Your childhood is a key time in the development timeline. This is where you adopt behaviors and form habits. This is where you learn how to process emotions. It’s where you gain an understanding on what relationships are and how they should operate.
Your childhood is also a time when your subconscious develops. It’s a permanent warehouse for all of your memories and has a storage space larger than any cloud. It is always on, always working, and keeps track of life moments, all without your awareness.
The brain remembers anything and everything that goes on during those childhood years. It can try to suppress any bad memories, but at some point, they will find a way to resurface. Even the information that you deem unimportant can have a way of impacting your behaviors.
What Does Reparenting Mean?
Reparenting is a technique used to backtrack and meet any unmet needs from your childhood. Unmet needs can be either emotional or physical and can include affection, security, structure, care, and compassion.
As a child, your parents are supposed to fulfill any needs. Then, as you progress into adulthood, you have the foundation for healthy development and proper well-being. If you grew up in an environment where those needs were not met, you need to teach yourself how to get what you missed.
Reparenting can involve new learning and purging of unproductive, bad habits. It’s a way for you to take control of your own well-being.
The Benefits of Reparenting
Use of reparenting allows you to process your unmet needs in a safe space. You can openly get vulnerable, be confrontational, and learn about what’s hidden deep down. During this process, you can learn to trust another adult figure, understand what it’s like to be supported, and feel secure attachment.
It creates a sense of self-love that you may have been missing or gives you newfound acceptance. By reparenting yourself, you can break down some of the walls you’ve built up since childhood.
How It Works
In a perfect world, parents should treat their children with unconditional love, avoid judgment, see the uniqueness in each child, give attention, and provide encouragement at all times. Any wounds from their own previous experiences shouldn’t be shared.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to always separate this out and approach parenting in this manner. The main focus of reparenting is to give yourself that compassion that you may have been lacking in receiving. You start to nurture yourself in ways to fill in the blanks of what was missing during your childhood. The inner child in you that may still have wounds gets the attention it needs to start healing.
How Reparenting Helps with Anxiety
Anxiety stems from a number of different causes, one of which may be unresolved childhood issues. Carrying this trauma with you can lead to being anxious in adulthood.
If you didn’t receive the unconditional love and emotional support that every child craves, you may find yourself battling low self-esteem, negative self-talk, perfectionism, depression, and anxiety.
Through reparenting, you can address the root cause of your anxiety and process through it more effectively. This process may be even more beneficial for the fact that it addresses coping mechanisms as well as self-esteem issues all while attempting to manage your anxiety.
This may involve learning how to establish and maintain healthy boundaries. You may learn how to better express your emotions and be able to have healthy communication with others. All in all, it may teach you to have more positive behavioral patterns rather than default to negative ones.
Reparenting isn’t something that you have to do alone. Contact us to learn how we can help you through this process, we would love to connect with you at RAFT Counseling! We offer in office sessions in Parker, CO and online sessions are available throughout Colorado.