Episode 42 of Wellness Me Up — Wellness Me Up Diary Entry
with Life & Conscious Parenting Coach Lati Ghanem
Written and hosted by Amanda Reece, founder of Wellness Me Up.
Lati Ghanem is a life and conscious parenting coach who does not work with your child. She works with you. This one covers generational patterns, why you react the way you do, walking beside instead of in front, and an imaginary friend named Ñonka. Also Amanda unpacked a lot of her own shit in this one. Fair warning.
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Who Is Lati Ghanem?
Lati — short for Latiffe — Ghanem is a life and conscious parenting coach who helps women break the generational patterns they developed long before they became mothers — so they can build a better relationship with themselves and their children.
She is warm and sharp and will shine a flashlight on the thing you have been avoiding with such grace that you will not even see it coming. She will also ask you about your relationship with your parents within the first five minutes and somehow make it feel completely natural.
We talked for a long time before hitting record. And then we kept going. And I left with a lot of things to journal about. Which you will hear.
The Parent-Child Relationship Shapes Everything
This is where Lati starts and it is worth sitting with.
Every therapist eventually asks — tell me about your relationship with your parents. And for good reason. Because that relationship is the blueprint. It shapes how you value yourself. How you see yourself. How you move through the world. How you show up in friendships, in romantic relationships, and eventually — if you become a parent — how you show up for your children.
And most of the time the reactions that catch us off guard — the moments where we scream or say something sharp or respond in a way that does not feel like us — are not coming from the present moment at all. They are coming from something that was installed a very long time ago.
Lati helps people find where it was installed. And then she helps them change it.
Give Yourself Grace. And Give Your Parents Grace Too.
This is the starting point Lati comes back to with every client and it is one of the most important reframes in this entire conversation.
Most parents do not wake up in the morning wanting to make their children's lives harder. They pull from the toolbox they were given. They were probably taught that authority and discipline was how you raised a good person. That emotions were weakness. That certain things were just not talked about. They did the best they could with what they had.
And they probably learned that from someone who did the same.
This is not about excusing harm. It is about understanding the chain. Because when you understand the chain you can stop being the next link in it.
I shared my own version of this. I am estranged from my family — if you have been listening to this podcast or reading these diary entries you already know that. And I can hold two things at once. I do not think my mother is a fundamentally bad person. And I also learned things from her that took years of therapy to undo. Both of those things are true. And sitting in the complexity of that — rather than needing one clean narrative — has been a huge part of my healing.
The Necklace Tangle
This was the image that came to me mid-conversation and I could not let it go.
I have been going through my belongings as I transition fully into digital nomad life — getting rid of things, packing light, letting go. And I found this bag of necklaces that had all gotten tangled together. A complete mess. And you start to pull on one and realize it is connected to three others and some of those chains are going to end up broken no matter how carefully you go.
That is what enmeshment looks like. That is what generational patterns look like. You start to pull on one thread — why do I react this way, why does conflict make me so uncomfortable, why do I feel responsible for everyone else's feelings — and you realize it is connected to everything else. And some of those connections have been there so long they feel like personality.
They are not personality. They are patterns. And patterns can be changed.
Meet the Child You Actually Have
This was the first practical Lati-ism that landed and I want anyone who has children in their life to actually hear it — parents, aunties, coaches, teachers, anyone. This messaging matters for all of us.
Children come with their own souls. Their own spirits. Their own wiring. Some love math. Some love art. Some want to play soccer. Some want to read alone in their room all day. And there is no amount of tutoring or pressure or insistence that is going to make a child who hates math into someone who loves it.
You have to accept and attune to the child you actually have in front of you. Not the child you expected. Not the child you planned for. The one who is actually there.
This landed for me in a very specific way. When I was a child and youth worker I had very high expectations for the kids I worked with — because I have always had high standards for my own space and my own life. And I remember a supervisor pulling me aside and saying these kids need expectations that are right for them. Where they are. Not where you think they should be.
That stayed with me from my early twenties. And hearing Lati say it again in the context of parenting just deepened it even further.
You're Stitching Up a Story That Hasn't Happened Yet
This is the line that lit my brain up in so many different pathways and the one I knew immediately was the title of this blog and this episode. I literally thought of a Raggedy Ann doll being stitched together before the story is even written. 😄
Lati was sharing a story about one of her clients — a woman who was having a very difficult time connecting with her two-year-old son. She thought he was needy. She loved him but she could not understand why she kept pulling away.
And as they worked together something emerged. This woman had a very traumatic history with her father — violence, fear, deep wounds. And without fully realizing it she had started associating her son — just because he was a boy — with that same threat. She was protecting herself from connecting with him because she had already written a story about who he was going to become.
Lati said it directly. You are stitching up a story that has not even happened yet. You are predetermining this little boy's future based on your past. And that past has nothing to do with him.
The relief on the client's face was visible. The exhale. The realization that her son was not predetermined to be anything. That she had him. And she had tools. And she could guide him differently.
We do this all the time. We see parts of people who hurt us in the people in front of us and we react to the memory instead of the moment. We write the story before it is lived.
Side note — squirrel thought. I realize I have been doing this so much in my own life and I need to say it out loud because sitting with Lati cracked it open.
I grew up around a lot of white men who were racist, prejudiced, and in addiction. And that shaped something in my brain that I am still unpacking. It was actually one of the reasons I did not pursue mediation as a career way back when — there was a bias I was carrying that I could not fully name yet. I still work in that field now, just behind the scenes. But my brain will sometimes still go looking for evidence of the pattern. Looking for proof that it is going to go the way it has gone before.
This has also shown up with my nieces. I sometimes notice myself looking for the parts of them that remind me of my estranged siblings. And lately I have been feeling something like being mirrored — like I am back in childhood, in that middle child dynamic, navigating the same tensions. And then I have to stop myself and remember — they are their own people. They are not their parents. They are not my siblings. They are them. And I need to meet them as them.
I am still organizing my thoughts around all of this. But I wanted to name it here because that is what this diary is for.
Walking Beside. Not In Front.
This is the image Lati uses for what conscious parenting actually looks like and it changed something in how I think about guidance more broadly.
A lot of us were raised with the idea that the parent leads and the child follows. The parent has the answers. The parent controls the situation. And if there is a conflict someone has to win.
But Lati says — if you are in a power struggle someone needs to win. And the moment you remove that framing entirely the whole approach changes. You are not trying to win. You are trying to guide. You are walking beside the child, not in front of them. You are a guide, not a controller.
And children have things to teach us too. They came here for a reason. And sometimes the child in front of you — with all their intensity and all their needs and all the ways they activate you — is showing you exactly where your own work still needs to happen.
I also love the vocabulary piece Lati brought up. The words we use matter. Power struggle means someone wins. Walking beside means you are in it together. The reframe is in the language.
Transactional Love Is Not Love
This one hit me in a very specific place and I am still sitting with it.
I grew up in an environment where everything was transactional. Get good marks and you get this. Behave this way and you get that. Love and approval were always conditional on performance. And I remember feeling the weight of that — the constant performing, the constant trying to earn the thing that should have just been there. It activated my people pleasing in ways I am still untangling today.
And I have been very intentional with my nieces about not wanting our relationship to feel that way. I love them. Deeply. But I also have boundaries and rules — safety and health, respect, and having fun. Three rules. My nieces have known them since they were little kids and they can still recite them to this day. And I am not going to reward with food — i.e. if you are good you get ice cream, if you are not you do not. I do not want it to be transactional. Auntie just quietly reallocates her energy, her time, and her money — and there is no timeline on when that comes back around — when those three rules are not in motion. That feels a whole lot better than the transactional bullshit that activated my people pleasing chameleon ways. 😄
I want them to express themselves. I want them to call me on my shit. I want to listen to their perspectives and model accountability — because accountability was never modeled for me as a kid. Not once. I cannot think of a single clear example of someone in my family taking real accountability for something.
So with my nieces I am going to label it when they are being little shit heads — lovingly — and get curious with them about where it is coming from. The same way I did with thousands of kids as a child and youth worker. Where is this coming from? What is underneath this? Let's get curious about it. Let's take some accountability here.
And even with my own family estrangements — I still feel love for them. I do. When I talk to my nieces about my family I try to highlight as many good things as I can. They are bits of those people. And I want them to know that love exists even when I could not keep showing up in the way that family needed me to show up. Because I kept trying to be the fixer. The helper. The secret keeper. The person who controlled everything and put everyone else first. And I could not keep healing in that environment while maintaining the mask and being who they needed me to be.
There were so many hamster wheels happening. And I had to get off of them. I watched the same patterns on repeat. I knew exactly when and how people would behave or react to pretty much anything — and that is not fair to anyone, including them. To predict someone so completely is to stop seeing them as capable of change. And I had to remove myself from that dynamic to stop doing it.
I just could not do it anymore. And walking away was the most loving thing I could do for myself. And ultimately — I believe — for them too.
To my knowledge they are all very much still on a few of those hamster wheels. But also not to my knowledge. Because I have removed myself from it. And that is the whole point.
Lati said something that I want to hold onto. I will love you no matter what. Whether I agree with your decision or not. Whether I approve or not. I am not going to cheer you on for everything. But I will always love you.
And I sat with this for a while before writing this diary entry out. Because I have estranged myself from my family. So can I really claim unconditional presence? Am I a hypocrite for wanting to model that while also having walked away?
I do not think so. Here is what I have landed on. Estrangement was not the absence of love. It was the only way I could stop disappearing inside a dynamic that required me to perform, to fix, to keep secrets, to be everything for everyone and nothing for myself. I could not be present for anyone while I was doing that. I was showing up as a shell.
So the presence I chose first was presence for myself. And from that place — I can actually show up. Not perfectly. Not always. But genuinely.
What I can honestly offer my nieces is this. I will always love you. I will always be honest with you. And if I ever need to step back it will not be because I stopped loving you. It will be because I need to take care of myself so I can show up better when I do. That is a more honest model than unconditional presence anyway. Because unconditional presence is not always possible. And pretending it is just teaches kids another version of the mask.
The WTF Wheel Question: What Have You Outgrown That You Occasionally Miss?
Lati answered first — and then flipped it back on me. Because that is just who she is. 😄
Her answer was Ñonka. Her imaginary friend from childhood. She named her specifically choosing a name with the ñ because she wanted something unique that started with a letter that had no Spanish names. Her whole family knew about Ñonka. Her sister would hear her talking to her in her sleep. And Ñonka was just... there. Her constant companion in a loud and opinionated family.
What she misses is that unconditional presence. Someone who is just there with you. In it with you. Who wants to hang out and play and does not need anything from you in return.
And then she asked me.
When I added this question to the wheel I had an initial thought about smoking. Not that I miss smoking — I absolutely do not. I am the worst ex-smoker alive. The smell makes me want to run. But what I sometimes miss is what smoking represented to me back then. What I thought it was giving me. The ease. The social permission to just stand somewhere and be. The feeling of being present and connected without having to do anything except light up and lean against a wall.
I have found so many more enriching ways to have those things now. Real ones. But occasionally that old version of me gives me a little nudge and says remember us? And I do. And then I let her go again.
And Ñonka sounds like a lot more fun anyway. I would much rather go play with Ñonka.
What Wellness Me Up Means to Lati
Be well with yourself so you can be well with others.
She said it simply and it is one of the most complete answers this question has ever received.
If you love yourself you can love others. But until you understand how to be safe and well within yourself you cannot really expect others to be safe and well around you. And that does not mean you have to be healed and perfect and finished. It means you are doing the work. You are turning the flashlight on yourself. You are getting curious about the story you are stitching up.
Awareness. She landed on that word at the end and I agreed with it immediately and deeply. So much of wellness is awareness. It is one of my own core values. As I keep learning about the things that help me feel more wellnessed up — it always comes back to this. You cannot change what you cannot see. And the seeing is everything.
Wellness me up. Let's do this.
Want to work with Lati?
Lati Ghanem is a life and conscious parenting coach helping women break generational patterns so they can build a better relationship with themselves and their children. Free 45-minute consultation available — no hidden anything, just a real conversation to see if you are a fit.
👉 livinginprogress.com
📱 Instagram: @livingin_progress
If this one made you want to go journal... go journal. And subscribe to Wellness Me Up wherever you listen.
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