Growing up, you likely took in millions of messages about the kind of person & parent you were supposed to be… messages about your external appearance & surface level behaviors which came in the form of rules and definitions.
Success means doing these jobs and making this amount of money.
If you have these genitals, you’re supposed to do this for a living.
Your body is supposed to look like this in order for you to be attractive.
Showing your emotions means this about you. Not showing your emotions means this.
A good parent does this, and this, and this. And never does this or that.
When a parent is a good parent, you can tell because their child behaves like this and not that.
(I’ve left the rules & definitions ambiguous, because each person will have their own special flavors of what-means-what based on their upbringing.)
Trying to live your life according to these myriad and often conflicting rules can feel overwhelming, disappointing, and frustrating. You go about making choices which you think will bring you the fulfillment you’re seeking, yet the distance between you and fulfillment remains.
You may often find yourself stuck between wanting to make the right decision and fearing making the wrong one.
And especially when it comes to parenting, you probably have a squillion conflicting messages about what you’re supposed to and not supposed to do.
But... what if there is no such thing as an objectively right or wrong decision?
When you begin identifying the difference between your Self and your conditioning, you create space to connect with your inner truth and make decisions that are aligned for you.
Sometimes, those decisions may look like the decisions you were told you should make, but because you’re making them from a place of inner clarity, your internal experience will feel more grounded and peaceful.
And other times, those decisions may not match up with conditioned & societal norms! Over time, you’ll find that the more you follow your own clarity, the more you’ll also cultivate your confidence to continue pursuing your own energetic alignment (instead of trying to avoid everyone else’s potential judgment).
While, of course, you won’t divorce yourself from your decades-old patterns of belief & behavior overnight, deciding to attend to your inner world will provide you with many opportunities to integrate your awareness on a daily basis, which moves you in the direction of feeling more alignment from moment to moment to moment.
I don’t subscribe to there being a singular right or wrong way to parent (or to live, for that matter). In my work with folks, we explore how conditioning is showing up in all of the aspects of their parenting & life in order to create more space for integrity, clarity, and fulfillment.
I’ll spotlight opportunities to break out of the right/wrong and good/bad paradigms of judgment in order to root more firmly into your inner truth and start making decisions from that place.
About Me
Hey… I’m Nic Strack (pronouns: they/them)! 👋🏽🤗
I’ve been fascinated by relationships & responsibility since I was a wee one, and my love of observing myself and others only strengthened over time.
I went to college at the University of California - Berkeley and got a degree in Cognitive Science with an emphasis on Psychology.
Now I’m in my late 30s and I’m in the process of integrating my myriad experiences from the past few decades into my daily life. I’m divesting from my former obsession with “self-help” and “self-improvement” and am discovering new facets of my conditioning and of my Self alllllllll the time.
As I question and look underneath social & cultural norms, I’m establishing my own & my fambly’s own way of living and relating which are actually aligned with who we are as individuals and as a fambly.
It’s a very challenging & deeply rewarding process which is full of ups and downs on the day-to-day!
My perspectives are informed by an infinite number of unnameable & unknowable factors — AND — some of the factors which I know inform my perspectives include that I’m a queer, audhd (autistic + adhd), trans, gender fluid, mixed-race, mama of color who was raised by immigrants in the USA.
My mom passed away in September 2020, and my brother passed away in October 2022. Their deaths have taught me so much about grief, loss, relationships, expectations, control, surrender, responsibility, life, presence, love, and more.
I’m married to my best bro, Eric (he/him), and our two sweet baby bubbas are Uni (they/she) and Kylo (he/they). 🥰