WHAT IS SELF-REPARENTING?

“Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.” - Tara Brach

When was the last time you paid attention to yourself? Without an inner critic running its usual monologue?

For most of us, paying loving attention to ourselves is totally foreign. Sure, we may treat ourselves to something, but that isn’t really paying attention. What I’m talking about is pure presence with yourself - nonjudgmental, fully alert, and with a loving acceptance of all that you notice.

This is mindfulness directed at the parts of you that you usually avoid, dismiss, criticize or hide. And it is essential if you want to make lasting positive change in your life.  

In my last post I illustrated how transformation requires a gestation phase where the inner work takes center stage. Part of this crucial inner, transformative work is learning how to reparent yourself. 

Self-Reparenting is giving yourself what you didn’t receive as a child. 

Often this looks like learning how to stay with and accept emotions and aspects of your personality that were not appreciated when you were a child. With practice, you increase your ability to hold all aspects of yourself with compassion and non-judgment.

You have to learn how to work WITH yourself, not against yourself. 

Whether your childhood was amazing, awful, or somewhere in between, your parents raised you with the knowledge and self-awareness that they learned from their parents. They did the best they could with what they knew. 

But the truth is, most of us did not get all of our needs met, or feel unconditionally loved. Because of this, we were never taught healthy ways of relating to ourselves, to others, or to life in general.

The good news -  it's never too late to learn! With coaching you can practice this loving attention and self acceptance, to retrain your brain. 

Can you commit to not reacting to your fearful or anxious thoughts? 

Next time your mind starts swirling, can you stop and take a deep breath, and remind yourself that your thoughts are simply old stories on repeat in your brain that have lived there since you were a kid?

Forgive yourself for believing these old stories. And forgive your parents for anything they did not give you as a child. Grieve what your childhood self never received, so you can let go of the baggage and heal.

What did you always want, but never received? 

Usually this is something you are reluctant to give yourself now. Maybe it's time off to rest and play, because your old story is that you have too much to do, and you need to stay on top of everything or else you’re a failure. Wherever your saboteur voice lurks is a clue to where you need some self-reparenting.

Give yourself permission to give your adult self what you never got as a child. Treat your adult self the way you wish your child self had been treated. You deserve this. Everyone does.

Breaking the generational cycle of passing down fears and judgement takes a little time and practice. After all, you are removing the old mental stories that have been looping in your brain since you were a kid! So be patient with yourself, and trust that you’re worth the effort.