Reparenting from the Inside Out
You are with your toddler in the park and it’s time to go home. She is busy playing with sand and rocks and is not ready to leave. You give her a 10 min warning and then a 5-minute reminder that soon you will go home. She still has a hard time and seems like she is not listening. You understand that she is having fun playing and doesn’t want to leave and try to be empathetic and yet she still responds with complaints, crying, and screaming. Soon it moves into a full-blown tantrum. From her perspective, you are depriving her of playtime, but you know that she needs boundaries and structure. It’s lunchtime, soon-to-be nap time, and you need to go home.
While your toddler is having her meltdown, you too are experiencing emotional turbulence. You feel anxious and unsettled and are having a hard time calming down. Eventually, you walk home, she calms down and you start to feel relieved. You notice that you also feel drained and depleted from the episode, but don’t understand how such a small incident could exhaust you.
This kind of emotional response to a minor situation is a marker that you have been triggered. Your child’s tantrum was not just taxing on your nervous system but touched a place you don’t often attend to – your inner wounded child.
Your Inner Child Revealed
We grow up into our adult bodies, but often our emotional age or our beliefs about ourselves and the world don’t develop with us. As children, we learn very quickly what we need to do in order to be loved, accepted, and how to protect ourselves – for better or for worse. Unless we consciously change them, we retain those childhood beliefs, which then dictate our adult behavior, limit us, and impact our quality of life. It’s like having our 5-year-old self-making business decisions when we are 40, or our 10-year-old self making relationship decisions when we are 32 years old.
This is the voice of our inner child.
The Hardest Part of Parenting is Reparenting Ourselves
Whether you are a parent or not, your inner child lives inside of you and goes wherever you do. As Confucius famously said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Your childhood beliefs will persist until you turn to them and listen. Your inner child is a gift, there to alert you to yourself. He/she is inviting you to have a deeper relationship with yourself and your journey. When you start to pay attention, you’ll notice that your inner child often comes alive in times of stress and is looking for his/her needs to finally be met.
Moving Your Whole Self Into Adulthood (or Dialogue with Your Inner Child)
As an adult, it is now your job to form a relationship with, nurture, and comfort your inner child, like you would your own actual child. Attending to your inner child, with gentle listening, love, and compassion, forms a bridge between the inner child and our adult self. An open dialogue with your inner child essentially allows you to bring him/her up to speed with your adult self.
It can feel uncomfortable, especially since we are not taught to tend to our inner child, but we can start by simply turning our attention to him/her. Take some time to think about the needs that you had as a child that were never met. How does that need feel now? When does that need call out to you? What lessons, inner dialogues, and patterns do you need to unlearn? Then ask yourself, what experience are you longing to have now?
Let’s go back to the episode with your screaming child in the park, this time with the understanding that your inner child was calling out for healing. Perhaps your intense reaction to the episode with your child was related to your beliefs around crying and screaming. Did you feel like you were in emergency mode? Did the screaming make you feel like something terrible was happening and you had to solve it or someone was going to leave you? Did you feel insecure about your ability to be a mother? Were you worried about other people thinking you’re a bad mother?
When you understand the source of your reaction, you can identify what your inner child needs to be soothed and comforted, similar to what you would do with your own child.
No matter what the belief is, or how long you have lived with it, you can shift and change the way you view yourself and the people around you. As you pay attention to your reactions to different situations and people, you will be able to identify your inner child and his/her needs and begin to address them.
With gentleness, love, care, and compassion, this will transform your life (and your toddler’s too).