Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein. This is episode 31.

Today, I have an interview with an incredible trauma-informed, parenting coach. Her name is Manon. She is French and lives in Australia. She travels around different cities in her van with her five year old daughter, giving workshops and teaching parents about connecting with our children and all of these different ways where we can have a bodily, somatic experience of calm and peace and joy and connection. I really love following her stuff on Facebook and on Instagram. So, I reached out to her and asked if she would come speak with our audience, speak with you guys, all about the challenges of raising kids in general and specifically, children with hearing loss.

She gave us so much beautiful wisdom. It was a very moving episode for me. I learned a lot from it and took a lot out of it. On my own healing journey, I’ve been learning a lot about how our bodies work, how our nervous system responds to difficult situations, to trauma… And recently, I also learned about inner child work, recognizing that within us, within ourselves as adults, we still carry and move through the world with ourselves as a child. Sometimes with some unmet needs, with very difficult memories, or difficult experiences that we are carrying inside of our inner child. How to start to make a connection within ourselves to ourselves as children and bring that message to our inner child that they are not alone, that we can take care of them, that it’s safe now.

The more that I’ve done this work, the more that I’ve come to understand
what it was like for me to be a child. I’ve noticed so much growth in my own
parenting, and being able to relate to my children truly, truly as people, as
funny as that sounds. So, I found this to be very powerful and I wanted to
share some of that with you guys.

You know that it’s very important to me to integrate and put together all
the different pieces of our life, and all the different pieces of how audiology
is affecting our life, whether you are a student of audiology or if you have a
child or family member with a hearing loss, or if you are dealing with hearing
loss, you know that it’s complicated and it gets into many different parts of
your life; Your relationships, your ability to work, your ability to
communicate… For this episode, I’d like to ask you to give yourself the time
to listen to this episode and enjoy the slower pace of our conversation and
take in the messages that Manon shared with us.

I’ll also tell you that because she is in Australia, and I’m in Israel, we coordinated the time. It was 5:30 AM for me here, so, I thought I’d wake up early before my kids woke up, but alas they all joined me. So, you might hear the squeals and laughter and joy from my children throughout the episode, which is quite appropriate. I tried my best to edit out most of the disruptions. I think we’re still going to go with it, because that’s real life. It was actually quite beautiful in the end to have them there because you’ll hear Manon walk me through a little visualization, and having my children there actually made it really moving for me and I hope you’ll do that as well. She also references a meditation that I have, a free download which you can grab at allaboutaudiology.com/meditation. All you have to do is put your email in and you’ll get the meditation sent straight to you.