How To Use Self-Parenting To Heal the Past – For Good
As adults, our childhood can often elude us. We can only recall a handful of memories, and yet there were thousands of moments that impacted the people we are today.
We like to reference children as “sponges”, which is spot on. Children are constantly soaking up the world around them as it imprints lasting impressions on the psyche. Children are not consciously thinking about these impressions – they’re soaking them up emotionally. The mind and body start to form implicit memories (as opposed to explicit memories – the kind you can remember). Implicit memories are tucked away into the unconscious mind, yet greatly inform our adult life, and not always to our benefit.
However, children can’t regulate their emotions; they depend on others, mostly their primary caregivers. For example, a parent hears their daughter crying and naturally responds by holding, feeding, or changing her diaper. The child depends on her parent to meet her needs, and this fosters an internal message of safety and comfort.
No parent is perfect, and even the most loving and attentive parents will fail to respond to every childhood moment that could be resolved with the presence of a caring parent. Children are destined to fail, be rejected, and hurt. These moments eventually fade into the back of our psyche and play on our emotions and behaviors later in life.
As adults, we naturally find that knowing and/or thinking something doesn’t always work to resolve our childhood pains. I have had many clients say, “I know what’s wrong, but now what?”. This illustrates the lack of impact our thinking brain has on our emotional brain.
*This is not to say the thinking brain has ZERO impact, it’s just a lot less efficient than targeting our emotional brain.
Self-Parenting exercises offer an empowering tool to finally go back and resolve some of these pains with the help of emotionally stimulating experiences. It can help transform symptoms of anxiety, depression, body image issues, addictions, relationships issues, etc. Here is a way you can start healing the past with the help of your adult self.
Step 1: Access Your “Parent Self”
This exercise depends on your ability to access the parent within you, and yes, we all have one. You have to be a loving, centered, and compassionate parent to the inner child you are about to meet. This takes practice, especially if you haven’t consciously accessed this part of you before. These are a few of the ways to embody the parent self:
- If you are already a parent, use the experience of a time you comforted your own child. Think of a time you weren’t stressed or frustrated. Instead, use a memory when you were completely present, compassionate, and available to soothe your child’s pain.
- Think of how you would respond to a child you were taking care of – perhaps a child in your family or simply an imagined one. Practice accessing the part of you that would naturally care for his/her well-being.
- Locate the wise self. We all have what many have called the “wise self”, “higher self”, “authentic self”, or simply, “the self”. A good way to access it might be the feeling you get when a friend asks for advice. This experience can usually foster some sagely advice (hopefully for your friend’s sake.) This state of mind is usually associated with a sense of calm, curiosity, connection, compassion, confidence, clarity, and courage. This state of mind isn’t clouded with too many “negative emotions” and feels open-hearted.
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Remember, psychologists promote the “good enough parent” for optimal caregiving. This parent is one that provides a good enough amount of attention, acceptance, affection, and appreciation. But without at least a general sense of this state, the child inside could be more mistrustful and not feel comforted.
Step 2: Locating The Child Within
“The child can be your master teacher in the emotional world, showing you again and again what’s true for you and how you really feel.” -Arlene Drake
If you’ve been around a child recently you may have noticed a quality that many adults don’t possess… directness. Children haven’t had a chance to build their adult defense mechanisms, their brain is working mostly from pure emotion, and they have little inhibitions. They speak from the heart, and are great at expressing the raw truth about an experience. We sometimes cannot rely on our adult interpretations of the past, we have become jaded by years of rationalization, repression, and other psychological defenses.
This step is all about separating the child “part”. This isn’t just some wacky new age exercise, the psychological benefits of separating yourself into parts is well documented. A theory of why humans experience mental illness is from a lack of integration of the mind. The dis-integrated parts of the psyche have remained dormant from the past and were never allowed to be integrated. Using parts helps to build bridges of communication between different parts of the brain, promoting integration and wellness. It also helps to create a healthy distance from present day emotions to safely work with them. This allows stuck emotional energy to flow easier, and provides an effective way to self-regulate our nervous system.
In order to access the child: first, follow today’s distressing emotion, behavior, or thought. Use the grounded presence of your loving adult self to start becoming curious. Explore the triggering experience and start to access the emotion. Use this data to help explore the moments of your childhood. You may be surprised how seamless this can be, taking only a few seconds to have a memory pop up from the depths of your unconscious. If you’re still having trouble, try using some childhood photos as this can help jog your memory.
To be clear, your goal is to imagine in your mind’s eye the child version of yourself as a separate entity from your adult self. Once you’ve identified the child part, you can explore some additional details:
-How old is he/she?
-Where is he/she?
-What was he/she just doing?
-What is he/she wearing?
-What’s the expression on his/her face?
-What is he/she feeling?
-What is he/she thinking?
Begin to enter the scene as your parent self, while seeing that child part even more clearly. Begin to entertain how you could start to approach him/her.
I also must caution that this reuniting with the child doesn’t always go smoothly. Perhaps the child isn’t initially comfortable seeing you – their sense of trust in others is so broken, he/she is extremely hesitant. The inner child could also be angry that you have failed them, continuing to let the people that originally hurt him/her into your life.
This isn’t always expected, but is possible. If this happens, play around with the experience, use the warm and welcoming parent self to help to start gain the child’s trust. Depending on the intensity of this reaction from the child, it may take a few more reunions to get the child safe enough to continue to exercise.
Step 3: Offering What The Child Needs
When healing the wounds from the past, it’s not enough to simply know that the experience is over. The child inside needs to experience safety, love, and care. When the child part of you feels safe, it speaks to the emotional brain, and the body’s fight/flight/freeze response can be soothed and rewired for safety.
If experience is the key element to healing, then emotion is how the experience leaves a lasting unconscious impact. Understanding the previous emotion felt from step 2 is one thing, now it’s your job to imprint a new healing emotion. These may include: love, safety, confidence, presence, validation, joy, excitement, calm, and connection.
The ways you can illicit this type of emotion is up to you and what the child seems to need at the time (remember, you are being the comforting parent to the distressed child in the imagined scene). Here are some ideas on how to accomplish this:
–Speaking to the child.
-Communicating a sense of reassurance.
-Physical touch, such as: hugging, hand on the shoulder, or pat on the back.
-Non-verbal gestures such as eye contact, relaxed bodily presence.
-Suggesting a new activity such as playing a game.
-Offering something like a glass of water or their favorite stuffed animal.
Here are some specific examples:
-The child was blamed for the families problems, so you might explain they were a good child and it wasn’t their fault.
-If he/she was ridiculed for being sad, give them permission and acceptance to cry.
-If the child was hit by their father, you can enter the scene and protect the child, using healthy aggression to stop the abuse.
-If he/she didn’t receive enough love and warm, you can hold the child, take deep breathes, and rub their back.
The goal isn’t to change who the child is, or ask them to be different – this will happen naturally with your parenting. The goal is to simply provide the child with what they need and they will naturally feel free, safe, valued, confident, etc.
Step 4: FEEL The New Emotion
As indicated in step 3, the associated healing emotion is the key component to change. Make sure the child inside is actually feeling the new emotion. Look for cues such as a smile on their face, their body starting to relax, or a natural embrace such as a hug.
At this point it would benefit to notice the new feeling inside your present day self. Feel the old “negative” feeling start to melt away and be replaced with the sensation of the new healing emotion.
To end the experience, you can say good bye to the child for now, or just simply go back to your current present moment (whatever feels comfortable).
Putting It All Together – Henry’s Anger
Henry had an absent father. His mother was often stressed and had little time to attend to Henry’s emotional needs. He is now 35, an accountant, and recently married with a 2-year-old son.
One of Henry’s concerns is his anger, which seems to always come up on Friday mornings. He notices the anger distances himself from his wife and son. He notices that Fridays are a unique day, in that he usually works from home and watches after his 2 year old son. His wife usually leaves in a hurry without much instruction.
As she leaves, he notices a pang in his neck and shoulders, he continues to explore this emotion to access the younger part in him. He grounds himself in his adult self as he is presented with an image of his mother leaving for work, instructing him to look after his younger brother.
As Henry explores the incident, he can hear his inner child complaining about the situation: “It’s not fair, I want to play with my friends down the block!”. He can see the grimace in his face and stiff posture. He’s 12 years old, wearing his favorite Miami Dolphins jersey.
Henry starts to work with his inner child so he can feel heard and validated. He decides to respond verbally with soft eyes and welcoming posture – “I know it sucks you have to look after your brother, your mom appreciates how much you help”.
Henry imagines playing a quick video game with his 12-year-old self, and reassuring him that when mom comes home he can have his friends over. He can see the smile on the 12-year-old’s face, and a sense of resolve washes over him.
Having an experience with your inner child is not meant to devalue the adult experience. Sometimes we have good reason to be upset, depressed, or frustrated. It’s still an option for Henry to address his concerns with his wife. This could lead to a conversation and new compromise on a different interaction before she leaves the house, albeit with a much better understanding of childhood wound that causes the anger. This can now be something he can even share with his wife.
The practice of reparenting the child within takes practice and persistence. Eventually, you’ll feel more in control of your life and the past will no longer run the show.
Using the Self-Parent Exercise To Change Your Behavior
The example above can be seen as a healing experience, but there are other behaviors and emotions that the exercise can target. Take for instance a child that received little to no discipline and their mother would often focus on feeding them baked goods to pacify them. The adult form of this could be someone that has a difficult time sticking to a schedule, tends to procrastinate, and uses food to self-soothe. They may get easily overwhelmed when faced with a difficult task that requires discipline, and frequently responds with a trip to the kitchen for some fresh baked cookies.
This adult never had a loving and firm parent that used healthy boundaries and discipline for the child. In order to change the present day problems with discipline, the adult can use this self-parent exercise to be the loving and firm parent to their self.
The adult can see that he’s watching T.V. and eating a bag of cookies instead of cleaning the house. He can now use the exercise to parent the inner child to get his chores done before watching any T.V.
Identify, Practice, Repeat
Start noticing the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that get in the way of living your best life. Notice these pop up throughout the day. Use the Self-Parent protocol to start to explore them. The more your practice, the more you can change these patterns for good. The self-parenting exercise lays down new neural pathways, this is why it can change your life so dramatically.
Remember, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect, starting a practice like this takes courage and patience. Soon you’ll start to see changes and a clearer road to living your best life.
