Reparenting ourselves into healthy adulthood!

Most meaningful therapeutic work involves some degree of healing and reparenting our inner child. And rightfully so. Tending to our inner “little one,” as I like to call her, is an opportunity to heal old patterns, learn to love ourselves, and to become for ourselves the stable adult so many of us lacked in our actual childhoods.

But what I think a lot of pop culture inner-child work has gotten wrong is the idea that tending to or loving the inner child is enough. What I have found in my own healing, tending to my inner little one, and from years of study and practice in the realms of alcoholic and dysfunctional family systems, trauma work, and healing codependency, in tending to the inner child it is important that she grows into a competent adult who does not need to stay stuck in the grief and trauma of childhood.

Learning to parent myself, in ways my actual parents were unable to, caring for my own inner little one and helping her learn to feel safe, have been so transformative.

But eventually, my inner little one had to grow up. I, the adult, had to teach me, the child, the adolescent, the teenager, the young adult, how to feel and express her emotions, ask for her needs to be met, meet them when others could not.

I, the competent adult had to meet myself at each necessary developmental stage with the same quality of attention, boundaries, structure, and discipline that I would have received from competent parenting, so that I could learn important social, emotional, and material skills like earning money, self-care, emotion regulation, achieving goals, healthy relating, and all the things I did not learn from the parents who birthed me.

This is important, because had I continued to tend to her as a perpetually neglected child, had I not met and attended to her through each of these developmental stages, I the adult, could not have stepped fully into my own power. And this is critical to full adult development.

So often, when we are not appropriately met (or are not able to eventually meet and support ourselves) through the appropriate stages of development, we run the risk of remaining in a collapsed, disempowered state of helplessness. We might learn enough to get by in life, but it is not enough just getting by.

Just like we did as actual children, our inner little child (and emerging adult) needs love, acceptance and present attention. We need to know we are good enough, and that we belong. But in that same way, our inner little one also needs structure, healthy discipline and boundaries. We need to learn that in taking chances and growing competence, we grow confidence. And as our confidence and our sense of belonging in the world grows, the more safe we feel in stepping more fully into our power.

So as we learn to connect with our essential goodness, inherent value and worth, as we heal and tend to the untended or unseen parts of ourselves, we must also do the work of developing the kind of developmentally appropriate structure and boundaries that help us grow into healthy and competent adults, caring for our inner child while being responsible for our adult selves in present time.