Re-parenting: How To Heal Your Inner Child?

What is re-parenting?

When we grow up we do not always get what we need from our parents. This is not to blame them for not doing a great job, because everyone makes mistakes and no parent is perfect. But sometimes we need to reteach ourselves how to respond to certain situations or control certain emotions. The concept of re-parenting as I know it comes from the idea of opening up to our inner child. We talk to that little childish version of ourselves that comes out when something big or important happens.

For example, when someone does something we dislike that upsets us. We can react as an adult and properly talk to that other person about what bothers us, or the inner hurt and upset child can up and decide to throw a tantrum and punch a wall. These strong emotional reactions often come from traumas in our childhood that we have yet to heal. That is why as adults it is our job to re-parent and teach ourselves what we didn’t learn as a child. It is important to do this from a place of love and without judgment as your inner child is yourself. 

Examples:

Self-soothing-

When we are toddlers our parents may not have given us the opportunity to self-soothe. When a baby is crying parents can deal with it one of two ways. Either they strongly reprimand the child for crying and make them feel like showing emotions is bad, or they immediately give the child what it wants so that it will stop crying. Both of these ways are wrong as one teaches a child that they can’t express discomfort and the other teaches that they can manipulate people into getting what they want.

In the second example, the child doesn’t know how to self-soothe. They will have really strong emotional reactions as an adult and will have a hard time dealing with those emotions. The way you can re-parent yourself is by teaching your inner child that first of all it is okay to feel our emotions, but we can’t use them as leverage. Then we can understand that things don’t always go as we want them to. We need to be okay with that in some way. Re-parenting takes a lot of practice and patience as you are unlearning childhood patterns that you repeated during all your life. 

Emotional regulation-

This one is really similar to self-soothing as it involves emotions. The difference is that self-soothing is about dealing with your emotions and learning to calm yourself down. While emotional regulation is simply learning how to respond to situations with a socially acceptable reaction. This is a common effect on people that don’t know how to self-soothe but also on neurodivergent people that have a hard time with this.

Allowing yourself to be you (self-expression)–

As children, our parents might have set for us an idea of who they want us to be. Maybe they judged us for the activities that we liked or what we wanted to wear. As adults, this creates not only a lack of self-esteem but fear of being ourselves because we are scared of judgment. Our job as adults is re-learning what we like, and who we are and letting the world see it. We need to reassure our inner children that they are safe and they can be themselves.

Expressing opinions (not being complacent and quiet with others)–

Our parents might have also prevented us from expressing our opinion. This as adults could have led to a sense of unimportance or letting ourselves be disregarded. This often leads to people-pleasing but it also connects to a lack of self-expression. Now we need to teach ourselves that it is okay to speak up and express our needs. Re-parenting is an important process in becoming who we dream to be.