CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Parenting Without a Map: Raising Kids Without Role Models

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

I recorded this solo episode of @thecallinghomepodcast for anyone who is parenting without role models or someone who is fearful of having children because they don't have a roadmap from their own childhood. Join The Family Cyclebreakers Club: www.callinghome.co/join Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466. Follow Whitney on Instagram: www.instagram.com/sitwithwhit Subscribe to Whitney's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@whitneygoodmanlmft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca slash YMX. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Calling Home Podcast. I'm your host, Whitney Goodman.

I'm really excited to be here with you today. We're going to be talking about parenting without a role model, without a roadmap. This episode is great for anyone who feels like they do not have a role model for their parenting or who is considering having a child and is unsure because they're not sure who to look for, for advice or guidance or they feel like they're kind of lost at sea in this process because they don't have any parenting role models. And if you relate to this episode, you really should join the Family Cycle Breakers Club, our membership community at Calling Home this month. As you navigate the journey of parenthood, especially after experiencing childhood trauma, it's common to feel

uncertain and overwhelmed by decisions that shape the lives of your future children. But what if you could find the clarity, confidence, and community through this process. Our weekly content and support groups are designed specifically for adults like you, who are contemplating the significant next step of becoming parents or raising children after childhood trauma. Led by a licensed family therapist, we have three therapists now at Calling Home that run our groups. Our groups offer a safe space to explore your thoughts, emotions, and more importantly, your doubts.

about parenting. Act now because the four-week deep dive on this topic just started on April 7th, and our groups meet Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time, 9 a.m. Pacific time. And we've only had one group so far. So it's a perfect time for you to jump in. And I run those groups specifically. This exclusive content is available for our members as long as your membership remains active. So don't miss out on the chance to embark on your empowering journey toward confident parenting. You can visit callinghome.com and join at the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Today, let's build a foundation that not only supports you, but also nurtures the next

generation of your family. Now let's jump into the episode. Why is it so hard to parent without a map? I think a lot of people, and those people probably don't listen to this podcast, but the people who grew up with role models in their family with a lot of. of emotional maturity, language for repair, attunement between parent and child and between spouses, or a good amount of structure, but also freedom to explore. I think they take for granted how much wealth there really is to grow up in a family system like that. And as a therapist,

I know the types of challenges that people face when they do not have that map, because you are spending so much of your energy, trying to learn emotional regulation on your own, trying to emotionally regulate the adults in your family, trying to figure out what is wrong with you that for some reason the people in your family cannot apologize, take responsibility or repair, or you're trying to help the adults around you repair with one another and make their marriage stable, whatever it is, there's also a big lack of attunement. An attunement between adults and their and their children is very, very important. When a child feels seen and understood by their parent, they feel safe. And when a parent feels like I can, to some degree, anticipate

your needs, give you what you need to feel better, the bond grows between those two people. And you will feel this, you know, when you are a new parent with a little baby, right? Where you start to really understand like, oh, that's what that cry means or that's what they need when they're acting like that. Like you will know your unique child and even I remember having this feeling, you know, when other people would be holding my baby and they would be crying and the person is like trying to shush them or rock them a certain way and you're like, no, no, no, that means that they're hungry or they're uncomfortable or they're scared. They want to come back to me and you will feel this feeling inside of you like, oh my gosh, I need to meet the needs of my child. And those of you that do have children might remember feeling that. But there's also certainly things that can get in the way of attunement. And I have spoken about my own process of

dealing with postpartum depression with my first child. And that really got in the way of me feeling attuned with my child. I think if you experience that, you might even feel like other people could be a better parent to them. And it's hard for you to learn how to connect with your child. And so then you feel out of step with them and that can continue to pile up. And there's all these different junctures or moments throughout a child and a parent's life where they have to kind of readjust to achieve that attunement. But when you are an adult who grew up as a child, not feeling very integrated into your family, not feeling attuned to your parents, feeling like they didn't really know or care

what you needed, or they weren't really making an effort to figure it out, it's hard not to know what that feels like and to have that roadmap. And you might even have some of this anxiety about yourself, like, am I going to be able to do that with my child? Because I've seen in my family that certain things got in the way of that. And that can be a big fear for people. I think growing up also without the language of repair is very overwhelming. And I talk about this a lot that I really think based on the data that I have collected by working and surveying this population and watching videos online about this and really immersing myself in the community of adults who are estranged from their parents is that this lack of repair and the inability to

admit wrongdoing and apologize is at the core of a lot of the mistrust and misattunement of these estranged relationships. And a lot of these adults, you know, they repeat the same line to me over and over. It's not about what they did then. It's about what they're doing now. If they would just apologize and change their behavior, I could have a relationship with them. And I can't even tell you how many times I have heard those phrases from adults individually in so many different contexts. And so I think that's one thing that I hear being expressed from young parents or parents who are anxious about their parenting and how it's going to play out. And people who are deciding to become parents is like, am I going to be able to fix things and repair?

And when you don't have a model for that, sometimes you go a little bit too much to the other extreme where you're so afraid of messing up that you're just like saying sorry all the time and not able to stand firm in your boundaries and your identity as a parent as well. There can be a disorientation that a lot of new parents feel, but that childhood trauma survivors who become parents feel even more intensely. and that is this feeling of like, I'm just winging it. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I think I would say like 99% of parents feel that way at some point, at least at some juncture in the journey. And that is because you are doing something that you've never done before. Parenting is this really bizarre thing that we've kind of all been conditioned to believe should just be innate. And we should know how to do it the second that the baby comes out. of us. And I'm glad that there is this new sort of way of looking at this that is becoming

more popular. And I think that, you know, Dr. Becky Kennedy at Goodenside has really spearheaded and pushed this line of thinking that we should approach parenting in the same way that we do learning any other skill. And she talks a lot about how you would not, you know, look down on or shame a pilot for needing courses to fly a plane or a doctor who needed additional training or medical education, that we would actually applaud that and think it's great. But that for some reason with parenting, we have this mindset of like, if I can't figure it out right away, there must be something wrong with me. And I can tell you guys, that was like the worst belief that I held as a new parent, especially because I had children before a lot.

of my friends. And I had this constant feeling of like, I'm just bad at this. It's because I don't know what I'm doing. But I definitely grew up with a mentality that like especially motherhood is just part of your DNA and it's ingrained in you and you should just know how to be a mother the second that the baby comes into your life, whether that's through birth or adoption or whatever your journey is to parenting. But it should just be innate. And it isn't always that way. certain people are better at different parenting tasks. And so if you have this feeling of like, I'm just winging it, I don't know what I'm doing. I tend to overcorrect or I freeze in really tough moments or I'm always outsourcing my intuition to another person because I just feel

like I can never be good at this. I just want to normalize for you that that is a very common feeling among all parents, even people who grew up in safe, stable homes who love and respect their parents and look at them as their role models. The other thing that I think becomes very difficult and is very normal for parents who are survivors of childhood trauma is this overcorrection or freezing in very difficult moments. And that typically comes from a desire to really distance yourself from who your parent was and the impact that they had in your life if you experience trauma at the hands of your parent. And so some examples of that, which I talk about this more in the article that I wrote for

the Family Cycle Breakers Club this week. And that article is called Avoiding Extremes, Not Letting the Pendulum Swing Too Far. And members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. CO can read that article, and that would be a great compliment to this podcast episode. But often these adults who are so afraid of becoming their parent will swing the pendulum too far to the other side. So if they grew up with no structure, they will become like militant and extremely structured, even with a child who doesn't need that. If they grew up in a home where there was too much structure and the parent was overbearing and very, very, very,

militant, again, in how they ran the house, that child might then perceive that I need to be extremely lax and not get involved in my child's life at all. And there's no consideration of like what that child needs or what feels good to them as the parent or the context of the world that they're living in. But instead, it's just this like, I need to be opposite of my parent. And that is not always the best choice. Sometimes something that you, didn't like or that had a negative impact on your life may not have the same impact on your own child. There are of course practices in parenting that are abusive and harmful no matter what the context. And then there are some other ones that have a little bit of wiggle room on how we perceive

those and the impact that they have on the specific child being raised. Let's talk about some common triggers and patterns that tend to come up for childhood trauma survivors. So unhealed dynamics, dynamics that you haven't fully worked through on your own and discovered like the meaning behind and carry on a narrative for that in your own life can show up in your parenting in some pretty interesting ways. The first one I see a lot is perfectionism. So survivors of childhood trauma might feel like they cannot make any mistakes with their child because then they are going to, quote unquote, mess them up. And I think that's where the language of repair really comes in and becomes so important. You also might find parents who over function or under function in their

role as parents because of what they experienced in childhood. And so I explained this a little bit that, like, you can have a parent that puts so much pressure on themselves and they get way too involved in the child's life and really overcompensate and don't let their child learn or grow or someone who really backs off completely and does not take an active role in parenting maybe because they're so afraid that they will mess up or because they are trying to again kind of flip the script on what they experienced and they're not really taking into consideration what's important to them the world they live in and what their child is like. you can also, even with really good intentions, mimic patterns of emotional distance,

emotional immaturity, and emotional volatility. In that article for the Family Cycle Breakers Club that I was telling you about, I talk about a client composite and her name is Cassie. And I talk about how Cassie really wants to be patient with her child and parent in a different way, but she finds herself becoming very, very triggered when she has to set any type of boundary with her child. And so a lot of you can have really great intentions, but still find yourself screaming at your kid at 5 o'clock, you know, when you're really overwhelmed and overstimulated or, you know, saying like, that's it. I'm taking all your toys away and starting to like throw everything in a

trash bag because you're overwhelmed and you don't know what else to do. And so we all might find ourselves like at the end of our rope from time to time. But if you have not worked on some of these patterns and experiences from your own childhood, there's so much more likely to show up in your parenting despite you absolutely not wanting them to. And I think that's why some parents will say, I really tried my best. I tried to do things differently. I did want to be different or maybe I even was a little bit better than my parent. And that's what we can hope for, right? But that doesn't mean that there aren't still some of these things that we need to work on. And so we have to balance this idea that you cannot be perfect. You cannot break every single cycle in your family or become

this totally different person overnight. Your children are going to have things that you do that hurt them, bother them, cause chaos in their life, and the value of repair is so, so important. And I think that's what we always have to come back to is what were you hoping you got from your parent? Was it perfection or was it actually just recognition in moments where things went wrong? It's very important for survivors of childhood trauma who become parents to build their own parenting map and value system. And a lot of people who grow up in maybe healthier, less dysfunctional families, they can look around their family and say, I really like how these

five people parent. I can see role models all around me that I want to emulate and take things from. When you grow up in a highly dysfunctional family or you are a survivor of childhood trauma, that may not be accessible in your family. you may actually look around and say, wow, I do not want a parent like any of these people. My family is full of addiction and abuse and dysfunction and domestic violence. And I can't think of one person in my family that I want to emulate my life after or my parenting. And there are, of course, shades of gray in between where some of you might have one or two people and some of you have none. And that's why I think it's really important to not just look to one person and say, I'm going to do

everything like them because you're not them and you're not living their life, but to instead consult with a variety of sources. So this podcast is one. Going to therapy can be helpful in getting that feedback from your therapist, going to support groups like the groups that we have at Calling Home, especially our group this month, I think is really helpful that Wednesday group to help you learn from other parents and other people who are considering becoming a parent about what they're doing differently, how they're organizing their homes, and how they're they view their values as a parent. You also might want to look at friends, other mentors that you've had, even coworkers, people in TV shows, people on the internet. And you of course have to

be really careful with looking at anyone from friends to influencers to TV characters and knowing that you cannot look at them and say they are the perfect parent. I want to be just like them. The point is to understand that none of these people are perfect and none of them should probably be copied 100% because they're not you. Instead, how can you say, oh, I really like how this person handles boundary setting? And I love the way that this mom has so much fun with her kids. And I love how this person makes time for their career and their children. And reading books by people who have lives like yours is very important and kind of looking at what are pieces that I want to take to make into this unique parenting map for me. And so if you did not have any parenting

role models in your life, I want you to know that you may have not had it modeled in this easily accessible in your face way, in your home, but you can still learn it. And that is the beauty of life today is that there are so many resources to learn from. And I see parents out there that I look at them and I'm like, that's not for me. That is not the type of parenting journey that I want to have. And people could certainly look at me and say, I don't want Whitney's life. I don't like the way that she engages with motherhood. And that's not for me. And that's okay. The other thing that is so important, and I've talked about this so many times in this episode, so I hope that this is the one thing that you really remember is that we need to make rupture

and repair a normal part of parenting. Kids will be upset, they will be hurt, they will be harmed. It's just the reality of life. There are going to be things that my children come to me and say, I really didn't like that. And I am going to have to be accountable and understanding for those things. And those might not be things that I can fix or change, but I can still listen to them and try to make them feel understood. And so can you commit to saying, I cannot be a perfect parent, but I can listen, I can validate, I can repair, I can try to do better. And if I can't really fix it, I can at least make my child feel like I heard them and like their input matters to me, even if I don't do exactly what they want me to do. It's also very important that you develop

a good language of feelings, boundaries, and your own needs as a parent and your child's needs and your family's needs as a whole. And you can integrate this into that parenting map that you're developing and even look to some of those potential mentors for how do they handle things like this. How do they talk about feelings? How are they setting boundaries? And these are conversations that you can have among people that you love and trust in your community. And that's important and can give you feedback as well. As part of your own internal parenting map, I think it's great to ask yourself, what did I need at their age? And what does my unique child need at this age because sometimes we really project our own needs from that age

onto our child and they might need something completely different. And so this is a big goal and reminder for survivors of childhood trauma that the things that you wanted and needed as a child are not automatically the right things for your child. Of course, if you needed safety and consistency and love, those are the bare minimum. But sometimes we enter these situations where you did not get access to like anything as a child. You never had gifts or toys or the ability to get something that you loved. Your parents would spend money on alcohol and drugs and you went without and you remember feeling so ashamed at school and always like comparing yourself to other kids or getting bullied.

And I have seen people in that position say, well, I am just going to give my child everything. I never want to see them go without and they are really in this situation where they feel like they cannot set boundaries around consumption or gifts and they always have to meet the need of their child and that is not a good place to be in either. So thinking about what might I be trying to give my inner child through my child and is that always the right thing or do I need to work on that with myself. It's also important to note that you are just going to be a good enough parent, not a perfect parent, for your unique child. And again, that's where rupture and repair come in because good enough parents, they do make mistakes. All parents make mistakes.

Childhood trauma survivors often get very worked up about their legacy and what they're leaving behind because they feel such immense pressure to break all these cycles and do something differently. And I think especially with like therapy culture now and cycle breaking and wanting to not pass down generational trauma, that that can get very, very, very. heavy on the shoulders of someone who has already experienced so much adversity in their life. And so I want you to remember that your legacy as a cycle breaker is not just about doing everything perfectly. It's about being the person who starts to shift the family. It's about saying I am going to lift us up to here and I'm going to pass the baton on to the next person and that I know that I will not do everything perfectly, but I am going to try to not cause any more additional harm. And I'm going to, again, there's that word repair, do something when I have caused

harm or inflicted pain on someone. And I think the biggest thing here is that it's not about being a perfect parent. It's about being a reflective parent, a parent who's willing to say, I'm sorry, I'm learning. I'm going to try to do better. next time. Or, oh, I said I wasn't going to do that. And I just criticized you again, before I said hello, I'm going to step back and try that again, right? We also have to remember that it is a myth, that there is a fully healed person out there. And I, of course, believe that you should contend with a lot of this stuff before you have children and at least get a handle on it and an awareness and be able to manage your emotions before you start to put that on your child.

But there is not going to come a day where you say, I am fully healed and now I am ready to be a perfect parent. That is a myth. You may have not had a map for parenthood or a mentor in your parenting journey or maybe you're just thinking about having children and you're not sure who you want to emulate. But I want you to know that you are still forging a path forward. And every moment where you repair is a moment where you show that you are human and you are loving and that you care. If this episode resonated with you. I hope that you'll join us inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. You can gain insights on whether you truly want to have children and address the anxieties that may arise. Build self-esteem and stop the cycle of trauma that you

experienced in your own upbringing. Learn tools and strategies to create a loving, healthy environment for your family. I know we've made a huge impact in the short time that calling home has been around because one of our members told me recently that these groups have saved their life. Week by week, many have reported feeling understood and equipped with the necessary tools to achieve their parenting goals. Join the community that is changing thousands of lives every day at callinghome.com. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you on Thursday for another Q&A episode.

Bye. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service link in the show notes below.