186. Break Unhealthy Family Dynamics: How to Heal the Relationship with Your Parents, with Adult Parenting Coach Kan Yan
What happens when you stop trying to fix your parents and start rebuilding the relationship itself from the inside out?
Alejandra Siroka sits down with Kan Yan, founder of Parents Reimagined, to explore what actually helps long-standing parent–adult child dynamics shift. Rather than focusing on quick breakthroughs, they look at why awareness alone rarely changes family relationships, especially when those patterns were shaped by fear, silence, or unspoken cultural rules.
Kan shares how growing up afraid of a parent he also loved left an imprint on his nervous system, and why expecting a single emotional conversation to undo decades of conditioning often leads to disappointment. What happens when repair becomes a steady practice instead of a single moment?
The conversation also examines multicultural family dynamics and the quiet agreements many families hold around what can and cannot be talked about. Things to avoid often include staying locked in surface or action-based conversations that never touch internal experience. Alejandra and Kan invite listeners to consider how language, presence, and consistency can slowly loosen rigid roles, even with parents who never learned how to talk about feelings or relationships.
Rather than offering a promise of a perfect outcome, this episode presents a grounded way of thinking about change that includes release, reimagining, support, and experimentation. It encourages listeners to understand that healing does not mean getting the parent you once wished for, but it can include uncovering a relationship that feels more alive, more honest, and more human.
Quotes
- “Our kind of solution set of reality depends on the kinds of things we can see around us.” (10:22 | Kan Yan)
- “Instead of saying, hey, mom and dad, you're messed up, I went to my dad and I had a big conversation with him where I shared, actually, I'm having a hard time.” (12:48 | Kan Yan)
- “What I tell people is to not expect very much from catharsis when it comes to this kind of relationship, because this relationship has been forged over decades, know, in the early decades in a daily hour by hour way.” (16:35 | Kan Yan)
- “Just because you bring some awareness to the relationship doesn't mean that the other person is suddenly going to become the fantasy parent that you never had.” (32:55 | Kan Yan)
- “There's a lot of stigma and shame around having some sort of unsatisfying parent relationship. We think that we should have a better relationship and so we hide it. That's a real problem because the more you can have support from outside of the family system, the more likely it is that things will change.” (37:15 | Kan Yan)
Links
Parents Reimagined: https://www.parentsreimagined.com/
Language Alchemy Group Coaching: https://www.languagealchemy.com/groupcoaching
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Podcast Music composed by Gary Lapow: open.spotify.com/artist/1HlMhcNfKIELxYil5mVqD
Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm
