The Path to Wholeness—Rebuilding from Alignment

At its essence, alignment for me means that I’d rather be the parent my children need than the parent the world expects me to be. It’s a choice to stay true to my promise to always show up for them—not as an idealized version of a “good parent,” but as my full and honest self. Alignment has meant learning to disobey the world’s rigid rules for parenthood and instead trust my intuition, even when it takes me far off the well-traveled path.

In stepping into alignment, I’ve discovered the power of being bold, creative, and potently myself. I’ve learned to stop carving away at my identity in an effort to fit into impossible molds. But this process hasn’t been easy. Like many parents, I came to alignment through a breaking point, where the old way of living simply stopped working. For me, as an internalizing PDAer, that moment involved realizing how deeply I’d internalized my stress responses and how much of myself I had sacrificed in the name of being “good.”

Letting Go of What Doesn’t Serve

Rebuilding from alignment begins with a kind of surrender—a willingness to truly and deeply let go of expectations. And I don’t just mean the surface-level demands, but the underlying beliefs that prop them up. This is where the concept of the “fake drop” comes in: a fake drop happens when we let go of the specific demand but don’t release the belief that it should still be happening.

For example, we might decide to pull our kids out of school because it’s what they need right now, but continue to hold onto the belief that good parents send their kids to school. Or we might do our best to keep our kids safe in the moment, while quietly berating ourselves for not being able to prevent every injury or argument. These fake drops keep us stuck. They perpetuate the cycle of self-criticism, making us feel like failures because we haven’t truly released ourselves from the impossible expectations that created the demands in the first place.

I see this happen all the time with parents who begin practicing low demand parenting. They start by dropping demands for their kids, but without interrogating their beliefs about what it means to be a good parent, they end up feeling even more depleted. Instead of finding freedom, they feel like they’ve fallen into a pit they now have to claw their way out of.

The Inner Work of Letting Go

Letting go is more than a practical shift—it’s a deeply personal reckoning. Many of us, myself included, carry internalized ableism and deeply held beliefs about who we are supposed to be. These beliefs are often rooted in childhood experiences where our worth was tied to our ability to perform, achieve, and conform.

If you’ve been pretending to be a version of yourself for so long that you don’t even know who you would be without the performance, letting go can feel like losing your very identity. For me, that meant facing the truth that much of my “goodness” was performative, designed to keep me safe and liked. Releasing that performance was terrifying—it felt like stepping into a void where I might be unrecognizable, even to myself.

The Impact on Relationships

As if the internal shifts weren’t challenging enough, alignment often brings changes in our external relationships as well. When you step off the standard parenting path, the friendships and social connections you once relied on can start to fracture. Some of us experience crippling envy or self-shame when we see other parents whose lives look more conventional. Their neat and tidy pictures of parenting can trigger massive waves of grief, which we often repress into shame.

Other times, the disconnection is mutual. When your parenting experience becomes harder for others to understand or relate to, a gulf can form that’s difficult to bridge. For me, this has meant grieving relationships that once felt solid, as well as redefining what community looks like.

Rebuilding from Alignment

But here’s the truth: alignment isn’t just about letting go. It’s also about creating something new in the space that’s been cleared. For me, rebuilding from alignment has meant learning to trust my instincts, even when they go against everything the world has taught me. It’s meant standing tall in my truth, even when that truth invites disapproval or judgment.

Rebuilding has also meant reconnecting with my children in a deeper, more authentic way. By choosing trust and connection over power and control, I’ve been able to show up for them as the parent they need—messy, imperfect, and fully present. And in doing so, I’ve discovered a version of myself that feels whole and steady in a way I never thought possible.

But perhaps the most profound shift in this journey has been learning to embrace failure and mistakes—not just as inevitable, but as essential. For so long, I believed that good parenting, good adulthood, good life was about perfection—about getting it right, being in control, and hiding anything that didn’t fit the narrative.

Now, I see that perfection was never the goal. What matters far more is humility, the willingness to be wrong, and the courage to own our struggles without shame. It’s in these moments—when we can honestly say, I don’t know, or I made a mistake, or I need help—that we unlock the richness of being human.

This shift isn’t just personal; it has the potential to transform how we define what it means to be a parent, and what it means to be an adult. Instead of clinging to the illusion of perfection, we could step into a way of living that values growth over certainty, connection over control, and curiosity over judgment. We could build a culture where midlife isn’t about proving you’ve arrived, but about deepening into who you are becoming.

When we release perfection and embrace the value of learning through failure, we model for our children—and for each other—a life of authenticity and resilience. This, to me, is the heart of alignment: not just being who the world tells us to be, but becoming who we are meant to be, with all the messiness, beauty, and humanity that entails.