How Mentors Can Help Adults Reparent Themselves
Children are supposed to learn many life skills from their parents, including how to take care of their own emotional and physical needs. These life skills include:
Love and Respect
Self-Belief and Self-Confidence
Emotional Management
Good Communication Skills
Sometimes parents fail to provide the emotional, psychological, and physical shelter required for healthy children. This results in adults who are stuck in trauma-time who remain forever ruled by an inside force, the wounded inner child.
There is a method for adults who were traumatized and not parented in childhood. It is called reparenting.
Some children live in environments where their parents are unavailable, either physically or emotionally. In some cases, children are harmed by those who were supposed to protect and guard them.
The term reparenting designates a process by means that a person is offered new parental figures with positive characteristics.
Adults can’t return to their childhood and begin again. So reparenting means giving yourself what you did not receive in childhood from the original parents. Reparenting involves learning to give your wounded inner child all the love, respect, and dignity they deserved when you were young.
The inner child lives in each human and is the core of who they are as people. The inner child is molded 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 behaviors.
These inside parts of ourselves have a significant impact on how we see ourselves and how we behave as adults. Some signs you have a wounded child might include that you:
Have a deep feeling that there is something wrong with you
Are a people-pleaser
Are a rebel and feel alive when in conflict with someone else
You are a hoarder
Are not able to let go of possessions and people
Experience anxiety with something new
Feel guilty for setting boundaries
Are driven to be a super-achiever
Are ridged and a perfectionist
Have problems starting and finishing tasks
Exhibit constant self-criticism
Feel ashamed at expressing emotions
Feel ashamed of your body
Have a deep distrust of anyone else
Avoid conflict, no matter what the cost
Have a deep-seated fear of abandonment
If you recognize yourself in many (not necessarily all) of the above-listed items, then there is a high chance that you have a wounded inner child.
It may seem counterintuitive to think that an adult can be reparented by someone other than their original parents. In fact, many people fall into the trap of wanting their original parents to finish the job and hold resentment towards them because they cannot.
At the beginning of a mentoring program, a mentor can assume the role of a new parental figure. The mentor begins to teach their client various life skills that the mentor specialise in that can aid in the child, now an adult, in learning to live productively in the real world.
Reparenting must be carried out carefully by a mentor so that, eventually, the reigns can be turned over to the adult who must then carry on the lessons on their own. To be clear, this is supposed to be what happened initially, but the original parents were too damaged or self-involved to carry out these actions.
After instilling into their client, all the lessons they can, the mentor slowly backs off and instead helps the adult to attempt by trial and error to live successfully. The idea is for the adult to grow into their own parent, not for the mentor to become a forever parent to their client.
There is no substitute for good parenting. However, if you did not receive what you needed in childhood, it is never too late to begin anew by reparenting yourself.
Reparenting yourself allows you to give yourself all the love, respect, and dignity you did not receive in childhood. As your own parent, you can spend your time enjoying your years on planet earth because you feel stable, happy, and able.
