S05|22 - How to be the Conscious Parent you Desire with Bryana Kappadakunnel

Bryana Kappadakunnel is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (90464), an Infant-Family Early Childhood Mental Health Specialist, a Perinatal Mental Health Specialist-Certified, and a Certified Conscious Parenting Coach via Dr. Shefali’s training program. She is the owner & voice behind Conscious Mommy where she teaches parents to become the conscious parent they never had. She is the mom of 2 young children, and lives with her spouse in Southern California.

What we talk about today:

• Bryana’s story of finding her wounding and coming to understand conscious parenting and its intersection with healing
• How perfection in conscious parenting is not the goal and why
• Why prescriptive advice in parenting isn’t the most supportive
• How to start the important process of your own inner healing one small step at a time

Connect with Bryana here:
Workshops & Classes: learning.consciousmommy.com
Insta: www.instagtam.com/consciousmommy
TT: www.tiktok.com/@consciousmommy
FB: www.facebook.com/consciousmommyco
YT: www.youtube.com/@consciousmommy

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Coaching has changed my own life, and the lives of my clients. More connection, more healing, more harmony, and peace in our most important relationships. It increases confidence in any parenting challenges and helps you be the guide to teach your children the family values that are important to you- in clear ways. If you feel called to integrate this work in a deeper way and become a parenting expert, that’s what I’m here for.

Email me at [email protected]
My coaching program: click here
Find me on the ‘gram: @the.parenting.coach
Work with me 1:1: click here
Website: click here

 

 

Episode Transcript

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Hi, I'm Crystal The Parenting Coach. Parenting is the thing that some of us just expected to know how to do. It's not like other areas of your life where you go to school to be taught, get on the job training, or have mentors to help you learn. Now, you can get that help here.

I believe that your relationship with your children is one of the most important aspects of your life, and the best way that you can make a positive impact on the world and on the future. I've made parental relationships my life study, and use life coaching tools with connection-based parenting to build amazing relationships between parents and their children.

If you want an even better relationship with your child, this podcast will help you. Take my Parenting Quiz, the link is in the show notes. Once we know what your parenting style is, I'll give you some tips tailored to you and a roadmap to help you get the most out of my podcast. I invite you to help me spread the word by sharing your favorite episode on social media or with a friend. 

Welcome to today's podcast, How to be the Conscious Parent you Desire with Bryana Kappadakunnel. 

Bryana is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, an Infant-Family Early Childhood Mental Health Specialist, a Perinatal Mental Health Specialist-Certified, and a Certified Conscious Parenting Coach via Dr. Shefali’s training program. She is the owner & voice behind Conscious Mommy where she teaches parents to become the conscious parent they never had. She is the mom of 2 young children, and lives with her spouse in Southern California.

 

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I have a special guest today. I am super excited to introduce her, and I'm going to let her introduce herself also. Her name is Bryana Kappadakunnel, and she is on Instagram as the Conscious Mommy. Is that right? It's, Conscious Mommy?

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yes. Conscious Mommy. That's right.

 

Bryana’s story of finding her wounding and coming to understand Conscious Parenting and its intersection with healing

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Okay. So, tell us a little bit more about you and what you do right now, but also just your background story. How did you get doing this?

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Sure. Well, I'm am a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist; and I specialize in working with new moms and families with very young children, as well as Conscious Parenting.

And so, my main mission is to help parents become the conscious parent they never had. And there's a story, you know, that I'm not going to take all the time to explain to you – but there is a reason why I came into this, this work. 

I had a very complicated and difficult relationship with my own mother that left me constantly questioning who I was – feeling just a deep sense of loss and chronic rejection and wounding, I would say. 

And I never understood why I felt that way, especially because my mother was so beloved. She was beloved by my family. She was beloved by my community, and I just had this wildly different experience with her. 

And when I found my way into the Master's program that I took in Clinical Psychology and I had, we have to do what's called a Practicum. It's basically like a year-long unpaid internship before you can even get your registration to start practicing under someone else's license for many more years. 

I was offered the opportunity to work in a therapeutic preschool, and to help these children that had experienced serious trauma, deep trauma – you know; foster care, a physical abuse, neglect, drug and uterine exposure, all kinds of different things. 

And I found myself relating to these kids in such deep ways. And as I watched them and I supported them and I learned through them, I started to realize how the issue is in the relationship that they do not have with a reliable, predictable, dependable adult who sees them for who they are – who loves and honors them and desires to protect them. 

What is going on with these parents? And that really shined a light on me, 'Oh, okay, this is what I've been dealing with…it isn't that my mom was intentionally trying to cause harm, it was that she had her own baggage that I didn't really know much about – but she was projecting it onto me.' 

And our relationship was so complicated as a result of my mom really having a hard time, kind of, owning herself. 

And so, it was through this beautiful process of being a therapist and hearing other people's stories and hearing other people's vulnerabilities that really made me do my own self-reflection work – and realize, "This is what I am meant to do…I am meant to help children and parents find a deep sense of safety, connection, and trust." 

And the way that I see that happen most effectively is when a parent can become more aware of themselves and understand the hurts that they went through, understand their past experiences and how it influences the way they see this child…and then actively choose to play out something different, particularly when it is an issue of woundedness. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: So, that's me; and that's how I came into this work, and how I feel. Yeah, I feel very convicted in it. And, I see-- I mean, I've been doing this for 11 years. I see-- 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Were you a parent-- When you went through that experience, and you were doing that practicum and you were kind of realizing these things about your childhood and your ways of being coming from that childhood, did you have your own family at the time?

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Nope. This was-- This was 11 years ago. I didn't have my own kids then. I started the whole reparenting process before I knew about it on Instagram. I never-- I was never on Instagram until I got on Instagram. 

But I was doing the reparenting process as, you know, an 18, 19, 20-year-old girl; and then into my graduate experiences, which is more like my mid to late 20s – and even still now, I'm still reparenting now.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Always.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: We're in constant evolution.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: We're always. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah. It never stops. Yeah.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Okay. That is so beautiful because I think a lot of us find that we have kids, like my experience, and then think I'm going to be a certain kind of parent and then feeling so triggered by my own kids respond in the same way that I found my parents responding to me without even really knowing that that's how it was going to be – or not even really knowing what to do at that point. 

And so, I think it's so beautiful that you found it so early, way before it was even kind of – I don't want to say "fad" because I don't think it's a fad, but like this new wave of like being in this new kind of, at least what I see in social media and the world of a lot of people who are like, 'Okay, we want to do things differently than the patterns that have been passed down to us.' 

And I feel like it's burgeoning this new community, and people are starting to learn and understand and do the work – but it's amazing that you were able to find it so well before all of that.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: I feel like I was so desperate. I've always been a relationship person; and I've always loved to be around people and will be anything that anybody needed me to be if it meant that they would be around me. 

That's how desperate I was for connection, that was how lonely I felt; that was how disconnected I felt that I was so willing to be anything anybody needed me to be. I was an actress, in fact. I was in-- I was in the theater. 

It was like the best thing ever because I was like, 'Well, at least I can go and pretend to be something else and get praised and get accolades for it.' You know what I mean? 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: But I really-- I really since kind of hung up that coat and realized that the performance, performing and being something else for other people, it was actually so draining for me – and it did not fill my cup. It did not give me a sense of inner peace. It made me feel like, 'Well, I have to keep the show up.' 

 

Why prescriptive advice in parenting isn’t the most supportive

Bryana Kappadakunnel: And I relate this back to parenting in so many ways because I think a lot of, especially with modern day parenting and all this stuff on Instagram, it does make us feel like there's a bit of a performance piece that's expected of us as parents. 

We're expected to fake it until we make it or whatever else we feel like when we scroll the feed and we get advice or suggestions. 

And I really want to call us all into letting go of this feeling of performance, and really allowing us to go inward and embrace that…I am not an actor in a play, I am a parent in a relationship. 

I do not need you to tell me what words to say to my kid because it's not about the words. It is about me slowing down the busyness, the chaos that surrounds us deeply connecting to whatever is happening in the moment between me and my child. 

If I've acted out or behaved in a way that I regret, taking accountability – trying to do that with compassion and with grace, and really resist the urge to be so self-loathing and self-rejecting and really just, "Wow, I was not trying to hurt you, but I see that I did…gosh, that stings, sorry I did that – I love you honey, and I'm here for you and I'm going to keep working on it."

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I love that. I tell people often that the biggest part of this kind of work, this kind of parenting is allowing ourselves to be human – allowing ourselves to have, like, we're going to make mistakes. 

Like you said, the reparenting process. We're continuously doing that even if we've been doing it for years. I think even if, once we've been doing it for decades, it'll feel that way also. 

And so, I think what's so beautiful about it is that what we often weren't given when we were kids, was that piece of it. There was a lot of mistakes, for sure – but there wasn't a lot of like, "Also that was actually on me…that had nothing to do with you, my child." 

Like, "That was-- that was me, and that that was something I was going through." 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Right.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: And apologizing and reconnecting. And that wasn't something we were often modeled, but I think it's such a beautiful thing we can give to our kids.

 

How our kids motivate us to be better parents and individuals

Bryana Kappadakunnel: I mean, I did not have parents who knew how to take accountability for their behavior. And if my mom were alive, I am not convinced that she would, that she would take accountability. 

She didn't when I had high hopes and high expectations that she would. And so, part of my learning journey was to recognize that we're all able to do it. 

The question is; will we allow our ego to get out of the way and humble ourselves and know that we can still like deeply love our children and still behave in ways that we deeply regret? 

I have a very, like, simple example of even yesterday. I was annoyed about something-- I don't even know what I was annoyed with. Oh, I was just like busy. I was-- I had a lot of things going on, so I was doing a lot of things and my son came over and he asked me a question, and it's like--  

It was a very annoying question that I did not want to have to stop and attend to. So, I was like, "I don't know." And I kind of snapped, "I don’t know, stop asking me that." 

And my little four-and-a-half-year-old picks up a piece of paper, and he covers his face with it. And I knew immediately, he was reaching out for connection; he was feeling my rush and my busyness, and that's very anxiety-provoking for him. He's a very sensitive child and he, you know, wants to know like…are we still good? Are we still safe? Like, you're so busy and acting super weird, are we still good?

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Is everything good? Yeah.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Is everything good?

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: -our energy.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: So, I had to stop, I had to look at his cue. I mean, his cue was glaringly obvious. He held up a piece of paper like this and stared at me; and I said, "Mm, that wasn't okay, huh? I snapped at you, and I think you were really just wanting to connect with me and maybe I made you feel bad inside because I snapped."

And he goes, "Yeah, mom, I just wanted to play with you."

And I said, "Gosh, honey, so sorry, I'm feeling a little frustrated and a little worked up, but I want you to know it doesn't have anything to do with you…I love you, and you know what? I think you do have a very good idea. Maybe I do need to stop, take a moment and pause. Let's play a game. Let's play a game and go fish." 

And so, we did. I made some, made a little lunch for us and I took a little pause – but it was my child, it was my child who had to be the one to remind me of my wound-- This is part of my wounding – part of my wounding is stay busy, be productive, achieve, achieve, achieve…that way people will like you, you will be safe and, you know, you'll have to have--

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: You'll be of worth, right? You'll have worth to productivity. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Totally. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Like all the things we get done, then I can feel good about myself.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Correct. And then people will love you too. So, not even just me feeling good about myself, like this is how I learned-- this is how I got love. 

And so, here I am acting out my wounds completely unconsciously. And like all of us, my little child comes in, flashes the mirror and says, "Girl, you need to take one out of your own playbook…you telling people all the time to slow down and be still – now look at you, you're snapping and behaving completely inappropriately toward a child who just wants to play because you're not looking at what's really driving this behavior." 

And what was driving this behavior was pure ego, for me; it was pure ego. Thank God, we have little kids that hold up the mirror and show us. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I was just going to say, I think children are our best teachers.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: They are.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Right? If you haven't done your own work, if you haven't done your own inner work and healing and you have kids…it will just, you'll just be continuously triggered by things and you're like, 'Wait a second, what's happening here? What's behind this?'

And so, when we talk about wounding, it's the ways of being that are more subconscious that have come from how we were responded to – not only by our own parents, but by media and culture and, you know, all of the things around us that now we notice are triggering us. 

And then we choose to look inwards at us instead of blaming it and like, 'Our kids are the problem, and our kids this and that.' 

It's like, what's going on inside of me? Like, what's happening? What's coming up for me, and why? And what's there? 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: And then doing that work. I'm curious, now that you're an adult and you've been doing this for a while, how old are your kids?

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Four-and a half. And then my littlest one will be two in a couple weeks.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, cute. How has your relationship with your mother changed throughout the years since doing like your own kind of inner work?

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah. Well, you know, unfortunately, my mother passed before I became a mom. My mom died of colorectal cancer seven years ago. She was 53. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, I'm sorry. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: And, you know, we don't-- We don't stop mothering postmortem, everybody. You will-- Your impact as a mother will continue to be present even after your body has passed on. 

And I would say that my relationship with my mom has become filled with a lot more compassion for both of us. I think it was very, very hard for me to feel compassion for her when she was alive. And I mean this like before she was sick, before she was sick. 

Of course, when my mother was dying, I was nothing but pure compassion for where she was at with the passing. But in terms of like my expectations for her, that she would like hear me and she would take accountability and she would get it and she would understand that she hurt me, it was totally intolerable for her. 

She was not able to go there, and I resented her for it. And I was angry with her for it. And I punished her for it. I behaved in punishing ways toward her. It was very dysfunctional. It was not healthy. 

I would say that since she's passed and I continue to heal that relationship, one of the things that I continue to do for both of us is…it wasn't okay that I was hurt and she was hurting – and repeating that and having that be part of the story, that it wasn't okay what I experienced and she wasn't actively trying to harm me.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: She was acting from her own wounding herself.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Correct. She was acting from her own wounding. And it's not okay to take out your wounding on other people, but it does happen and we do have to find a way to forgive.

And you know, a lot of the conversation around forgiveness is so surface, right? This idea of like forgiving the other person. 

Yeah. I guess, I could forgive her, but that's not actually the work. It's more like a Band-Aid on a broken leg. The work is really finding deep compassion for myself, for her, and grace. Right? Really appreciating that part of the human condition is; we are going to make mistakes – we are going to suffer and cause suffering. 

Like that's going to happen; and really coming into that and appreciating that is like the full breadth of this experience of being a human being allows me to see her and everybody who I encounter with truly a deep sense of reverence and truly a deep sense of love.

And at the end of the day, all everybody wants – every single person I've ever met wants – is to feel connected. That's it. We just want to feel like we matter, like somebody loves us. Like we can love other people. Like we are important; like our lives are meaningful, that's all we want. 

And I feel like as parents, we have the opportunity to instill that sense in the child, especially when the children are very young. And it's a shame when we don't, when we interfere on the process…sad, when we do. And that does happen. 

And a lot of people I know like myself, that's what happened; our sense of love, of worthiness, of love and enoughness was infringed upon and we're not broken. Healing is not impossible. It's messy, but we will do it; and we will be better people in the end.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. I love that. I feel like when I came to my own-- My own story was a little bit different in that my mom was still parenting when I started to parent – and still parenting like younger children at home.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Ooh.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I come from a big family with a widespread, and so there's eight of us. And by number seven, a number eight, she was like, 'Okay, this is not-- this whole parenting thing is not working great, we need to do it a different way.' 

And so, she actually gifted me this book, Hold On to Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, which is amazing. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Wow.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: And she was like, "This is the way." And I read it and I was like, in my heart of hearts, just like, "Oh my goodness, this is the way, like this is the way."

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: What a joy?

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: It was really cool because she actually later became a therapist; we do work together and stuff. 

And it was so cool to see their transition and the way that they changed their parenting, and how that panned out. And then, for me, also-- And again, it's like, it's a years' long process. It's not just like something overnight. 

But doing that healing has really changed so much in my relationship with my own kids and my relationship with my parents. And now looking back on it, I think like they didn't have the tools; they didn't have the skills. Right? 

They were raised in a generation that was even more harsh than how we were raised. And I don't know if you've ever flipped through like parenting books from the 80s and 90s, but like, they're terrifying. They're like--

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah, yeah.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. They're very much like, "This is how you should do it". And anyways, they're very more disciplinarian and, I guess, authoritarian than how we do it. 

And so, I feel like there wasn't-- there wasn't the research there, there wasn't the help there, there wasn't support, there wasn't the healing. 

I almost think of it as like an evolution of like, it's kind of come to this point where now we can finally be in this space. We have the knowledge to be able to move forward and give our children something different. 

And I think both of us are saying like, "You don't have to do all of the work right now and you're one generation, it's turning in inwards and starting to do that work." And anything you do that you can give them is going to just set them up for so much more success.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Wow. That was so powerful to listen to. And I just want to speak to that feeling that like, we have to be fully healed so that we don't damage our kids. 

"Have I done the damage," parents say to me? "Is my kid ever going to recover from this?" 

It's like, "Yeah, of course, of course your kid will recover from this…you're not that powerful. I know you think you are, but you're not that powerful. We're not that powerful as parents." 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: We will-- We will evolve and we will grow because that is part of the human – the soul, really, that's part of what the soul is desiring to do anyway; it's to really expand itself and to grow.

 

How perfection in Conscious Parenting is not the goal and why

Bryana Kappadakunnel: So, this idea that like we have to be so healed and "perfect" ourselves in order to facilitate that for the child, is reflective of a culture and a society that continues to want to remind everybody that we're not enough as we are. 

You know, the truth is, is that you will never be-- Like you will always be reparenting, always, you will always be-- Even when you have adult children, your adult children will be teaching you things about yourself that they may not be privy to. 

They may not even be realizing that they're teaching you these things about yourself, but your adult children – if you're open to it – are going to be teaching you in the same way that your young children will always be showing you, 'Here are more things for you to work on'. 

That doesn't mean that you need to be taking, you know, every single opportunity to work; that might be exhausting. And I don't know if that's possible, but if in the moment-- Like that situation with my son, if in the moment it feels relevant and you're open to kind of being humbled a bit, you can grow immensely from it. 

And, that's where-- That's what I want folks to really remember, is that this is not an experience of perfection. We're not trying to perfect how you parent; there's no such thing. 

My goal is to teach parents how to reflect not perfect, how can I reflect more? How can I understand myself more? How can I understand my child a little bit better? What do I think they're actually trying to tell me? What is this moment actually saying about me right now? What's my automatic belief – is it one that is self-rejecting, that is self-loathing…or is it one that's filled with compassion and grace? 

And the more we can meet ourselves as parents with that deep sense of compassion and grace – 'This is hard, it's okay that you messed up, it's okay that you were snippy, it was okay that you yelled.' 

Like, it's okay, these things are going to happen and let's move forward. Let's find a new way to interact, a new way to engage with this child. Let's find a new way to establish safety, a new way to establish trust; and then we commit to that. 

And I think that's how we make, and that's how we allow these conversations of parenting to feel accessible. I get it all the time. I don't know if you get it on your post, but people are like, 'Oh, look, just another thing to make me feel bad about how I'm parenting or to make me feel guilty.' Right? 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yes, all the time. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: I get those messages all the time; and I sit with them and I think, "Gosh, what about this message brought that up for somebody?" Because again, like that wasn't my intention, but I can recognize the impact. But what is it about? 

And I think-- I really think it's because when we receive it, it feels disconnected in a way. It feels like this is what, this is the only way to being a good parent as opposed to here's a tool to help you be more effective. 

I take this information and I think, this is the only way to be a good parent. So, I hear about reparenting, and I'm like, 'Holy crap. So, now I'm not just raising this child in front of me, but now I have to raise myself…this is exhausting, I don't have the time and this space for it, so I'm not going to do it.'

Or, you know, 'I don't have the resources to do it, and so I'm not going to do it.' And then I'm going to perpetuate the patterns and probably feel even more worse about myself down the line. 

And so, I'm making these conversations accessible in honoring the fact that like, we are human. Like, you're going to-- Most of the human experience with the depths of joy and excitement and peace and passion and pleasure and compassion and all the things that we experience, also comes with pain and hurt and suffering and loss and confusion. It has to be both. 

And really, to truly appreciate like the highs, those virtues, we have to know how to be with the things that cause us pain. And that's such an important conversation for parents, especially parents with young children, what a season of life that is hard, it's hard to have young kids. It's a lot of work.

 

How to start the important process of your own inner healing one small step at a time

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. It's so physically draining. And we, again, going back to the self-worth and productivity thing – and the people-pleasing and the perfectionism – adding all of that in where we feel like we fit into this culture where we always have to be perfect all the time…and that we always have to give, give, give to our kids all the time. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Right. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: It's just not sustainable. That's just not-- It drains us; that's what's so exhausting, right? 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Is that drain of how we feel like we should be performing. So, I love this idea of like meeting ourselves where we're at as a human race. Like that we are all wounded, we all have our own inner woundings. 

We all come to the table with all of this baggage that we brought with us; and that we really, truly are doing our best with what we have, with our experiences, with what's going on with us right now. And the more that we can really feel into that and believe that, the better able we'll be able to find that same compassion and grace for our own kids.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Absolutely. And thinking about coming to the table with baggage – you know, you got one suitcase, you got two suitcases, you got several carry-ons – whatever you got, that's okay. 

We're not going to open up everything and then sit in the whole big pile of all the stuff that's in, we're going to open up one at a time. We're going to figure out where each little piece goes, and we're going to compartmentalize it; we're going to put it in its place. 

And pretty soon, that five pieces of luggage gets down to four; and then down to three, and then down to two. And the stuff is still there. That's so important because so many people believe that if they do the work, then the stuff will never be there. No, it's there.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah, that it'll just go away. You won't be human anymore.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Right. No. It'll still be there. And sometimes, the house rattles. Sometimes you get-- You know, I'm in California; sometimes you have a little earthquake, when things come out of their place. 

That's the kids pressing the buttons, giving you a little earthquake; taking some of that stuff that you thought you had neatly packed. 

'Ooh, it's coming out again.' 

'Okay, let me see what is this.' 

'Okay, it needs to be kind of reorganized, then I can put it back.' 

That's the process. That is the process. It's not about clearing it all away. You won't, you're not a robot; we're humans. We're not going to clear it all away. We'll figure out where it goes. We will make space, and we will allow ourselves to thrive because of this process. That's how it goes. 

At least in my professional experience, that's what I have found the work to look like for my clients and the families.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Totally. I think that is-- I think that is always how it goes; we're always going to have something-- Just like you said, we're always reparenting – and yeah, over the years, you're going to have a lot less luggage. You're probably going to have a lot less triggering, right? 

You're going to be triggered less by things or, at least, know how to move through them more when you do. And so, it's not like it's all doom and gloom; it does get better, for sure. But just allowing yourself the space and the time and the grace to go through that process. 

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Yeah. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: So, thank you. Thank you for coming here and just sharing your experience with us, and your insights with us. I think it has been so helpful because I also find the same thing in my work that people come to the table already feeling bad about themselves. 

And my intention is never to make them feel worse about themselves; it's to help them heal. It's like the opposite. But it can be sometimes overwhelming to feel like, 'I have this and this and this and this to do, and I also have this…how do I do this?' 

And, I think just starting just one little bit at a time, one little healing step, one little moment, whatever you have the space to do is enough for now. And then, just allowing it just to be little bits and little bits over time.

Take that, take whatever you can from this episode and start your own healing journey as you listen in here. 

 

How to connect with Bryana Kappadakunnel

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I would love for you to just share how people can meet or connect with you on Instagram or work with you or whatever.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Absolutely. Yes. Well, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok @ConsciousMommy. Probably the best way to connect with me though is via Instagram; that's where I spent most of my time. 

And I have tons of workshops and classes, as well as my like foundational eight-week class that I teach twice a year; all of that can be found at learning.consciousmommy.com. And if anybody is looking for individual support, you can always reach out at consciousmommy.com and you'll see my availability, and can go from there.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Sounds fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. And for everybody who's listening, we're going to be running a workshop; and I would love to get some feedback around what you would want to hear from a workshop, so send me an email or an Instagram message.

I've had a lot of people asking about chores. I've had a lot of people asking about highly sensitive kids. So, if any of those topics interest you, reach out via email or Instagram and let us know so that we know what to do for the next workshop. 

Thank you so much for being here today, and we appreciate it. We appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us.

 

Bryana Kappadakunnel: Thank you so much, Crystal.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Thanks for listening. If you'd like to help spread this work to the world, share this episode on social media and tag me – send it to a friend, or leave a quick rating and review below so more people can find me. If you'd like more guidance on your own parenting journey, reach out.