Reparenting in Action-Top Tips and Methods
How to Begin Reparenting Yourself
Reparenting ourselves is a daily dedication to living our lives in alignment with our goals. Reparenting ourselves is when we do the work of actively showing up for the child selves within us. We ask them what they want and need and we support those parts of ourselves with love, attention and without judgment.
When we do this work, we can learn to soothe and comfort ourselves versus asking someone else to do that for us. We can set goals and meet them. We can learn to respond to life from a calm grounded centered way versus reacting from anger, upset, or sadness.
You can connect with your inner child and gently begin reparenting yourself. You can spend your days tuned into your own needs, wants, and desires. You can find the power and agency that comes with living a life aligned with your truth—knowing that you are your most powerful, dedicated, loving parent.
Our inner child is that remainder of our child self that stays with us as we age. Your inner child may be keeping you from meeting your goals.
In contrast, emotional adulthood is when you take responsibility for your thoughts and the feelings they create. You don’t blame or shame others for the outcomes in your life and the decisions that you make. Emotional childhood is the opposite of emotional adulthood.
Reparenting is when we choose to wildly and courageously accept ourselves and our child selves just as we are.
We don’t seek to change us or make us different, but rather we show up with a full open heart for the scared, sad, lonely, or worried parts of us. We show for all the angry, irritated, grumpy parts of ourselves and the joyous, happy, and free parts.
We learn to be a loving accepting parent to every single child within us—the joker, the clown, the sad sack. We are them and they are us. We are those kids because they are our past and we get to love ourselves deeply—then show up in new ways. We can show up for ourselves in the ways we may have wanted our caregivers to show up for us when we were children.
Not doing this healing work, not reparenting ourselves, is always an option. You don’t have to do this work, my angel. But it leaves our shadow side spinning, leaves our inner children wanting and begging and demanding so much from us.
Doing this work of reparenting ourselves is a free and beautiful way to find, cultivate, and create peace for ourselves.
Note that I said free and beautiful, not necessarily easy.
This reparenting work is challenging. I want to remind and encourage you to be gentle, loving, and patient with yourself throughout this process. Don’t quit before the magic happens. You’re learning to be a parent, and that can be a challenging thing to take on.
The benefit of reparenting yourself is that you choose, each and every day, to show up for your full self. It is so liberating. It’s so beautiful. It’s been so healing for me. I wish and hope for the same for you, my darling. You’ve got this.
These are my favorite ways to show up and continue reparenting myself.
One, make promises to yourself and keep them.
Whether it’s your morning ritual or routine, daily future self journaling, exercising, intuitive eating or doing daily breathwork. What matters is making the promise to yourself for yourself and showing up for you in the way we may have wanted our parents to show up for us. Be dependable, responsible, and reliable.
This is how we heal, by reparenting, by being that dependable adult for ourselves, whatever that looks like in your own life.
Maybe go outside at your lunch break, take a five-minute stroll, eat your meal at a park bench. It really almost doesn’t matter what you do, but make those promises to yourself for yourself and keep them.
Two, establish firm healthy boundaries and stick to them—not just with other people but with myself.
Remember that healthy boundaries means saying, if you do X, I will do Y. If you yell at me, I will leave the room. If you call me names, I will not hang out with you anymore.
The boundaries I keep with myself are about my own time, often about my bedtime, when I wake up, and what I do with myself throughout the day. My inner child will want to buffer in all sorts of ways and will bring all these perfectionist stories into my life. Then I can continue reparenting-showing up as her loving parent to let her know that we’re not doing that tonight.
Three, show up for your feelings, whatever they may be.
The first step in the thought-feeling-action self-healing protocol I teach is to feel our feelings all the way through. Don’t push through them or ignore them. Instead, we show up for our emotions.
Sometimes those emotions we feel as adults are sparked by something that our inner child is upset about or hasn’t gotten closure on. Maybe there is something that our parents did or didn’t do for us or ways they weren’t able to show up for us because they had their own wounded kiddos within.
When I feel a big cry coming on or feel upset about something, I let myself feel it. I find a quiet place and feel all of my feels all the way through. I let my inner child sob or get angry or whatever she needs. When I’m crying, I hold myself and tell my inner child, baby girl, I’m here for you. You’re safe. It’s okay to cry.
I encourage myself to feel it deeply knowing that my adult self is holding a safe space for those big feelings.
When we feel stress in our bodies, we need to complete the cycle and crying, screaming into a pillow or shaking our bodies out are great ways to move stress, anxiety, disappointment or other feelings all the way through us. Then adult us can pause, catch her breath, and can look at the thoughts that sparked these feelings within us—the thoughts that keep us stuck in these childhood patterns of reactivity.
No better way out than through, my love. Let your child self feel her feelings and remind her that you, a loving adult, a loving parent, are there for her.
Four, be gentle when you make mistakes.
Own them, apologize, make amends, and please don’t beat yourself up. Make it right. Be kind to yourself and others and allow yourself to move on versus spinning in blame or firing off that second arrow right into your own heart.
Five, allow yourself to rest.
Pushing yourself too hard is stressful for your adrenal glands, which puts more cortisol in your system, which disrupts your digestion, mood, energy, sleep, hormones, fertility and thyroid. It also repeats the harm that may have happened for your inner child. For example, if that kiddo was pushed too hard or told that their worth was related to an external measure like doing well at sports or getting good grades etc.
You don’t need to be harsh to get things done. Be loving, tender, and firm with yourself. Let yourself rest when you need it and attend to things you said you would do when you said you would do them.
Find that balance where you’re giving yourself a break and also adulting when appropriate.
Take a lunch break at work. Spend a weekend day reading. Take a bath. Go for an adventure. Be the loving parent who lets your little one play in the sand, go down the slide, draw, color or make a mess. We all need that.
Give yourself permission to do it and to rest when you need rest.
Six, be rigorously honest.
In my life, this means being an emotional adult and showing up and taking responsibility for my thoughts, feelings, actions, and the outcomes of those actions. When my inner child feels that an emotion I’m having may be dangerous or scary, she can start to spin some detailed subterfuge.
She can start to make all sorts of excuses and I get to be her parent and say, it’s okay, it’s just feelings, there’s nothing to be scared of here.
I get to recognize that because feelings were not something that was talked about in my own childhood, my inner child wants me to bypass them. When I feel her trying to do that, I get to give her some love. I can do breathwork meditation to get more deeply in touch with my feelings. Then I can then show up for myself with the complexity of an adult mind.
I get to be honest about it. I get to own the fact that having feelings doesn’t always feel easy. I can be honest with myself about the feelings that I’m having.
Seven, I let my inner child play.
I say yes to play. I am so silly inside and adult me doesn’t always get to let that out, particularly if I’m putting an overwhelming amount of things on my plate. So I connect in with child me and let her let me know when it’s time to make art without caring about the outcome.
Eight, I also embody my strong adult self and show up for my child self.
I often do this about painful experiences in the past. I do my breathwork and I get grounded in my own adult power and agency. Then I sit quietly and, in my mind’s eye, I go back into a stressful or difficult childhood situation that I feel may be influencing me now as an adult.
I watch myself.
I watch how that child me acted, reacted and showed up for herself in whatever that difficult childhood situation was. After I watch her and how she lived through it, I swoop in. I talk to her sweetly and I relieve her of any blame or guilt she’s feeling for being herself, for messing up, for not understanding the rules because she was a child.
Nine, is that before I physically reach out to my inner child, I ask for her consent.
For so many of us, consent was not an active thing in our youths. We were told what to do and when to do it—even if our intuition was screaming no.
Many of us may have had experiences of unwanted or inappropriate touch as children or teens and your inner child holds all of that. One beautiful way to empower yourself and your inner child is to have a seat, connect in with smaller you, and get that person’s consent for touch, for a hug, a high-five or to otherwise physically connect.
My inner child loves hugs, but only with appropriate consent. So I’m thoughtful about asking her to give me a firm yes before I put my arms around her. Showing up like this and embracing her autonomy and her sovereignty over her body has been so healing for me.
Ten, celebrate your inner child.
Maybe you didn’t feel truly seen, heard, or appreciated as a child. Past is past, my love, and while you can’t change it, you can show up for yourself as that loving parent you wished you’d had.
Growing up there was this constant refrain that I was too much, too loud, too enthusiastic, too big, both energetically and physically.
I love showing up for my life as my true and authentic self. But child me learned to hide that all away, that it was safer that way.
Those stories kept me from starting this podcast for about a decade or so. So I show up for that little me who thinks she’s too much as her adult, her loving parent. I tell her how loved she is and how loved I am for being exactly ourselves and no one else.
Eleven, show up for your inner child, listen more than you talk and take what you hear from that person seriously.
Don’t write that kiddo off or dismiss what you hear. Listen to the often frustrated, primal needs of our perennial inner child—for sweetness, love, kindness, acceptance, and to be deeply nurtured. These needs are the same today as when we were children.
You get to show up and to ask your own perfect inner child to tell you a story or show you her favorite place to play and experience that together.
Just listen. Hold space. Let her feel the love you have for her and for adult you by being her witness, like a loving parent would. What a beautiful exchange and what a beautiful way to show up for inner you as that loving parent.
I know that when I show up for my inner child, I show up for all the people in my life.
Without healing our childhood wounds, we will try to get what our inner child needs from others. Instead of doing our own reparenting work for ourselves.
We’ll want others to make us feel loved, feel safe, cared for, seen and heard, when the truth is that all of that is an inside job. Only you can make you feel anything at all.
There is no quicker way to create drama in any relationship than to ask someone to meet the needs you didn’t get met as an infant or a child. You are asking them to do the process of reparenting for you.
It’s not loving to yourself or to the other person and it’s not ultimately going to get you what you need. You can meet your own needs, continue reparenting yourself and live into your own power and your emotional adulthood.
The new relationship you form with your own self can be such a beautiful and beneficial thing. This can afford you such a gorgeous entry to doing the work of changing your adult life.
When you connect in with your inner child and learn where your habitual thoughts come from, you can start to shift those thoughts that don’t serve you.
You can continue reparenting-rewriting those stories so you can meet your goals, live with the health you want, find love, get that job, launch your business, or travel the globe with a renewed sense of connection with you.
I love this reparenting work and I hope it is so supportive for you. Start simple, start easy. Keep checking in with your inner child. When you hear her speak, listen in and give her some love. It’s you you’re loving on after all, and that’s magnificent.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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