Well, this is a Trip: Reparenting Your Inner Child While Parenting Your Own Child
Now, if this isn’t one of the wilder concepts I have had to wrap my head around…I surely cannot recall what tops it. As if parenting, in and of itself, isn’t a total mindset shift, sprinkle in some inner child work and you’ve got yourself a real doozy. And by real doozy, of course I mean a set of beautifully complex and complicated opportunities to heal and even potentially break some generational cycles, all whilst raising another human being.
Let’s take a few steps back to look at this experience a bit deeper. “Reparenting” refers to the process of identifying our own needs that went unmet in our childhood, and now, in our adulthood, meeting those needs for ourselves. With, or without the help of a therapist, we can recognize those needs such as security, safety, attunement, affection or stability that weren’t met in our own childhood experience and then begin to notice ways that, in the present moment, we can identify and fill those needs for ourselves.
As children, we often take our cues about our personal experiences and their importance from our parents or caregivers. When we have a parent or parents (caregivers) who, for certain reasons, are unwilling or unable to meet our needs, we might begin to internalize that those particular needs of ours must not be important. I believe we do this for a couple reasons:
It is far too painful to consider that our needs are important and could be met, but due to reasons outside of our control and within our parents’ lack of capacities, abilities, or willingness, are not
We have got to survive our childhood and if we think that those taking care of us aren’t quite capable- we would be absolutely terrified!
What can then happen is we begin this adaptive process of minimizing those needs- because, as I stated above, it is far too painful to recognize them as going unmet in the present moment than to banish them off to far away corners of our mind and experience. This minimization can be in the form of diminishing their importance to ourselves and others all the way to dissociating from these needs altogether. In the service of our survival, we reinvent what is important to us. However, this doesn’t last forever. And eventually, we will either:
Either have a big life event (ahem, having our own children) that brings forth these dissociated or minimized experiences (unmet needs) or
Begin to recognize we want more out of our own lives and relationships and begin our own deep dive into this work.
Either way, we end up at the same place- asking ourselves, what’s going on here?
For the purposes of this blog, let’s just take experience A from above and consider some thoughts. The first being, the way in which traumatic memories get stored isn’t always in a narrative form. What do I mean by this and why am I bringing trauma into it again? Great question! I consider a childhood of unmet needs, or as Gabor Mate states “not enough good things happening,” potentially traumatic. And narrative memory is our memory system that stores things in story form- we have an experience and we can talk about that experience. If we have dissociated off from some particular experiences, we do not always have access to the narrative of this memory. We do, however, often have the stored body memories of these experiences, though, to teach and guide us.
And sometimes those stored “guides” aren’t always the gentlest when they come forward. I am a big believer that that which triggers us about our children may be an indicator of our unmet needs in our childhood. Big emotions? Not listening? Acting out? Take some time and think about how those experiences were (or weren’t) attended to when you experienced them as a little one. It could be that these acts of connection (that is how I like to think about “temper tantrums”) weren’t successful for you and you had to cast them off in your subconscious realm to get by as a kiddo. This is a pretty sophisticated thing for a child to have to do.
I recently went on a family trip (there were 17 of us!) with my 3.5-year-old daughter. If I had a dollar for every time one of my family members told me that my daughter reminds them of a younger me, I would have at least a dozen dollars. The messages created kind of a cool experience and were also so incredibly humbling because she is a big feelings kid. She knows how she feels and she is going to let you know, too, which I appreciate. And I can also get pretty overwhelmed by it (yes, I am a therapist who deals with emotions all the day, but I am also a human and a human mother!). So, I have to practice both attending to her needs and also attending to the inner child in me getting triggered in these dynamics. Remember, we sometimes have to minimize or dissociate from those needs when they go unmet. And so, seeing these needs in another little one can bring up all those hard feelings in me. And besides, I don’t always love a scene and my daughter couldn’t care less (at this point in her life, at least) who sees her feeling her feelings in their fullest forms.
Now, I would love to give you a step-by-step guide on how to reparent yourself, but that feels as simple to accomplish as supplying you with a step-by-step parenting guide when you leave the hospital with your newborn baby. And while I did ask for one of those in the days after giving birth- I don’t think they quite exist. And if they did- I’d be skeptical because I don’t know how helpful they would actually be. Our experience is always our best teacher. We learn and grow as we go. What I can say is, breaking these cycles truly begins with the ways in which we talk to ourselves. If we want to be more attuned and present parents, we have to remember to give our inner child that love, playfulness, curiosity and grace that we needed when we were younger.
It can begin with the dynamic with your big feelings child- speaking to her in the way that you needed when you were a kiddo. But it also could begin with talking to yourself NOW in the ways that you needed when you were younger. “You are enough.” “I am here for you no matter what.” “Your feelings are not too much for me.” “I love you no matter what.” And sometimes, as you hear yourself saying these things to your own child, see how they resonate within. Like I said, pretty trippy experience. Remember, you do not have to do this work alone. If any of this resonates with you, please reach out to us here to set up your initial appointment.
In warmth,
Tesa
