The many benefits of re-parenting yourself the right way

When your first childhood fails, you can find healing through giving yourself another chance at unconditional love.

by: E.B. Johnson

Childhood is more than just a brief window in time. It is a crucial moment in our lives, and one in which we form our baselines for everything from relationships to self-perspective. The lessons we learn as children follow us throughout life, but when those things are hurtful or bad, they can cause major personal conflict in our adult lives.

If you had a childhood that was abusive, neglectful, or otherwise toxic and dysfunctional — then it might be time to consider giving yourself a second childhood. By engaging in the process of re-parenting, you can learn how to re-engage in life and re-invest in yourself in important ways. Stop looking backward at the pain and the loss and start looking forward to a future that’s defined by your own authentic joy and fulfillment.

When re-parenting becomes the right choice.

Many of the challenges we face in our adult lives can be traced back to learning moments in our childhood. Some of these moments were good and brought with them valuable lessons and happy memories that linger in the best parts of your brain. On the converse end, however, are the traumatic and challenging relationships and experiences; which go just as far to inform our perspectives and the lessons that we learn in childhood.

Re-parenting is often the right choice if you had a childhood that was plagued by feelings of fear or inadequacy. This is a process of getting back to your roots, and taking the hand of that inner child (we all have)who’s still struggling to find balance, discipline, and unconditional love.

Beyond just buying ourselves some nostalgic toys, giving yourself a second childhood is actually a nuanced process of being the caretaker you never had. This “re-parenting” involves repairing the attachments and beliefs that were formed between ourselves and our caretakers in childhood, while forming a new foundation of love and unconditional acceptance. You don’t have to hang on to the abuse, neglect and criticisms of the people who raised you. You can become your own person and give that inner child the safety they never knew.

The foundations of successful re-parenting.

There are 4 aspects to successful re-parenting. Beyond creating a sense of nostalgia, we can use these foundations — discipline, joy, self-love, and emotional awareness — to reshape the way our inner child sees themselves and the world around them.

Gaining discipline

Discipline is an important life skill we all have to learn; whether our lives are a big party, or a serious slog. Through discipline, we learn how to get what we want, but also perform the basic actions that fulfill our most core needs. Discipline isn’t just about learning how to get up on time and brush your teeth (though those things are certainly important). It’s also about learning how to methodically approach your goals, dreams and objectives…no matter what they may be.

Bringing joy

Re-creating our childhoods requires that we also reconstitute that sense of joy that was stripped from us. Childhood is a period in which we should experience a lightness and an excited optimism. While you may not be able to recapture that exact innocence you can still get excited about life by creating new joyful memories. By getting creative here in the present, we can reshape (and in some cases replace) the painful and negative experiences of our past.

Caring for self

As children, we should be taught the value of caring for ourselves (both mentally and physically), but we often aren’t. As a matter of fact, many of us are taught to sacrifice ourselves when it comes to the needs of others; especially if it means getting some sort of validation or “love”. This is often created by broken relationships with our caretakers. Likewise, if you watch a caretaker sacrifice themselves — you’re like to mimic the behavior in adulthood.

Regulating emotions

Do you struggle with emotional outbursts? Do you bury your emotions down deep inside until they corrupt your sense of self? These are examples of maladaptive emotional regulation. This occurs from having little emotional awareness, and few positive examples when it came to embracing and dealing with your feelings. Perhaps you were punished when you showed emotion, or perhaps you grew up in a household that volatile and emotionally perilous. Either way, learning how to positively regulate your emotions is a core step in re-parenting.

The many benefits of choosing to re-parent the right way.

If you’re on the fence, it’s important to realize the incredibly powerful benefits of making the commitment to re-parent your inner child. From increased self-esteem to maximum independence — it’s often the best gift we can give ourselves.

Increased self-esteem

Parents who criticized you, abused you or otherwise neglected you take a serious toll on your self-esteem. Even if the pain they caused is decades in the past, its effects linger. By taking the initiative to rework their messages, you can actually increase your self-esteem and therefore create a new way of looking at yourself, your life, and your abilities.

Reworking bad habits

We don’t just take our self-esteem from our parents; we take all sorts of habits from them too — from coping habits to relationship habits; they touch on it all. When we re-parent ourselves, however, we get a chance to not only identify these habits (or patterns). We get a chance to rework them, too. The more bad habits re-work, the more peace and contentment our lives become filled with. This is because we put ourselves on the right path to authentic joy.

Greater sense of self-love

Re-parenting yourself requires creating happy memories and increased self-esteem. It also requires, though, that you learn how to give and receive absolute and unconditional love. Unconditional love is all-encompassing, and it is beyond revoking. Learning how to love yourself in this truly powerful way allows you to become comfortable in your own skin; flaws and mistakes included. Cultivate a greater sense of self-love and you will find your life filled with happiness you have never known.

Finding comfort in life

Life is not an easy experience and rarely is it comfortable. Not only do we have to deal with complex emotions, but we also have to deal with endless hardships. The true power is learning how to find comfort in the journey of life — despite the adversity it throws your way. Achieving this doesn’t happen with the “perfect relationship” or by getting the recipe right. It happens by learning how to accept yourself while finding the silver lining in any singular moment.

Maximum independence

Because re-parenting asks us to free ourselves from the toxic patterns and beliefs we learned in childhood, it helps grant us an independence we never imagined before. While you might pay all your bills and tick all the “grown up” boxes — you’re not really independent if you’re still living in the shadow of a toxic childhood. You have to throw off those shackles in order to be truly free in both mind and body.

Improved relationships

When we struggle to form strong, lasting and healthy interpersonal relationships, it’s often as a result from the failures we experienced in past relationships. Among these relationships are included the relationships we formed with our caretakers. These are the first reference points by which we start to build our definitions of love, intimacy and connection. By re-parenting over the poor examples set for you in childhood, you can learn how to be a better friend, partner, and even parent.

The best ways to start the re-parenting process.

While extensive re-parenting is best done with the assistance of a mental health professional, there are a number of steps you can take to kick-off the process of nurturing your inner child. Don’t wait to start healing. Build a better tomorrow for yourself by getting started with these basic techniques.

1. Be honest about what went wrong

Before you can move forward or identify what steps you need to take in order to care for your inner child, you have to be honest about what went wrong and accept where you’re at. Consider it a bit like orientation. Until you know where you’re at, it’s impossible to figure out where you’re going. You have to accept your past, accept the parents that you had, and accept what broken parts need to be fixed.

Don’t rush head-first into action. Spend some time getting to know your inner child first. Slowly, and gently, let them open up to you. Listen to them when they tell you who hurt them, and how. Listen to them as they explain why they’re struggling.

Detach yourself and pretend that you’re a stranger as you watch them unfold the painful memories, and the relationships that broke your child’s heart. Don’t run from the feelings — simply watch them go by. When you’re done, document the experience. Engage in this practice slowly and regularly. Ease into the waters with your inner child, and through that find the power and compassion to accept what it’s time to fix.

2. Practice compassionate accountability

If you were raised in an abusive or highly dysfunctional home, then odds are you learned at an early age that mistakes (and emotions) were unacceptable. For this reason, you might notice that you have become highly critical of yourself and your abilities; which can, in turn, lead to dramatic outbursts whenever you feel like you “got it wrong”. This stems from self-loathing, but we can rework that self-loathing by practicing compassionate accountability.

Start dropping judgement and learning how to be more understanding with yourself. Let yourself make mistakes, and know that it’s not possible to get everything right, no matter how hard you work to make everything “perfect”. If a critical parent taught you it wasn’t okay to mess up, understand that it came from their insecurities…not your inabilities.

When you make a mistake acknowledge it, but before your emotions swoop in to punish you — take a step back and count to 10. Look at the misstep and ask yourself what lessons you can take away from it. The next time a similar situation occurs, are you now equipped to deal with it better? Take this silver lining and use it to overcome the self-loathing that comes along with every mistake that you make. To error is human. Embrace it to find peace in the journey.

3. Incorporate joy on a regular basis

A happy childhood is important to building a happy adulthood, but that’s not something that everyone is blessed with. That’s why it’s important to give your inner child those joy-infused moments now, while you hold control. By creating happy memories, we can replace or (at the very least) overshadow the painful ones right now in our present. When we incorporate this childlike joy on a regular basis, it transforms our lives.

Get back in touch with that childlike sense of wonder and excitement about life. Treat yourself to nostalgic toys from days long past. Take yourself on the family holidays you never got. Find the fun in every gathering, every zoom call. Look for excuses to laugh and be silly.

The more fun you have with your inner child, the more comfortable they become. The more they relax, the easier you’ll start to feel in your own skin. Life doesn’t have to be endless suffering and drudgery…even if that was the life our parents lived. Allow yourself to be happy. Allow yourself to create a life that was better than what they had. Don’t stay chained to a past, and to people who don’t decide your present. Treat yourself to the brighter sides of childhood you missed the first time around.

4. Set some limits and boundaries

Giving yourself a second chance at childhood isn’t just all about giving your inner child back their sense of joy. While a parent might take their child to Disney World, they still make them eat their vegetables too. This is called discipline, and it’s an equally important part of re-parenting yourself the right way. If you didn’t get that sense of structure in childhood, have enough self-respect to give it to yourself now.

Teach your inner child that life is about fun, but accept the fact that it involves energy, effort and concentration too. Look at your future. Where do you want to be in 10 or 20 years? Whatever that answer is, it’s going to involve planning. And that involves having the discipline to execute the actions that need to be undertaken.

Breakdown every aspect of your life, from romantic relationships to your career. Within each category, consider what you want and consider what absolutely if off-limits. Use this to set boundaries for yourself and the people around you (and stick to them). The more specific our boundaries are, the better. Communicate them to yourself and others regularly. Lean into them and find a new comfort in knowing where the limits lie.

5. Master the art of self-soothing

Another important aspect of re-parenting ourselves is learning how to emotionally regulate. When you have a traumatic or dysfunctional childhood, it causes you (often) to develop maladaptive ways of handling your emotions. You might slide from one extreme to the next quite easily, or you might bury our emotions away entirely until they fester inside. Both means are toxic, and can only be overcome by learning how to self-soothe and emotionally regulate.

In order to regulate our emotions (and therefore our moods) we have to first embrace our emotions for what they are — the good and the bad. This takes time, and journalling and meditation are a great place to start. When an emotion happens, step back and take note of it. Take note too of how it makes your body respond.

Once you get comfortable acknowledging your emotions, watch how they impact your responses. The more aware you become of these patterns, the easier it becomes to create solutions that limit the negative consequences of your emotions. For example, by learning how to identify anxiety-causing situations before they happen, you can come up with creative ways to excuse yourself, or calm the mind. The more aware you are of your individual emotions, the easier it becomes to calm them and control them.

6. Fall in unconditional love with you

The greatest gifts a parent can give their child in this life is unquestionable and unconditional love. This means creating a world in a which your child knows that — no matter who they are, or what mistakes they make — you will always be there loving them and supporting them. Unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional excuses. It means letting that inner child know that they are beautiful and accepted no matter who they choose to be.

Spend a few minutes every morning talking to your inner child. Imagine sitting with them in the place they love most and imagine spending a day of joy and laughter together. In that laughter, say to your inner child, “There is nothing you could ever do that would make me love you less.”

“What if I mess up?” Nope, that’s not enough. “What if I get things wrong?” We all do. Comfort them and tell them that no matter what happened in the past, they are safe with you. That’s because you know them, and you see them. Tell them that you’ll fight for them every day of their lives and let them know that there’s nothing in this world that could remove them from your love. The more love you give them, the more at peace they will become until — suddenly, one day — all the pieces fall into place.

Putting it all together…

If you had a childhood that was fraught with hardship and pain, it might be time to give yourself the childhood you never had and learn to re-parent your inner child. This process is a long one, and one that often requires the help of a mental health professional. We can kick start the process, though, by learning how to set boundaries and give ourselves unconditional love.

Be honest about the childhood that you had and the caretakers that built it. Only when you accept where you’re at can you figure out what you want to change. Start with compassionate accountability and stop taking it so hard on yourself when you get things wrong. We’re all human. Work hard to replace your painful childhood memories with regular infusions of joy, but set the boundaries that allow your inner child to understand the importance of discipline. Beyond that, work hard to give them the emotional regulation and soothing they were never allowed to have in the past. By becoming safer in your emotions, you can become more aware and proactive about their effects in your life. Above all else, though, learn how to love yourself as unconditionally as your parents should have. Then, you will have the strength and the power to overcome the past and transform your life from the inside out.