December 16, 2024 • 43 mins
2024 is not a year any of us will forget anytime soon. The positives and negatives that defined this year have everyone reflecting and predicting what is waiting for us in 2025. Shaping Freedom is taking the time to look back on some of our best conversations this year with the amazing people trying to push us forward in our relationships, communities, and lives.
But before all of that, it has to be said that parents today have never had it as hard as it is. 24-hour news cycles, social media, societal instability, and a very uncertain future have left parents feeling adrift within themselves and how they raise their children. This is why we pulled our best conversations from the year and cut them together, to act as a guide moving forward. We’re going to hear from Brock Johnson on how growing up in a household with entrepreneurial parents contributed to his journey of becoming a social media expert and building a family-run business. We’re going to hear from Abby Kamen on what it means to be an authentic parent versus an authoritative one, and we’re going to hear from Monica Wisdom about how to navigate life without parents being present and so many more incredible voices that offer up their stories, their experiences, and their wisdom.
Parenting isn’t the only thing we must reflect on this year. In this episode, we pulled some of our best conversations yet with people like Aaron Robinson, former NFL player Chukky Okobi, and painter and artist Joseph Awuah-Darko to cover topics such as loss, generational trauma, what it is like to be from an immigrant family in the United States, and most importantly how we grow and strengthen our family bonds.
This is Shaping Freedom and we all wish every person, parent, and family the absolute best moving into the new year.
But before all of that, it has to be said that parents today have never had it as hard as it is. 24-hour news cycles, social media, societal instability, and a very uncertain future have left parents feeling adrift within themselves and how they raise their children. This is why we pulled our best conversations from the year and cut them together, to act as a guide moving forward. We’re going to hear from Brock Johnson on how growing up in a household with entrepreneurial parents contributed to his journey of becoming a social media expert and building a family-run business. We’re going to hear from Abby Kamen on what it means to be an authentic parent versus an authoritative one, and we’re going to hear from Monica Wisdom about how to navigate life without parents being present and so many more incredible voices that offer up their stories, their experiences, and their wisdom.
Parenting isn’t the only thing we must reflect on this year. In this episode, we pulled some of our best conversations yet with people like Aaron Robinson, former NFL player Chukky Okobi, and painter and artist Joseph Awuah-Darko to cover topics such as loss, generational trauma, what it is like to be from an immigrant family in the United States, and most importantly how we grow and strengthen our family bonds.
This is Shaping Freedom and we all wish every person, parent, and family the absolute best moving into the new year.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Shaping Freedom with Lsan Bosquia, the podcast where
we help you unlock your potential and redefine what it
means to be free. I'm your host, Luisan Boskia. I'm
a former corporate executive, a life strategist, and the founder
of Shaping Freedom. With a background spanning corporate, artistic and
(00:26):
personal development. I bring a unique perspective to empowering others.
Listen in to discover inspiring stories and practical insights that
will help you reclaim your life and rewrite your narrative.
My intention is for you to gain the tools and
motivation to be free in your relationships, your communities, and
(00:48):
within yourself. This, my friends, is Shaping Freedom. My guests
and I spoke a lot about parenting this year. The
reason being that the topic of par parenting is absolutely critical.
It is the foundation of emotional, mental, and behavioral development
for our children. That's no easy feat. It's important. Parenting
(01:13):
shapes our society and it informs our culture, and so
I think that there need to be more conversations around parenting.
There needs to be more support for parents. Parents need
safe spaces where they can come and vent about, talk
about and share how they're affected by the parenting that
(01:38):
perhaps they received or what's been programmed, and also what
they're going to do and how they're navigating their role
as parents. So if you see a parent, please support them.
What I got out of the conversation with Rock Johnson
was the importance of understanding that we are models for
our children. They see what we do, observe, and choose
(02:03):
to either adopt or reject based upon how resonant we
are with the things that we're telling them to do.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I think I would be remiss to not talk about
how I was brought up. I was raised in a
very entrepreneurial family. A lot of people know my mom,
Selene Johnson. I was raised, of course by her and
my dad. My dad's the CFO and has always been
of all of the companies they've run, and my mom
is the CEO, the front facing face of the brand,
and so growing up, my sister and I both got
(02:34):
to just watch our parents be entrepreneurs and start to
experiment with social media. And my mom had a podcast
back before it was even podcasting. She used to just
record her voice and burn it onto CDs and then
mail out hundreds of CDs on a monthly basis they
listen to in their car. That's the environment that I
was raised in, and so from a very young age,
(02:56):
I wasn't like being sat down at the dinner table
and told I have to be an entrepreneur and here
are the KPIs of a successful business. I was just
getting to watch my parents, and I learned a lot
through Monkey See Monkey Do.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Abby Cammon. We spoke about how parenting differs when you're
in authentic relationship with your children, and as an aside
during that conversation, I refer to that authoritarian parenting. While
a lot of us may have been on the receiving
end of that method of parenting, that it really creates
(03:32):
challenges later on because it's really about discipline. It's focused
on discipline and making people do something versus allowing them
the opportunity and ability to be guided and to also
think and apply some critical thinking to their behaviors. One
of the things that I am personally frustrated with is
(03:54):
this idea of this war mentality that is happening at
the very macro level. When we start off at the
micro level telling children nonviolence, tell somebody, talk it out.
You know, these are your brothers and sisters, and it's
(04:17):
like we teach these things like parenting in the ways
that some of us are trying to parent differently, where
it's about curiosity and questioning and having authentic relationships versus
authoritative ones. I believe that if we can create more
(04:38):
of this culture within our families, it will eventually bubble
out into the rest of the world. But we have
to allow this runoff and spill off to happen. I
guess you know, I.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Do think that you bring up a really huge point.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
With Aaron Robinson, we talked about the grief of emotional
unavailability and how that has affected and is affecting many
men in their relationship with their children.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Specifically, I started a men's group with a couple of
my friends who are also aligned in this mission and
are dedicated to their spiritual practice. We just had our
first one a couple of weeks ago and have our
next one this next week, and ironically, the topic is
grief exploring grief, and that was something that came up
(05:39):
in our first In our first meeting we had at
our studio Flow State in Portland, Oregon. We had about
twenty men show up. We just put it out there.
We just posted a flyer and twenty men showed up
and we went around the room and shared a lot
about just kind of introductions. But then what are we
(05:59):
moving through? And something that came up repeatedly was an
emotionally unavailable father, like over and over again, just every
single time. And I myself included, I was like, yeah,
like I don't even know, Like I don't even know
who my dad is, even though he's standing right there
in front of me. Who is this man? I guess
it's like a tale of the times, Like I guess
(06:21):
they didn't have the resources or the willingness to kind
of move through their blockages. And these are the things
that we're tasked with today with we just know too
much just to stay in a prison of our own suffering.
It's like, we have other people who are willing to
(06:41):
go on this path, but it's important for us to
seek out the solutions. Like we can't just wait around
and then just take what we're given to numb the pain,
to distract ourselves from the grief, from the loneliness.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
That I With Monica Wisdom, we spoke about navigating life
as a motherless daughter, and there are a lot of
ways for a mother to herself be emotionally unavailable. Some
of us were raised by people who were emotionally burnt
(07:20):
out and therefore were not available in the way that
they probably would have wanted to be because of how
distracting it is sometimes to deal in stressful situations themselves.
When my parents divorced, they made the decision that my sister,
(07:42):
brother and I would live with our dad, and so
I was raised with our father as a single parent,
and then later with my stepmother when I was around
eleven years old, and that relationship was one where my
father was really because my mother. We had a relationship
with our mother, and he wanted to make sure that
(08:06):
we were clear that we had a mom. And out
of that time, I uh really missed having a mom
and having someone, you know, I didn't know of a
lot of people who were growing up without their mother.
And because of that, I similarly started to give what
(08:31):
I wish i'd had when I was going through the
changes that my body was going through, you know, my emotions,
my hormones, boys, you know, and all of that, and
so I tried to give that to my sister because
it was something that I hadn't had Ainsley Burrows and
I talked about loneliness and loneliness and children through a
(08:55):
lack of support, and I think that if we look
around at what our children are seeing today, what our
young people are saying today, and what we are saying
to each other today, it sounds like a resounding plea
for more community, less isolation, more support, more encouragement, less judgment,
(09:18):
less righteousness, and really us getting in and connecting with
each other and creating heart to heart connections and doing
that with our children. Again, if you remember, parenting shapes
our society, So it's important for us to understand that
providing support, providing emotional and mental support creates people and
(09:40):
human beings who are able to then create culture, a
culture of support.
Speaker 5 (09:47):
What they realize from the studies that the upper of
addiction isn't sobriety is that it's connection that people need.
So sometimes as a parent, not saying to your artist
kid or even your gay kid or your trans children
(10:09):
that you support them, you leave them lonely in the world,
and it's that loneliness that gets to them, and just
you calling and saying, hey, I support you, I love you,
I believe in what you're doing. That could change somebody's life.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
That's right, that's right. Lastly, my conversation with Jasmine Harper,
which was all about the importance of understanding and integrating
self care into the parental role and experience. She's a
relatively new mother, and that's what we talked about about
(10:49):
how shocking parenting is and how there's really nothing that
really prepares us for how all encompassing the of a
parent is. And so we talked a bit about that
and about her journey transitioning through and into parenting her child.
(11:11):
Even in those initial conversations, when I heard where you
are in your journey of your life and the chapter
of new motherhood that you're in, I was like, I
have to talk to I really want to have a
conversation with this woman and with this new mama to
talk about what that part of your journey is like.
(11:31):
And so we were committed to making sure that this
conversation that you and I are having and getting ready
to have actually came to fruition because it's such an
important conversation, because parenting is shocking.
Speaker 6 (11:47):
You have this whole life that you're used to for
however long, and then all of a sudden overnight, things
just change and you are completely committed to raising this
child that you just gave birth to you and you love.
So maybe you know you don't know all of the
right things that you're supposed to be doing. You just
have to figure it out along the way. We need
to make sure we're good in order to make sure
(12:09):
that our child is good.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I also had the opportunity to explore the topic of
loss with Aaron Robinson. We spoke a bit, and funny enough,
we actually talked about Kanye and a clip of a
conversation that he was having where he talked a lot
about the things that were happening in his life, and
at the end of the clip, the bottom line for
(12:36):
him was that he missed his father. And so again
this is to me more about this parenting topic, but
more specifically about loss. It's one of those things where
navigating loss and learning how to actually process and contextualize
what it is that we're going through helps us as parents,
(12:58):
and it also helps us to walk this planet. I
myself have had incredible loss. I am walking the planet
having lost a brother, my mother, my father, my grandparents,
and so many of my other ancestors. And it can
(13:20):
be a very scary and painful thing at times, and
what has helped me to navigate is remembering who these
individuals were in my life, taking the lessons that they
shared while they were here, and applying those to what
(13:43):
I'm doing. There are times when I am feeling tired,
quite frankly, and you know, I tend to kind of
veer on the working too much side sometimes and I
can sometimes hear my father tell me to do my best,
you know, to show up to be a woman who stands.
(14:05):
I think about my mom and her and I can
hear her very gentle voice telling me to make sure
that I rest. Lisa get some rest. And my brother
really like connecting to his energy and the things that
he told me about being authentic and showing up and
(14:28):
getting done what I know is important for my life.
So the topic of loss is a huge one. We
all experience it in one way or another. Sometimes it's
a person, sometimes it's a situation or a circumstance. And
loss doesn't have to be this thing that takes away
(14:50):
from us. It just evolves and transforms the relationship into
something else. So here are my conversations about loss. And
he was ranting about his experience in the family with
his ex wife, and you know, he's like going on
and on and he's talking to a group of people,
(15:12):
and at the end of it, at the very very
end of this clip, he says, and it's almost like
in the middle of like rah rah rah, and this
is going on and that went on and I'm a
man and I want to be treated like a man,
you know, And at the very very end he says,
I think I just missed my father. And that hit
me because there was all of that energy and talk
(15:38):
and venting about these experiences, and the bottom line to
it was really, you know, I wish my father was here.
It was like I missed my father. I wish my
father was here. Was something along those lines. And I
think that happens a lot in our lives, where people
want results and they want to feel better and they
(16:00):
want to not be in a place of pain and struggle,
and we focus a lot on that feeling better when
there's this if we can get to that underlying thing,
you know, if we can just find that that thing,
that weed that needs to be plucked, it helps it
(16:21):
will help us to get to to first of all,
get clear about the place we could want to go
and then also be willing to be a little more
vulnerable and courageous to do what needs to happen to
extract that weed from our you know, the garden of
our life. And I don't have a question.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
I just wanted to share those.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And and also Monica wisdom, And in those conversations we
talked about how a woman or young woman navigates her
life while also navigating the loss of a parent. If
we remember and if we connect to the energy and
the spirit of that person, they're always with us.
Speaker 8 (17:22):
And she even sat me down one day. My uncle
was a weed smoker back of the day, and she said,
I want you to smoke a cigarette. I want you
to smoke a weed, and I want you to drink this.
I want you to know what it feels like. You'll
never do it again. So it was like she knew
in her soul that she wasn't going to be around.
And so we have to look for those divine guidances
(17:43):
that our parents gave us before they left this earth.
And just know, truly, what I would tell a young
girl is that you have everything you need. She gave
you all that she had to give, no matter how
she passed away. That was all. It's everybody's destiny to
go to the other side, and sometimes people go earlier,
(18:05):
sometimes people go through childbirth. But I promise you, one
you have everything that you need. And two, she's always
with you. I talk to my mother this morning. My
mom is still with me, and I can see her
influence on me. Can I look in the mirror and
I see her, So she's always there.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Generational trauma is the emotional, psychological, and behavioral patterns that
are caused by family members having traumatic experiences and then
passing them down from one generation to the next. They
often come from unresolved pain, negative beliefs, and coping mechanisms
(18:47):
that people created and then unconsciously wind up giving to
the other people within their family. Understanding generational trauma is
so important, and while it is a painful thing to
extract from your family legacy, I see it and from
(19:11):
a shaping freedom perspective, it's a challenge and an opportunity
for transformation, not just for your personal transformation, but as
a way of transforming the fabric of your entire family.
I had that conversation with both Chanti Das, who is
the founder of silence to shame, and also with Ainsley Burrows.
(19:34):
Actually Shanti said it best. What she said is that
trauma is eating away at our families. This pain that's
being experienced is quite just literally eating away at our families,
eating away the beauty of who we are and how
we can show up in the world. And so my
(19:57):
intention is to help by having these conversations and creating
a space where people can come and talk about these things,
and on the way, it winds up spilling onto our families.
And so one of the things that I've been talking
about a lot lately is sometimes that childhood trauma that
(20:19):
we talk about, or these generational patterns that we talk
about are parents and caretakers who did not know how
to process and how to manage their stress, who didn't
know how to release their stress, or who didn't know
what self care was because they were so busy trying
to figure out how to take care of their lives,
(20:39):
how to keep their lights on and pay their mortgage
or pay their rent, or take care of their children.
So I think that this world that you're helping to create,
where we raise mental health and mental well being and
emotional health and emotional wellbeing as much a part of
our lives as getting up and taking a shower and
(21:00):
brushing our teeth and combing our hair that has to
be in there somewhere or else. This is just going
to continue on forever. I think that so many problems
in our lives, and so many of the challenges would
be served by something as simple as if you need
a nap, take one. If you're hydrated, drink some frickin water.
(21:23):
If you feel something about something, say something to that person,
even if it's messy. But when we store things up,
we become a rager, and we become a very negative
contributor to our families, to ourselves, to the people that
(21:43):
we interact with. And we have to do something about it.
And so this work that you're doing through silence the
shame is so important. And on your behalf, I'll ask
that those we can support your organization and support this
thing that you're doing. However, however they can not everyone
(22:07):
can pull out their checkbook. But whatever it is that
you can do, find this woman, support her, support this organization,
have these conversations, and let's figure out a way to
evolve out of this as a culture, because it is
holding us back it is.
Speaker 9 (22:25):
And the last thing I'll say is to your point,
I love everything you just said. It is eating away
at our families. Absolutely, we need families to have these conversations.
Put your phones away, let's talk about this. You got
to talk through these situations because it's festering and it's
tearing some families apart.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
One of the things that Ainsley and I talked about
in the clip that you're going to listen to or
see in a couple of moments is the challenge and
in particular for first generation ers like myself and like him,
who tried to have these conversations with our caretakers or
with our parents, and how they very often shut those
(23:11):
conversations down. And you know, there's no judgment around it.
It's just what was done at the time. But some
of us are still carrying that along. I had a
conversation with someone recently where someone who was really feeling
challenged by a perspective that their adult child has about
(23:33):
the way that they were raised and some things that
happened when they were younger. And in this conversation with
the parent, I shared that there are two roads that
we can take when confronted with or when provided the
gift of receiving or hearing some feedback from our children.
(23:55):
One would be the authoritarian way of show letting it
down and really leaning into your role and your title,
your title in that person's life. I'm your parent, so
I don't want to hear it. That's gaslighting. The second
option is to hear it and to listen. And that
(24:16):
doesn't mean you agree, and it doesn't mean that the
reflection is necessarily a one hundred percent accurate one. Sometimes
we were misunderstood. Sometimes there were other things going on.
Sometimes a person or our child has received something from
us that we did not intend to share with them,
(24:40):
but we don't know that unless we or until we're
willing to have the courage to actually hear that person's perspective.
So this is a little plug for really taking care
of ourselves as parents so that we have the ability
to have healthy care communication with our children, and also
(25:03):
to allow our children to have healthy communication with us,
because if they don't get to share their hearts with us,
how are they going to be able to do that
with other people that they encounter as they move through
the planet.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
And when you're like from a family who their generations
of like trauma that's there and you're trying to work
through how it's affected you. If you're going to the
people who are who have been through that trauma and
haven't engaged with it, it makes it even more difficult.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yes, because they take it personally. I remember once trying
to have a conversation with my father and I called
my father Papa, and I was just like Papa, and
I was like trying to talk about something but it
was not I didn't think it was that deep. It
was deep, but it wasn't like super deep. And I
remember like saying something to him and he could so personally,
(26:03):
so it shut me down. I couldn't even finish what
I had to say.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
I literally, just during a pandemic, went through that whole
thing something similar. I don't know exactly what your thing is,
but I went to this thing with my mom where
I'm having this conversation about our family tree and I'm
talking to my cousin and my cousin yeah, did you
know that, I'm like what it was just like something
that's just mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
So I go to my mom, sit down with her,
and I'll have a conversation and she's like nothing like
that ever happened.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
So those of you who have followed for a while
know that I am the daughter of a Haitian father
and a Puerto Rican mother, and that led to me
having the experience of being a first generation person. So
the topic of immigrant families and some of the things
that happened within immigrant families and first generation children is
(27:04):
one that is near and dear to my heart. There
are aspects of it that crack me up in a
good way, and there are other aspects of it that
were really challenging because what I experienced as a first
generation child was watching a parent navigate their own transition
(27:27):
and acclamation to a new culture, and it creates some
nuance in the ways that were raised. I got to
have that conversation with several of my guests this year.
Joseph Aua Darko and I talked about the tension around judgment,
surrounding the judgment surrounding mental health, and about the difference
(27:51):
in perspective in the ways that certain things are approached.
My father was Haitian, my mother from Puerto Rico, and
I am the daughter of a Haitian immigrant and growing
up in Brooklyn. You know, in this country, so I
(28:14):
grew up within, you know, in this country, as my
father was also acclimating and adjusting to his experience as
an immigrant in this country, which creates created a bit
of a tension, you know, because we you know, to
have children who are growing up. It's very different than
(28:37):
the experience that he expected, I guess, or was more
accustomed to as a parent here in a new land,
in a new country. In your short It's Okay, which
was beautiful, Which was so beautiful, and so generous, you
talked a bit about the ways that mental health gets
(28:59):
treated with different backgrounds, you know, in different countries. But
I think that the career, the experience of a lot
of us is very similar to that, in that mental
health is treated so differently and with so much you
didn't say this, these are my words, so much judgment
(29:21):
and accusation in a way that's very different from having
some kind of a physical ailment or a physical diagnosis
of some kind. And you touched on that, and I
saw it very very recently, and that really struck me
because that is the experience of so many people. Ainsley
(29:44):
and I talked about two topics around it. One was
the emotional barriers and what some of us would consider
emotional unavailability. That quite frankly, was just the ways that
some immigrant parents sometimes times are focused on the acclamation
to the American dream, to working to building a life
(30:06):
in a new place, sometimes with a different language, how
that takes priority over other things. Ainsley and I also
talked about the shame that is sometimes experienced as a kid,
a first generation kid born into a family where there's
mental illness. I had the opportunity to speak with him
(30:29):
about something that I've not spoken about a lot in
my life. It's only recently that I've been willing to
share some of the struggles with mental illness that happened
within my family. So it felt very healing and I
felt so much less isolated having the opportunity to speak
(30:52):
with someone else about.
Speaker 5 (30:53):
That a lot of the safe spaces that exist inside
of the US don't really exist, what not in a
different kind of way in immigrant communities. Even like growing up,
as I tell my mom I love her, what's difficult
even to this day it's still not. But like I
(31:14):
could tell Lorial's mom, I love her, and it's harder
to tell my mom I love her. Yeah, yeah, And
that is that.
Speaker 6 (31:23):
Is such a crazy thing to me.
Speaker 5 (31:26):
It's just it's just so odd.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Especially for you being as affectionate a person as you are,
and as expressive as a person as you are of
a person that you are as you are. But I
think a lot of it has to do with what happens.
And again we're speaking about the Caribbean right now, right
where there's so much that is about the attainment of
(31:50):
the American dream and what that's.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Supposed to look like. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And I will say that while my father was a
person and my father who was from Haiti, was a
person that you know, we exchanged I love you for sure,
and he was a very affectionate man. At the same time,
we didn't talk about those things, you know, those deeper things,
(32:18):
because it was there was a belief there that you
just move past you just like you know, handle the thing,
do the thing, and don't stop to look back and
kind of process or unpack.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
For me as somebody from a Caribbean and being male
in America, it also there is another thing that comes
with that, right. So it's like it says after that
was tough exterior and certain things that consider us like
what is this foolishness.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Chuky Okobe, and I had the opportunity to also talk
about the experience of being a first generation Nigerian American
who also moved around a lot due to his parents' divorce,
and how that translated into some of the beliefs that
he had and then later released. So this is a
(33:27):
great topic, the topic of immigrant families. I'm looking forward
to hearing what you have to say about this topic
as well.
Speaker 10 (33:34):
You know, growing up, you know, I was first generation American.
My parents are from Nigeria. Where did you grow up, Chucky,
I'm originally I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is where
I was born, Okay, and so lived most of my
life in Pittsburgh. However, when my parents split, we moved
around a lot as a kid, and so I was
(33:56):
a new kid in the school all the time. I
went to six schools before I scho Wow. So I
got used used to always being the new kid, and
I developed a belief that I didn't fit in anywhere.
Because of these continued experiences of being new and having
to assimilate to a new way of thinking, a new
way of being. You know, I went to you know,
(34:18):
it was originally, you know, I'm from Squirrel Hill, which
is the second largest Jewish community in America behind Manhattan,
and so grew up around a lot of you know,
white people Jewish people, which is not a problem you know,
to me as a kid, I didn't know any different.
So when my parents split and then you know, end
(34:39):
up going to public school with inner city black kids,
I still didn't quite fit in because you know, I'm
from you know, my family's African. They speak different, we
eat different food, we have different ways of engaging life.
So when I was with all white people, I felt
like I didn't fit in. When I was with all
black people, I still didn't fit in. And so then
(34:59):
you see how that becomes a belief that I don't
belong anywhere.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
This next section is the conversations that I had with
my guests around strengthening family bonds. This was really fun
conversation because this was really about what do you do
with all of this. So we talked about you know,
parenting and loss and generational trauma, and some of the
(35:25):
challenges within immigrant families, and some of the challenges around
mental illness within our families. This topic around strengthening family
bonds was one was with Abby Cammon where we talked
about the idea of choosing your people. I loved that
(35:46):
because what that says is a lot of times we
go through life saying, well, this is just my family,
and you grow up with people and they're your siblings
or your parents, or your cousins. And what I love
about the radical choice that Abby recommended around choosing is
it gives us the opportunity to look someone in the eye,
(36:09):
someone that we love, someone that has grown up with us,
and looking at each other to say, hey, you know what,
I choose you. I want to have a relationship with you.
I'm not going to assume that because we've grown up together,
or because we've been around each other since we were
very little, that that means that I know everything about you,
and I know everything about who you are. Making that
(36:29):
decision to choose your people means that you're making a
concerted and conscious effort to build a powerful relationship with
a person that you love. Love that love, that love
that It's a great thing for you to maybe think
about for a couple of folks in as we move
(36:51):
into the new year, doing this can help your family
grow closer, and it also helps us to get to
know each other for who we are are, not who
we think we are, and not who we expect each
other to be. So I cannot speak enough about that,
And please do listen to the episode with Abby Cammen
from more of her gems. She had a ton of them.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Dear everyone, you're going to have to choose your people.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
There's nobody's given to you. I don't care what your
story is, how you got together, whether you were birth
together or whatnot. Now you have to choose each other,
that's right. You have to radically choose each other. And
with that, I hope you get to create some infinite
energy between you, which means that it is really a
safe space to grow together, knowing that nobody's going to
(37:40):
be perfect on this journey, but the safety to say, hey,
this didn't go well, or this is going really well.
Let's do more of this, Let's bring more people into
this from both sides. But it's that choosing of each
other which I write about in my book, is during
this time of COVID and during this time of our
familial awakening, I I radically chose my children and I
(38:02):
asked them to choose me to and there were other players, certainly,
but the place that I started with was them, because
I thought we were already open to it. But I
realized that I had to tell them I chose them,
and that I wanted to learn and grow with them,
and I wanted them to choose me and see all
of me and know that I had so much work
to still do on myself, and I wanted to be
(38:23):
safe in my discovery of myself with them and for
them to likewise be safe in their discovery journey as well.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And then Antonio Nevis and I also talked about the
pressure of having or believing that you need to project
an image of perfection in our lives, in this kind
of fantasy of like the perfect family where everyone is
just smiling and everything is great all the time, and
this image of what it looks like when things are
(38:52):
actually falling apart and imploding on the inside. And so
the intention to strengthen family bond includes choosing your family
and also includes looking really at what's happening in our
familial life. Where are we struggling, what do we know
(39:14):
we're passing down through generations and interacting with each other
with that does simply doesn't belong anymore. Let's make an
effort and a commitment within our own lives to strengthening
our family bonds, to living in authenticity, to getting in
there and dealing with the things that are standing in
(39:36):
the way of our ability to be healthy, and then
our ability to then infuse that emotional and mental health
into the people that are relying upon us so much.
Speaker 7 (39:50):
This idea of living on all a pilot is personal
for me because seven years ago, according to the Internet,
I was living my best life ever. Had a successful career,
traveling across the globe, delivering keynotes, multiple books, was married
to a beautiful woman. We had newborn twins, you know,
(40:10):
driving a minivan, and got the house with the white
picket fence, all those checking all those American dreams.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Tie that up in a little bow and present it
as look what you did.
Speaker 7 (40:20):
Look but behind the scenes, even though I was quote
unquote living that American dream, behind the scenes, my life
was a hot mess. That marriage I'm telling you about.
My wife and I were knee deep in marriage counseling,
getting fired from marriage counselors. Having not being raised by
a father for the most part in my life, I
was I was struggling to connect with my kids and
what that meant to be a father. As much as
(40:40):
the business was going good, I'd come from a corporate background,
so I didn't know what it meant to be an entrepreneur.
At a time when I wanted to connect with my
dad to build a stronger relationship, he was diagnosed with
dementia and can no longer walk, talk, beat himself, et cetera.
And instead of having outlets to really share that with others,
I started holding into myself and that led to gaining
(41:03):
thirty pounds of weight due to emotional meat eating. That
led to having one, two, three glasses of wine. Those
things you don't need to injure day.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
All right, So I think the guests kind of spoke
for themselves. I do want to thank you all so
very much for listening as twenty twenty four comes to
a close, for me personally, for the Shaping Freedom team,
for all of us. I just want to give us
(41:39):
all a moment of applause and celebration and congratulation for
everything that you have personally gone through, work through, thrived
through released, elevated this. I'm wishing you all the very
(42:02):
best for twenty twenty five. I want to thank you
so much for listening. It means the world to me.
I cannot tell you how encouraged I feel, and how
encouraged my team feels when we hear people coming back
and talking about a little tidbit that they heard that
(42:24):
helped them to navigate something going on in their lives.
The topic of family and the ways we're interacting with
each other is one that we're going to continue to
build upon in twenty twenty five. And for now, I'm
wishing you the best end and wrap up to this year.
Take really good care of yourselves, give yourself as much
(42:48):
of a break as you possibly can. Naps are needed,
those conversations are needed. We want the best of you,
We want the healthiest of you. I look forward to
twenty twenty five. Thank you so much.
Welcome to Shaping Freedom with Lsan Bosquia, the podcast where
we help you unlock your potential and redefine what it
means to be free. I'm your host, Luisan Boskia. I'm
a former corporate executive, a life strategist, and the founder
of Shaping Freedom. With a background spanning corporate, artistic and
(00:26):
personal development. I bring a unique perspective to empowering others.
Listen in to discover inspiring stories and practical insights that
will help you reclaim your life and rewrite your narrative.
My intention is for you to gain the tools and
motivation to be free in your relationships, your communities, and
(00:48):
within yourself. This, my friends, is Shaping Freedom. My guests
and I spoke a lot about parenting this year. The
reason being that the topic of par parenting is absolutely critical.
It is the foundation of emotional, mental, and behavioral development
for our children. That's no easy feat. It's important. Parenting
(01:13):
shapes our society and it informs our culture, and so
I think that there need to be more conversations around parenting.
There needs to be more support for parents. Parents need
safe spaces where they can come and vent about, talk
about and share how they're affected by the parenting that
(01:38):
perhaps they received or what's been programmed, and also what
they're going to do and how they're navigating their role
as parents. So if you see a parent, please support them.
What I got out of the conversation with Rock Johnson
was the importance of understanding that we are models for
our children. They see what we do, observe, and choose
(02:03):
to either adopt or reject based upon how resonant we
are with the things that we're telling them to do.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I think I would be remiss to not talk about
how I was brought up. I was raised in a
very entrepreneurial family. A lot of people know my mom,
Selene Johnson. I was raised, of course by her and
my dad. My dad's the CFO and has always been
of all of the companies they've run, and my mom
is the CEO, the front facing face of the brand,
and so growing up, my sister and I both got
(02:34):
to just watch our parents be entrepreneurs and start to
experiment with social media. And my mom had a podcast
back before it was even podcasting. She used to just
record her voice and burn it onto CDs and then
mail out hundreds of CDs on a monthly basis they
listen to in their car. That's the environment that I
was raised in, and so from a very young age,
(02:56):
I wasn't like being sat down at the dinner table
and told I have to be an entrepreneur and here
are the KPIs of a successful business. I was just
getting to watch my parents, and I learned a lot
through Monkey See Monkey Do.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Abby Cammon. We spoke about how parenting differs when you're
in authentic relationship with your children, and as an aside
during that conversation, I refer to that authoritarian parenting. While
a lot of us may have been on the receiving
end of that method of parenting, that it really creates
(03:32):
challenges later on because it's really about discipline. It's focused
on discipline and making people do something versus allowing them
the opportunity and ability to be guided and to also
think and apply some critical thinking to their behaviors. One
of the things that I am personally frustrated with is
(03:54):
this idea of this war mentality that is happening at
the very macro level. When we start off at the
micro level telling children nonviolence, tell somebody, talk it out.
You know, these are your brothers and sisters, and it's
(04:17):
like we teach these things like parenting in the ways
that some of us are trying to parent differently, where
it's about curiosity and questioning and having authentic relationships versus
authoritative ones. I believe that if we can create more
(04:38):
of this culture within our families, it will eventually bubble
out into the rest of the world. But we have
to allow this runoff and spill off to happen. I
guess you know, I.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Do think that you bring up a really huge point.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
With Aaron Robinson, we talked about the grief of emotional
unavailability and how that has affected and is affecting many
men in their relationship with their children.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Specifically, I started a men's group with a couple of
my friends who are also aligned in this mission and
are dedicated to their spiritual practice. We just had our
first one a couple of weeks ago and have our
next one this next week, and ironically, the topic is
grief exploring grief, and that was something that came up
(05:39):
in our first In our first meeting we had at
our studio Flow State in Portland, Oregon. We had about
twenty men show up. We just put it out there.
We just posted a flyer and twenty men showed up
and we went around the room and shared a lot
about just kind of introductions. But then what are we
(05:59):
moving through? And something that came up repeatedly was an
emotionally unavailable father, like over and over again, just every
single time. And I myself included, I was like, yeah,
like I don't even know, Like I don't even know
who my dad is, even though he's standing right there
in front of me. Who is this man? I guess
it's like a tale of the times, Like I guess
(06:21):
they didn't have the resources or the willingness to kind
of move through their blockages. And these are the things
that we're tasked with today with we just know too
much just to stay in a prison of our own suffering.
It's like, we have other people who are willing to
(06:41):
go on this path, but it's important for us to
seek out the solutions. Like we can't just wait around
and then just take what we're given to numb the pain,
to distract ourselves from the grief, from the loneliness.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
That I With Monica Wisdom, we spoke about navigating life
as a motherless daughter, and there are a lot of
ways for a mother to herself be emotionally unavailable. Some
of us were raised by people who were emotionally burnt
(07:20):
out and therefore were not available in the way that
they probably would have wanted to be because of how
distracting it is sometimes to deal in stressful situations themselves.
When my parents divorced, they made the decision that my sister,
(07:42):
brother and I would live with our dad, and so
I was raised with our father as a single parent,
and then later with my stepmother when I was around
eleven years old, and that relationship was one where my
father was really because my mother. We had a relationship
with our mother, and he wanted to make sure that
(08:06):
we were clear that we had a mom. And out
of that time, I uh really missed having a mom
and having someone, you know, I didn't know of a
lot of people who were growing up without their mother.
And because of that, I similarly started to give what
(08:31):
I wish i'd had when I was going through the
changes that my body was going through, you know, my emotions,
my hormones, boys, you know, and all of that, and
so I tried to give that to my sister because
it was something that I hadn't had Ainsley Burrows and
I talked about loneliness and loneliness and children through a
(08:55):
lack of support, and I think that if we look
around at what our children are seeing today, what our
young people are saying today, and what we are saying
to each other today, it sounds like a resounding plea
for more community, less isolation, more support, more encouragement, less judgment,
(09:18):
less righteousness, and really us getting in and connecting with
each other and creating heart to heart connections and doing
that with our children. Again, if you remember, parenting shapes
our society, So it's important for us to understand that
providing support, providing emotional and mental support creates people and
(09:40):
human beings who are able to then create culture, a
culture of support.
Speaker 5 (09:47):
What they realize from the studies that the upper of
addiction isn't sobriety is that it's connection that people need.
So sometimes as a parent, not saying to your artist
kid or even your gay kid or your trans children
(10:09):
that you support them, you leave them lonely in the world,
and it's that loneliness that gets to them, and just
you calling and saying, hey, I support you, I love you,
I believe in what you're doing. That could change somebody's life.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
That's right, that's right. Lastly, my conversation with Jasmine Harper,
which was all about the importance of understanding and integrating
self care into the parental role and experience. She's a
relatively new mother, and that's what we talked about about
(10:49):
how shocking parenting is and how there's really nothing that
really prepares us for how all encompassing the of a
parent is. And so we talked a bit about that
and about her journey transitioning through and into parenting her child.
(11:11):
Even in those initial conversations, when I heard where you
are in your journey of your life and the chapter
of new motherhood that you're in, I was like, I
have to talk to I really want to have a
conversation with this woman and with this new mama to
talk about what that part of your journey is like.
(11:31):
And so we were committed to making sure that this
conversation that you and I are having and getting ready
to have actually came to fruition because it's such an
important conversation, because parenting is shocking.
Speaker 6 (11:47):
You have this whole life that you're used to for
however long, and then all of a sudden overnight, things
just change and you are completely committed to raising this
child that you just gave birth to you and you love.
So maybe you know you don't know all of the
right things that you're supposed to be doing. You just
have to figure it out along the way. We need
to make sure we're good in order to make sure
(12:09):
that our child is good.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I also had the opportunity to explore the topic of
loss with Aaron Robinson. We spoke a bit, and funny enough,
we actually talked about Kanye and a clip of a
conversation that he was having where he talked a lot
about the things that were happening in his life, and
at the end of the clip, the bottom line for
(12:36):
him was that he missed his father. And so again
this is to me more about this parenting topic, but
more specifically about loss. It's one of those things where
navigating loss and learning how to actually process and contextualize
what it is that we're going through helps us as parents,
(12:58):
and it also helps us to walk this planet. I
myself have had incredible loss. I am walking the planet
having lost a brother, my mother, my father, my grandparents,
and so many of my other ancestors. And it can
(13:20):
be a very scary and painful thing at times, and
what has helped me to navigate is remembering who these
individuals were in my life, taking the lessons that they
shared while they were here, and applying those to what
(13:43):
I'm doing. There are times when I am feeling tired,
quite frankly, and you know, I tend to kind of
veer on the working too much side sometimes and I
can sometimes hear my father tell me to do my best,
you know, to show up to be a woman who stands.
(14:05):
I think about my mom and her and I can
hear her very gentle voice telling me to make sure
that I rest. Lisa get some rest. And my brother
really like connecting to his energy and the things that
he told me about being authentic and showing up and
(14:28):
getting done what I know is important for my life.
So the topic of loss is a huge one. We
all experience it in one way or another. Sometimes it's
a person, sometimes it's a situation or a circumstance. And
loss doesn't have to be this thing that takes away
(14:50):
from us. It just evolves and transforms the relationship into
something else. So here are my conversations about loss. And
he was ranting about his experience in the family with
his ex wife, and you know, he's like going on
and on and he's talking to a group of people,
(15:12):
and at the end of it, at the very very
end of this clip, he says, and it's almost like
in the middle of like rah rah rah, and this
is going on and that went on and I'm a
man and I want to be treated like a man,
you know, And at the very very end he says,
I think I just missed my father. And that hit
me because there was all of that energy and talk
(15:38):
and venting about these experiences, and the bottom line to
it was really, you know, I wish my father was here.
It was like I missed my father. I wish my
father was here. Was something along those lines. And I
think that happens a lot in our lives, where people
want results and they want to feel better and they
(16:00):
want to not be in a place of pain and struggle,
and we focus a lot on that feeling better when
there's this if we can get to that underlying thing,
you know, if we can just find that that thing,
that weed that needs to be plucked, it helps it
(16:21):
will help us to get to to first of all,
get clear about the place we could want to go
and then also be willing to be a little more
vulnerable and courageous to do what needs to happen to
extract that weed from our you know, the garden of
our life. And I don't have a question.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
I just wanted to share those.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And and also Monica wisdom, And in those conversations we
talked about how a woman or young woman navigates her
life while also navigating the loss of a parent. If
we remember and if we connect to the energy and
the spirit of that person, they're always with us.
Speaker 8 (17:22):
And she even sat me down one day. My uncle
was a weed smoker back of the day, and she said,
I want you to smoke a cigarette. I want you
to smoke a weed, and I want you to drink this.
I want you to know what it feels like. You'll
never do it again. So it was like she knew
in her soul that she wasn't going to be around.
And so we have to look for those divine guidances
(17:43):
that our parents gave us before they left this earth.
And just know, truly, what I would tell a young
girl is that you have everything you need. She gave
you all that she had to give, no matter how
she passed away. That was all. It's everybody's destiny to
go to the other side, and sometimes people go earlier,
(18:05):
sometimes people go through childbirth. But I promise you, one
you have everything that you need. And two, she's always
with you. I talk to my mother this morning. My
mom is still with me, and I can see her
influence on me. Can I look in the mirror and
I see her, So she's always there.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Generational trauma is the emotional, psychological, and behavioral patterns that
are caused by family members having traumatic experiences and then
passing them down from one generation to the next. They
often come from unresolved pain, negative beliefs, and coping mechanisms
(18:47):
that people created and then unconsciously wind up giving to
the other people within their family. Understanding generational trauma is
so important, and while it is a painful thing to
extract from your family legacy, I see it and from
(19:11):
a shaping freedom perspective, it's a challenge and an opportunity
for transformation, not just for your personal transformation, but as
a way of transforming the fabric of your entire family.
I had that conversation with both Chanti Das, who is
the founder of silence to shame, and also with Ainsley Burrows.
(19:34):
Actually Shanti said it best. What she said is that
trauma is eating away at our families. This pain that's
being experienced is quite just literally eating away at our families,
eating away the beauty of who we are and how
we can show up in the world. And so my
(19:57):
intention is to help by having these conversations and creating
a space where people can come and talk about these things,
and on the way, it winds up spilling onto our families.
And so one of the things that I've been talking
about a lot lately is sometimes that childhood trauma that
(20:19):
we talk about, or these generational patterns that we talk
about are parents and caretakers who did not know how
to process and how to manage their stress, who didn't
know how to release their stress, or who didn't know
what self care was because they were so busy trying
to figure out how to take care of their lives,
(20:39):
how to keep their lights on and pay their mortgage
or pay their rent, or take care of their children.
So I think that this world that you're helping to create,
where we raise mental health and mental well being and
emotional health and emotional wellbeing as much a part of
our lives as getting up and taking a shower and
(21:00):
brushing our teeth and combing our hair that has to
be in there somewhere or else. This is just going
to continue on forever. I think that so many problems
in our lives, and so many of the challenges would
be served by something as simple as if you need
a nap, take one. If you're hydrated, drink some frickin water.
(21:23):
If you feel something about something, say something to that person,
even if it's messy. But when we store things up,
we become a rager, and we become a very negative
contributor to our families, to ourselves, to the people that
(21:43):
we interact with. And we have to do something about it.
And so this work that you're doing through silence the
shame is so important. And on your behalf, I'll ask
that those we can support your organization and support this
thing that you're doing. However, however they can not everyone
(22:07):
can pull out their checkbook. But whatever it is that
you can do, find this woman, support her, support this organization,
have these conversations, and let's figure out a way to
evolve out of this as a culture, because it is
holding us back it is.
Speaker 9 (22:25):
And the last thing I'll say is to your point,
I love everything you just said. It is eating away
at our families. Absolutely, we need families to have these conversations.
Put your phones away, let's talk about this. You got
to talk through these situations because it's festering and it's
tearing some families apart.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
One of the things that Ainsley and I talked about
in the clip that you're going to listen to or
see in a couple of moments is the challenge and
in particular for first generation ers like myself and like him,
who tried to have these conversations with our caretakers or
with our parents, and how they very often shut those
(23:11):
conversations down. And you know, there's no judgment around it.
It's just what was done at the time. But some
of us are still carrying that along. I had a
conversation with someone recently where someone who was really feeling
challenged by a perspective that their adult child has about
(23:33):
the way that they were raised and some things that
happened when they were younger. And in this conversation with
the parent, I shared that there are two roads that
we can take when confronted with or when provided the
gift of receiving or hearing some feedback from our children.
(23:55):
One would be the authoritarian way of show letting it
down and really leaning into your role and your title,
your title in that person's life. I'm your parent, so
I don't want to hear it. That's gaslighting. The second
option is to hear it and to listen. And that
(24:16):
doesn't mean you agree, and it doesn't mean that the
reflection is necessarily a one hundred percent accurate one. Sometimes
we were misunderstood. Sometimes there were other things going on.
Sometimes a person or our child has received something from
us that we did not intend to share with them,
(24:40):
but we don't know that unless we or until we're
willing to have the courage to actually hear that person's perspective.
So this is a little plug for really taking care
of ourselves as parents so that we have the ability
to have healthy care communication with our children, and also
(25:03):
to allow our children to have healthy communication with us,
because if they don't get to share their hearts with us,
how are they going to be able to do that
with other people that they encounter as they move through
the planet.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
And when you're like from a family who their generations
of like trauma that's there and you're trying to work
through how it's affected you. If you're going to the
people who are who have been through that trauma and
haven't engaged with it, it makes it even more difficult.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yes, because they take it personally. I remember once trying
to have a conversation with my father and I called
my father Papa, and I was just like Papa, and
I was like trying to talk about something but it
was not I didn't think it was that deep. It
was deep, but it wasn't like super deep. And I
remember like saying something to him and he could so personally,
(26:03):
so it shut me down. I couldn't even finish what
I had to say.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
I literally, just during a pandemic, went through that whole
thing something similar. I don't know exactly what your thing is,
but I went to this thing with my mom where
I'm having this conversation about our family tree and I'm
talking to my cousin and my cousin yeah, did you
know that, I'm like what it was just like something
that's just mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
So I go to my mom, sit down with her,
and I'll have a conversation and she's like nothing like
that ever happened.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
So those of you who have followed for a while
know that I am the daughter of a Haitian father
and a Puerto Rican mother, and that led to me
having the experience of being a first generation person. So
the topic of immigrant families and some of the things
that happened within immigrant families and first generation children is
(27:04):
one that is near and dear to my heart. There
are aspects of it that crack me up in a
good way, and there are other aspects of it that
were really challenging because what I experienced as a first
generation child was watching a parent navigate their own transition
(27:27):
and acclamation to a new culture, and it creates some
nuance in the ways that were raised. I got to
have that conversation with several of my guests this year.
Joseph Aua Darko and I talked about the tension around judgment,
surrounding the judgment surrounding mental health, and about the difference
(27:51):
in perspective in the ways that certain things are approached.
My father was Haitian, my mother from Puerto Rico, and
I am the daughter of a Haitian immigrant and growing
up in Brooklyn. You know, in this country, so I
(28:14):
grew up within, you know, in this country, as my
father was also acclimating and adjusting to his experience as
an immigrant in this country, which creates created a bit
of a tension, you know, because we you know, to
have children who are growing up. It's very different than
(28:37):
the experience that he expected, I guess, or was more
accustomed to as a parent here in a new land,
in a new country. In your short It's Okay, which
was beautiful, Which was so beautiful, and so generous, you
talked a bit about the ways that mental health gets
(28:59):
treated with different backgrounds, you know, in different countries. But
I think that the career, the experience of a lot
of us is very similar to that, in that mental
health is treated so differently and with so much you
didn't say this, these are my words, so much judgment
(29:21):
and accusation in a way that's very different from having
some kind of a physical ailment or a physical diagnosis
of some kind. And you touched on that, and I
saw it very very recently, and that really struck me
because that is the experience of so many people. Ainsley
(29:44):
and I talked about two topics around it. One was
the emotional barriers and what some of us would consider
emotional unavailability. That quite frankly, was just the ways that
some immigrant parents sometimes times are focused on the acclamation
to the American dream, to working to building a life
(30:06):
in a new place, sometimes with a different language, how
that takes priority over other things. Ainsley and I also
talked about the shame that is sometimes experienced as a kid,
a first generation kid born into a family where there's
mental illness. I had the opportunity to speak with him
(30:29):
about something that I've not spoken about a lot in
my life. It's only recently that I've been willing to
share some of the struggles with mental illness that happened
within my family. So it felt very healing and I
felt so much less isolated having the opportunity to speak
(30:52):
with someone else about.
Speaker 5 (30:53):
That a lot of the safe spaces that exist inside
of the US don't really exist, what not in a
different kind of way in immigrant communities. Even like growing up,
as I tell my mom I love her, what's difficult
even to this day it's still not. But like I
(31:14):
could tell Lorial's mom, I love her, and it's harder
to tell my mom I love her. Yeah, yeah, And
that is that.
Speaker 6 (31:23):
Is such a crazy thing to me.
Speaker 5 (31:26):
It's just it's just so odd.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Especially for you being as affectionate a person as you are,
and as expressive as a person as you are of
a person that you are as you are. But I
think a lot of it has to do with what happens.
And again we're speaking about the Caribbean right now, right
where there's so much that is about the attainment of
(31:50):
the American dream and what that's.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Supposed to look like. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And I will say that while my father was a
person and my father who was from Haiti, was a
person that you know, we exchanged I love you for sure,
and he was a very affectionate man. At the same time,
we didn't talk about those things, you know, those deeper things,
(32:18):
because it was there was a belief there that you
just move past you just like you know, handle the thing,
do the thing, and don't stop to look back and
kind of process or unpack.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
For me as somebody from a Caribbean and being male
in America, it also there is another thing that comes
with that, right. So it's like it says after that
was tough exterior and certain things that consider us like
what is this foolishness.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Chuky Okobe, and I had the opportunity to also talk
about the experience of being a first generation Nigerian American
who also moved around a lot due to his parents' divorce,
and how that translated into some of the beliefs that
he had and then later released. So this is a
(33:27):
great topic, the topic of immigrant families. I'm looking forward
to hearing what you have to say about this topic
as well.
Speaker 10 (33:34):
You know, growing up, you know, I was first generation American.
My parents are from Nigeria. Where did you grow up, Chucky,
I'm originally I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is where
I was born, Okay, and so lived most of my
life in Pittsburgh. However, when my parents split, we moved
around a lot as a kid, and so I was
(33:56):
a new kid in the school all the time. I
went to six schools before I scho Wow. So I
got used used to always being the new kid, and
I developed a belief that I didn't fit in anywhere.
Because of these continued experiences of being new and having
to assimilate to a new way of thinking, a new
way of being. You know, I went to you know,
(34:18):
it was originally, you know, I'm from Squirrel Hill, which
is the second largest Jewish community in America behind Manhattan,
and so grew up around a lot of you know,
white people Jewish people, which is not a problem you know,
to me as a kid, I didn't know any different.
So when my parents split and then you know, end
(34:39):
up going to public school with inner city black kids,
I still didn't quite fit in because you know, I'm
from you know, my family's African. They speak different, we
eat different food, we have different ways of engaging life.
So when I was with all white people, I felt
like I didn't fit in. When I was with all
black people, I still didn't fit in. And so then
(34:59):
you see how that becomes a belief that I don't
belong anywhere.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
This next section is the conversations that I had with
my guests around strengthening family bonds. This was really fun
conversation because this was really about what do you do
with all of this. So we talked about you know,
parenting and loss and generational trauma, and some of the
(35:25):
challenges within immigrant families, and some of the challenges around
mental illness within our families. This topic around strengthening family
bonds was one was with Abby Cammon where we talked
about the idea of choosing your people. I loved that
(35:46):
because what that says is a lot of times we
go through life saying, well, this is just my family,
and you grow up with people and they're your siblings
or your parents, or your cousins. And what I love
about the radical choice that Abby recommended around choosing is
it gives us the opportunity to look someone in the eye,
(36:09):
someone that we love, someone that has grown up with us,
and looking at each other to say, hey, you know what,
I choose you. I want to have a relationship with you.
I'm not going to assume that because we've grown up together,
or because we've been around each other since we were
very little, that that means that I know everything about you,
and I know everything about who you are. Making that
(36:29):
decision to choose your people means that you're making a
concerted and conscious effort to build a powerful relationship with
a person that you love. Love that love, that love
that It's a great thing for you to maybe think
about for a couple of folks in as we move
(36:51):
into the new year, doing this can help your family
grow closer, and it also helps us to get to
know each other for who we are are, not who
we think we are, and not who we expect each
other to be. So I cannot speak enough about that,
And please do listen to the episode with Abby Cammen
from more of her gems. She had a ton of them.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Dear everyone, you're going to have to choose your people.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
There's nobody's given to you. I don't care what your
story is, how you got together, whether you were birth
together or whatnot. Now you have to choose each other,
that's right. You have to radically choose each other. And
with that, I hope you get to create some infinite
energy between you, which means that it is really a
safe space to grow together, knowing that nobody's going to
(37:40):
be perfect on this journey, but the safety to say, hey,
this didn't go well, or this is going really well.
Let's do more of this, Let's bring more people into
this from both sides. But it's that choosing of each
other which I write about in my book, is during
this time of COVID and during this time of our
familial awakening, I I radically chose my children and I
(38:02):
asked them to choose me to and there were other players, certainly,
but the place that I started with was them, because
I thought we were already open to it. But I
realized that I had to tell them I chose them,
and that I wanted to learn and grow with them,
and I wanted them to choose me and see all
of me and know that I had so much work
to still do on myself, and I wanted to be
(38:23):
safe in my discovery of myself with them and for
them to likewise be safe in their discovery journey as well.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And then Antonio Nevis and I also talked about the
pressure of having or believing that you need to project
an image of perfection in our lives, in this kind
of fantasy of like the perfect family where everyone is
just smiling and everything is great all the time, and
this image of what it looks like when things are
(38:52):
actually falling apart and imploding on the inside. And so
the intention to strengthen family bond includes choosing your family
and also includes looking really at what's happening in our
familial life. Where are we struggling, what do we know
(39:14):
we're passing down through generations and interacting with each other
with that does simply doesn't belong anymore. Let's make an
effort and a commitment within our own lives to strengthening
our family bonds, to living in authenticity, to getting in
there and dealing with the things that are standing in
(39:36):
the way of our ability to be healthy, and then
our ability to then infuse that emotional and mental health
into the people that are relying upon us so much.
Speaker 7 (39:50):
This idea of living on all a pilot is personal
for me because seven years ago, according to the Internet,
I was living my best life ever. Had a successful career,
traveling across the globe, delivering keynotes, multiple books, was married
to a beautiful woman. We had newborn twins, you know,
(40:10):
driving a minivan, and got the house with the white
picket fence, all those checking all those American dreams.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Tie that up in a little bow and present it
as look what you did.
Speaker 7 (40:20):
Look but behind the scenes, even though I was quote
unquote living that American dream, behind the scenes, my life
was a hot mess. That marriage I'm telling you about.
My wife and I were knee deep in marriage counseling,
getting fired from marriage counselors. Having not being raised by
a father for the most part in my life, I
was I was struggling to connect with my kids and
what that meant to be a father. As much as
(40:40):
the business was going good, I'd come from a corporate background,
so I didn't know what it meant to be an entrepreneur.
At a time when I wanted to connect with my
dad to build a stronger relationship, he was diagnosed with
dementia and can no longer walk, talk, beat himself, et cetera.
And instead of having outlets to really share that with others,
I started holding into myself and that led to gaining
(41:03):
thirty pounds of weight due to emotional meat eating. That
led to having one, two, three glasses of wine. Those
things you don't need to injure day.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
All right, So I think the guests kind of spoke
for themselves. I do want to thank you all so
very much for listening as twenty twenty four comes to
a close, for me personally, for the Shaping Freedom team,
for all of us. I just want to give us
(41:39):
all a moment of applause and celebration and congratulation for
everything that you have personally gone through, work through, thrived
through released, elevated this. I'm wishing you all the very
(42:02):
best for twenty twenty five. I want to thank you
so much for listening. It means the world to me.
I cannot tell you how encouraged I feel, and how
encouraged my team feels when we hear people coming back
and talking about a little tidbit that they heard that
(42:24):
helped them to navigate something going on in their lives.
The topic of family and the ways we're interacting with
each other is one that we're going to continue to
build upon in twenty twenty five. And for now, I'm
wishing you the best end and wrap up to this year.
Take really good care of yourselves, give yourself as much
(42:48):
of a break as you possibly can. Naps are needed,
those conversations are needed. We want the best of you,
We want the healthiest of you. I look forward to
twenty twenty five. Thank you so much.
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