exactly.

Janet Lansbury: And he absolutely will. I believe in that.

I’m so glad you were here today to talk about this. I really, really appreciate it. Where can we find out more about your work as a, you call yourself a psychodynamic coach?

Lavinia Brown: Yes, exactly. Because psychodynamic means understanding how your past is affecting your present, which for me, I believe that a thousand percent. So my website is my name, laviniabrown.com. I’m on Instagram as The Inner Child Healing Expert, that’s on social media. And yeah, we’ve got the podcast, which thank you for letting us call it Becoming Untriggered, because it’s all about that. We’re all triggered, that’s normal, we’re humans. But this life is about becoming less triggered as a parent and partner.

Janet Lansbury: Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Lavinia Brown: Thank you, Janet. I’ve learned a lot about my children just tonight.

Janet Lansbury: Well that’s great. I always love talking with you. Let’s do it again, okay?

Lavinia Brown: Can’t wait.

Janet Lansbury: All right, you take care. Bye-bye.

Lavinia Brown: Bye.

♥

Here are some good places to learn more about Lavinia Brown’s work. I highly recommend her!

LavinaBrown.com 

Instagram (The Inner Child Healing Expert)

Lavinia’s (and her partner Andrew’s) podcast Becoming Untriggered

Lavinia’s YouTube Channel