Chrissy Powers on moving away from the purist ‘good girl’ archetype, and reparenting ourselves while parenting

Life After Birth with Yara Heary

Hi mamas. Today on the podcast, I’m joined by Chrissy Powers, a licensed marriage and family therapist, mum, wife, writer and embodiment coach. I’ve been following Chrissy on social media for quite some time and I just love her beautiful, authentic, warm presence, which shines through in this conversation.

In this episode, we discuss Chrissy’s background and some of her early internalised ideas of being the ‘good girl’, how this showed up in her adulthood and her mothering, and her departure from this archetype over time, allowing her to redefine herself according to her own ideals in her thirties and into her forties.

We also discuss purity culture and Chrissy’s experience of growing up in a small evangelical Christian church, the ideals that she was raised with, and the shame, guilt and isolation this culture can create. We discuss this in relation to Chrissy’s experience of parenting her children, and where the line is between what is and what isn’t our job as parents.

We also discuss:

• How our children shouldn’t and can’t be the complete source of our fulfilment, and our experiences of needing work and other pursuits to feel fully whole, which ultimately then allows us to give more to our families and connect with our children in a more present way

• Chrissy’s traumatic birth experience and the start of her mothering journey, and the disparity between what so many of us expect motherhood to be, and our lived experiences of it, and the significance and importance of having support in those early stages

• Consciously choosing to parent in a different way to how you were parented, and the immense work involved in having to heal the parts of ourselves that may still be hurting from our childhood experiences, to then allow us to parent in a different way for our own children, to imprint a new legacy into our family.

• Getting rid of the ‘good child’ archetype, which is fed into by the ‘good girl’ archetype and the thinking that our child’s behaviour reflects on us, which is not a responsibility for our children to hold

And much more. This was a beautiful conversation and I hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it.

Here is where you can find out more about me (Yara), how to work with me and some resources:

Why Am I So Angry Workshop

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@lifeafterbirthpsychology

www.lifeafterbirth.com.au

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Find out more about Chrissy:

@chrissyjpowers

https://chrissypowers.com/