1. Your Story of Love



Every single one of us shares a need to be loved. We also share the way we learn about love, which is from our parents and caregivers. Our parents teach us, through their actions and words, whether or not we are worthy of love, and what it feels like to be in a love-based relationship. If you were lucky enough to experience unconditional love from your parents as a child, then it is probably easier for you to extend healthy love to your children (and receive it back from them). 

But the reality is that many of us experienced differing levels of unhealthy relationship patterns with our parents. Perhaps they were harsh, or uncommunicative. Maybe they gave us the silent treatment when we disappointed them, spoke to us with disdain or disgust, or even used corporal punishment. As children, we only know what we experience. So we accept, without question, that this is what love looks like. 

As adults, we can do the work of individuation by examining what love looked like to us when we were young. Where can we now make adjustments in the way we give and receive love? Are we generous with our love, or do we hold back as a protective mechanism? Do we have issues with co-dependency or control? 

Side-bar: Codependency is essentially needing another person to act a certain way, or to need us, for us to feel worthy of love. It is an epidemic in our culture. 

What’s your love story and how would you rewrite it? 

2. Your Story of Loss

Loss is an inevitable aspect of life. None of us are getting out of here alive. Nor are the people we love and cherish. We will lose jobs, marriages, or friendships. We will experience health crises. We will fail. 

Given that reality, learning to grieve fully and effectively is a really useful tool. When I was young, death and loss were not conversations for children. They were kept hushed in corners and hidden behind closed doors. 

Most of us are terrible at grieving what has been lost. We project blame or anger onto others. We numb our feelings with alcohol or do not allow ourselves to feel what needs to be felt. We isolate ourselves in our grief. 

Healthy grief and loss processing are incredible gifts to demonstrate to our children. Learning to cope with the pain of life increases our capacity to experience all of life. It expands our access to empathy and compassion. It allows us to be brave and courageous in the way we continue forward in our lives after loss. Healthy grieving is uncomfortable! But it is so valuable.

Giving ourselves permission to grieve, and allowing our children age-appropriate ways to witness our grief is the best way to show them the power of grieving. 

What’s your story of loss? Are there past losses that you need to grieve more fully?

3. Your Story of Achievement



We all know parents who live vicariously through their children. I have definitely fallen into this trap over the years. “I was raised to achieve, and so gosh-darn-it my kids are going to be achievers too!” 

When we lay our own academic, athletic, or relational disappointments on our children we rob them of their right to find their own passions, dreams, and goals. They’ll often rebel from the pressure, and we can create the unintended consequences of our children underperforming because they resent our demand that they follow a certain path of achievement. 

They start to create an internal story (perhaps one that we can relate to) that “I need to DO to be of value. I need to achieve to be loveable.” 

What’s your story of achievement? Have you pursued success in the name of validation or passion? What has been the impact of this on your life? 

4. Your Story of Abandonment

Hello, human being. You are not alone in having places inside of you where you feel profoundly alone. These are the remnants of all of the times you’ve been betrayed, abandoned, dismissed, or forgotten. They are treasure maps to your own healing. 

Most of us wait and wait for something or someone to come along to fill the void. And then we have children. We understandably cling to them to satisfy our longing, sometimes suffocatingly so. Hyperparenting is a trauma response. 

Parenting requires a connection. But done well, it means that we embrace relational risk. Meaning that we will love wholeheartedly and unconditionally, and be willing to… 

Let. Go. 

Oof. 

Our abandonment issues are not our children’s responsibility. We didn’t bring them into the world to satisfy our needs for relational safety. The responsibility to heal our abandonment wounds lies squarely in our own corner. If this was a serious issue for you as a child, the deal is these wounds are likely with you for life. You can become more adept at recognizing their insidious and harmful repercussions so that you don’t go down the hole of sabotaging relationships because of your fear of losing relationships.

But abandonment issues run deep and color our world. The opportunity is to learn to be the safe harbor for your child regardless of your past (the one they can return to time and time again as they explore their world). 

What is your abandonment story? How does your fear of abandonment impact your relationships? 

5. Your Story of Conflict

Our default setting for conflict most often is the conflict culture we experienced in the home we grew up in. Whether you avoid conflict at all costs or you’re always ready for a fight, you likely learned this from your early environment. If you grew up in a family of yellers, you yell. If you grew up in a family that simmered in silence, you simmer. Unhealthy conflict strategies create disconnection and resentment, and have an impact on our nervous system, keeping us in a constant state of fight or flight. 

Unchecked, we pass these unhealthy communication strategies down, generation after generation. 

Healthy conflict doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It must be intentionally cultivated. This takes learning new things and practicing. It also means taking responsibility for being the one who will do this work. We devote an entire chapter in our book, The Peaceful Parenting (R)evolution to what we call Constructive Conflict. That’s how important this is.

Healthy conflict enriches relationships. It creates buy-in and collaborative agreements. But it must be learned, demonstrated, and modeled. 

What’s your story of conflict? Are you quick to fight or conflict-avoidant? What has been the cost of your relationship to conflict? 

6. Your Story of Courage

Living a life without regret comes with a price tag: courage. We have to take great leaps of faith and resist the human urge to cling to the status quo. We regret the risks we didn’t take, the fights we backed away from, and the opportunities we squandered. 

Stepping into the great unknown takes incredible bravery and resolve, but it’s where every magical thing in life happens. Speaking from 50 years of life experience, the unknown has never let me down. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t scary. 

When we live a life of caution, we limit possibilities. Many of us were taught by our families of origin to avoid risk at all costs. Or we saw our parents take risks that created turmoil, and so we made a vow that we would live a “safe and secure” life. We were taught that other people’s expectations of us, and the obligations we have to others, supersede our own dreams, vision, and goals. 

Truth bomb: We are all equal parts courage and cowardice. But our approach to life shapes how we respond when our kids face life’s inevitable challenges. Do we guide them from fear or bravery?

What’s your story of courage? What are times in your life where you wish you were braver? When have you been more courageous than you thought you could be? 

7. Your Story of Shame

Our defensiveness protects our shame. I like to think of defensiveness as a prison guard, whose job is to protect my tender parts at all costs. Defensiveness serves its role but it also creates a wall between us and the other people in our lives. This limits intimacy and causes sabotage in our relationships. Shame underlies much of our personality and style of relating. 

It takes its hold through both what has been praised and condemned in you. From the moments you felt exposed…and therefore needed to create a protective mechanism. When we feel shame, we hide the aspect of ourselves in what Carl Jung calls our shadow. Our shadow is our “unloveable parts.”

Rather than hiding our shame, it's useful to examine it. We can bring it out of the shadows, with tenderness, empathy, and grace, and into the light. Rather than holding onto our vow to never feel that way again, we can bring mature wisdom to integrate these aspects into our wholeness. 

The thing about the aspects of ourselves that we keep in the shadows is that they tend to trigger us the most when our children exhibit them. So healing them allows us to be in a more authentic relationship with our kids. 

What’s your story of shame? Where are you defending yourself against feeling shame? 

8. Your Story of Safety

Fear is the adversary of good parenting. Here at the Jai Institute, based on our integration of the principles of Nonviolent Communication, created by one of our heroes, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, violence is anything that causes physical, emotional, or relational harm to another human being. 

In other words, we’ve all experienced varying degrees of violence. Which, understandably, creates fear in our worldview. Most of what we fear arises from moments in our lives where our sense of safety was violated. Even if it was minor. Our psyche doesn’t measure in degrees. It measures in emotions. 

Cultivating inner safety is an inside job. Meaning we get to do the work of creating safety for ourselves and accepting the difficult truth, which is that we will experience harm in our lives, in the physical, emotional, and relational realms.



So will our children. 

There is no amount of worry, preparation, or protection that will change this fact. Cultivating resilience and inner safety (I’m fundamentally ok no matter what happens to me) is the answer. 

What is your story of safety? Do you feel vulnerable even when you are safe? What environments and conditions give you the greatest feeling of safety?  

9. Your Story of Money

It’s critical that we help our children cultivate a healthy relationship with money. Which begs the question: “How do we do that if we don’t have a healthy relationship with money?” This isn’t just about financial literacy, and understanding how bank accounts, credit cards, and debt work. 

This is about our worldview:

• Is it grounded in scarcity or abundance? 
• Are we driven by materialism or committed to sacrifice? 
• Do we see the world through a lens of not-enoughness? 
• Is money a dirty word or something to be pursued at all costs (as taught to us by our family of origin)? 

Money is a complex topic that impacts so much of our lives. Bringing our children into money conversations early and often gives them a precious gift. They learn that it’s not necessary to weave shame into the equation.

What’s your story about money? What do you believe about it that may not be true? 

10. Your Story of Marriage and Relationships

Many of us didn’t grow up witnessing healthy relationships, or marriages that we would want to have. We more likely watched two people struggling to get their needs met, and using less-than-effective strategies to do so. 

Of course, we grow up determined to do things differently, but the relationship between our parents growing up (whether they were together or not) colors our perspective and what we communicate to our kids about relationships. 

So it bears examination, and a very brave willingness to look at the role we play in the ineffective relationship patterns that are playing out in our own lives. The challenging truth is that there is only one person’s behavior, communication, and reactivity we can change:

You look at that person in the mirror every day. 

Healthy relating is a lifelong journey. There’s no “done” there. We all have blind spots and growth opportunities. Modeling healthy, compassionate, empathetic, and kind relationships with boundaries to our kids takes intention and patience. 

What is your story of marriage/relationships? 

Healing these stories begins by becoming aware of our own stories. This article is intended as an entry point, not a destination. These stories unravel and reveal themselves over time. Be patient with yourself as you do the work of radical self-inquiry, and find support when you need it.

We are here cheering you on. Here’s to healing in the name of the people who will benefit from it the most: our children. 

Meet Your Author, Kiva Schuler
Jai Founder and CEO

Kiva’s passion for parenting stemmed from her own childhood experiences of neglect and trauma. Like many of her generation, she had a front row seat to witnessing what she did not want for her own children. And in many ways, Jai is the fulfillment of a promise that she made to herself when she was 16 years old… that when she had children of her own, she would learn to parent them with compassion, consistency and communication. 

Kiva is a serial entrepreneur, and has been the marketer behind many transformational brands. Passionate about bringing authenticity and integrity to marketing and sales, she’s a sought after mentor, speaker and coach.