What It Really Means To ‘Reparent’ Yourself
As a child, your parents are your only window to the world, the lessons they teach you, and the environment they raise you in shape your reality and your personality growing up. Some children were lucky enough to have emotionally balanced parents who provided a safe and healthy environment for them to grow up in, where love, understanding and communication were easy and smooth, and others grew up with more challenging, stubborn and emotionally abusive parents who forced them to cope in unhealthy ways, which is what we call ‘survival tactics’ and ‘coping mechanisms.’
As an adult, you start unlearning these tactics that are no longer serving you and start reparenting yourself. Simply put, you start providing for yourself what your parents couldn’t provide for you and giving yourself the love and support you didn’t receive from them.
Reparenting yourself starts with distinguishing between which unhealthy behaviors are inherited from your parents and which are yours. The unhealthy behaviors that you inherit by default may include neglecting yourself to please others because that’s what your parents taught you. It includes not properly expressing yourself or your needs because you were always suppressing your voice in order not to start a fight with your parents, who invalidated your opinions and taught you that a good child never argues back. It includes not having boundaries with people who disrespect you or cross the line because you weren’t allowed to set boundaries with your parents. It includes feeling unworthy or unimportant because your parents always made you feel inferior to others, whether your siblings, your relatives or your friends.
Reparenting yourself is the process of realizing that your parents weren’t always right and they were flawed in many ways and it’s time to start getting rid of their voices, their influence, their judgment, and their impact. It means giving yourself the love, attention, support, dedication, and kindness you didn’t receive from them. It means breaking the family chain by deciding to follow your own manual instead of blindly following theirs.
Reparenting yourself means paying more attention to yourself and your needs, even if it means betraying your parents, because you’re now in control of your emotions and your mental health. It means being more patient and compassionate with yourself instead of beating yourself up for your failures the way your parents did. It means putting your needs and feelings first even if you disappoint them or distance yourself from them. It means speaking up and asking for what you want even if it is going to start a fight.
Reparenting yourself simply means taking matters into your own hands because now you can. You’re not a child anymore and you can consciously choose different patterns and behaviors that bring you what you truly want. You have the power to pick a different experience and a different life regardless of what you witnessed as a child. Reparenting yourself means consciously honoring and choosing yourself and realizing that you don’t have to live the life your parents have been living.
Growing up is a gift, because you can always change what didn’t work for you and celebrate the person you’re becoming as you strive to heal your childhood or abandonment wounds. It’s a gift because if your parents somehow made you feel unloved or unworthy, you can now change that narrative and embrace the parts of you that were neglected. It’s a gift because it means that you can heal your inner child so you can have a better relationship with yourself and others. Reparenting yourself takes a lot of time and discipline, but the outcome is worth all the effort and all the pain.