Journey through Parenting:
How the Past Affects the Present
A class suitable for parents, teachers, and caregivers of young children
Join Emily McCrea, Conscious Parent Coach & Educator and Inner Child Journey Guide, and Christianna Deichmann, CranioSacral Therapist and Pre and Perinatal Psychology Educator, for an exploration into parenting with more emotional connection to yourself and children in your care.
The course is designed for participants to discover meaningful ways to cultivate presence with children and themselves by bringing awareness to how the body and subconscious mind function in response to a child’s behaviors (stress). The course models Robin Grille’s Inner Child process. Participants learn the developmental phases all children experience and how to map back to their own past experiences that are presenting challenges in the parent-child relationship in the present time. These developmental phases, or Rites of Passage, are linked to the onset of specific emotional needs that are sequential and hierarchical in the neurophysiological development of a child.
Humans are biologically wired to be connected to our caregivers and emotional needs. Maladaptive strategies develop when our needs are not met. In these moments, experiences become stored as implicit memories lurking under the surface waiting to be triggered, or rather, waiting to be healed later in life. By attuning to these implicit memories, parents and caretakers can build a more coherent narrative around how their own personal upbringing and earliest experiences in life are influencing their parenting styles in the present time. We can learn how to repair ruptures in relationships and how to nurture and care for internal wounds.
This course provides you with a map to understand how the past affects the present. If you can understand what’s happening in the background of your body, and your psyche, then you can start to meet unmet needs in yourself and your child right now! By meeting needs, you become more resilient in your being and have more agency over your behaviors, beliefs, and relationships. You can unlock the power to change and possess greater capacity for joy, pleasure, and love. In turn, you are equipped to be more emotionally connected with the children in your care.
Learning Objectives:
- Explore the principles of neuroscience, polyvagal theory, attachment, embodiment, and trauma-informed healing modalities.
- Equip participants with paradigm-shifting dialogue about Consciousness in the realm of parenting and teaching within the constructs of our schools and childcare systems.
- Learn techniques to cope with anxiety and stress in the home and school environments.
- Practice co-regulation skills and regulating “triggered” emotions.
- Identify common behavioral patterns in children and map these patterns to emotional needs and stages of development.
- Understand your own personal story and recognize areas in your life where your past is influencing maladaptive coping strategies in the present time.
The structure of class will include:
- Live Lectures, recorded for on-demand viewing
- Grounding practices and coping skills for managing stress
- Homework to vitalize the material between sessions
- Community to share your experience with others in the course
- Digital workbook to download as a resource and tool
Meet the Instructors!
Emily McCrea, Creator of Rebel Shift Childhood
www.rebelshiftchildhood.com
Emily is the creator of Rebel Shift Childhood LLC. founder of Downtown Community School Inc. Certified TEACH through Love conscious parent-educator, certified Inner Child Process practitioner, Resilient-Heart-Trauma-Sensitive practitioner, long-time progressive educator and consultant, content creator, trainer, international speaker, LGBTQ youth ally, play-maker, emotional interpreter, and fierce advocate of children’s rights. Emily is neurodiverse and the mother of 2 children, 13 & 19.
Hear from Emily:
“I provide transformative mini-workshops, courses and one-on-one coaching and consulting to individuals, families, educators, schools and organizations.
Rebel Shift Childhood LLC. is dedicated to providing cutting-edge psycho education, honoring self-expression, providing supportive and inclusive cutting-edge support, with a neurologically sound approach that creates emotional safety and healthy sustainable relationships. Emily’s work and purpose is to interpret children’s needs and empower them to find their individual voices and to express their unique gifts. I specialize in supporting sensitive kids and their families. This work includes normalizing stress and identifying the root causes of tricky and troubling behavior. I work in tandem with other therapists to provide families and children robust support and healing for the whole family. I work in collaboration with schools and organizations facilitating community training, workshops, professional development, restructuring, mentoring and emotional support.
As an advocate and family/school liaison/IEP support specialist for sensitive and gifted kids. I identify and advocate for children’s emotional needs and feelings and assist in helping educators decipher troubling and confusing behavior. I offer an alternative to talk therapy and provide crisis support to families. I will work in tandem with other practitioners and therapists to create a robust support plan.”
Christianna Deichmann, Owner of Balanced Bodies Wellness Clinic
www.balancedbodiescst.com
BCST® , Certified Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Educator
Hear from Christianna:
“My passion has always centered on how I can nurture whole brain functionality, and in turn be the master of my own destiny, invoke resilience and courage to evolve and step into a higher level of consciousness. Becoming a parent initiated my desire to help change the world.
I love uniting science and spiritual wisdom together to better understand the invisible dynamics of life, relationships, suffering, and health. My experiences draw from Eastern and Western medicine traditions, as well as esoteric teachings. Awareness is the first step to healing, and this book is one way I can participate in the revolutionary paradigm shift taking place in our world right now by helping parents discover how their past defines the present in their Family Field. I help parents explore how deeper self-understanding helps raise children who thrive.
As a psychosomatic therapist, I have particular interest in helping parents discover how their presence shapes who their kids become and how their brains get wired. I help empower parents to accelerate their progression, integrate trauma, and build coherency to create their ultimate life.”
Class 1: Moving Inward, An Introduction to the Inner Child Journey
Welcome to Journey through Parenting! Our course over the next 5 weeks will provide you with the latest research and therapeutic tools to provide systemic change within you and your family dynamics, or classroom. This class is experiential and meant to provide you with a path to deeper self-discovery and understanding of how you arrived with your parenting beliefs and why you behave the way you do in response to your children’s behaviors. Our world needs connected relationships more than ever. Healing is a journey not a destination, our work is ongoing, and with the right tools to navigate, we find it’s an incredible journey of self discovery. Together we can pave the way towards a new future.
We want this journey inward to help you navigate parenting stress with an informed lens. We have created a digital workbook to help you keep track of all the material we have created for you. The content is designed to be interactive and help guide you through experiential exercises. Each week you will receive a zoom link and reminder for our live call, then you will receive a recording following the module that you can listen to on a number of platforms: your phone, your iPad, laptop, you name it, you just need to click the link and you will be dialed in! Every week, we have homework for you to do. If you cannot make it live to the course, please email us anything that comes up for you, or any material you want us to discuss on the call. All of the homework feeds into topics being covered in the subsequent module.
What is the Inner Child Journey and who is Robin Grille?
The Inner Child Journey is A GUIDE FOR TRANSFORMING YOUR GREATEST CHALLENGES AS A PARENT OR A TEACHER INTO FRUITFUL OPPORTUNITIES
On page 6 of the digital workbook included in the course curriculum, we included a video from Robin Grille titled, “Parenting is Modeled to Us”, and how we were parented is stored in our bodies as implicit memory. We are not given a roadmap when we become parents, so it is necessary to tap into our internal wisdom that we have garnished through experience. Tapping into our wisdom takes coaching. Moving inward and tapping into our personal wisdom is a learned skill that we can teach to children, teachers, and parents. Imagine how different the world would be if we knew how exactly our bodies and our minds function?
The Journey itself comprises 5 steps that we have listed on page 26 of the digital workbook. This is where we have a video that demonstrates how to do an Inner Child Journey with a facilitator.
Class 2: Holding Stress
Stress is a normal part of life, yet many of us struggle to actually move through and work through negative stress in sustainable ways. Learning to navigate adversity and regulate stress in our bodies and minds is the most important skill we can learn, and it’s an ongoing process. This section of the course explains the states of the autonomic nervous system: social, sympathetic, and the parasympathetic, and how these states change constantly due to stimuli or stress. We define trauma and how it is an event that occurs in the nervous system. Unresolved trauma diminishes the functioning of the nervous system and is stored as implicit memory. We will discuss the impact of trauma, stress or overwhelm to the child’s nervous system and traditional parenting. The key to managing stress and preventing it from becoming traumatic is our nervous system’s capacity for resilience.
We have an overall lack of awareness around how co-regulation should be modeled to children. When co-regulation is not modeled the majority of the time, then maladaptive strategies occur.
- Self-regulation may be inadequate and unsuccessful
- Opportunities to build autonomic circuits of connection are interrupted
- Adaptive survival responses override social engagement
- Patterns of protection replace patterns of connection
During this class, we will consider how a “trigger” sets off a physiological event in the nervous system that is a learned pattern from unresolved trauma. This trigger is always tied to an emotional need. So we will begin to map our stories to unmet emotional needs during key developmental phases in our life. As we practice noticing and understanding our overreactions or under reactions, we become more attuned to the triggers that caused these reactions in us. And as we become more attuned, we can begin to work on becoming more aware as to why we reacted the way we do. How do you respond to stress most often? Write it down. Record it, start to reflect on what your triggers are, what’s going on in the space when you get triggered, and what are your responses in each particular space?
As we begin to explore neuroscience, we will consider resilience and the window of presence that exists for us. We will practice regulation skills for the nervous system and explore how certain behaviors are road signs for specific emotional needs.
Class 3: Stuck in the Past: Growing Our Inner Voices of Wisdom
Week 3 builds upon everything we have learned about the autonomic nervous system and how our emotional needs feed into the actual states our nervous system takes on to function, while taking into consideration our Inner Dialogue, otherwise known as our Ego. We look at how our ego may be disconnecting us from our child’s needs based on our own unmet needs.
We spend most of our lives talking to ourselves. Our egoic minds developed and grew in relationship with our early caregivers- and so often when we are triggered we are not able to discern what’s what or who’s who or how we got stuck in the muck. How we respond and support ourselves in challenging times is what matters most. Humans, young and old, learn from experience, and all that a person experiences is stored in the body and the mind like an emotional backpack. Since the brain is pattern seeking, our minds constantly assess each experience in our emotional backpack looking for evidence to confirm and provide meaning to our stories. Unprocessed or poorly processed experiences become negative stories lurking under the surface waiting to be triggered in the body’s attempt to heal. This is really a fascinating process; our nervous system and our cognitive minds work together to create stories. The process of identifying and naming our emotions while uncovering the stories we are unconsciously telling ourselves is a powerful process of tracking our nervous system. This mapping process allows our fight, flight or freeze responses space to regulate and mature. Once regulated, we can access the feeling of relief, peace, satisfaction, curiosity, joy, empowerment, love, compassion, and much more. This process is what morphs experience into wisdom.
This segment of our journey begins to explore felt sensations in the body that are linked to states in our nervous system. We will create different energetic feeling tones and practice exercises that can up-regulate or down-regulate our nervous system. We can consciously change our states of being through our higher cortical brain functioning. During this process, we will explore the Developmental Needs of all children, and how these needs relate to the basic principles of Polyvagal Theory written by Stephen Porges. We will demonstrate a full Inner Child Journey as defined by Robin Grille and discuss traditional parenting communication that is steeped in shame, manipulation, and gas-lighting versus the new paradigm of compassionate communication that fosters emotional connection.
Compassionate communication is a practiced skill. We will explore appropriate ways to connect with a child who is triggered, while simultaneously setting boundaries. The topic of Boundaries is an ongoing conversation and highly changeable as our boundaries adjust with every relationship. We can talk about and acknowledge our feelings without blaming others, and it is necessary for healthy relationships: “I feel sad, I feel frustrated” Then our job is to identify our needs and meet them ourselves: “I need some space right now, I need a break from talking about this” The error many of us make is that we attempt to control children by making our feelings their responsibility, telling ourselves that we must teach them how to be kind by shaming them: “you are making me mad, you hurt my feelings, if you cant listen then you don’t get to have dessert” etc.
We want to avoid making our triggers our children’s problem. That burden is too much for our children to carry and it is unhealthy, it creates codependency in our children. We must shift our perspective and look at our children as the catalyst to our old wounds. The last part of the lesson is practicing tools for connected communication with children in our care.
FAQ
How can I access this class?
This is an online workshop which requires access to Zoom in order to participate. Once you are registered, an email will be sent prior to each session with a Zoom link for access.
Will recordings be available after the live sessions?
Yes, recordings will be available to session registrants only within the course, for a limited time.
Class recordings are available on-demand, along with an enriching digital workbook housing informative videos, class content, and journaling prompts.
What time zone will the course be using?
Are refunds available?
APPPAH
63 Terracina Blvd, Redlands, CA, 92373
TEL: 720-490-5612
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