Reparent Your Self.

Someone once said, “You shall know the truth and it will piss you off.” One of the truths that most of us eventually come to the realization of is that our parents did the best they could based on their level of awareness and exposure. When most of us come to this realization and see the need for reparenting, we are busy with our own kids and being adults. We become like our parents, victims of victims perpetuating the circle of dysfunction and trauma. As American Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung once observed “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it would direct your life and you would call it fate.” We live below the veil of consciousness as a result of our indoctrination, domestication, programming, and script handed to us by our caregivers, parents, and society. If you don’t reparent yourself, you will constantly blame your parents for messing you up and you might not be fully present to care for your own kids too and the circle continues perpetually.

 American writer James Campbell once quipped ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.’ It is very hard activating the reparenting process as we often idolize our parents and doing the work necessary to make the reparenting possible requires a lot of soul searching, introspection, collaboration, and self-awareness. The reparenting process requires having empathy for your parents, compassion for their effort to do the best they could and not blaming them. British author and writer of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowlings noted in her 2008 Harvard University Commencement Speech “There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction”.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

The way we move forward is to have the awareness that we can become the wise parent to ourselves that we did not have as a child. This is a process called reparenting, and it enables you to relearn how to meet the unmet needs of your inner child through daily, dedicated, and conscious action.

When we experience our parent-figures engage in supportive behaviors, we learn that it’s safe to express our needs and reach out to other people for help. Most parent-figures never learned how to meet their own needs, let alone another person’s, passing on their own unresolved traumas and conditioned coping strategies. Even well-intentioned parent-figures don’t always give us what serves us. Meeting all of someone’s varied and unique needs all the time is almost impossible.

The reparenting process looks different for everyone. Generally, we want to quiet our inner critic and embrace self-respect and compassion. With the help of the wise inner parent, you can learn how to validate your reality and feelings by witnessing them, rather than instinctually judging or ignoring them. Your wise inner parent cultivates acceptance while honoring the needs of your inner child—to be seen, heard, and valued for the authentic parts of yourself. You become the priority.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF REPARENTING

Emotional Regulation

The first pillar of reparenting is emotional regulation, or the skill to successfully navigate our emotional states. Emotional regulation is our ability to cope with stress in a flexible, tolerant, and adaptive way. The ways we can regulate our emotions are all practices you are likely well versed in by now: deep belly breathing to regulate our stress response, nonjudgmentally witnessing changes in our body’s sensations, and noticing patterns in our ego-based narratives that are connected to those emotional activations.

Loving Discipline

The second pillar is loving discipline. This pillar involves creating boundaries with ourselves that are maintained over time. We do this by making and keeping small promises and developing daily routines and habits. Discipline is an important part of the healing process and cultivating it helps us to show up for ourselves. Many of us were raised with shame-based perceptions of discipline—it involved punishment for being “bad” and we may have felt judged or rejected.

Self-care

The third pillar goes hand in hand with loving discipline: self-care. The phrase itself has gotten a bad rep in recent memory, as it’s been commodified and used as an example of self-indulgence. True self-care—supporting your needs and valuing your worth—is not indulgent at all, and it’s fundamental to holistic wellness. Self-care is the act of learning to identify and care for your physical and emotional wants and needs, especially those that were denied in childhood. There are so many ways to incorporate acts of self-care into our day: meditating for five minutes (or longer), moving our bodies, journaling, spending time in nature, spending time alone, allowing the sun to kiss our skin, connecting intimately with a person we love.

Rediscover your childlike sense of wonder

The fourth pillar, one of the ultimate goals of the work, is to rediscover our childlike sense of wonder. This state is made up of a combination of creativity and imagination, joy and spontaneity, and, of course, playfulness.

Meditation

• The Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – The Race
• We are told the faster we go, the more we get done but eventually this frenetic pace will leave us stressed and overwhelmed. When we rush mindlessly we can miss details, make mistakes, and fail to enjoy the process. Sometimes when we slow down, we go further and more importantly a gradual pace allows us to savour each step along the journey.

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Your Brain’s Info Membrane

• When we go online, our brain’s metaphorical membranes are overloaded with stimuli and it becomes difficult to regulate what we digest. We are exposed to a barrage of tragedy, negativity, photos that look harmless that lead to unhealthy comparisons, misinformation that can fester, viruses sneak in, and our filter make mistakes as a result we can start to feel a range of emotions from anger to anxiety.

Podcast

• THIS Is Why Your Comfort Zone Is Holding You Back…And How To Fix It – Ed Mylett Podcast

All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.