Childhood Messages And Inner Child Healing With Tina Hamilton
Title: Tina Hamilton Childhood Messages
Welcome to this episode of trauma-informed parenting. We are concluding today this is the last in our series, Things I Did Not Learn in School. And I have a very special guest, Tina Hamilton from The Burnt Bean. She has been on the podcast before. She talked about decentering and I will make sure I link that in the show notes so you can go back and listen to that one. It was an awesome episode if you missed it. And I’m going to let Tina introduce herself and her business and tell you a little bit about what she does.
Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for having me back. It’s lovely being here today. I am an inner child healing coach for moms. I work with moms who are exhausted, burnt out, and frustrated either in parenting or life in general. And I help them to uncover their deepest wounds and messages that have them living life in the margins. So I work with moms to give them the strategies and resources that they need to live life in alignment with the vision that they hold for themselves.
And that’s exactly why I wanted Tina to be on this podcast, because we really don’t learn how to be a parent while we are in school. I remember when I was in high school, I had one catechism class somebody dug up a book from the 1950s about how to be a wife and a mother. And all the high school students were snickering, under their breath, like, what is this? We don’t do this anymore. Which is sad because we don’t learn these sorts of things in school. And I remember having this sunny yellow view of motherhood, this view in my mind of what kind of mother I was going to be, was going to be happy. I was going to get dressed and put on makeup every day. And then I had children. And if you have children, you know what I’m talking about. So tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming this parenting coach.
Yeah, so funny. They say that the best parents are the parents who don’t have children, right? Yes. So I grew up in a single-family home. I was what you would call the good kid, the kid who followed all the rules, did what was expected, and I took care of my younger brothers. When my parents got divorced, I was a kid who almost always had her head stuck in a book, and I was praised for my straight A’s. So meaning, like, I took school seriously. And I honestly believed that if I had the right grades, if I always did what was asked of me, that I would have made it, that my life would be better than what I saw all the adults around me living. And while my grades and success in school did offer me opportunities that weren’t available to my parents or the other family members that were around me, I still struggled with the exact same challenges that they did, right? I still had the financial stress, the relationship strife, the emotional unavailability, and the overall sense of dissatisfaction. But it wasn’t until I became a parent when I realized how incredibly unprepared I was for what lay ahead. For starters, being a mom, it might be the only thing in life where you’re handed something that you’re responsible for without an instruction manual and told you’ll, figure it out, right?
I’ll never forget my baby shower when I opened a gift from I don’t know from who it was from, and it was a pillow that said, what baby needs? And I said aloud, oh, good, finally something that’s going to tell me how to be a mom. Every woman in the room laughed and said, oh, you’ll be great. You’ll figure it out. Honestly, this is all just a really long way of saying that there was not a single aspect of my education or my environment that prepared me for motherhood.
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motherhood
I came into motherhood leaning on the examples of the parents and caregivers of my childhood. And while I recognized that they did the best that they could, their examples left a lot to be desired. So early in my parenting, I was reactive. I was controlling. I had expectations that exceeded my daughter’s developmental capabilities, and I grew up believing that children should be seen and not heard. And I’m sure that’s something that a lot of your listeners can relate to, especially if they grew up in the children are seen and not heard. And so when I had my own child, I had that same expectation that she wouldn’t speak unless she was spoken to. And I remember being shocked, embarrassed even, that my daughter would insert herself into conversations and demand attention. Right? As parents, we can all recognize that that’s just typical behavior of children, like, that’s what they’re supposed to do. But it caused such a rage inside of me that was fueled by fear. I was afraid that I was being judged that my child was different than every other kid, because I really thought that kids were supposed to be this other way. And so I just became more controlling and more demanding. And in the short term, that really worked for me. I mean, I had a three-year-old who could sit quietly in a toy corner for hours at a time, playing with one toy at a time, never asking for help. And when it was time to clean up, she independently cleaned up her toys and even pushing the chairs at her table, which for some parents, that might sound like an absolute dream, but I started to realize that it was coming at an expense. I was always yelling. I was always demanding. I was never leaving space for her to actually be a kid. And I was basically expecting her to act like a responsible adult as a toddler. And then somewhere around the age of three, we had a really tough morning in that. But she was acting like a toddler, and she was just pushing every single button that I had, and I snapped, and I screamed at her, complete with cursing and slamming my fists on a table. Like I terrified her. And I mean, I terrified myself, if I’m being honest. And something that she used to do, actually, she still does it, is that she reaches for my face, and she touches my face as, like, a grounding for her. And in that moment, I instinctively pulled back. I was just so heated and so angry, and she just retreated from me. And the look on her face was though- like I was a monster. She didn’t recognize me. I will never forget that moment. And that was the moment that started to change everything for me as a parent.
childhood messages
I realized that my childhood messages were so deeply ingrained in me that I had no idea how to nurture her or myself. And I was just so shocked, because in that moment, I remember standing outside her bedroom door, and I was going to go in, and I was going to grab her from her room and force her to do what I wanted her to do. And when I walked into her room, she looked at me and she said to me, you hurt my feelings when you talk to me like that. And I remember, first off, Kathleen, if I had talked to my parents or any adult in my life like that, I would have gotten a beating. But at that moment and I didn’t recognize it at the time, but something spoke to me in that moment where I just sat down next to her and pulled her into my lap, and we sat there and cried together. And what I’ve come to realize is that she was the voice of my inner child in that moment. I didn’t know that I had an inner child at that point in time. I didn’t even know that she existed. But my daughter sitting in front of me demanding that I do better, just cracked me open. And since then, she has become my greatest teacher. She’s taught me things that I’ve never learned in school and things that I wish I would have learned, like how to identify my triggers, the signs that my body is sending me, that I am triggered, how to manage my own emotions, how to even identify my own emotions and how to lean in and feel and process what I’m feeling and calming my nervous system. It’s all about emotional awareness and regulation and how to be able to connect authentically with people around us. And they don’t teach us that in school, not even remotely close to coming to teach us that.
life as an educator
And I was an educator for almost two decades, so I know what we teach in school now these days. And so I became an inner child healing and parent coach to help other parents with that same journey, to help them identify how their own paths are showing up in their parenting and so that they’re able to heal those wounds that are preventing them from truly connecting with themselves and their children. Wow. Sorry. This is a really long answer, but I was an education major in college, and I spent, like I said, almost two decades in the classroom. And even though I took extensive courses on child development and psychology and spent a lot of time with kids, I was still wildly unprepared for what was ahead.
Yeah, same. I have an education degree as well, and I can remember taking all those courses. But then I can also remember just being very shocked when I started my student teaching and it was suddenly to the teachers because I had two majors, so I had to do two different student teachings, but to them, it was always all about the behavior. I was kind of like, wait a minute, what happened to all of these things that we learned about children’s needs being met physically and then emotionally? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, all these things that we’ve learned, where are they? They were gone. They were out the door.
I would say that it becomes all about classroom management so that you can teach your content and not at all about the environment and the nurturing of the children to get them to a place where they feel safe, and where they can learn. Because that’s the number one thing. If kids don’t feel safe, they’re not going to learn 100%.
Yeah, totally. I say that all the time. It’s like felt-safety is the most important thing. If your child does not feel safe, they can’t learn. And I’ve seen it in my own children who have trauma histories where they would go to home school co-op and come back and be like, I had no idea anything that the teacher was talking about. I didn’t absorb any of it. So yeah, but I just want to backtrack here for a second for our listeners. And if someone’s listening and they’re kind of like, I don’t even know what a childhood message is, could you define that and give an example, maybe a couple of examples of common messages that we learn in our childhood? I know I could list a bunch of them, but I would like you to because this is your area of expertise.
Yeah. So first off, your inner child is the part of yourself that was developed between the ages of zero and seven. This is not to say that your past experiences from seven on don’t impact you, because they absolutely do. But your childhood messages or the messages from your earlier life experiences are things where you store unprocessed emotions in your body. Your body remembers when it was overwhelmed with emotion, right? Your nervous system becomes overwhelmed with emotion, and it’s unable to process what is happening around you, so it attaches a message to that emotion.
childhood memories
So let’s just say, for example, that when you were a child, your parent comes home from work and they are absolutely exhausted and you were having trouble with your homework, and you ask your parent for homework and they kind of just shut you down, push you away. I don’t have time for that right now. You need to figure it out on your own. You in that moment, you begin to feel like, well, my needs aren’t important here, or that I’m too needy. My parent doesn’t have time for me. Because as children, we don’t understand that our we don’t understand that life is we don’t we’re not the center of the universe. Right? Developmentally, we believe that everything is because of us. And so a parent’s behavior, how a parent reacts to us in the moment, can make us feel like, well, I did something wrong or I’m too needy or I’m not enough. And so that message gets attached to that emotion. And if we don’t process that emotion, it kind of gets stored in what we call so the internal family systems call it the shadow part of ourselves. And the shadow part stores all of these emotions that if we showed them as a child, it threatened our connection to our caregivers. And your primary goal as a child is to maintain that connection to your caregivers, because that connection was a lifeline. Right. You can’t survive without that connection to your caregivers. They provide your food, your shelter. You would need them just right. And so when they are stored in the shadow part as you get older, if there’s something that reminds you of that emotion or of that situation that had happened right now, let’s say that you’re an adult and your partner comes home and they’ve had a bad day at work, and they slam their work back down and they’re moving around the house, which is kind of like you can sense that they’re angry or upset about something. Your body will remember that time from childhood when this happened with your parent and your body will start to send you a signal that, oh, something’s off here, I’m not good enough, I did something wrong, that my partner’s mad at me. And you start to relive this pattern from childhood in your adulthood. That’s just one example of a childhood message.
being needy as a child
Basically, if you think about the big one that comes to me is being too needy because that was one for me. But another one is being a people pleaser, right? If you felt as a child that you needed to keep the peace around everybody around because there was high tension in your childhood. Maybe you had parents who were going through a divorce or whatever it was being the people pleaser. Or being the one who kept the peace as a child will then correlate to you becoming a people pleaser as an adult because you want to keep the peace. You want everybody to be happy. You put everybody else’s needs before your own. And you kind of disconnect from yourself because of these childhood messages, because you were trying to protect that relationship with your child, with your adult caregiver when you were a child.
Well, I think those are excellent examples because I am trauma-informed parenting here. So I talk about trauma. But sometimes we have to understand that it doesn’t mean that you have this big t trauma, that you have these childhood messages that are directing your parenting. It can be something as simple as that. The homework example that you gave or the people pleaser, which is I’m a middle child, I’m a people pleaser. That was kind of my go to and I like you was like the peacemaker in the family and getting good grades and keeping my head down, reading a lot, doing everything right. And so those patterns still repeat in adulthood and then they begin repeating with our parenting. And that’s why these are so important. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that you had some huge trauma in your life, even though that’s what this podcast is about. There are little t traumas and those are like the paper cuts that kill you. They wound you and you don’t think they’re that significant. You don’t think they’re making that big of a difference in your life. But when you add them all together, they do make a huge difference.
Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that when I work with parents I tell them that. And this is often where parents suddenly become very worried and anxious, is that like, oh my goodness, I’m ruining my child because I do these things and I first want to just put it out there. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re leaning into these difficult conversations, you’re not ruining your child, you are showing up and learning how to show up better for your kids. So let’s just put that there. Right. It’s coined childhood emotional neglect. I think neglect is a little bit of a strong word because when you think of neglect, you think of the neglectful parent that leaves their child at home for weeks at a time by themselves with no food. Like, that’s where my mind goes for neglect, right? Like I said, it could be like those little things that a parent just has a bad day at work and isn’t responsive to their child’s emotional needs in the way that the child needs the parent to be responsive. And like you said, it just creates that tiny little paper cut that kids hold onto because they make it about them. And those are the little tea traumas. And it doesn’t have to be the big T living through war or gun violence or a plane crash or something like that. It’s the little t’s, right? Every single one of us have experienced every single one of us has experienced it in some way, shape or form.
I agree. And I’m going to ask you another question. What are three things you think parents need to know about inner childhood healing? I think you’ve covered a lot of it, but if there were, like, three main things that you could point
First, I think that every adult can benefit from inner child healing, whether you’re a parent or not. And whether you’ve had the big T trauma or not. As we were just talking about having a horrible childhood is not a prerequisite for benefiting from inner child healing wounds. And the resulting messages are simply created when our nervous systems are overwhelmed and the child didn’t have the words or a supportive adult to help process the event. Dr. Gabor Maté, if you’re familiar with him, he talks about trauma and its effects beautifully and he says that the trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened inside of you because of the event. It’s not the car accident or your parents getting divorced, it’s what happened after. Was there the space to process your emotions? Was there support a trusted adult to help you make sense of the feelings and the sensations and thoughts that are in your body and mind. And like, we were just talking about any number of things could have caused the trauma. It doesn’t need to be what you typically think of when you hear the word trauma. And it’s the wounds that we’re holding deep inside of us that are affecting the way that we’re showing up as adults. Those wounds change how we interact with everyone around us, whether it’s your boss, your best friend, your partner, your children, those wounds, your actions today are basically being filtered through all of your previous life experiences. And when your children start acting in a way that reminds your body of those old wounds, you’re going to get triggered and you’re going to go on the defense and you’re going to act from learned behaviors instead of a consciously aware place. So that’s first and foremost.
Second, I think that every parent does the best that they can with the resources and level of consciousness that they have available to them. You’re not a bad parent. And for the majority of us, our parents were not bad people. Our parents are human beings with their own baggage, their own wounding from childhood. You are a human being with your own baggage and wounding from childhood and your parents and you are parenting in the way that you know how, which is likely in the ways that we were parented, and how they were parented. You have to look at society as a whole. And through my own work and work with clients, there’s always this moment of anger toward our caregivers. Like, how could they do this? And when we start to look at how our parents were raised and understand the expectations of society or what was happening in the world around us as children, we can have deeper compassion for our parents and how they were raised. They didn’t know any better. And as we learn better, we do better. And I think it was Maya Angelou who said, you do the best you can until you know better. And then when you know better, you do better. And so you’re here, you’re learning, and it’s not going to be perfect, right? So today you may have a fantastic parenting day, and you’ll get it all right. And then tomorrow morning, you’re going to wake up and your child is going to be cranky. And you’re going to be cranky because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep or you’re hungry or whatever it is you’re stressed out about a thing at work, and you’re going to snap at your kids. And giving yourself grace and compassion in that moment is really important.
Third and then finally – being triggered can look vastly different for every single person. So for some of us, it might look like losing our heads and screaming at our kids, or a partner or a friend, or some random stranger in traffic. And for others, it might look like shutting down or closing off scrolling on our phones, or becoming overly permissive and lacking boundaries. And it could even look like addiction, whether it’s alcohol or drug shopping, gambling, or eating, it’s going to show up differently for every one of us, depending on our own backgrounds and our own childhood messaging. And it will be different from day to day also. So when you’re doing your healing work, it’s really important to lean in and get curious about what’s going on for you in the moments when you’re triggered. Because the more that you can understand yourself and recognize the signs that you’re triggered, the better you’re able to start to shift your behaviors. It all begins with awareness, right? Check-in with your body when you’re triggered, where does the trigger sit? What does it feel like, what are you trying to avoid or make feel better? Is there a message going on about how you think parenting this situation should be? It’s really about getting curious and leaning into those moments so that you could build your self-awareness, that you could start to shift the way that you react when you’re triggered.
how to have peace
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Well, I love all three of those points and I 100% agree with you. And I would say to parents who are listening, obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, you are investing in your parenting and you’re investing in researching some new things and learning some new things. And I would just say do not feel guilty for taking some time to process these things, to journal about things, maybe even find a trusted friend or a therapist or a counselor or a parenting coach like Tina, someone who can help you work through these things. Because I’m just saying from my own childhood messages and my own personal experience, I felt guilty for beginning to work on myself and listen to my body and think about what I was feeling. For some reason. I don’t know what the message was, but the message was you’re last. And so therefore, if you are investing time by going to a counselor or journaling, or learning some coping techniques, then it’s wrong. And so don’t think that parents it’s not wrong. In fact, your whole family is going to benefit if you invest in taking care of learning your childhood messages. And like I say all the time, making sense of and peace with your past is very important.
Absolutely, I agree. And that’s bringing it back to what you didn’t learn in school, taking care of yourself. How do you take care of yourself? We hear self-care so much self-care is a lot more than just taking a shower, right? They tell moms like, go take a shower. That’s a basic human need, right? Self-care is being able to drop in and learn how you best can support your nervous system and what works for you because it’s going to look different for every single parent. And you learn all those things through journaling, through working with a counselor or a coach or a therapist. You could do it on your own. You absolutely can do this work on your own, but there will be moments when you want to give up and just say like, oh, all hope is lost. And that’s the benefit of doing this work with somebody else, right? Because they can hold that space for you and really give you the tools and the encouragement and the compassion when you kind of lose it for yourself.
Exactly. I agree. So to finish up, where can people find you and what resources do you have to offer?
So I mostly hang out on Instagram. My Instagram handle is at the burnt period bean, and there I have all sorts of content. There’s also the link that I’m about to say, but I have a free download that you can get from there. It’s called Ten Signs that your inner child needs healing and what you can do about it. You can get that either from my Instagram handle or on theburntbean. And I currently am offering one on one coaching and I have a group coaching that is starting in April, so I’ll be starting a program there.
That’s awesome. And if you get any of her freebies just by signing up to get her freebie, then you’re on her email list. And her emails are awesome. I get her emails and they always have really great content. I always learn from them. So make sure that you sign up for one of her freebies on her website. So thank you again for joining us today. Tina, any last words? One last thing you want to say? One last thing?
Well, first I want to say thank you for having me on today. As a former educator, this is a really important conversation. I left the classroom because I feel like what our children is learning is outdated and unhelpful. And so thank you for this series and for talking about the hard things and for the listeners. You are doing the work, you’re here, you’re listening to important conversations, taking it all in and putting into practice whatever resonates with you. You being willing to lean into these conversations and learn how to show up better is what’s going to change the world. So stay curious and keep leaning in.
I agree. Thank you for listening
You’re welcome to send me an email to contact@traumainformedparenting.com.