Live •  Interactive •  Online

Mothering As Medicine

A Trauma-Informed Parenting Course To Promote 
Your Children's Optimal Physical & Mental Health

With Lissa Rankin, MD & Rachel Gilgoff, MD

Live on Zoom • March 26 to April 30, 2025
Wednesdays from 9:00 to 11:00 Pacific Time • Six Two-Hour Sessions

Dr. Lissa Rankin

New York Times bestselling author, doctor, researcher, and teacher.

Rachel Gilgoff, MD

Pediatrician, integrative medicine specialist, speaker, and trauma specialist.

PRESENT

Mothering As Medicine

Mothering As Medicine is a 6-week trauma-informed parenting course for mothers of young or adult children. The course is co-taught by OB/GYN Lissa Rankin, MD and Pediatrician Rachel Gilgoff, MD, who are both mothers who are passionate about preventing and treating the kinds of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) traumas, as well as developmental traumas, that lead to chronic illness in both pediatric and adult populations. 
 
This course is designed for any “mother-identifying” people to empower you with the knowledge and skills to address the root causes of your young or adult child’s struggles and develop more safety, intimacy, healing, and secure connection with your young or adult kids. Using cutting-edge science and compassionate techniques, you’ll learn how to foster optimal physical and mental health for your child—and for yourself. 

This course integrates tools like an understanding of a child’s developmental needs, attachment theory, Internal Family Systems, polyvagal theory, generational trauma work, and ways to repair ruptures in your connection with your kids, so you can create a transformative experience for your family. Whether your child is grappling with anxiety, depression, behavioral challenges, or chronic health issues, this course will help you become the healing presence they need, so you can get closer with your kids in the best possible way.

As parents, it’s scary to learn that the scientific link between childhood trauma and pediatric or adult-onset disease is solid. If our kids have mental or physical health struggles, did we do something to contribute to their challenges? Is there anything we can do to improve the physical or mental health outcomes of our kids by healing our own trauma, helping our kids heal theirs, parenting differently, or breaking generational trauma patterns?

This course isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about learning how to foster safety, connection, healthy attachment, autonomy, mutual respect, and healing in your family. Join us for a trauma-informed, Internal Family Systems-friendly, non-shaming, non-blaming 6 week online Zoom healing workshop for anyone identifying as the primary caregiver of young kids, the mothering influence of adult children, or anyone considering becoming a parent who wants to set their kids up for optimal health.

"Trauma is a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence." – Peter Levine

  • Do you feel your kids are slipping away and you don’t know how to connect? 
  • Does your child have physical or mental health issues and you are wondering if it has anything to do with you?  
  • Did you have a rough relationship with one or both of your parents and are worried you are doing the same thing to your child?
  • ​Are you worried your partner is a “bad” parent and don’t know what to do about it? 
  • ​Does your child have chronic medical issues and the stress of it is wearing down on them and the whole family? 
  • ​Would you like better intimacy, to feel closer to your child? 
  • ​Would you like to support your teen in picking “better” friends and romantic partners, but you don’t want to be too controlling or intrusive? 
  • ​Would you like to set your kid up to have healthier relationships when they are adults? 
  • ​Has your child been going to therapy for years and is not getting relief? 
  • ​Is your child’s therapist suggesting psychiatric medications and you are wondering if there is something else to do instead? 
  • ​Is it possible your child’s medical problem might actually be a parenting problem?
  • ​Is there an uncomfortable distance between you and your adult kids and you long to reconnect?

Are Your Children or Adult Kids Struggling With Physical Or Mental Health Issues? 

Especially since the pandemic, many of us with young kids, teenagers, or adult children have watched those we love the most struggle. The pandemic interrupted the developmental stages of countless children, teenagers, and college-aged young adults, putting them in the pressure cooker of lockdown with parents and siblings, without the support of their peers. Add to this the stressors of a potentially lethal pandemic, the educational interruptions and job displacement, and the relational challenges with their parents and peers, and you have a recipe for a generation of kids who grow up with extra challenges that are nobody’s fault. And that doesn’t even touch upon the ravages of climate change or political instability and how that will affect their futures.

As caring parents who want to set our children up for success in health and life, is there anything we can do to make this time easier for our kids, young and old? Why not take advantage of this opportunity for deeper intimacy with our kids, so we can help them (and ourselves) heal from the past and set them up to have healthier, happier lives? Why not teach our kids the basics of Internal Family Systems (IFS), help them learn to speak for their parts, and show them that we want to help them heal their pandemic wounds or their Mommy or Daddy wounds, not when they’re 60, but as soon as they’re ready to do so.

As a pediatrician who worked with California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris, MD on the ACES Aware project, and as an OB/GYN physician who supported many mothers through the transition into parenting, Rachel Gilgoff and Lissa Rankin feel amazed at how often parents bring kids into clinic with health issues that involve a larger family dynamic and underlying family stress. 

Maybe a child’s mother is being too controlling, and the child is resisting that control by controlling the only thing nobody else can control- their own body. Maybe their migraines, their chronic pain, or their gastrointestinal or menstrual problems are actually the result of chronic nervous system dysregulation caused by unprocessed trauma. Maybe their depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or addictions are stemming from not feeling safe enough at home to fully express their uncomfortable feelings, so it’s easier to numb out, distract themselves, or shut down emotionally than to express their rage, terror, helplessness, hopelessness, or grief.

These dynamics are often the intergenerational transmission of trauma - big T or little t. 

They reflect how you were parented and what you came to see as normal parenting. In this course, we’ll invite you to consider questions like “How were you parented? How has that affected your physical and mental health today? How has that impacted how you view yourself and others? Did you get your needs met as a child? Did you feel safe and loved? Was there predictability and empathy?” 

How were you parented? How has that affected your physical and mental health today? How has that impacted how you view yourself and others?  Did you get your needs met as a child? Did you feel safe and loved? Was there predictability and empathy?” 

Often we do one of two things in response to the way we were parented. We- parent the same way, or we go in the completely opposite direction. Regarding parenting the same way, we may think to ourselves, “I turned out okay, so the way my parents parented must have been the right way.” However, when we really sit with ourselves, our sensations, our ways of being, we might start to notice the ways that we are not actually okay. We might get in touch with the ways we are struggling to maintain the facade for the outer world, when our home life, our relationships, our inner well-being and health are suffering. Some of us may go the other way. Our parents were strict, militaristic, and authoritarian, so we shower our kids with love, nurturance, and empathy. However, we often go too far and become permissive parents, giving empathy without boundaries, expectations, and structure.   

We may have had neglectful or permissive parents and feel we need to protect our children by being extra strict, which may turn into rigid, controlling, inflexible parenting, without the empathy and warmth kids need. The nugget here is that, as parents, we are all trying our best. We all want to do right by our kids and see them grow up to be successful. Our childhood experiences, however, can unknowingly derail our efforts. We may feel that our strict rules and strong punishments are a way of protecting our children and preparing them for the harsh world. We may feel that being permissive is a way of showing our unconditional love and support. However, there is a mountain of science showing that we need both - empathy and boundaries, love and structure, nurturing and high expectations. 

Maybe you feel good about the way you’re parenting, but you’re struggling with the way your partner parents. Maybe you see the ways in which your partner is passing his or her trauma down to your children. Maybe you have tried all the ways you can think of to help your partner be a better parent, but you’re are at your wits end.

Unfortunately, the impact of the way we parent doesn’t stop in childhood. As the ACE studies have shown, those with high ACE scores have a life expectancy twenty years shorter than those who experienced less trauma in childhood. But even if those traumas weren’t our fault or our parents fault, Positive Childhood Experiences (PCE’s), which we can help create for our kids, can be an antidote to some of the inevitable pains our kids go through. 

As uncomfortable as it is to examine this, all of us, no matter how good our intentions, have done something that lands as traumatic to our children, often because we either repeat the traumatizing behaviors of our own parents or because we rebel and do just the opposite, which may also be differently traumatic. So don’t worry! You don’t have to be a perfect parent. Studies show that “good enough” parenting is enough to set our kids up for healthier, happier lives. But you can take responsibility for learning what it means to be a “good enough” parent, and if your kids are already grown and you weren’t a good enough parent, you may have more power than you realize to turn around your relationships with your kids, positively impacting not only their mental and physical health, but your own.

Rather than getting paralyzed with shame over this inevitability, we can rise to the occasion, put our pride aside, and hold ourselves and each other accountable for the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) traumas or “the trauma of everyday life” relational traumas that we might have unwittingly passed on to our kids.

Even more empowering and inspiring is the potent opportunity to deepen the trust, safety, intimacy, and capacity for healing with our young or adult children. Especially for those who might have grown distant from adult children, taking the plunge into deep healing work on ourselves- and then approaching our kids with greater insight, humility, and care for their wellbeing- can be the most important personal development work we ever do. It might even improve our own health or the health of our kids.

We can do this brave, courageous healing work as gently as possible when we examine the way we parent through the infinitely compassionate, non-pathologizing lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS). And then, if they’re open to it, we can share “parts language” with our young or adult children, as a way to grow closer and develop greater intimacy, safety, trust, and enjoyment with our kids.

If this trauma-informed, science-based, heart opening parenting workshop sounds like just what the doctor ordered for you as a parent, your relationships with your kids, and a path to better physical and mental health for both you and your children, we welcome you to learn, share, grow, and heal together in safe, brave community.

"Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work." – C.S. Lewis

THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR YOU IF:

  • Your young or adult child has a medical condition doctors are struggling to cure and you’re wondering if there’s anything you might be able to do to counteract the helpless feelings you feel;
  • You have a child struggling with mental health issues you suspect might be trauma-related, and you want to encourage your child to embark upon a healing journey, rather than only taking medications;
  • You’re considering becoming a parent and you want to learn about healthy childhood development, attachment, and how to prevent relational trauma in your future child’s development;
  • ​Your relationship with your kids is strained and you want to take responsibility for healing anything that might have come between you and your kids so you can repair any disconnection and foster secure attachment;
  • ​You realize you might have been too controlling, too lax, too conflict avoidant, too intrusive, too emotionally unavailable, too neglectful, too narcissistic, too boundaryless, too distracted, too absent, too much of a helicopter parent, or too passive when you needed to protect your child from someone else- and you want to make it right now that you realize it;
  • You want a lifetime relationship with your kids and you’re willing to put in the work to create the conditions to foster that goal.

"Acknowledging the pain you’ve caused is the first step to rebuilding trust." – Brené Brown

When we give our kids permission to express what upsets them about us as parents, when we earn their trust and demonstrate that we can handle hearing what’s true for them in ways that demonstrate our maturity, our love, our curiosity, and our ability to Self-regulate our own parts, we invite our kids to step into deeper intimacy with us. When they learn that we can handle hearing the ways in which we’re imperfect as parents, when they stop having to take responsibility for our feelings and are allowed to just express their own, we can help calm their nervous systems, strengthen their immune systems, and set them up to have the kind of “ventral vagal” co-regulation and connection that helps support optimal physical and mental health. 

When we can show our kids we’re trustworthy, we can support them to speak up about what we might have done to interfere with the connection we all crave with our kids. They can feel safe enough to confront us with their legitimate distress without kicking off defensive parts in us, parts that invalidate or deny their experience, parts that take their complaints too personally or center ourselves too much, or parts that might attack and blame-shift, eroding trust with our kids. 

This might feel challenging at first, especially if you were raised with parents who never offered you this kind of humility, showed little interest in repairing disconnection.

We Will Guide You Through:

  • Learning the basics of Internal Family Systems so you can educate your young or adult child about the IFS model and share “parts language” within the family;
  • Understanding developmental stages, so you can diagnose whether your child got stuck at any developmental stage, no matter how old they are now;
  • Brushing up on attachment styles and learning how to foster secure connections with your kids;
  • ​Discover how attachment styles influence your child’s behavior and emotional well-being, well into their adult relationships;
  • ​Learning how to repair and strengthen your bond with your child, fostering a secure attachment that promotes resilience, even if you’re both adults;
  • Making sense of different styles of stress responses by understanding Polyvagal Theory, learning strategies to help your child (and yourself) move into ventral vagal states of safety and connection;
  • ​Identifying patterns of trauma that may have been passed down in your family, so you can break the chain and let it end with you;
  • ​Modeling healthy boundaries to create safety and trust, so your child will know how to protect themselves and individuate;
  • ​Gaining insight into what children need at each stage to grow into autonomous, healthy adults;
  • ​Understanding the impact of making your child the golden child, lost child, or scapegoat
  • ​Translating what your children are trying to tell you through the behaviors they exhibit;
  • ​Learning why “helping” your child too much may be disempowering;
  • ​How perfectionism can impact your child throughout a lifetime;
  • ​How to support your family - your children, possibly your partner - while still supporting yourself;
  • ​How to help yourself heal, reparent your inner wounded child, and lead from your wise self;
  • ​Building your own village, your support system;
  • ​Finding the people who see you and love you as you are.

“If we help our children heal from the wounds we help create, we can change their relational future and impact their physical and mental health.” -Lissa Rankin, MD

What Inspired Lissa & Rachel To Co-Teach This Class?

Lissa Rankin, MD’s Inspiration

As an OB/GYN physician, I had the privilege of being the first person to touch new humans when they entered the world. I also got to watch those kiddos grow up with their mamas and see how the way someone parents impacts a child’s development. Then it was my turn to become a mother, and I realized that being a full-time OB/GYN was going to developmentally traumatize my child’s need for secure attachment to her mother. It took me a year after my baby’s birth to extricate myself from a corrupt health care system that gave lip service to patient wellbeing while ultimately selling out to the financial bottom line. During that year, I watched her develop the avoidant attachment style, no doubt because of my unavoidable neglect, given that I was required to take 72-hour call shifts monthly and 36-hour call shifts every few days. I felt so much grief over my involvement in her attachment wounding that I introduced her to Internal Family Systems (IFS) at the age of 7 and got her into IFS therapy as soon as she was ready, at 16, during the pandemic. 

Before she went to Portugal for a gap year before college, my teenage daughter then invited me to join her in therapy, so we could talk about our “parts” together and help her heal her Mommy wounds. This gave me a chance to show her that I could be trusted to take responsibility for my impact on her childhood development, to be curious about getting to know her parts compassionately, without judgment, to be non-defensive when listening, witnessing, mirroring and validating any pain she experienced because of my mothering, and to show her I want to make amends for any harm I’ve caused, whether it was intentional or not. The outcome of that joint therapy was magical. We were able to develop compassion and empathy for each other, get to know each other’s parts in a safe way, and get validation from each other about how we’d both been feeling. My daughter also learned that she wasn’t responsible for my feelings and that any pain I might experience because of my relationship with her isn’t her fault or her job to fix. This freed her to have empathy for my feelings- and allowed me to have empathy for hers- without getting all tied up in each other’s shoelaces.

When I met Rachel Gilgoff because of our shared interest in trauma healing as it relates to the treatment and prevention of medical illness and because of her work with Nadine Burke Harris around the ACES Aware initiative in California, we began discussing mothering as it relates to medicine. We felt inspired to create a class she might then share with the parents across California and beyond.

Rachel Gilgoff, MD’s Inspiration

My first fellowship was in Child Abuse Pediatrics, and my role for ten years was to evaluate for physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. I vividly remember talking to a mother, telling her that her infant son had multiple broken bones consistent with physical abuse, and her tearful response: “How did this happen? I swore I would be a better mother than my mother was.” Learning about the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the neurobiological and physiologic impact of trauma and toxic stress, and the intergenerational transmission of suffering, made me realize I needed to learn more about ways in which I as a medical provider could do my part in the multidisciplinary prevention and healing of toxic stress. Over the years, I practiced trauma-informed care as best I could within a traumatizing system. However, I became increasingly frustrated with our child protection system including systemic biases, lack of awareness of trauma neurobiology in their treatment planning, and the use of consequences rather than a strengths-based, healing-centered approach for children and their caregivers. Our healthcare and child welfare systems are like strict, authoritarian parents - which we know from science is not the most helpful parenting style. 

While this vicarious trauma from my work was building within me, I was becoming increasingly anxious, tired, and depressed. 

And my family was struggling because of it. I was unprepared for the flood of emotions that I would experience - in particular, the anger - that I would then take out on my children. People who know me would most likely describe me as easy going, quiet, shy, and introspective. I don’t think I ever yelled or even raised my voice until I had children. It was a complete shock to me how out of control I could feel when confronted with such small people. 

What I didn’t realize at the time was how my past childhood experiences and the stress of my current job was affecting my neurobiology, my health and wellness, as well as how I parented my children.

Once I learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences and how they affect our health and well-being on a cellular level, I quit my super stressful job to focus on my family’s mental and physical health - to find answers and healing strategies for myself, my family, and my patients. It has been said that our children teach us more about ourselves than we teach them. And boy have I learned a lot over the past seven years once I opened myself to the lessons. While I continue to learn and grow, I have found strategies and interventions that keep me regulated and more present for my kids (and husband!) and to heal my internal wounds. And the result - we are all more mentally and physically healthy. We treat each other with respect and empathy and thoroughly enjoy being around each other. I hear people talk about the teen years as though there is no hope and that we are doomed to have bad relationships with our teens until they develop their frontal lobes. We set the expectation that our teens will talk back, be disrespectful, and ignore us. I can testify on a personal, academic, and professional level that there is another way!  

As parents, we can start by healing our own childhood traumas, learning strategies to manage our own emotions in the moment, and creating a parenting strategy that encompasses both empathy and healthy expectations. 

I now practice Integrative Medicine at Getzwell Personalized Pediatrics, train other physicians and health care clinicians about trauma-informed care, and conduct research at Stanford University. My strong belief is that toxic stress is treatable and that we can all heal at any age. I look forward to connecting with you on a deeper level and building this parenting village together.  

The Workshop Program*

Six LIVE 2-hour Zoom Sessions with Lissa Rankin & Rachel Gilgoff

All sessions will be recorded and are available within 24 hours of each session.

* Session content subject to adjustment.

9 am - 11 am Pacific Time

11 am - 1 pm Central Time

12pm - 2pm Eastern Time

Session One
Wednesday, March 26th. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
Opening Circle To Support Mothering Energy
Imagine if your mother or father could show up to our opening circle to own up to anything she or he did to unwittingly cause you pain. Imagine if you could get the apology you need for any intentional or unintentional harm done to you because of your caregivers, or lack thereof. This is exactly what we’ll help you journey into. During our opening ritual, we’ll help you tap into the generational wounds you might have taken on from your own caregivers. We’ll also help you get clear, both individually and collectively, what your intentions are for participating in this journey. 

We’ll help you get clear on your values as a parent, what you want for your family, and how we can support each other in a safe, brave community as mom-identifying people. We’ll guide you through a meaningful ritual to help support your best intentions, while holding a space of empathy, confidentiality, clear boundaries, and vulnerability. We’ll be using writing, movement, ritual, music, and other modalities to open a liminal space for healing, not just for your kids, but for you. 
Session Two
Wednesday, April 2nd. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
 The Link Between Trauma & Physical or Mental Illness
Are you in survival mode? Is your child? In this session, we use guided practices, experiential learning, Internal Family Systems, somatic movement, and psychoeducation to explore how supportive, challenging, and traumatic experiences change our biology, for ourselves and our children. This will help us understand how our survival strategies show up in our behaviors and emotional responses- and what we can do to turn those reflexive survival strategies around.  

We all want to do well, to be our best selves, to show up in a calm, collected, thoughtful way. So when we aren’t doing well with ourselves or our children, it is often because we are neurobiologically in survival mode. When we or our kids yell, scream, ignore, belittle, zone out, submit, or wind up disconnected or estranged, these are behaviors that tell us we are in survival mode, ruled by our instinctual stress response. In those moments, our nervous systems are on fire, and we are neurobiologically unable to use our thinking, rational minds. This isn’t willful defiance, disrespect, or laziness; it is brain biology. It’s a stress response. These behaviors are a form of communication, but they don’t always communicate what we intend for them to. Knowing this, we can avoid the pitfalls of common behavior modification strategies and instead lean into tools that help us and our children feel safe, understood, and seen.  

Once we recognize that these “acting out” behaviors are understandable and sometimes unavoidable trauma responses, once we learn what’s within our power to change, what do we do if we realize our partner or someone else close to our child might be causing intentional or unintentional harm? How do we intervene or protect our child from a co-parent, spouse, or the romantic partner of an adult child, while maintaining good boundaries and not being too controlling? You’ll come away from this session with practical tools to help you get through the next week or two with your young or adult kids in ways that might be different than what you’re accustomed to.

Session Three
Wednesday, April 9th. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
The Development Stages Our Kids Must Master
Even if you became a mother when you didn’t choose to, most of us want what’s best for our children and can’t imagine we would ever do anything that could harm them. But no matter how many books we read, how much we try to be “perfect,” and how loving our intentions are, sometimes we aren’t exactly the medicine our kiddos need. We might even, without even knowing it’s happening, participate in actions that cause chronic nervous system dysregulation in our kids, which can lead to physical and mental health struggles in our younger or older kids. This can be a hard pill to swallow. We’d rather believe our kids are like cars, and when they break down, we can just drop them at the mechanic for an overhaul. But sadly, it’s not that simple. Sometimes, if we want the best health outcomes for our kids, we need to become the medicine they need in order to make the most out of what conventional medicine might have to offer our kids.

In this session, we’ll teach you about childhood development and what happens when these developmental stages get interrupted, often through no fault of your own and with nothing but good intentions on your part. It’s not uncommon for developmental arrests at various stages to lead to attachment trauma, assertiveness issues, and personality disorders in adulthood. This can impact the way our kids show up in relationships in adulthood, including how they parent their own kids. We’ll link this up with our understanding of Internal Family Systems so we can have a non-pathologizing, non-demonizing lens on things like narcissism, codependence, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and other behavioral challenges that can result because kids got developmentally arrested at certain stages. The good news is that, even if we’re grown adults, we can still grow up! We’ll help you learn what you can do, and how you support your kids (with appropriate boundaries) to heal from developmental trauma they might not even know they have.

Session Four
Wednesday, April 16th. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
Attachment Theory & How To Foster Secure Attachment
Our early relationships influence how we see others and how we see ourselves. As kids, we grow up asking “Can I trust other people? Can I trust myself? Was I told and made to feel that I have value? Was I allowed to have my own emotions? Did my emotions matter? Was I supposed to be seen and not heard? Could I trust my caregivers? Did they protect me? Am I empowered to protect myself?” When our early attachment needs go unmet, we develop understandable survival strategies that can significantly impact how we (and our kids) behave in adulthood, especially in intimate relationships.

In this session we will explore the four main attachment styles, consider our own attachment style, get curious about the attachment styles our kids may have taken on, consider what the attachment styles of our caregivers might have been, and examine how these patterns are passed down from generation to generation. More importantly, we will explore the ways that attachment styles can heal at any age. The good news is that secure attachment can be earned- at any age! It is never too late to heal our own relational wounds and break the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Together we will explore the ways in which we can pass down our internal wisdom and post-traumatic growth to our children.   

Once we understand attachment wounding and the attachment styles we adopt to get by, we can work within this compassionate understanding to show up in ways that activate our loved ones less. We can also take their behaviors less personally and hopefully grow closer, with our hearts open and tender, rather than guarded and closed. We’ll be using writing, music, and IFS to work on our own attachment issues, bonding our own hurt parts with our wise mature Self energy. Once we can do this for ourselves, we’re more healthily enabled to support our kids in doing the same.

Session Five
Wednesday, April 23rd. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
Repairing Any Unintentional Damage We’ve Caused
As mom-identifying people, we all want what’s best for our kids. But sometimes we are innocently ignorant about some of the behaviors we pass on from our own parents or from our cultural conditioning that can actually interfere with the development, individuation, and autonomy of our kids, whether they’re young or grown. 

What happened when there was a rupture? What was your experience growing up regarding people, animals, or plants who were in pain? Was empathy modeled for you? How has that impacted your empathy with your kids? In this session, we’ll discuss the four steps of an authentic apology, how to initiate a repair conversation with people who have hurt you or who you’ve hurt, and how to be as absolutely gentle as possible with yourself when you make mistakes that might unintentionally harm your young or adult kids. 

In this session, we’ll teach you grounded, practical strategies adopted from Lissa and Jeff Rediger’s unpublished manuscript, walking you through exactly how to initiate a repair conversation that can leave you more bonded than before the rupture and more trusting in your future connection with your kids and other loved ones. This will also help model repair, so your child learn that relationships are messy and will inevitably have ruptures, but this doesn’t mean we can’t stitch them back together and rebuild trust when it’s broken.

Session Six
Wednesday, April 30th. 2025
9:00 am - 11:00 pm Pacific Time
Being The Parent Your Kids Want To Enjoy 
Now that we’ve learned so much about developmental trauma, attachment wounding, healthy boundaries, and how to repair inevitable relational ruptures, how do we take this out of the abstract and translate this into our daily lives? We’ll discuss practical ways to support our young or adult children, given our new understandings, with the hopes that we’ll be able to develop safer intimacy without enmeshment, supporting the separateness and autonomy of our kids, without being too controlling or too laissez faire. We’ll also close with a healing ritual designed to support you with approaching your kids at the right developmental stage to begin a process of repairing any damage we might have done to our kids, while also helping them understand who we are and why we did what we did.

Imagine if your mother had done this with you? What if she had taken ownership for the ways she may have caused you harm, whether she was a helicopter parent, passively neglectful when she should have stood up for you and had your back, or boundary-violating in her intrusiveness. The end goal is what all mom-identifying people want- love, connection, joy, fun with our kids, to know who they really are, to be known by them, to be the kinds of parents they want to spend time with as we grow older, to repair any estrangement that might have developed, and ultimately, to develop relationships with our adult kids that will last the rest of our lives, and if this is not possible, to make peace with what is and forgive ourselves and our kids.

++ BonuS PROGRAMS

Recorded Workshop
# 1 HEAL YOUR WOUNDED BOUNDARIES
An Internal Family Systems (IFS) Approach To Relational Boundary Negotiations
Get support in setting, negotiating, and respecting boundaries using Internal Family Systems, so you can protect yourself and others in order to enjoy deeper, safer intimacy, trust, empathy & respect in all your relationships.

Therapists, self-help books, and recovery programs hammer into us the importance of healthy boundaries, and rightfully so. Without boundaries to protect us from mistreatment and boundaries to contain us from mistreating others, relationships are often unsafe, trust erodes, the intimacy we all crave and need for our emotional, physical, and spiritual health is hard to find and sustain, and relationships can be retraumatizing. 

Without healthy, safe, emotionally intimate relationships, our health can suffer and our recovery can be impaired if we do wind up sick. But once we learn to put healthy boundaries in place, we’re free to let our hearts blossom, like putting a greenhouse around an orchid bulb and getting clear about who we will and won’t let into our greenhouse. 
Recorded Video Training
# 2 THE MOMENTS THAT MADE YOU
The stages of childhood development and the personality characteristics and challenges in adulthood if these stages are inadequately parented.
This video training with Lissa Rankin focuses on the stages of childhood development and what can happen in adulthood when we don't get our developmental needs met. 

If our kids are young, we can be proactive about preventing mental or physical health issues that can arise from developmental trauma and common parenting mistakes. If our kids are older or if we were inadequately parented, this can help us have compassion for our own developmentally traumatized parts, as well as having compassion and making amends with our adult kids if our parenting has caused challenges for them in adulthood.

++ BonuS RESOURCES

Pre-Recorded Video Series
The Stress And Health Video Series
with Dr. Rachel Gilgoff & Dr. Devika Bhushan
Dr Rachel Gilgoff is an integrative medicine specialist, child abuse pediatrician, researcher, science writer, and mother of two amazing kids. She is dedicated to improving care for stress-related health issues and promoting lifelong health and wellness. 

Dr Devika Bhushan is a pediatrician, public health leader, and equity and health changemaker. In 2022, she served as the Acting Surgeon General for California. She have lived experience as a woman of color, a parent, a person with bipolar disorder, and an Indian-American immigrant to the US by way of the Philippines.

"What brought me here was a desire to live fully...wounds and all. I love the support of your community, Lissa. What better place to learn, love, and grow". – Donna, workshop participant

Mothering As Medicine

EARLY BIRD PRICE IS ACTIVE
$347 Save $100
Only $247
USD
including all bonuses
If the cost of this workshop presents a financial hardship, we hope you will contact us for tuition adjustment options. Please write to support@lissarankin.com.

About Lissa Rankin, M.D.

Lissa knows personally how transformational that kind of safety can be for the creative process. 

Lissa had never written a book when she first took Nancy's Writing From The Heart workshop at Esalen in 2007, right after her father died, she had a baby, and she quit her job as a doctor in the wake of her Perfect Storm (aka memoir-making material.)

After that workshop, her first memoir flew out of her. Nancy and the community of other memoir writers opened up her writing voice, and although that first book didn't get published (Lissa had no "platform" at the time), she's published seven books since then, including two memoirs.

Owning, writing, and transforming your own story from pain into magnificence is worth doing purely for medicinal purposes, regardless of whether anybody else ever reads your writing. But some trauma survivors feel passionate about sharing the lessons they've learned from their memoir-making material and have a bee in their bonnets about helping others who are still in hell when they've been to hell and made it back with holy grails of wisdom. >>>
While you certainly don't have to publish your memoir in order to receive the healing benefits of writing it, sometimes holding your story in a book in your hands helps you get it out of your body and into something beautiful that can help others, even if you self publish it.
Lissa Rankin, MD believes that writing and healing can be intimately related and teaches writing workshops infused with trauma healing and spiritual healing, both in person and virtually. Lissa agrees with Nancy Aronie that trauma is memoir-making material, and we can alchemize our pain into the most beautiful story-telling when we feel safe for the muse to come out to play, in a community of other writers who also feel safe and can help us hold our story while we rewrite it as art. 

Lissa has been writing since kindergarten and was offered her first book deal when she was 12, which she turned down, since they were her private stories. She was a creative writing major at Duke University and wrote her first fiction book as her thesis on African American women's literature while in college. Throughout her medical training while becoming an OB/GYN, she wrote stories inspired by her patients and used writing to heal the moral injury she felt while working within a corrupt medical system. 

When she quit her job as a doctor in 2007, she finally succumbed to her lifelong desire to be a career writer. Her first book Broken, a memoir about her journey through the wounded health care system, never got published because she didn't have an audience. So at the urging of her literary agent, in 2009, Lissa began blogging and publishing The Daily Flame, a daily email love letter from your "Inner Pilot Light" (Self) to your wounded parts, based on the healing model Internal Family Systems (IFS), a trauma healing spiritual path which Lissa incorporates into all the healing and writing workshops she facilitates.

Because her blog and Daily Flame emails quickly garnered a large readership, she was able to publish her first book in 2010 and has been blessed to have her last 7 books published. 
Her third book, the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has sold over 300,000 copies in 28 languages. 

In addition to putting in her 100,000 hours and writing every day, in 2012, Lissa founded the Whole Health Medicine Institute, where she and a team of luminary faculty train physicians and other health care providers about “Whole Health” and the “6 Steps to Healing Yourself.” Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials, her TEDx talks have been viewed over 5 million times, and she leads workshops, both online and at retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu. 

Her latest health equity project is non-profit work committed to democratizing trauma healing and spiritual healing while eliminating the public health epidemic of loneliness, bringing Internal Family Systems and other healing modalities out of its current status as a luxury good to anyone who needs it and is open to it, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or gender identity. 

Lissa lives bicoastally, half time in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter Mira, who is also a writer, and her puppy Gaia, who would tell great stories if only she knew how- and half time in Cape Cod with her partner Jeffrey Rediger, author of CURED, who is currently working on his own memoir-writing therapeutic journey.

About Rachel Gilgoff, M.D.

As a pediatrician, Dr. Gilgoff brings a multidisciplinary approach to stress, trauma, healing, and well-being. In 2012, she learned about the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study which demonstrated that ACEs are extremely common and are associated with increased risk for heart disease, asthma, cancer, obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety and suicide. Knowing that childhood trauma and chronic stress could have lasting impacts on our health and well-being, she has made it her personal and professional mission to help her family and patients prevent and heal traumatic stress.
She is currently an advisor with the California Aces Aware Initiative, an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a co-Principal Investigator on Systems-based, Multidisciplinary Assessment of Adversity and Toxic Stress for Individualized Care (The SYSTEMAATIC Project), an ACEs and Precision Medicine research project through the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM).

Rachel Gilgoff is board certified in General Pediatrics, Child Abuse Pediatrics, and Integrative Medicine. She enjoys being an advisor, researcher, science writer and mother of two amazing teens. She is passionate about improving care for stress-related health issues and promoting life-long health and wellness.

Rachel Gilgoff, MD grew up in Southern California. She received her bachelor’s degrees in Molecular and Cell Biology and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, and her medical degree at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. During her pediatric residency at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, she developed a passion for Adolescent Medicine. Most recently, Dr. Gilgoff completed an additional training as a Certified Integrative Psychiatric Provider which, combined with her other training and experience, she is now leveraging to offer Parent and Teen Coaching at GetzWell.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How do I contact customer service?
Please contact us by sending an email to support@lissarankin.com
What kind of technology will I need in order to participate?
In order to participate in this course, you will need to:
a. Access Zoom for the live calls and 
b. Access our learning platform through a web browser like Chrome or Safari. Teachable is a platform that hosts all the material for the course, including class recordings. 

You will need a good connection to the internet. You can use a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone.
Do you offer stipends or adjustments?
We believe that money should not be an obstacle to healing. If you currently do not have the means please write to support@lissarankin.com
I can't make some or any of the live calls
Many participants do not come to the live calls for many reasons ranging from time zones to work schedules or emergencies. For some its simply a choice. All classes are recorded and made available together with any material indefinitely on our teaching site.  Chose what is best for you. You will not miss out on any content.
I am visually impaired
A person who is visually impaired will be able to navigate our content using a reader and other common navigational tools. We do not rely on slides or other visual representations.
Screenshot of Lissa Rankin teaching in a video
Where can I access the recorded calls?
Once you have signed up you will log in to our learning platform where you will find all recordings and material. It takes time to provide the content after a call. Usually we will post within 24 hours. You will have access to everything for the indefinite future.
Can you call me?
We are not resourced to make calls to individuals. You can reach us by email at support@lissarankin.com.
I don't have Facebook!
If there is an associated private Facebook group, we recommend you join. It is optional but not critical for the course so don't worry if you don't have Facebook.
Can I cancel?
Once you make a payment it triggers a series of events and expenses on our side from payment processing costs to adding you to lists and platforms. If you cancel, we cannot recoup those costs and will have to pass them on to you. Please read our terms carefully before you make a purchase. Terms
©2025 Lissa Rankin INC ·  All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

Join this interactive online workshop. Limited special offer $397.
$197
Starting in
countdown
00 Years 00 Months 00 Weeks 00 Days 00 Hours 00 Minutes 00 Seconds

If  the cost of this program presents a financial hardship then we hope you will contact us for a sliding scale option. Please write to support@lissarankin.com