How I'm Reparenting Myself

You may have seen the term “reparenting” on social media. But is it just another “therapy speak” buzzword?

My simple definition of reparenting is: giving yourself as an adult what you didn’t get as a child.

Have you ever heard someone say, “Well he didn’t have a good dad himself. Of course you can’t give what you didn’t get.”

This saying implies that it’s impossible to be a good parent if you didn’t have a good parent yourself. Instead, reparenting says I can give myself what I didn’t get as a child. Instead of allowing our upbringing to determine our destiny, reparenting asks, what do I have to heal in myself in order to be the best parent I can be?

Boundaries expert and therapist Nedra Glover-Tawwab says, “Reparenting is a healthy way to nurture your inner child while offering yourself the care you needed.

Reparenting is empowering in that we can meet our own needs and healing when we can give ourselves what we didn’t get. Reparenting can also be challenging as it brings up painful childhood wounds.

Here’s how reparenting has been both healing and painful for me.

You can reparent yourself in the areas of knowledge, skills, or experiences you didn’t have as a child. Here are some examples:

• Getting sex education, especially after purity culture

• Learning different ways of interpreting the Bible

• Reading books about trauma

• Understanding your attachment style

• Learning about neurodivergence, especially if you, your partner, or your kid is neurodivergent

• Understanding and regulating emotions

• Regulating your nervous system

• Critical thinking skills

• Both/and thinking (aka, dialectical thinking which is what we practice here at Walking the Middle Path)

• Managing your kids’ big emotions

• Choosing a different church

• Trying different spiritual practices

• Dating or having an egalitarian relationship

• Parenting your kids differently than you were

• Creating your own family rituals and traditions

  

Reparenting work can be empowering, rewarding, and painful at times. I’ll be honest that even more than my purity culture recovery, reparenting myself from the way I was raised has been some of my most challenging inner work.

Some of my reparenting work would appear to not be a big deal. For example, we go trick-or-treating on Halloween as a family. My kids love dressing up, they get excited about candy, and we go with our neighborhood friends and end at their house in a big party. Our neighborhood does Halloween big and several friends who don’t live here will drive in for the night! It’s been a great way to enjoy community and get to know our neighbors.

I wasn’t allowed to trick-or-treat as a child due to my parents’ religious beliefs and convictions (I’m sure I’m not the only one reading this?). I always felt like I missed out on the fun as a kid. Even as an adult, I’ve never been a fan of themed parties and dressing up and every year, I wonder if I’m missing something or if I know what I’m doing when I try to put together my kids’ outfits! This self-consciousness is because I missed out on the skills and experience of dressing up as a kid. Now, as an adult, I’ve made different choices for my family based on my values, and this feels empowering to me.1

Other ways I am reparenting myself have been more painful. One significant example is dealing with the shame of being a “strong-willed child”. Learning how to accept and nurture my will instead of shame and judge myself is difficult, slow work that I am doing in my own therapy. Some of it is very personal and still “in progress”, but I hope to share more on Substack and in my next book as I continue my reparenting work.

For both my smaller example of trick-or-treating and my bigger one of accepting being strong-willed, reparenting allows me to assert myself as an adult and give myself permission to explore the options I have now that I didn’t have as a child. When we are acting from our younger, inner child, we worry about “getting in trouble,” disappointing our parents, or “being bad.” As an adult, we have choices available to us that we previously didn’t, and we can make those choices aligned with our own values and not based on others’ approval.

Introducing a new practice at Walking the Middle Path: an Inner Child Practice. Your inner child is the younger part of you that holds the memories, body sensations, and emotions from your childhood. An Inner Child Practice is one that helps us connect to this younger part of us, to nurture ourselves, and update this younger part to the present.2

Think about an area of knowledge, skills, or experiences that you missed out on as a child but would like to explore now. You could use some of my examples above, or come up with your own. As you consider ideas, notice what sparks curiosity, creativity, or interest in you. Connect to this “spark” of emotion, perhaps bringing your hands to your heart or wherever in your body you feel the emotion. Ask it, “what do you need from me now?” Follow your inner child’s direction. It could be something small, like taking a nap, or it could be something bigger, like an area of emotional healing you want to explore further.

Leave a comment and share: how are you reparenting yourself? What knowledge, skills, or experiences are you giving yourself now that you didn’t get as a child?

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