*Smaranda Maier.
This week’s article from Authentic Health delves into the topic of reparenting.
“The inner child lives in each human and is the core of who they are as people. The inner child is moulded by the directions we receive in childhood that teach us how to parent ourselves. Painful, traumatic experiences, along with a lack of nurturing by dysfunctional parents, leave deep wounds in the inner child, and this, in turn, contaminates adult behaviours”. (Kneisl 1991).
My first contact with the term REPARENTING was in 2020 when I read the book “How to do the work” written by the psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera. I was at the very early stage of my own emotional healing journey when I heard this word for the first time. I was fascinated by the idea of being able to meet my own needs as an independent human being and became very interested to find out how this process can be done in my life. I have applied the teachings to my own life, and I started to feel relieved and nurtured and more balanced and happier overall.
But let’s see how reparenting works and how can help us.
Our consciousness is born way before the moment we are getting out of our mother’s womb and our blueprint is conceived way before our birthday. Everything that happens to us before the moment we are born and before the age of 7 is out of our control and yet marks the rest of our own life.
No matter how much our parents loved us as babies and then as small children, they only gave us the love what they were capable at that moment in time. There is no place of judgment or blame for what happened to us but when we reach to the stage of awareness, we, deal with emotional symptoms that affect our daily life and our wellbeing.
Low self-esteem, perfectionism, people pleasing symptom, imposter syndrome, addictions, the impossibility to say no, negative self-talk, and the list goes on……all of them have their roots before we reached 7 years of age because of the conditioning that we were exposed to during our early childhood.
Why it is important to understand what reparenting means and what is the difference between reparenting and body health?
It is natural for our human species when we are feeling out of control to look outside of ourselves in the external environment because we are designed to perceive “danger” and to defend ourselves by attacking.
If you ask yourself why that happens here is your answer. Our brain’s main function is to make sense of everything what happens to us, to spot danger and to protect us. Because this is the familiar our brain will look at the past as something what is known and familiar instead of looking at new solutions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the new solution yes perceived is dangerous. It can very easily mean that the new solution is unfamiliar. But our limbic system perceives it as a danger because it’s new.
There is a well-known saying that states: “your brain will always choose a familiar hell over un unfamiliar heaven”. And there are a lot of people who are stuck in their past because they don’t choose the unfamiliar.
But are we condemned to live in our past because we don’t know how to overcome those beliefs and how to reinterpret our experiences in a way that supports our health?
The answer is no. We can, with support and guidance and being in a safe space to develop a new positive psychology skill called reparenting. This reparenting concept refers to our mental capacity of identifying and reframing our old thinking patterns. It is certainly not our fault that we are thinking in certain ways that don’t serve us bought it is our responsibility to change them. Here is where the reparenting tool plays a very important role.
If you are looking at your own body you will probably notice that there were periods when you were very stressed, or you felt a heavy emotion and all your body felt tense and stiff.
But if you do a simple exercise and you are starting to think of relaxed, and not having anything going on, you will probably notice that your shoulders are dropping, and your body is starting to feel relaxed.
That’s the power of what a simple thought can do to your physical body, and this is exactly how emotions impact our health.
But notice, first there is a thought and that thought generates an emotion, a feeling in your body. So, if we can control and reverse a negative thought, we probably can control the cause of our disease in the body.
It is worth it to start spending time and raising awareness on recognising the thoughts and the beliefs that were formed in childhood, and are no longer serving us.
