Breaking the Cycle with Compassion
I’ve made it to my fifth country, Taiwan, and a very obvious theme has emerged that I wasn’t expecting. Parenting has come up in conversation again and again.
In my women’s group, we were working through the PQ parenting module, and it took about five minutes for most of us to slide into the same place: the Judge, the shame, the fear that we’re messing our kids up. We had to keep coming back to a simple truth.
Compassion Instead of Perfection
The goal isn’t perfect parenting. It’s better for our kids to see us normalize being human.
Our kids aren’t learning from our lectures. They’re learning from what we model, the tone we bring, what happens when we’re hijacked, and what we do next.
They’re watching whether we can recover and treat ourselves with compassion.
The Pain We Carry Across Generations
I had a conversation with someone last week who realized he’s still carrying anger toward his dad, and his shift was in experimenting with empathy, seeing his dad as an imperfect human. I also met a father who’s been living abroad for years and is struggling with his teen daughter because there’s a language and culture gap that makes it hard to express himself deeply. You could feel how much he cared and how powerless that felt.
Three different countries, people from three different backgrounds, and the same universal struggles underneath: beating ourselves up about our own parenting and carrying pain from how we were parented.
What I keep coming back to is the eloquent ending of the parenting module:
"Bring to consciousness your own relationship with your parents - how can you forgive them for being the imperfect parents that they were? If you can do it for your parents, you can probably do it for yourself."
💛
Reflection Question: Where are you blaming yourself as a parent (or your own parents), and what would change if you practiced compassion instead of perfection?
✨ If this spoke to you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my blog or connect with me on LinkedIn. And if parenting guilt or old family patterns are weighing on you, coaching can help you build the kind of mental fitness that replaces shame with self-compassion.
You can always start with a free Saboteur Discovery Session.
I’ve encountered so much beauty, serenity, and dedication.
And then, because life likes balance, there was also a giant banana train.
