A Tip for Reparenting Yourself

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about re-parenting yourself. So, what does it mean to re-parent yourself? Well, what this is pointing to is reestablishing a relationship with your inner child. Your inner child is the part of you that was there in childhood, part of you that had different needs for love, connection, attunement, and safety. When we are children, we really depend on those around us, especially our caregivers, parents, to provide those sources of love, connection, attunement, and safety.

And in many ways we can get those needs met and in many ways we might not get those needs met. And in fact, for many, many people, a lot of those needs aren't met. We don't feel safe at certain points in our childhood. We don't feel the love that we needed to feel. Our sense of worthiness wasn't established for us from our caregivers.

And you can trace this back generations and generations where trauma keeps getting passed down over and over and over. So we don't need to get caught up in blame, but it is a reality of being a human coming into the world where we have certain needs and they don't always get met. Now the idea of reparenting yourself is that later in life, you can come back to that inner child who still lives within you from a more resourced place, from a place where you're able to say to yourself, we're safe right now, we're okay. Is there anything that you need? When you're a child and you don't get a certain need met and you're not loved or there's not someone there to take care of you, you can't talk to yourself in that way. You don't yet have the inner resources to say, oh, this is because this person has their own trauma that they're struggling with.

It's not my fault. It's their fault. Let me take some space for myself right now. That hasn't been established in you yet. You depend on someone to do that for you.

But later in life, you can develop that self-concept, that inner narrative, and you can use it as an adult to relate to the younger part of you when it arises - when it's feeling fear, when it's not feeling worthy, when it's feeling some anxiety around separation in a relationship. And so there's a lot to say about reparenting yourself. But I want to offer you one thing that you can do when you're feeling that fear in your life or something that gets triggered, that feels like it's related to a younger version of yourself. Just take a breath and practice saying: we're okay, I'm here with you. Remember your strength.

Trust yourself. What is one step we can take right now? And what that is doing is it's reinforcing that there is an adult you to meet that younger you. And often that's the main thing that the younger you needs. It needs to feel that sense of being held. It needs to feel that sense of trust.

It needs to feel that sense of safety. And when it can feel that, then it's much better able to collaborate with the adult you on where you're trying to go. So try this out as a practice for yourself throughout the day. It's really simple. It doesn't take a long time, but can go a long way for your own wellbeing and in moving towards your goals and responding skillfully.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.