The Invisible Ghosts You're Passing on to Your LGBTQ Child and How to Finally Let Them Go

In today's episode, we will consider that the ghosts that haunt our parenting aren't in the dark. They're in our stories, our silences, and our fears. Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast helping parents of LGBTQ+ kids move from fear to fierce allyship and feel less alone and more informed so you can protect what matters, raise brave kids, and spark collective change. I'm Heather Hester. Let's get started. In today's reflection, you'll discover how parenting awakens old ghosts of bias and silence. You'll learn why breaking cycles of fear matters for your kids' safety and freedom. And you'll walk away with questions to uncover and release your own ghosts. And stick around for today's unlearn, where I'll challenge the myth that avoiding the past is the same as healing from it. Welcome back to More Human, More Kind. I'm Heather Hester, and today we're talking about the ghosts we carry as parents and allies. Not the spooky kind, but the actual invisible ones, the old fears and silences and biases that linger. In our hearts and in our homes. If you're listening, you care about raising brave, resilient kids and about breaking cycles that keep us small. But sometimes those inherited patterns sneak back in. They shape how we respond to our children or to differences, leaving us wondering, why we react that way again. In this episode, you'll learn how to name those ghosts, release what isn't yours to carry, and create more space for connection, compassion, and freedom. Because if we don't face them, we risk passing them on, and our kids deserve better than that. So you might imagine ghosts as shadows in the dark, right? But the real ones, they live inside us. They echo in the way that we raise our kids and in the patterns we repeat without even noticing. So what are these ghosts? I think sometimes it is helpful to have something we can visualize when we are dealing with internal stuff. Ghosts as a concept allow each of us to create our own visual to associate with our inherited patterns, our fears, the unspoken rules we grew up with or have accumulated throughout our lives. Similar to the name it to tame it method, face it to replace it works great for this visualization process. When you can see the fear or inherited patterns or unspoken rules, et cetera, when you can see these things clearly, you can swap it out for something stronger or kinder. Think about ghosts that you may have: silence around hard topics, discomfort with difference, inherited shame. How can Face It to Replace It work for you with these? Well, let's just take the first one and practice. Hard topics can bring out the fight, flight, or freeze response in most of us, with silence or freeze being the most common. Take some time with this specific pattern. Meditate on it. Journal about it. Face it. Ideas for ways to replace it may come to you during this process. If not, take some time considering ways you can change your patterns around hard topics that feel aligned with who you are. This is definitely one of my ghosts, so I will share a few tactics that I use with this one. First, instead of ignoring the topic, I will acknowledge it, but not engage. For certain hard topics, I have spent considerable time thinking about how I want to approach them with certain people so I don't freeze. But I think that the biggest help has been staying connected to myself. Remembering who I am, not getting caught up in the stories of the past or sucked into those old patterns, those old playbooks. And finally, I think parenting LGBTQ+ kids or finding yourself suddenly in a shift in your life plan often will bring all of these ghosts right to the surface. So why do we need to face our ghosts? Why can't we just let them float in and out of our consciousness, or even better, pretend that they aren't there at all? In most simple terms, facing our ghosts allows us to free them so we can move forward, so we can heal, so we can grow and achieve and be fully, authentically ourselves. If we don't do this work, we pass our ghosts onto our kids. And there's no maybe with that. It just happens. I actually love it when there is science to explain concepts that feel more esoteric. In 2014, Rachel Yehuda began research on intergenerational trauma which broadened the understanding of how trauma is transmitted across generations, these ghosts. And she examined in this research the biological, psychological, and social mechanisms surrounding this. So in most simple terms, trauma can be passed through the generations via alterations to the DNA. What does this mean? How does this happen? Well, first, violence and trauma can leave scars on— actual scars on the DNA, in the DNA. Descendants of traumatized individuals exhibit psychological changes in stress regulation and actual brain structure. And different interpretations suggest that some biological changes might be adaptive protective mechanisms, not just negative dysfunction, which is actually really fascinating. What ghosts can generational trauma create? Well, one is compromised or emotionally unavailable parenting styles. Another few can be heightened anxiety or interpersonal avoidance. A sense of mistrust. They can also be harmful coping mechanisms such as substance abuse or self-isolation. So what can be done? In her research, Rachel Yehuda found that narrative therapy is one thing that works really, really well. It encourages survivors to flip that script from victim to survivor. So let's zoom back out again and talk about a 3-step approach to facing our own ghosts, our personal ghosts. So first, I want you to notice when you feel triggered or scared, especially around something that involves your child. That's all this first step is because it is a lot easier said than done. Just notice, be aware, acknowledge, ask, is this mine or is this theirs? The second step is to interrupt that. When a ghost shows up, use the Face It to Replace It method. Say out loud, I see you, and this ends here and now. And then third, choose a new response, something that feels authentic to you, something that feels aligned with who you are. If it doesn't, you're not gonna do it. So pick something like curiosity or empathy or simply listening. Intergenerational ghosts pop up at the oddest times, especially when you've been doing work to heal and become more aware and connected. I've found that parenting teenagers especially draws them out for me out of seemingly nowhere. A phrase or a rule or dogma that was drilled into my psyche as a teen will either sneak into my rotation of parenting options or worse, just pop out of my mouth in a moment of frustration. Which is so annoying. So in addition to giving myself some grace for being human, which is also easier said than done, these times help me see where I am still carrying my mother or my father's voices into conversations, into my parenting. And these moments teach me that we all parent with ghosts, but we don't have to let them run the show. And perhaps most importantly, we can work through them and let them go so they don't become our children's ghosts as well. And this actually brought up something that I just wanna riff on for a moment, and that is that parenting is weirdly full of mirrors. And sometimes those mirrors show us shadows. The ghosts we carry aren't here to haunt us forever. They are here to remind us that we can choose differently, that we have choices, which is one of my most favorite things that I have learned along this healing path. There's always a choice. And the more that we are aware, the more that we are willing to really look in those mirrors to see those shadows, to face those shadows, we have choices. And we have choices to choose differently. We have the choice to heal. We have the choice to walk through. So I'd love for you to think about what ghosts show up most often in your parenting. For me, among many things, the two that popped up right away when I was writing this were religion and binaries. That everything that I was taught was, was taught on a binary, that everything exists on a binary. Whose voice do you hear when you feel yourself overreacting? For me, when I feel anger, I hear my father's voice. I hear my father's voice telling me that, quote unquote, the secret to a long life is to never getting angry. And that is what I grew up with, was not ever being allowed to be angry, to exhibit anger. My emotional growth was very stunted until I got a lot older and realizing that anger actually is an emotion that gives us so much information and learning to acknowledge it and sit with it and understand what it is telling us is far better than stuffing it down and pretending it doesn't exist. So, um, I just share that with you because I imagine that I'm not the only one that hears something similar to that. And then finally, how can you begin to release a ghost? By choosing curiosity over that fear. Again, I think a practice that makes this, I don't wanna say easier, but that makes this maybe more manageable is the idea of holding the tension of the opposites or acknowledging, understanding that many things can be true at once. So when you're looking, acknowledging this fear, naming this fear, and then also wanting to be curious about it, that it isn't just a clean switch from one to the other, right? There's, there's this messy in the middle part. So being able to hold that all of those things can be true at once really helps as you are working through, walking through, and healing. Before we jump into the unlearn for today, I want to take 30 seconds just to consider what kindness looks like in these moments. It can look like compassion for yourself and remembering that you are not broken because you carry ghosts. I want you to flip that and remember that you are brave because you are willing to face them. So The Unlearn is where we shine a light on the myths, the noise, and the unhelpful messages we've picked up and choose to let them go. Because when we do, we free up so much space for courage and for kindness. Today's Unlearn is about the myth that avoiding the past is the same as healing from it. We were told if we don't talk about it, it will go away. Or maybe perhaps if we stuff the pain or trauma from the past way, way deep down, it will stay hidden. Or perhaps even we were even shamed into silence by sayings like, "We do not air our dirty laundry." But here's the thing: silence doesn't equal healing. It equals repetition. And I'm gonna say that again because it is so important and so powerful. Silence doesn't equal healing. It equals repetition. What if facing our ghosts, naming them, talking about them, was actually the way to set them free? Healing doesn't happen in silence or in shame spirals. It happens with courage and sharing and connection with other people. This week, take 5 minutes to write down one ghost from your childhood you do not want to pass on. Ask yourself, what new story do I want here instead? When we unlearn silence, we reimagine healing and we act our way into a braver, freer world. Today we explored the ghosts of parenting, those invisible fears and silences that haunt us, and how facing them can set us and our children free. We can't choose the ghosts we inherit, but we can choose which ones we keep carrying and which ones we finally lay to rest. Face them, replace them, heal, move forward. If you want to keep exploring what it means to raise brave, kind kids and to do your own healing along the way, you can sign up for my weekly reflections at morehumanmorekind.com. It's where this work continues. Thank you for listening, for doing the work, and for choosing to be more human and more kind. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep facing those ghosts with courage.