Do you find yourself stuck in emotional patterns you can’t fully explain?
Perhaps you tend to be perfectionistic, overly self-critical, and struggle with feeling like a failure?
Maybe it’s difficult for you to put your needs first in a relationship, and you feel the impulse to people-please?
Despite your best efforts, you repeatedly end up feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, or disconnected, like something is missing.
These feelings and struggles are quite common and their root often lies in our earliest experiences – our childhood.
There is good news, however: In your adulthood, you can begin a profound healing process of reparenting by addressing your unmet needs and learning how to take proper care of your inner child.
In this blog post, we discuss how our childhood and adulthood are seamlessly interconnected, and how skills we can learn and practice as adults can lessen the impact of childhood emotional experiences.
Let’s get started!
The Lasting Impact of Childhood
The way we were parented directly influences how we view ourselves and interact with the world as adults:
- For instance, if emotional expression was discouraged at home (i.e., crying, hugging, or sharing fears), this may lead to difficulty showing vulnerability or emotional intimacy.
- If parental / caregiver love and attention were conditional – based on achievements or obedience – we may carry patterns of perfectionism or people-pleasing.
Children who grow up with inconsistent emotional support may develop insecure attachment styles. As adults, this can look like fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, or becoming overly dependent in relationships. It may also show up as emotional avoidance or detachment which are protective strategies developed in response to childhood emotional pain.
Other common adult struggles that often trace back to childhood experiences include:
- Chronic anxiety or a sense of never being “good enough”
- Codependency, where your sense of self depends on others’ needs and emotions
- Hyper-independence, a response to not feeling safe relying on others
- Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries
- Low self-worth or a harsh inner critic
These aren’t personality flaws—they are protective mechanisms learned during childhood when we had little power or control. However, as adults, we now have the ability—and the responsibility—to understand these patterns and begin the work of healing.
Understanding Reparenting
Reparenting is the practice of meeting your own emotional, physical, and psychological needs in adulthood—needs that may not have been adequately met when you were a child.
Reparenting is a compassionate, intentional process of showing up for yourself in ways you wish someone had shown up for you. What’s incredibly important to understand here is that reparenting is not about blaming your parents or caregivers. They may have done the best they could with what they knew at the time. Many of them were operating from their own childhood wounds, without access to tools or awareness to break the cycle.
Instead of wishing you had a different childhood and trapping yourself in the victim mentality or a pattern of self-pity, reparenting invites you to ask yourself:
“What do I need now to thrive? How can I give that to myself?”
By becoming the wise, nurturing caregiver to your inner child, you begin to shift old patterns and form new, healthier ways of thinking, feeling, and relating. This work takes time, patience, and daily commitment—but it is profoundly transformational.
The Four Pillars of Reparenting
| Pillar | Definition | Examples |
1: Loving Discipline |
Contrary to common beliefs, discipline is not a chore nor a punishment. It’s a form of self-respect. It’s the practice of supporting your well-being with guided, structured, committed, and consistent actions. |
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2: Self-Care |
Instead of spa days or chocolate boxes – think proper sleep schedule, healthy nutrition, regular movement, and cultivating compassion. Self-care here boils means supporting your body and mind in sustainable ways. |
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3: Emotion Regulation |
Emotion regulation is not about making the difficult feelings disappear. It’s the art of sitting in the discomfort, making space for the pain, and processing it using helpful tools and practices. |
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4: Joy |
Joy is often forgotten or pushed to the back burner in adulthood. However, it helps you reconnect with your playful, spontaneous, and creative inner child. It sends a signal to our nervous system saying, “Life is good! Make sure to enjoy that.” |
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Reparenting: Where To Begin
If you’re feeling confused about where to start, don’t worry. We’ve got you!
Here’s a step-by-step checklist for you to follow daily:
Focus on your breath:
- Take 5 minutes every day to connect to your breath.
- Inhale through your nose into your diaphragm and exhale slowly through your mouth. Try to make each exhale longer than the inhale.
- Visualise a balloon inflating with each in-breath and deflating with each out-breath.
- You can experiment with:
- putting one hand on your chest, another one on your belly.
- noticing any areas of tension in your body.
- dropping your shoulders,
- relaxing the space between your brows,
- unclenching your jaw,
- asking yourself “What do I need right now?”.
- Observe how your mental chatter quiets down and your nervous system calms down.
Keep one small promise a day:
- Pick a daily ritual to perform, whether it’s stretching, going to bed early, making your bed, or drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning.
- Make sure it’s tangible and short – 10 minutes long maximum.
- Showing up daily for yourself in these small ways is the perfect way to build self-confidence and trust in yourself.
Work on Your Mental Health
- The process of parenting takes time, effort, patience and perseverance. There’s no quick fix. It can be a very emotional and challenging journey. There’s absolutely no need to walk this path alone.
- Working with a psychologist, like one of the professionals from our team, can be an amazing resource – providing you with a safe space to explore and heal your childhood wounds with compassion, effective tools and techniques tailored to your unique needs.
If you’re ready to begin the process of reparenting and healing your inner child – take the first step and contact us here.
