Begin Reparenting Your Inner Child Today
Reparenting your inner child can relieve burdens that you’ve carried for far too long.
When our wounded inner child is at the helm of our emotions, we can feel like we’re waiting around to be rescued, to be saved, for someone outside of us to take care of us. We can be quick to anger, to blame others, or take on too much blame and responsibility on our own shoulders. The antidote is to learn the process of reparenting ourselves.
It can be exhausting to carry these child wounds around. Especially if the parents you were given didn’t show up for you in the ways you wanted them to.
Maybe you weren’t listened to, heard, seen, or cared for in the ways you wanted as a child. Maybe you were told the things you were seeing, feeling, intuiting just weren’t happening. Maybe secrets were kept and voices were raised. Maybe you lived with insecurity, hunger, a lack of boundaries or guidance. Maybe you were a parentified child—you grew up too fast because life asked that of you.
Most of our parents never learned to parent themselves, let alone how to show up for us as children.
Whatever your childhood stories, those inner child wounds will stay inside you, stirring up trouble, self-doubt, lack of motivation, anger, sadness, or anxiety until you learn to actively support and love your inner child.
We can learn the process of reparenting ourselves—of showing up as the firm, loving, kind, responsible parent of our dreams.
This is how we heal intergenerational and inherited trauma. This is how we shift the story of our lives for ourselves and generations to come. One of the things that I have found the most valuable in my own healing is learning to recognize, see, hear, and connect with the different parts of myself, starting with my inner child.
The concept of the inner child is that we all carry the memories and experiences of our childhoods within us.
We all have wounds and stories from experiences in our childhood. They stick around in us well into adulthood. Even if you tell the story, “My childhood was great, we never fought,” maybe your inner child is telling stories about how emotions were never processed. Everything was glossed over with this story of being fine and perfect.
The thing with kiddos is that they are brilliant, intuitive and find ways to survive, grow, thrive and get their needs met. We bring these skills into our adult lives and continue working to get our unmet needs met by any means possible.
Whether we recognize it or not, our inner child may be calling the shots more than we realize.
When my coaching clients tell me that something triggered them or they have resistance to practices like breathwork—often we can trace the origin of these stories to our childhood, our teens or our 20s.
Our inner children are tender, young, innocent, full of emotion and can be super sensitive. The pain and joy they carry within us can deeply influence us now. Children want to be seen, heard, and shown love—shown that we’re safe.
If you didn’t feel that as a child, it makes perfect sense that it would be hard to feel all of that as an adult, and harder still to embody it. The beauty of being an adult is that we get to recognize the ways our inner child is still asking for our support now.
We get to show our inner child a new way to function and move through the world when we begin reparenting ourselves.
We can show up for our daily lives either as an embodied adult or embodying our child self.
When we don’t take responsibility for our feelings, blame or shame others for the outcomes in our lives, not step into our full power to own our own thinking—this is emotional childhood.
This habit of being in emotional childhood can be a trauma response. I want to both honor that and empower you to do the work to give your inner child new tools so you can live your adult life squarely situated in emotional adulthood.
When we are kids, we have little capacity to control our emotions because they’re new to us in this lifetime. We’re learning how to handle anger, fear, grief, sadness in ways that are socially and culturally acceptable to our parents, siblings, teachers and other family members. It can be a challenging thing.
It’s important to recognize the role that socialization plays in how we learn as children to relate to our feelings and how that might play itself out in adulthood.
Humans assigned female at birth or raised as girl children often hear that it’s not okay to be angry, to raise our voices, to express displeasure.
Rather, we’re often taught to hold it in, to not express it, to not risk making anyone else angry or upset even when we’re angry or upset ourselves.
Children assigned male at birth or raised as boys are often taught not to express tenderness, vulnerability, gentleness, to present an outward façade of toughness. Boys don’t cry or express sadness, but their anger or acting out is tolerated and even sometimes societally approved of.
Not everyone learns the same lessons. All of this may get blurred in our particular individual home cultures. These are generalizations based on my own experience as a human, a life coach, a clinician, and a watcher of TV. These lessons are taught to us in so many ways and the patriarchy and gender norms are at the root of it, doling out oppressive constraints on our emotions for humans of all genders.
These stories can be the root of so much pain, so much sorrow, repression.
I know we can do the work of transcending these lessons if we want to, for our own good and that of all of humanity.
Doing this work is the work of reparenting ourselves in profound and complex and also simple ways.
This concept of reparenting will make so much sense once you’ve taken a stroll through the concepts of the inner child, emotional adulthood, and emotional childhood.
I often ask myself, particularly when I feel heightened emotions, who’s speaking right now? This is an entry into reparenting my inner child.
It’s often my inner child, especially when I can recognize that I’m not having a particularly adult reaction to what’s going on.
When my reaction is bigger than the moment truly calls for, that’s often when I’m reacting, or overreacting from that hurt child place. So too, when I find myself feeling wounded by someone’s words or when I’m having a hard time shaking something off.
These are some of the signs, for me, that my inner child wants and needs some attention and will keep hollering at me until they get it. I also know my inner child is awake and asking for support when I find myself buffering against a feeling or a task by distracting myself—or otherwise not taking responsibility for the adulting I get to do to reach my goals.
Another way she shows up is by being hard on myself, not giving myself enough credit for my success or judging myself harshly. That’s the little one in me that doesn’t want me to fail because she thinks it may kill me. I love her for that. I can show up for her and can let her know that she doesn’t need to be harsh. It’s just an old survival pattern that doesn’t serve me anymore.
What does it mean to reparent yourself?
Reparenting is the process of showing up for your younger self and giving those versions of you what they long for. It means holding space for them to feel their feelings without being mocked or ignored, or whatever their experience in their child self is.
Reparenting is about calming the central nervous system, which likely got freaked out when you were a kid and led you to react with a fight, flight, freeze response.
Calming the central nervous system is central to our healing as adults, so check out these blogs for more info: anxiety, adrenals, buffering, the stress response cycle.
When parts of us get over-activated into fight, flight, freeze over and over again, neural tracts get wired in our brains that make us more likely to react with panic, anxiety, or stress in certain situations.
This is where thought work—the conscious rewiring of our brains—and breathwork, where we learn to connect with our bodies, come in. These techniques help us begin to connect with ourselves so we can show up for reparenting.
For me, reparenting has been absolutely life-changing.
It has meant having lots of loving conversations with my inner child and children – there are lots of them within each of us – which are conversations I tend to have in my mind.
I first started connecting with my inner child by meditating on photos of little me. With my eyes closed, I invited four, eight, 14-year-old me in. Kids are super intuitive. If you’ve spent time around them, you know they love to ask and answer questions.
When I was first learning to connect with my inner child – and I still do this today – I made and make space in my heart for those little me’s to show up. I got really present with them and asked them what they wanted and needed from me.
What do I need from you? How old are you? How old do you think I am? How can I support and love you and how can you support and love me? What can we do together right now that will be supportive, loving, and helpful for us?
This process of simply practicing how to hold space for them and to ask them gentle and loving questions has been incredibly transformative. I wasn’t able to connect in with my inner children right away. It was a matter of patience and gentleness and focusing on self-love as the driver for this work.
I deeply believe that holding the intention of connecting with your inner child is healing in and of itself.
Even if you can’t immediately see your younger self in your mind’s eye, keep showing up each and every day.
I love to do breathwork for about 10 to 15 minutes, then I do my future self journaling and then I open up space to connect with my inner children. This whole process may take 20 to 30 minutes, which may be just about how long you spent scrolling social media while lounging on the couch every morning.
Consider developing a morning practice like this. It can be really supportive. This process is so different for everyone. Some folks may have a really easy time visualizing their younger self and some folks may find that more challenging.
The more you meditate on and contemplate the ways your inner child shows up in your adult life, the more they’ll show up.
One technique I love for folks who are having a hard time connecting with their inner child is to get out some paper and crayons and draw with your non-dominant hand—to open up a side of your brain that isn’t used as much. If you’re a righty, draw with your left, if you’re a lefty, draw with your right.
Start by drawing an image of yourself as a child to see what your inner child wants to express. Once you have this image, you can work with it. You can see what comes up. Often, we draw a picture of ourselves at a crucial developmental moment, a time of trauma or stress or at a really beautiful time.
Once we have this in front of us, we can have a conversation with little us.
To being reparenting, you can start to ask yourself what little you needs—love, comfort, support, guidance, safety.
This is the work to release the criticism of little us, the blocks that keep us from moving forward, from fully loving ourselves at each and every age and stage.
The more you can take responsibility for how you act or react when younger you is present, the more you’re showing up to be the most adult and empowered you possible. This is the process of reparenting yourself.
Your reparenting homework, my love, is to continue to tune into your inner child and when that person asks for your love and support.
Start to bring your full awareness to your inner child’s voice, to see and or hear them in your mind and to feel them in your heart and in your body.
Sometimes it’s just a felt sensation, and that’s great. Stay with it. Start by asking the loving questions:
My darling inner child, what do you want or need to feel peaceful? Is there something you’d like to tell me? Is there something I can tell you that would feel supportive? What’s the best choice that we can make, you and me together, to live our best life right now? What do you need to feel loved, seen, safe, and heard? How can I take care of you? How would you like to take care of me?
Practice this daily, and especially if you feel activated, upset, annoyed, triggered, irritated, put out. If you find yourself blaming, shaming, or acting like an emotional child, that’s often when your inner child needs you most. Show up for yourself. Be your own parent.
You can do this, my love. I know you can. Be firm with yourself, be loving, allow yourself to play.
You’re going to continue to raise awareness about when you’re in emotional childhood versus emotional adulthood. You’re going to continue to pay attention and notice when your inner child is being activated. You will notice when your inner children want your help, support or want to share something with you and teach you something.
You will notice when your inner children want you, adult you, to show up and be the parent for them—the parent they wish they’d had.