On this episode of The Fresh Start Family Show, Wendy interviews Lavinia Brown – a trauma-informed psychodynamic coach – about healing the inner child to become a conscious parent.

Lavinia emphasizes that our past experiences with our parents shape future relationship dynamics and that healing trauma is crucial for effective relationship based parenting. She explains that our children trigger us to confront unprocessed wounds from our past, and by healing our inner child, we can become more present and compassionate parents. Lavinia also shares her journey as a mother & connects with Wendy deeply about the transformative power of strong-willed, spirited children.

Listen in to be encouraged, inspired & motivated to pour into your own healing, which in turn, always has profound effects on our kids & parenting walk.

What if you could be an effective, firm & kind parent WITHOUT relying on fear, force, bribery & rewards?

Imagine learning a new way of firm (AND kind) parenting so you can end painful generational parenting cycles and create family legacies & memories YOU are proud of?

All while getting your kids to cooperate with your rules and boundaries with ease.

IMAGINE …

Parenting your kids with calm & confidence each day in a way that causes them to do what’s asked of them because they WANT to (not because they HAVE to) … because you’re helping to build essential life skills that have them behaving well & being respectful when you’re NOT looking!The Firm & Kind Parenting Blueprint is your step by step plan & video training to help you build the family of your dreams. Click HERE to learn more now!

Episode Highlight:

• Understanding the past is essential to becoming the parents we want to be today, as childhood experiences deeply influence our adult behaviors and parenting styles.
• Conscious parenting becomes more attainable after healing personal trauma, as mindset work is often ineffective when dealing with unprocessed emotional wounds.
• Disproportionate reactions in parenthood often signal unacknowledged pain from the past, and addressing these triggers is crucial for fostering healthier family dynamics.
  

Resources Mentioned:

Website: www.laviniabrown.com 

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.innerchild.healing.expert 

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtFSVu5DC5O2-f25L0U8rAw 

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/the.innerchild.healing.expert/Healing Mamas Community – Launched Jan ‘24 https://www.laviniabrown.com/making-peace-with-your-past

Ep. 111. Re-Mothering Yourself with Grace and Compassion with Laura Froyen

Not able to listen or want to read along with us?
Here is the episode transcript!

0:00:02 – (Wendy): Well, hey there, families, and welcome to a new episode of the Fresh Start Family show. I’m your host, Wendy Snyder, positive parenting educator and family life coach. And today on the show, we have miss Lavinia Brown, who is a trauma informed, psycho dynamic coach who supports moms to stop feeling anxious, depressed and angry through understanding and healing their past, clearing inherited emotional baggage, overcoming unconscious patterns and asserting healthy boundaries so that they can own their authentic feminine power without feeling too much selfish or guilty. Part French, Spanish, Austro Hungarian, Scottish and English, Lavinia has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Paris, Bali, Goa, Geneva, Spain, London and Cambridge, and now lives with her partner and three children on the Costa Brava in Spain.
0:01:01 – (Wendy): Amazing. Lavinia, welcome to the show.
0:01:05 – (Lavinia): I’m so happy to be here.
0:01:07 – (Wendy): Oh, my goodness. I have been looking forward to this interview for many, many weeks, since I saw you get on the calendar, because I just adore your voice and your work and I just really enjoy the depth of the conversations you have and the light that you bring to this very important area, which, by the way, listeners, today we’re going to be talking about the importance of healing your inner child to become a conscious parent. And, Lavinia, this is a subject we’ve had one other person on the show talk about, the process of remathering or reparenting, so to speak.
0:01:42 – (Wendy): And it was one of our most popular episodes. So to have this conversation again, but just with your take is going to be so meaningful. But like we always do when we kick off an episode, tell us your story. How did you get to be where you are today? How did you become so passionate about what you teach and what you help women with? And specifically a psychodynamic coach. Tell me more. Tell me all the things. Lavinia.
0:02:07 – (Lavinia): Well, psychodynamic means understanding your past to help be the person you want to be in the present. Our past catches up with us. People say, oh, but the past is in the past. I want to drag it back up. I got over it. It’s fine. It was bad at the time. But until you’ve done the conscious processing, and by processing, I mean feeling, because there’s a very big difference between talking about it and feeling it. Very big difference.
0:02:35 – (Lavinia): So until you’ve done that conscious processing of actually feeling that pain that you couldn’t feel as a child or adolescent or young adult because you weren’t psychologically evolved enough to, it was too big. So until you’ve done that, your past isn’t in your past, unfortunately. And what I find with mums, I only work with mums because it’s such a big an initiation into who you are. And often we find unconsciously we’re parenting like our parents. Even that’s possibly the last thing that you wanted to do.
0:03:09 – (Lavinia): That’s where the past catches up with us, if it hasn’t before. Because, let’s face it, before then, you don’t like a house, you move, you don’t like a job, you leave, you don’t like a partner, you find another one, you don’t like a country, you move. It’s only really until you have kids and then they’re like, in your face constantly. Obviously, some women do leave, but most of us don’t. And it’s then that you’re kind of not given any choice as to whether you can walk away from your past. And that’s why I help mums to clear their past, so that they’re not dragging it along with them and it’s not coming out at the worst possible times when they’re trying to be a conscious parent. And then, oh, suddenly they’re slapping or shouting or throwing something or manhandling or whatever it is that they don’t want to be doing, which was possibly done to them in the past.
0:04:04 – (Lavinia): So, in short, my route to this work was exactly that. I mean, I’ve been doing inner work for decades, since I was 23. So I started. I don’t know if it’s young, actually. Interestingly, 23 is kind of the age at which you can start doing proper inner work. You may know already, but we’re psychologically merged with our parents until we’re about 22, 23. It’s why don’t work with mothers that are younger than that, because up until that point, you’re not fully psychologically evolved, even though obviously you think you’re an adult, but you can’t look back on your past objectively.
0:04:48 – (Lavinia): You’re still merged with your parents fears, beliefs approach, so you can’t really do that work anyway. I started the work when I was 23, did all sorts of stuff, and it wasn’t until I became a mum that I was like, whoa, okay, I’m broken. I cannot do this. I am not liking who I am. In fact, I hate this. I want out. I don’t know what to do. I’m overwhelmed. Help. And this was the work that after 20, I mean, what am I, 48 now? So when I had kids, I’d been doing it for maybe ten years, but I’d never found something that helped me to like myself for years. I’ve been people, you name it. Tarot readers, crystal this, psychologists, you name it, everything. Yeah.
0:05:46 – (Lavinia): And they would always say the same thing. You just need to love yourself, right?
0:05:51 – (Wendy): You’re like, well, how the hell do you do that?
0:05:55 – (Lavinia): I was thinking, if someone else tells me that, I’m going to fucking punch them in the face. Tell me how. Everybody’s telling me what to do, how I don’t even like myself, let alone love myself. So this work for me was what gave me the entry point. And funnily enough, a client just today said to me, I don’t think I’m lovable. Obviously. Logically, I’m like, well, of course I am. But a part of me really doesn’t think I am.
0:06:23 – (Lavinia): And I said, well, which part is that? And she said, I guess it’s my five or six year old. And she said, I can do the inner parenting. I can love my younger self, but I don’t really love myself. And I said, that’s exactly why I love this work. It gives us an entry point. You don’t have to love yourself, first of all. You have to just start by loving your little self and what she went through. And from there we keep practicing receiving love, receiving compassion, receiving kindness. And then, of course, it grows.
0:06:58 – (Lavinia): And then slowly, slowly, it’s a process. You get to accept first of all, yourself. And then the love can come from that. So that was a crazy long answer. Sorry.
0:07:10 – (Wendy): No, please.
0:07:11 – (Lavinia): I’m sorry.
0:07:11 – (Wendy): I want to know more. No. And when you hit that rough spot in parenting. So I work with a lot of parents who have strong willed kids who are just like, that high degree of difficulty that just are like the high triggers. Right. So did you happen to be blessed with a strong willed kid or. No. Is it just parenting in general?
0:07:31 – (Lavinia): No. I have got three kids. Three kids born in three years. So don’t ask me why I did that. I think that was part of my high performing, let’s do this. I’m going to have more kids because then I look like I’m a better mother because I can cope somehow. I was trying to prove to either myself to other people, my parents, probably. So anyway, three kids in three years. First one was still is so sweet, easy, slightly people pleasing. I still beat myself up about that a little bit, to be honest. I parented her like a pet discipline, fear based.
0:08:12 – (Lavinia): If I scare her about something, she won’t want to do it. I still remember when we went to a wedding, she was maybe one and a half. I said, that’s the fire. Dangerous. You could burn yourself kind of fear, shock tactics. I did the same when she’d picked up some scissors. Really dangerous, because that’s what I’d had. Except I was all the rest of it.
0:08:33 – (Wendy): But I started out the same way with Stella. Yeah.
0:08:37 – (Lavinia): So often you look back and you’re like, oh, if only I knew what I know now. But anyway, it is what it is. This work is accepting. I didn’t know what I know now then. So we have to just move on. Take that energy instead of letting it spiral. Take that into. Right. How can I show up tomorrow? How can I be that better mom now? But anyway, so my poor first child parented like a pet, got my second child.
0:09:00 – (Lavinia): I thought all kids were the same. I thought you pressed a button, had a kid, they popped out, and you parented them. The same. Oh, no, my second, she was, and still is, a complete pain in the bum. I love her, obviously, but, oh, my.
0:09:21 – (Wendy): God, she’s your strong willed one.
0:09:23 – (Lavinia): She is so difficult. So she wasn’t having Any of my parenting approach? None of it.
0:09:30 – (Wendy): Yes, that was Stella.
0:09:32 – (Lavinia): Whatever she had, I don’t know if it was colic. We thought maybe it was milk allergy. She just screamed. All.
0:09:40 – (Wendy): Same with my kids day.
0:09:43 – (Lavinia): And I couldn’t do it. So my poor first child, listening to her sister scream, listening to me scream. I got to the point where I was so triggered by her, in fact, even neighbors would come around, go, it’s okay. You go and sit down. We’ll do it. She can smell your anger. We’ll take her half an hour later, they’d be like, sorry, I can’t do it.
0:10:09 – (Wendy): Now you know what I’m dealing with.
0:10:10 – (Lavinia): And they’re back over. I was like, here we go again. So I was calling my husband. Can’t you hear her? It was just awful. So that was when I started to look at myself and what I was doing, not because I thought it was my fault at the time. I don’t think I did think that. I was just screaming at her. I was beside myself, but that was the path that took me down. In fact, what I did was reach out to a healer.
0:10:40 – (Lavinia): I was so at the end of my tether. We’d tried the non milk, we tried everything. I went to hospital. I was in hospital the whole time going, there’s something wrong with this child. It shouldn’t be screaming like this. I think, actually, people might think this is weird. I do still think she had a past life or something around. She came into this world angry because she’s still angry. She’s got better and better with each milestone. When she could.
0:11:05 – (Wendy): How old are your kids now?
0:11:07 – (Lavinia): Now? 13? 1210.
0:11:11 – (Wendy): I’m almost 16. Almost 13.
0:11:14 – (Lavinia): So you’re on the same as me. Are you going through the second?
0:11:19 – (Wendy): Yes. Oh, my gosh. But, yeah, that colic stuff, I mean, it is no joke. I can’t believe how much development we’ve had that doctors still look at that condition and say, we don’t know what to do about it. Right? Because it is the most heartbreaking thing. And then when you have a toddler, too, combined with that, that’s the exact season that I lost my mind in. And that, thank God. God brought this work into my life. And I was like, my mind just opened. And that’s when my Journey started. But I was just telling the story the other day or yesterday on a speaking engagement I had. But reliving the night, it just sounds so similar of sitting on the floor.
0:12:05 – (Wendy): It was like a Tuesday night. It was dark because it was winter, and my husband worked an hour and a half away. And so it was the witching hour where the baby would start crying, and you had to move them constantly. They were never the baby who could just sit there. We have friends who have babies, and they put them down at dinner, right? Like, next to them while they eat. And we were always like, is that a real baby? Because that’s not how our babies operated. Like, you had to fly our babies around all the time, right?
0:12:34 – (Wendy): They could not sit still without crying during that phase of life. But then Stella was there with me, and she was a toddler. She was melting down because she’s my strong willed one. She was freaking out about something, having a tantrum. It was like 06:00 p.m.. I still had an hour and a half till my husband got home. And I just remember sitting there, and she’s screaming, the baby screaming, and just being like, I am miserable.
0:12:57 – (Wendy): And pushing the voice memo record on my phone. And I ended up texting my sister in law and saying, listen to this. Can someone please validate that I’m not going crazy? This is not a normal human. How the f am I supposed to deal with this, right? And it was just such. This moment with looking back, it seems like a surrender moment where I was like, okay, I’m ready to get some help. And thank God again. I was invited to a class that kind of started my whole journey of personal development. And, as you say, the inner work and learning, the parenting and all those types of things. But it’s just so interesting how many of people that I interview that end up helping others. We have that similar just moment where you’re just like, this feels like hell. It’s so hard. And I thought I was so good at life and then now I feel like a complete failure because I have no idea what to do here and all I want to do is punch a wall and run away.
0:13:54 – (Wendy): That’s what it felt like.
0:13:56 – (Lavinia): It is utter helplessness. And if you’ve experienced that as a child, that’s going to trigger the hell out of you because it’s bringing you back to the times that you felt utterly helpless. So, Zanthi, my middle one’s crying just triggered, felt. I went into a trauma. It was felt unsafe. The noise, the screaming. I remember calling the GP, the whatever, midwife, I don’t know, whatever they’re called, young mother thing. And leaving not one, but two messages because obviously it’s an answer phone because they’re always shut. There’s never anyone there. Leaving one absolute sobbing.
0:14:35 – (Lavinia): Both children screaming in the background. Sobbing. No one even called me back.
0:14:41 – (Wendy): Right.
0:14:41 – (Lavinia): I was like, what if I gone and topped myself? What would you have done with that evidence? Or, like, deleted it or something? Or gone, oh, we’re understaffed.
0:14:50 – (Wendy): You feel like you’re on an island. You feel like you’re on an island. And then some people, they don’t have the colicky babies or they don’t have the strong willed kid, and so they can’t quite get what you’re going through. And then the inner attack that happens, it’s just wild. And so sounds like that was the season that was just that pivotal time of all three years. And your nervous system was just like, boom, I’m ready for help. And that’s when you started, kind of like. But you had said you had been doing it for a while, but that’s really what kicked it into high gear for you.
0:15:22 – (Wendy): Yeah.
0:15:23 – (Lavinia): This is when I looked at my background. I’d never looked at my past. No one had ever asked me about my past, so I had no idea that my past was an issue. I thought I had a great childhood. That’s what often my clients. No, no, it was fine. It was great. I’m like, ok, you grew up to.
0:15:38 – (Wendy): Be fine, right, lavinia? You grew up to be air quotes. Fine.
0:15:41 – (Lavinia): Yeah.
0:15:41 – (Wendy): What do you mean?
0:15:43 – (Lavinia): Remind me? And then it’s like, well, do you know what? I often say this. You weren’t born with that. You weren’t born feeling unlovable. You weren’t born a perfectionist, you weren’t born an emotional caretaker. This has come from somewhere. So we need to look at what contributed. Even if it wasn’t directly, it was indirect or it was implied. Basically, you didn’t get what you needed. That doesn’t make you needy.
0:16:15 – (Lavinia): But your parents, a lot of people have problem getting their head around the fact, oh, but my parents tried their best. Yes. We’re not saying they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t. Your parents tried their best, no problem. And that best wasn’t enough. They’re two truths that coexist. And the healing comes from validating that part of you, the part of you that didn’t get enough, that perhaps has never had that validation. She’s never been heard.
0:16:47 – (Lavinia): No one’s actually ever said to her, how was it for you? What was it like growing up with those parents? And that’s when it’s like, oh, well, yeah, actually, yeah. I mean, my parents were pretty strict. Yeah. No, I was sent to my roommate. Yeah. No, I wasn’t allowed to be myself. Here we go. Yeah.
0:17:04 – (Wendy): Here we go. Yeah. There’s two things that comes to mind when you say that. One was like just the acceptance that’s helped me over the years of knowing. A mentor shared this with me once. We all are going to leave wounds on our children. You don’t get out of parenthood without leaving wounds. Right? Like without wounding, without even scarring. It’s just part of the human condition. There are things that our children are going to move through therapy because therapy is going to be normalized.
0:17:36 – (Wendy): This type of healing work is going to be so normalized for their generation that they’re just going to have access to it. It’s going to be this thing. Right. But they’re going to move through their own things. Right. Just like we are moving through our own things about our own parents. Right. And then the other thing that I loved, that I saw a video that you did the other day, living yours at some point was just speaking to how important it is to know that it’s like, and you speak into this a little bit greater before we get into our three sub points today, but the idea that we look at our parents today and a lot of them have evolved a little bit. Right.
0:18:12 – (Lavinia): They just have.
0:18:13 – (Wendy): Right? Like they’ve grown a little bit. They don’t have the little triggers in their life at this point when you’re retired, so they just operate different. Right. Maybe they speak to you differently. Maybe they’re more accepting, whatever. They’re a little bit more evolved now, sometimes I still have a lot of clients who have parents that I’m like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they still say that to you or disapprove of your compassionate discipline, whatever it may be.
0:18:36 – (Wendy): But a lot of us do have parents who have evolved a little bit. So then you almost feel guilty doing reparenting work because you feel like it’s like, well, they’re good people and they have grown. But your video was basically like, well, let’s look, though, with a realistic lens on what it was like. And that’s okay. It doesn’t make you a bad kid or a bad daughter or whatever, but can you speak to that just a little bit before we kick off this conversation about healing our inner child?
0:19:06 – (Lavinia): Absolutely. We’re not healing the wounds that were created now. We’re not looking at the ways in which your parents aren’t there for you now, although we are as well. That definitely comes into it. But the key point is to look at who your parents were then and what you needed then, and not to look back at what was painful then and go, oh, but that was a bit silly for a child. It may not have been silly at all. I’ve had clients who’ve had, like, we’ve been looking for the root cause of why they have a certain self limiting belief. They can’t ask for their needs to be met or whatever.
0:19:41 – (Lavinia): And it’s really serious. It’s affecting all areas of their life. It turns out they weren’t allowed to wear the pink dress at the party. They had to wear the blue. And they’re like, but it can’t be that. And I’m like, no, but remember, how old were you? Well, I was really upset. Well, yeah. That was you asking to express yourself in the way that you chose in your three year old mind. So to not be allowed to do that, and if you were strong willed or whatever it was, and if your parents were very strict or led through fear, then that would have been a really big deal at the time.
0:20:19 – (Lavinia): So we’re looking. Yeah. At the parents that you had, not necessarily the parents you have. And remember, I have to emphasize this really strongly, because this work is not about hating your parents. This work is not about making your parent out to be the world’s worst parent in the world. Not at all. We are focusing on the negative. Yes. We’re focusing on the ways in which they weren’t there for you in order to bring up the old stuck, unprocessed pain, because that is what is blocking you from naturally.
0:20:57 – (Lavinia): We don’t have to make any effort here from naturally coming to a place of acceptance of your parents as the flawed, limited human beings that they are, just as we are flawed, limited. So I sometimes think of it as it’s like this boggy marsh. We are draining that boggy marsh. That boggy marsh being the irritation, disappointment, pain, loss, anger. We’re draining it so that you can step across to the other side.
0:21:20 – (Lavinia): And that other side is acceptance. That’s where we’re going. So I will drag you down into the boggy marsh constantly, which isn’t fun. It’s so painful and it’s so hard. And that is how we drain it. And then you’ll come out the other side 100%. But it’s not easy.
0:21:40 – (Wendy): I love that analogy.
0:21:43 – (Lavinia): Well, my other friend said it’s like shit shoveling. I like that phrase. It’s also that. Yeah, but yeah, boggy Marsh, you are going into actually another analogy. Well, it’s not really analogy. It’s kind of true. I also like this. It’s like this work can be very hard to do because obviously, as you know, we come up with all sorts of resistance to feeling our pain. Of course we do. Like, part of you is like, what?
0:22:11 – (Lavinia): You want me to feel that again? I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid feeling that again. Are you kidding me? So part of us is going to be like, no. All these excuses that we come up with, oh, no, I’m fine, I’m fine. Oh, I do that. I can’t tell my mom for doing that, because I do it. Oh, she had a really, really hard childhood, so she didn’t have the tools, all of it. We come up with all the reasons under the sun why we don’t need to do this work.
0:22:37 – (Lavinia): And we’re going into it because this is the part that was fragmented off. So your child’s self is wired. It has a survival instinct to see its parents, its primary caregivers, as safe and loving. It has to, because it has a much higher chance of survival in a family unit than it does on the streets by itself, obviously. So that means that any behavior that that child perceives as not being in line with what it needs, I. E. Safe and loving, it, literally fragments off the psyche, fragments itself.
0:23:19 – (Lavinia): It can’t see it. So it can be really difficult on one level to ask people to go back and go, well, how was it hard? Because it’s like that part of you is going, oh, computer says no, like malfunction. They can see it, but they can’t go there. So I always say this is. I can give you a trick, actually. I’ll share it with your listeners. But we’re doing this work as adults because we want to be whole.
0:23:45 – (Lavinia): We don’t want to see the world through our inner child eyes. We want to see it through adult eyes, because that’s where the acceptance of our parents comes from. We’re seeing them as adults, and we’re adults. We no longer need them to be a certain way for us to feel okay. That’s the inner child. She needs her parents to be a certain way to feel okay. So we are basically doing that integration work. We’re like detectives. We’re going down into the depths of the cellar and finding that file that you threw away and opening that file and looking at it and integrating and creating a more objective view of your childhood, not one that is rose tinted because you had to survive, but a real view of how your parents actually were and how you actually suffered.
0:24:34 – (Lavinia): And the trick that I tell people is, okay, so you’ve got this memory. It’s painful, but you’re kind of brushing it off. You’re going, it’s okay. I had big shoulders. My mum couldn’t go, I had big shoulders. I was all right. I got through it, and I was like, okay, cool. So imagine the same memory. You’re a fly on the wall. Put you. Replace you with your child. Now what? They’re like, oh, how would you react if you saw your mum or your father doing that to your child?
0:25:08 – (Lavinia): Oh, no, it’s not okay. I mean, I didn’t know. It’s like. And then suddenly, this fierce mama bear comes out, and I’m like, right. That is more of an objective point of view. So swapping you for your child takes off these inner child glasses that you’ve got on, and you put your mama bear glasses on. Whole different story. So that’s one of the ways in which we can help ourselves to integrate that part that’s been fragmented off, which is necessary if we want to be the whole human beings that we want to show up as for our kids, for our partner, for the world.
0:25:48 – (Wendy): It’s so true. And I just love the analogy of the draining that buggy marsh. I love it. I love just your dialect and these fun little words that you have that’s different than my southern California words, but, like, the draining the buggy marsh. And then I saw rich roll share something the other day that was so beautiful. It was like the reinvention really happens in the million single moments, right? And he basically, the analogy.
0:26:17 – (Wendy): You mentioned shoveling shit. That was his analogy. It was like, it’s a million moments of shoveling shit. That’s actually. Everyone wants it to be these big breakthrough moments, right? Where you’re like, oh, my gosh, I just forgave my mom. I just moved through this. I no longer have a knee jerk reaction to hit or whatever. And really, it’s like these million moments that you’re integrating the healing. And then the other thing was just the realization that the healing comes through the feeling. And if we’re constantly pushing away the feeling, or, like you said, just segmenting it off, right, it’s in the file cabinet. It’s done. We got through it. But the feeling is what actually creates the processing of the emotions and the passing and then being able to get to that relaxed nervous system of some sort where you can actually respond the way that you want.
0:27:09 – (Wendy): And I know that’s what works. And over the years, I mean, call me crazy and tell me if you’ve gotten to this point, too, but I’ve been doing this kind of, as you say, inner work for 13 years, and I really do love it. Now when I get into a classroom as a certified life coach, we have to continuously do the work, so to speak. Right? Like, that’s how we keep our certification up. And I just can’t wait to get in that classroom.
0:27:34 – (Wendy): And I’m like, let’s dig it up. Tell me this is still happening, and I eat it up. I have developed a joy of loving it when I ugly cry these days in a safe space with a mentor that’s guiding me to really bring up the feeling that I’ve been either avoiding or suppressing or just wasn’t aware of. I love it, and it may be embarrassing in the moment, because it’s like, the ugly cry, especially. You’re like, oh, great.
0:28:05 – (Wendy): But it feels like a million dollars. It feels so good to be able to actually finally assess it and hold it dear instead of just acting like it’s not there. So that’s been a big part of me. And have you feel like you’ve developed a joy where you enjoy it?
0:28:24 – (Lavinia): Sadomasochistic love of hearing other people’s pain, because you’re like, I’m not alone, but this is where we’re human. I think this is where we find each other’s humanity. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a women’s circle, but I’m a total fan of women’s circles. To be ugly crying, as you said, snot rolling down your face, tears rolling down your face, and to be seen and loved. I mean, I learned how to cry again, aged 39, in a women’s circle because I just turned that switch off.
0:29:01 – (Lavinia): Not safe to cry.
0:29:03 – (Wendy): Fan yourself. Fan yourself. Like, you know, all the things women do. Yeah. Our version of that.
0:29:10 – (Lavinia): Stoic, nothing affects me, nothing. Being seen in your pain, and conversely, seeing other people in their pain. That’s why I’m sure you love what you do. It’s what I love. I love. Well, also, on an unconscious level, we’re doing this. Or maybe more conscious, we’re doing this because we’re giving to others what we want to receive ourselves. So to be able to hold space for other people in the depths of their despair, anger, fear is so powerful because that’s what we’re here for. We’re not here to scroll through TikTok or buy a posh car or clean homes or whatever it is. We’re here to feel each other.
0:29:55 – (Lavinia): So true. I think I’m a bit of a hermit because I kind of am, especially since we moved to Spain. I don’t see that many people. But then I was like, you know, get. I see people all day and I don’t know if you’re the same, but I’m quite intense. Like, if I’m going to have a conversation with you, it’ll be about your birth story. I don’t care what canopy you like best, it always kind of naturally goes into something deep. I can’t help it. That’s what I love about you all day.
0:30:24 – (Lavinia): So I’m kind of getting my. I do count my clients as, like, I love them, and I’m doing it all day, so it’s almost like that feels that very human and especially feminine need to be there for each other. So it’s kind of like, well, I don’t need that many friends because I’m doing every day. And if you think back to olden times, what were we doing? We were meeting at the communal well, scrubbing underpants and chatting and connecting with each other. Where do we have that now?
0:30:59 – (Lavinia): We don’t have that. So I think I really see this job as such an honor to be able to witness other people in their pain. And I’m very open about my pain. I’m very honest that I am by no means a perfect parent. And this work does not make you into a perfect parent in any way. I still shout on my kids, I raise my voice, but it’s because I choose to. Now.
0:31:22 – (Wendy): Right, exactly.
0:31:24 – (Lavinia): Really annoying.
0:31:27 – (Wendy): Our life coaching course, where we do our circles right, and we have men too, which is just the most beautiful thing to see men learning to do this kind of like a beautiful presence with the humanity of each other and learn to feel usually in third and fourth decades of their life. Right. But yeah, I forget what I was going to say about that. But anyways, lost my train of thought. But yeah, love it. All those circles.
0:31:52 – (Wendy): All good. Okay, well, hey, listen, we got to get into our points, lavinia, to cover. We’re just chatting, chatting, chatting, but covering this idea of just the importance of healing your inner child in order to become a more conscious parent. So let’s talk about our takeaway, number one, which is the relationship with your mom and dad set the tone for all future relationship dynamics 100%.
0:32:16 – (Lavinia): So this is kind of going back to what we said at the beginning. You’re not psychologically evolved fully until you’re 22, 23. So who are your biggest influences? Your primary caregivers? They’re your universe. You don’t know that the way that you’re being brought up is any different from anyone else. We don’t realize that. Oh, I thought that was normal. Oh, your parents didn’t do that. We don’t do that when we’re five. 6712 13.
0:32:41 – (Lavinia): So this concept of absorbing, I mean, I guess we’re talking nurture, nurture, nurture is everything in terms of the limitations, self limiting beliefs, fears that you pick up. If your parents didn’t think that the world was safe, if your parents didn’t act like the world was safe, I. E. You had a really neurotic, highly anxious mother that was constantly worrying, if you had a volatile mother that was constantly flying off the handle or 1 minute was happy, 1 minute was sad.
0:33:22 – (Lavinia): If you had a parent that was an oversharer and gave you inappropriate vaccines, look at their relationship. If you had a father that couldn’t control his temper, these things you’re going to think are normal for a start, but also they’re going to temper the way that you relate to them and therefore you’re going to learn, oh, parents aren’t always there for me. My needs aren’t perhaps important. I have to put my parents need first. Especially if you had to be an emotional caretaker and you were there to kind of cheer your mum up or calm your father down because no one else was doing it.
0:34:05 – (Lavinia): So these are the ways in which we learn how to relate to each other. The ways that our parents role modeled it between themselves and the ways that they treated us. Of course we do. Where else are we getting it from? Like I said, you’re not born knowing how to relate. So I feel that the way that we relate to ourselves, the labels that we were given, you’re so bossy, you’re so difficult, you’re so lazy, you’re so whatever it was, the way in which you were given conditional love for only being happy, for only being successful, these color the ways in which we show up in the world, and therefore the way we can trust or not trust, the way in which we can let people in or not, because it doesn’t feel safe.
0:34:47 – (Lavinia): The way in which we view the world as having our back or not.
0:34:52 – (Wendy): Not.
0:34:53 – (Lavinia): Yeah. So that’s the way in which our primary relationships, and I also include school in that. But the primary, primary ones are your parents. That colors how you move through life, because your brain, your brain wants to make a shortcut. If it creates a belief like, oh, it’s not safe to be vulnerable. Because when that happened, my mum walked out, she left me, or she dismissed me, or my dad spanked me, okay, it’s not safe. They all have, like, a hypothesis of a belief that they’ve got. It’s not safe to be vulnerable.
0:35:31 – (Lavinia): Then the brain will only look for confirmation of that. It doesn’t go, oh, no, you’re wrong. No, look, it was safe with him and it was safe. No, it wants a shortcut. It wants a way to understand the world. So every time this happens again. Yeah, not safe. Yeah, definitely not safe. And that’s how that belief gets hardwired. So again, it’s how you see the world. And then you start to expect that from the world and from other people.
0:35:57 – (Lavinia): So this work is all about undoing that by looking at the pain that was caused when you created that self limiting belief and inner parenting that child through that experience, so that this time she gets the comfort, love and support. She’s not dismissed, rejected, punished, hit. She has a different experience when she’s being vulnerable, and therefore that belief no longer holds. Suddenly it is safe to be vulnerable again.
0:36:29 – (Wendy): Yes. So beautiful. It’s amazing, the journey, right? To become more comfortable with looking at your past and all the things that we’ve talked about. And a lot of times I’ll have at the forefront how different I am from my parents because I always felt like an alien in my home. I was like, how was I born into this family was always this very positive, optimistic kid, and there was just so much pessimism and negativity and anger and annoyance and irritation and all these things.
0:37:01 – (Wendy): So I just always, like, I spent, like, I feel like, decades. Like, I’m just so different. And then now, as I’ve gotten older, I’m like, oh, my goodness. I see all these similarities, and I think what we just spoke about, it helps us have compassion for ourselves, right? Like, no wonder we are excessive worriers. No wonder we are highly triggered or whatever it may be. No wonder, because this set the tone. As you said, it set the tone. It set everything for 18 plus years. It’s where the neural conditioning came from. The pathways became paved.
0:37:33 – (Wendy): So I love that one for just giving ourselves compassion and being able to look at it. Okay, how about number two, Lavinia, which is finding conscious parenting is impossible, is common because parenting air quotes mindset work is not possible until you have healed your trauma.
0:37:51 – (Lavinia): First.
0:37:52 – (Wendy): Talk to us about that.
0:37:55 – (Lavinia): Mindset work comes from the prefrontal cortex. So the front part of your brain, which is concerned with logic, with reasoning, with the consequences of your actions. So it’s all very well reading the parenting books, listening to podcasts, learning how to breathe, that mantra that you’re meant to say just before you get annoyed, I did it all. None of it worked. None of it worked. And then people can get into this, oh, my God, it’s me.
0:38:23 – (Lavinia): There’s something really wrong with me. I am so broken that I can’t do this. Everyone else is doing it. I can’t. So it’s important to recognize that if you’ve had a challenging childhood in which you weren’t seen, in which you didn’t feel understood, in which you didn’t feel heard, and that, believe it or not, is the definition of developmental trauma, even though it’s like trauma. Oh, no, I wasn’t traumatized. No, developmental. Because it happened when you were developing. Your brain was developing, but it’s literally not feeling seen, not feeling heard, not feeling understood, living in an environment that perhaps wasn’t predictable, that wasn’t safe emotionally, these are very, very common things for our generation, and they were things that our parents generation just didn’t think about because they didn’t often have the emotional maturity.
0:39:18 – (Lavinia): So, we’re looking at developmental trauma, and if you’ve had that, your prefrontal cortex, the bit, the way you’ve got all the podcasts and the books and the mantras and the key phrases that goes offline when you are experiencing a trauma response. So you might think, well, parenting, why would I go into a trauma response? It’s my child. It’s not like a tiger’s in the room. Well, actually, if your child is doing something that reminds you of a time where you felt totally out of control and helpless or powerless, and it was a perceived threat. So we talked at the beginning about screaming.
0:40:01 – (Lavinia): That used to be a huge scrimmage, huge trigger. For me, it was with my daughter. I’d go into a trauma response, and it was even recently I had to go, why am I so pissed off about this child screaming on a plane? Everyone else was just, like, reading their books. And I was going, oh, my God. And I was like, I can’t stand this screaming. Like, shut the kid up. Do something. I was like, why am I having this reaction?
0:40:26 – (Lavinia): So that was because of my daughter. But my daughter originally, that was the original trigger. She was triggering me because it reminded my deep, deep rage that I would feel at my parents, that being utterly squashed, dismissed, hit into submission, not listened to. Not listened to. So my child screaming indirectly triggered me into a state where I remembered what it was like to be a toddler, a child.
0:40:58 – (Lavinia): So I then went into a trauma response, which meant that I would either. Well, me, my trauma response is fight. So I will scream, I will tell. I want to hit things, I want to throw things, I want to break something, I want to manhandle. That’s my response. Other women have different responses. You might have to leave the room. You have to leave the room. You can’t be there anymore. You might freeze. People just zone out. They’re just like, what? They just leave their bodies or fawn. Oh, no, stop. Here’s a sweetie. Here. Do you want to breastfeed?
0:41:30 – (Lavinia): Do you want a toy? Here? Like, distraction? Because they need to please. So basically, mindset work doesn’t work when you’re in a trauma response, when you’re being triggered by whatever it is into a state that reminds you of a time when you did feel perceived threat. Back to what we said before, my parents, I guess they were a perceived threat because they were violent. But even to a three year old, a child screaming at them, that’s a perceived threat. So that takes you back there and then the prefrontal cortex is not online.
0:42:03 – (Lavinia): You’re not thinking about the consequences of your actions. You’re being controlled by a much older part of the brain, the survival brain. And in this state, not only are you going to fight, flight, freeze form, but often you end up saying and doing what your parents said and did to you. That’s where a lot of my clients come to me going, I don’t understand. I used to hate it when my mum did this. And I just did it. Or with me. I was hitting my children. I was slapping them.
0:42:34 – (Lavinia): I didn’t want to slap them. It wasn’t actually. My partner at the time was like, why are you slapping them? To tell them to stop slapping each other. Yeah, but I wasn’t conscious. It just happened. And then afterwards, your prefrontal cortex comes back online and you’re like, oh, my God, I can’t believe I did. And that’s when the shame and the guilt sets in. And it’s a vicious cycle. So going back to the question, we can’t do mindset parenting, which is how I define conscious parenting. Gentle parenting, respectful parents, all about holding space for someone else. It’s about using keywords. It’s about connecting to your child.
0:43:15 – (Lavinia): You can’t do any of that. If you’re in a triggered state, forget it. You can’t. So you have to heal the triggers first. When you’ve healed those, your body is in a much more relaxed state. More often, you can think about the consequences of your action. You’re not in fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and you can start to apply parenting techniques. So I guess what I’m saying is, if you feel like you’re one of those mums, and I was 100% one of them, someone told me to follow Janet Lansbury, and I was like, okay, cool, yeah, I’ll do that.
0:43:51 – (Lavinia): I was like, no. After a couple of weeks, I was like, I’m unfollowing. I cannot do this. It’s bringing up so much pain. Someone said, read this book. I couldn’t read the book. I couldn’t read the book. It would just put me in a spiral. But, oh, my God, I can’t do this. I’m damaging my children. So we have to do this trauma work first. It’s not your fault if you can’t do gentle, conscious parenting. It’s not your fault. You’re just trying to do one thing in the wrong order.
0:44:20 – (Lavinia): You’re doing it in the wrong order. Look at your past first, clear your baggage first, and then you’ve got that bandwidth to apply mindset.
0:44:29 – (Wendy): Oh, I love it, Lavinia. It’s so true, right? It’s like, at least do it together too. I love the perfect world is do it first. Right? Wouldn’t that be just amazing if everyone could just do it first, then bring in the parenting, and the parenting would be so much easier, right? I think in our program, we do it at the same time. Right? We have the life coaching side of things.
0:44:51 – (Lavinia): Let’s go deep.
0:44:51 – (Wendy): Let’s look at the limiting beliefs. Let’s do all that in conjunction with every time you’re trying a new strategy and you’re triggered, bring it to the table. Let’s look at it right then and there as you’re trying to compassionately discipline. Right, or whatever. But I love everything that you’re saying. I think it’s always cool what God brings into my life in the moment that I have these interviews. But this morning, I was on a call, and all of my work these days is always in the business side of things. So as an entrepreneur, as a leader of a team, as a growing, pretty big business now investing all this money and stuff, I just have a lot of stuff come up, and there’s so much around money and wealth.
0:45:31 – (Wendy): And as we were talking this morning, it came up with a mentor. How much my rational brain will kick in and be like, well, I know that. I know that that’s not a belief that I want to carry, of course, but just tell me how to get rid of it. Of course I know that this, that or that, and it’s, again, around wealth and money. But we covered how I stop myself from going into feeling and what I really am avoiding or what I’m not executing right now, which I’m looking forward to executing more over the next few months with this new program I’m in, is being able to stop the barrage of like, well, you should know better.
0:46:14 – (Wendy): You know that you don’t want to slap, you know that you don’t want to whatever. Think about money in this way. It’s like, well, no, by saying that, I’m not able to instead switch into, like, well, what are you feeling at this moment? What are the memories that you have around this? What is feels so uncomfortable? Why does this feel so unsafe? Just stop with the logical, like, you should know better. You do know, like, or Lavinia, just tell me. Tell me how to get rid of. Right? Like, but it’s like, no, it’s an inner, like, to slow down and really get into that and be.
0:46:52 – (Lavinia): Let’s.
0:46:52 – (Wendy): And as we talked about, the healing happens through the feeling, and it’s just kind of that first gateway. But you got to get out of that rational brain of like, I got to switch my mindset. I know what I want to do here, but it’s not happening. And get into, let’s just drop into the feeling and just see how long we can sit there and at least discover it and then move into it. So that was like, my journey this morning that I was like, oh, one.
0:47:17 – (Lavinia): Of my favorite questions is when you’ve touched that nerve of that feeling. Part is, how old is the part of you that is feeling this right now?
0:47:28 – (Wendy): I’m adding that to my journaling this week.
0:47:31 – (Lavinia): How old? And then it’s like, okay, well, no, don’t journal it, feel it. Because then you’re writing it. That’s a layer of distance, right? I love it. Feel it. You’re like, oh, stop. How old is the part of me that’s feeling this? Close your eyes, go into your body. Oh, God, I’m five. Oh, you’re five. Interesting. Where is this feeling manifesting in your body? Let’s make space for five year old you.
0:48:03 – (Lavinia): She’s brought this up because she’s ready to heal it. She doesn’t want to be carrying it anymore. This is the trauma imprint from your childhood, and she’s ready to heal it. That’s why she’s brought it up to you. I feel like our wounds are constantly knocking at the door. Constantly. But we have to make space for them. And when we can be that welcoming space for whatever age we are, that’s feeling this pain going.
0:48:30 – (Lavinia): And also, another question I love is like, what does that part of you need right now? Obviously, she’s feeling a feeling. What does she need? What words would soothe her in this moment? What actions would soothe her? What does she want? And imagine it happening. And then you are co regulating yourself. This is obviously with the inner parent. I forgot to say that. But it’s so much a part of my thing that of course the inner parent is there. So the inner parent is there with you.
0:49:01 – (Lavinia): That way you are co regulating yourself through an experience that you weren’t co regulated through. That’s why it’s coming up in your daily life. It wants to be healed. So going back to that, your past is not in your past, it’s coming up in your daily life. And if we make the space to recognize it and heal it, it’s gone. It doesn’t want to be in you.
0:49:25 – (Wendy): I love that. And, Ben, before, we’re going to cover our last point here in just a second, but before we do that real quick, I know I’ve seen you speak on when we’re engaging with this new voice, right? A lot of times we’ll try to picture the perfect parent or the parent that we wish we had or we wish. But I saw you speaking once on the idea of just. It can just be a new voice. Will you talk to us a little bit about that, lavinia? Because a lot of this is just creating, like when we talk about reparenting, it’s creating the voice that we needed, but maybe not necessarily imagining the face of our mother saying it. Is that right?
0:50:08 – (Lavinia): Oh, yeah. No, I wouldn’t recommend having a person. And you’re absolutely right, it doesn’t have to be in a parent. People can get a bit hung up on. Oh, but I can’t feel my inner child. You might be in your inner child, but you’re still your mum, you, your adult, you, your at work, you. What we’re doing with the inner parent is meeting ourselves where we’re at with whatever we need to hear. So it can be an inner best friend.
0:50:35 – (Lavinia): If the kids are kicking off at bedtime, you’re like, oh, my God, I can’t bear this. I’m getting really triggered. Please get to bed. I’m going to start screaming in a moment. Then your inner parent is your neighbor, your best friend. Oh, God, I hate it when they do that. I hate this time of night. You’ve got this, you’ve got this. I’m thinking there’s a glass of wine waiting for you downstairs. It’s okay, right?
0:50:54 – (Lavinia): Your best friend, it can be your inner coach, it can be your inner therapist, it can be your inner sister. It’s someone who is saying and being there for you in the way that you need them to be. Just the other day, I get in a real flap about finding a parking spot. It really gets me really anxious. And I had to go somewhere, especially somewhere new. And I’m like, but I don’t know the town. What if I get lost? This is totally inherited from my mother.
0:51:23 – (Lavinia): So I had to drive somewhere. I had to be somewhere on time. So that’s like, oh, my God, imagine that. I normally leave, like, way too early. So I’m in the car, got the map thing on full volume, trying to read the thing while I’m driving, and I’m like, oh, my God, parking. Shit. What if I don’t find a parking? Then I might be late. What if it’s like miles away? And I got my inner parent, my inner friend, she was sitting in the car right next to me and she was like, you’re being so brave.
0:51:52 – (Lavinia): Wow. Driving all by yourself. You’ve never been here, you’ve never been to this town. You’ve got to be there on time. You don’t know whether there’s going to be a car. And we’ve got quite a big car, so I’m always like, wow, what if it can’t fit in the space and I like, so she was like, it’s okay. We’re going to find a space. I’m going to help you find a space. We’re going to get there early. We’re going to keep driving until we find that. And I was like, yeah, I am being brave. Yeah.
0:52:21 – (Lavinia): Wow, I’m really brave. That’s what I needed to hear. Sounds kind of stupid. I’m sure most people would take that kind of thing totally in their stride, but for me, it’s a trigger. It’s like, anxiety trigger. So she was reassuring me that I’ve got this that’s in a parenting meeting yourself where you’re at, getting them to say and do what you need to hear in order to feel safe. Definitely love that.
0:52:49 – (Wendy): Sometimes I laugh at the back and forth that’s going on in my head, and I imagine these little people, and I’m like, it feels like if someone could see the craziness going on between this voice and that voice, right? But really it’s just this beautiful developing this voice. And I actually was able to support my daughter the other night. So she’s almost 16, and she just had gone into, like, a little bit of a shame spiral.
0:53:14 – (Wendy): It was way too late. 1030 at night. Her and daddy were leaving to go to a concert the next day, like, getting on an airplane to go see a show, and she made a mistake. And we were parenting and redirecting and all the things, and she just went into this shame cycle and she was having trouble pulling herself out of it. Hey, what did you learn from the mistake? All the things that we do. But she was just feeling really bad, like she had ruined the night and all these things, and not much was working to get her out of the shame, so to speak.
0:53:44 – (Wendy): And then we did ask that question of like, hey, what would you say to your best friend right now? What would you say to, she has this amazing best friend. If she had made a mistake and said something to her dad that she realized might have hurt him, and you could feel the whole energy in the room shift as she spoke aloud, what she would say to her best friend. And that is really what I think kind of turned the ship around and helped her be able to at least go to bed without feeling, like, leaving the situation with that shame feeling, but instead, like, oh, I’m going to be okay. I think everyone just needs a full night rest.
0:54:23 – (Wendy): And then, of course, in the morning, everyone was great. But that was the pivotal question. What would you say to your best friend right now? And would it be true would it be true? Right? Because I think when we say that stuff to ourself, we’re like, oh, that’s such bs. I’m not brave. I’m a freaking idiot because I left late and I shouldn’t, we’ll justify it. But when you think, is it really true that your best friend’s brave if she’s never been somewhere and she’s in this busy town with this map? It is true. It’s absolutely true. So I love that little prompt. Okay, well, last one we have on our list is. Our amazing takeaways is when it comes to healing our inner child in order to become a conscious parent, talk to us about the disproportionate reactions in our present.
0:55:08 – (Wendy): I. E. Our triggers are portals to unprocessed wounds from your past.
0:55:16 – (Lavinia): Yeah, I mean, we kind of touched on that before with the screaming. I’m feeling a bit bad now that what I’ve said about my middle child. I feel like I need to qualify it. But when we have a spirited child or a demanding child, it’s like they unconsciously demand more. My first child was okay being a people pleaser. It’s just, I guess maybe our two energies synced better. My second child needed more, and she made me give her more. And that was my growth. That was the growth that I needed to do.
0:55:53 – (Lavinia): So becoming this conscious parent is about understanding that the trigger has come from the past, healing it, because that’s what we need to do to be whole, because our children need us to be whole. They need to feel us. And like I said, I had to learn how to recry. At 39, my children wanted me to cry. They wanted my vulnerability. They didn’t want some armored vehicle. And often when we become mums, we get into this place where if we’ve had to be self reliant, self sufficient, because there simply wasn’t anyone there for us as a child or teenager, that can get us very far.
0:56:37 – (Lavinia): The patriarchy loves self sufficiency, self reliance, independent thinking. Great. But at what cost did you become these things? So it’s sometimes when we become mothers that our heart is broken open and we’re like, oh, I want to let this child in. I want to feel her. I want her to feel me. And you’re trying to open up. Your mum self is trying to open up. And your inner child’s like, no, shut the door. No, it doesn’t feel safe. No, but I want to open. No, but I want to open up. No. So you’ve got this inner tussle between the part of you that doesn’t feel safe opening up because it wasn’t safe to open up, and the part of you that desperately wants to because you know that’s what your children need.
0:57:25 – (Lavinia): So using disproportionate reactions in life to help us to understand where that wound lies, because like we said before, that disproportionate reaction is reminding you of a time that you felt helpless, shamed, belittled, dismissed, abandoned, rejected. Whatever that wound is, then we can heal it, because that’s what our children need us to do. So our children will trigger us, obviously, unconsciously. But I think there is an element of our children pushing the buttons that they know will lead us to our true, whole selves. I think they sense it.
0:58:13 – (Wendy): Amazing.
0:58:13 – (Lavinia): My second child was just pushing on that button constantly until I stepped up. I had to step up. If I hadn’t had her, I wouldn’t have stepped up in the way that I would still be a very strict, authoritarian, selfish, judgmental mother. I would be awful. So I’m so deeply grateful, even though it was a nightmare, and sometimes it still is, but she is still, like the weather vein of the house, same as Stella.
0:58:48 – (Lavinia): Many times I’ve gone, what is wrong with her? Oh, my God. She’s gone. Batting into that thing that she does. I can’t stand it. And then it was like, well, are we giving off funky. No, I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t know what. Oh, hold on. Yeah, maybe I’m a bit anxious. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Actually, I’m quite angry. Fuck, yeah.
0:59:11 – (Wendy): It’s so true.
0:59:13 – (Lavinia): I hate that. It’s just, like, mirrored back to me and regurgitated in my face every time. I haven’t picked up on what I. And it’s like, I hate having to be this person has to be on top of it. But at the same time, what a gift. What a gift to have, like, an inbuilt therapist, coach, healer in your house.
0:59:36 – (Wendy): It’s so true.
0:59:37 – (Lavinia): Constantly, like you said, millions, millions of moments of shit shoveling, because they are our gift. If I hadn’t had her, I would be blissfully unaware, blissfully selfish, blissfully miserable.
0:59:53 – (Wendy): Yeah, it’s so true. I know this may sound dumb, but it’s like, the way I see it is the strong willed or spirited, they’re like a breed, right? I love animals. I love dogs. We’re like a dog family. And I love all the different breeds of dogs. All of them have their own unique qualities. And the strong willed, spirited child is, like, this very special breed that I believe elevates humanity.
1:00:23 – (Lavinia): They demand it.
1:00:24 – (Wendy): They demand it and they don’t take bs.
1:00:29 – (Lavinia): The worst bit is they remind us of us. Because let’s face what I was that child.
1:00:36 – (Wendy): I still am.
1:00:37 – (Lavinia): Too much, too difficult, too loud, too intense, too this. Oh, it’s like having a bloody mirror in your house and it’s really uncomfortable.
1:00:47 – (Wendy): And we are like, if you look at us, that’s what we do. We hate to be cocky, but we’re elevating humanity, right? It is not the most easy. I have friends who are in businesses selling products where they sell products to make money, whatever that’s called, business to business. Like, let me sell you a coaching program where you’re going to double your money in two years, right? We’re not selling those programs. We’re selling programs that literally elevate humanity. And it’s not always easy, but man, do we love what we do. And it’s just those of us who do this, we have huge justice buttons. We can’t sit back and just watch people just, you can’t do it. You have to help and you heal yourself.
1:01:30 – (Wendy): It’s all just this beautiful thing and then those little mirrors are just these gifts and these, like, it is just so fascinating. But Lavinia, I feel like you’re like a soul sister from another mother. I feel like we have so much in common and just. What a pleasure and honor to spend this last hour with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Your sense of humor is so fun.
1:01:54 – (Wendy): I want your accent. I want to live in Spain. I at least want to visit. But if you could end us off with telling listeners where they can come find you, learn about your work, all the good stuff.
1:02:07 – (Lavinia): Absolutely. And I wanted to say earlier, where were you when I needed you? Your course sounds amazing. Oh my God. To be able to do it hand in hand. Wow. Because, yeah, most of us don’t do this work until we’re like, oh, I’ve just done something I hate. Oh, I feel like a shit, you know, thank you for doing what you do. I wish I’d had that then. So me, you can find me on my website. It’s my name, laviniabrown.com I’m on instagram, laviniabrown coaching.
1:02:37 – (Lavinia): So I post four times a week. There’s been so much free content. So much free content. Because I know that not everyone can afford the big programs. I have free content. I have a free downloadable course. I’ve got self led programs that you can pay for in installments. And I’ve obviously got my coaching program. I’ve also got a new community coming out, so I’m very excited about that. That’s going to come out early next year and that’s going to be amazing.
1:03:04 – (Lavinia): I hope so. A global community of mothers healing alongside each other. There’s a course, but it’s also going to be two live q and a’s a month. So really doing this together, like we said, the women’s circles, like you said, the dirty crying in front of each other. Not that anyone else has to do that or wants to do that, but there’s such a magic involved in feeling that you’re not alone, that you’re not the most broken mother that there is, that it’s not your fault because other mothers are feeling exactly the same. So hopefully that new community will really enhance that girl.
1:03:45 – (Wendy): Oh, that’s exciting. And pray that you’ll be blessed and settled in your own body as you create that because I know it’s a lot after creating, I’ve created my program six years ago now and it is a lot when you create it, but it is so fun when it’s finally out there in the world and you have it and all the good stuff. So that’s really exciting to hear that’s coming. And listeners, Livinia’s Instagram is so beautiful. She drops these really pivotal, would you call them, quotes, thoughts, but just little nuggets that you can really ponder and chew on for the day.
1:04:19 – (Wendy): So she’s a really fun person to follow on Instagram and will just really make you think and be motivated to step into the healing work that Lavinia does. Well, thank you, sweet mama, for being here. Thank you for everything. And, and listeners, make sure you go find all things Lavinia Brown.