It was two in the morning. I was folding laundry warm out of the dryer. My 6-month-old daughter had finally fallen asleep snuggled up to my chest in her baby wrap. I was listening to a podcast of Dr. Brené Brown speaking with Jonathan Fields about the importance of creating cultures of vulnerability, compassion, and wholeheartedness in the workplace. “It’s so important for leaders to demonstrate what they want to see in their people” Dr. Brown intoned. Exactly, I thought to myself. It’s got to come from the top down. “This is the thing I say that people get most upset with me about. It’s that we cannot give people what we don’t have, we can’t ask people to do what we’re not doing.” “That’s right. You tell those CEOs how they better behave, Auntie Brené.” I whisper. “Actually, the group that gets the most pissed off about it is parents of young children.” Excuse me? My ears perk up. “You can’t raise a child with a greater sense of resilience than your own. You can’t raise a child with more self-compassion than YOU have. When I say that, people get itchy, they get irritated. When I tell people, you can’t love a child more than you love yourself. They get hostile.” 

I had to sit down. I hugged my sleeping baby. The depth of love I felt for this child, who felt simultaneously so much a part of me and also entirely her own person, was more than I’d once thought possible. What did Brené Brown mean I couldn’t love her more than I loved myself?! A decade earlier, I would’ve done whatever I could to dismiss those words that riled me up and left me questioning; thrown myself into staying busy, eaten my way out of the feelings, watched season after season of tv. Five years earlier, I would have rested on my ego and listed all the different ways I did indeed love my daughter more and that Dr. Brené Brown might know about a lot of things, but she did not know this.  But I was 33 when I became a mother and knew by then that when something made me feel that fiery discomfort, I should stay put and dig deeper and see what it could teach me. 

Sitting with this idea that we can’t give our children any more love and resilience than we have for ourselves, lent an urgency to the work I was already doing to look at my own childhood and heal the wounds I found there. Research like the ACES study conducted by Kaiser Permanente and the CDC shows that adverse experiences we have as children affect us long after we’ve become adults. It is important for us to address and heal these wounds because sometimes the way that we make meaning of experiences in our lives is not through the perspective of the empowered adults we are, but rather through the perspective of the wounded, hurt children we were. 

To reparent our inner child, we must first become conscious of and acknowledge the experiences and events in our day to day that might trigger wounds from the past. An emotional wound is an important need that was unmet. People react in many ways when faced with unmet needs, but most of the time we find some way to cope. Sometimes that coping is healthy and generative, other times it is destructive and perpetuates the pain. The task of reparenting requires us to become more mindful about those moments that bring up big feelings. When we recognize the pain of those unmet need resurfacing, we can practice self-compassion and ask ourselves questions like: “How can I meet this need for myself now?” “In what ways am I more capable now than I was as a child?” “How can I disrupt these negative feelings and empower myself to nurture my inner child?” Reparenting work is not easy and can benefit from the support of therapist.