EP 77 - How to parent powerfully when you're a sensitive mum with ‘sensitive’ or ‘challenging’ (or ‘neurodivergent’) children

With LIAN BROOK-TYLER

On the Secret Witch Show today our guest is Lian Brook-Tyler. Lian is one of my own long-standing, trusted guides - she’s a shamanic healer, teacher of wild magic, podcaster and co-founder of Waking The Wild. Her mythical journey truly began when she was ruptured open to Spirit with the sudden death of her father – which led to her mysteriously recovering from 15 years of chronic pain, panic attacks and anxiety. That inexplicable transformation inspired her to leave a leadership role in the corporate world to immerse herself in discovering what creates pain and struggle, and conversely, how to create a life overflowing with love, magic, beauty and truth.

In this episode we explore the crucial work of soul and sovereignty through the lens of ‘parenting.’ We dive into the common challenges that many women face around parenting children who can be often be experienced and labelled as ‘sensitive’, ‘different’ or ‘challenging’ in some way - perhaps also labelled as ‘neurodivergent - and how we can navigate this when we ourselves are sensitive (and possibly neurodivergent) ourselves. We explored how parents of the ‘sensitive young souls’ of the world often heartbreakingly feel like ‘bad mums’, and what we really mean by ‘sensitivity’, how it is actually a superpower rather than a disadvantage - and how we can begin to parent from our power, meeting everyone’s needs and modelling a new way of love and understanding.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

We can often judge ourselves as “bad mothers”, yet what this really means is we are feeling “my children are not behaving in a way that my family, culture or school deems is an okay way to behave” - we are actually making ourselves and our children wrong for something that is a neutral difference (or ‘divergence’) to the cultural norm
If we look at indigenous cultures, we can see we are all innately wired to be sensitive. Humans weren’t born for the modern world and its bright lights, smells, chemicals, electricity, devices - and so we learn to close down, to even just function
If we have been raised in a culture that has us try and fit nicely into a system where we follow the rules, we will value ‘fitting in,’ and it will require us to heal those wounds and free ourselves from the conditioning to welcome these sensitive aspects of ourselves and our children, and free ourselves from judgement
The things we think are our ‘problems’ are actually literal gifts. Those wounds and gifts will be different for everyone, depending on what our soul is here for, but, for example, Lian’s sensitivity to what’s going on and her heightened awareness to spirit, was a gift as she was here to be a shaman. Sensitivity is a gift if we are here to be healers
To parent powerfully, we need to know and honour our boundaries - without that we won’t be able to parent - at least not in a conducive and sustainable way. Yet, that’s been made culturally wrong, too. We’re told we should be “access all areas” to our children and not have time to ourselves - that we shouldn’t have needs - and it takes deep healing to recognise we need boundaries in place
Powerful parenting requires leadership - which needs us to look sovereignly at what’s right for us as parents, and what’s right for our children, and make powerful aligned choices.

Resources and things that we spoke about: