#53 Reconnecting to, and healing, the inner child w/ Tiffany Trieu (Triệu Thanh Nguyệt)
“The reason why you are hearing that [inner] voice now, loud and clear, is because you are ready to face your traumas. Sometimes we haven’t heard that voice in the past because it might have been too overwhelming for us. We might have felt like there’s not that space to be held, and that’s when traumas happen, when we don’t have that space to really fully integrate that experience within ourselves.”
How can we relearn practices of self/community nourishment, taking up space and boundary-setting through serving the needs of our inner children? In what ways can inner child work aid us to co-create safer environments for both children and adults, aswell as the relationships between both?
Today, we are joined by Tiffany Trieu (Triệu Thanh Nguyệt), an inner child advocate, community cultivator, and human connector. As a child of refugees, specifically of the Vietnamese diaspora in the 1970s, Tiffany has spent the last five years of her adulthood exploring how family trauma from surviving a war has shaped how she relates to herself and those around her. She believes our inside and outside worlds are much more connected than we’re given space to acknowledge. And currently loves exploring how personal and collective rituals allow us to bridge our inside to our outside, from meditative visualisations to communal celebrations.
In this open, emotional and deeply inspiring conversation, Agrita and Tiffany explore what it means to heal the inner child through embodiment practices, tending to, and balancing, our inner child and parent needs, and being there for ourselves in order to mend damaged relationships with loved ones, the wider community and place.
What to listen out for:
Tiffany's grounding practice of doing breathing exercises before discussing sensitive topics like inner child work
Power of inner child expression within the "adult world" e.g. work spaces
Inner child healing as foundational to self-parenting
Connecting the dots between childhood and adulthood ruptures through listening to our inner voices
Addressing gaps in consent education for children and how these traumas infiltrate into the adult world
Co-creation of safe spaces for children, with children, by being there for ourselves as adults
Liberating the inner child through emotional expression, creativity and play
Challenging our tendency to discredit ourselves in healing work by valuing our inner/ancestral wisdom
Reframing the negative narrative around expressing/connecting to our inner children to alleviate ourselves of years of suppression of our thoughts, emotions and inner wisdom
Working with older generations to tend to generational traumas, to hold each other accountable and preserve community integrity
Importance of sitting with the truth to slow down the process of healing, with the example of mourning
Legitimising the experience of "negative" emotions e.g. rage and what it means for your inner child
Resources:
The Power of Discord by Claudia M. Gold and Edward Tronick
Tiffan'y MindBodyGreen article
Dr. Trish Phillips: thedoodledoc.com
Self-Parenting: A Guide to Inner Conversations by John K. Pollard III
Kwonyin: www.kwonyin.global (Tiffany's friend and fellow healer)