How to actually feel truly safe. Reparenting Yourself

When our Vulnerable inner child arises it comes as an intense feeling. It calls out in desperation and urgency, hoping to be heard and rescued.

Sometimes the inner child is enraged and demanding, fiercely protesting and demanding access to whatever it is that we think will make the pain go away. This is the Angry Child, who is equally as vulnerable.

How we respond to our inner child reflects not our intentions, but what we've been taught through our experiences growing up.

If we didn’t have an attuned capable adult responding to our needs in childhood, our brains learn to experience an overwhelming existential distress when such feelings arise, because we've long learned that ‘no one is coming to save us’.

In desperation, unconscious internal defences form in an attempt to get rid of the vulnerability. We can develop ‘critical parent responses’, which attempt to shame, banish, control vulnerability away, and often do silence the distress temporarily, but at a huge cost to our self-esteem.

Do you recognise any of these within yourself?

In addition, we can also turn to numbing (drinking, scrolling, sex, bingeing, drugs) and distractions to hide and distance from the intense feelings of the Inner Child.

If seeing these cards raises the hair on your arms, and by that I mean if your emotional wounds feel numerous, and your inner critical parents have long established themselves as a dominant committee in your head, this article is primarily aimed at you.

You are not to blame for the presence of these inner critical parents, they are a response formed within you to cope with the challenges you have had to face in life thus far.

Until a profoundly different way to respond to our distress is learned, there will be a suite of 'coping strategies' (perhaps they should be named 'survival strategies') which fight to suppress or release our distress unconsciously.

These inner defences fight our pain tirelessly, while the Vulnerable / Angry child longs for a loving, capable and safe person to arrive to relieve us of the existential pain we have faced alone in the world until now.

In hopes of finding such a person, we might enter and leave relationships, the worst of which are relationships which carve deeper into our existing wounds. The best of which are with loving, capable and safe people that may genuinely ease the existential terror of the Inner Child, for short periods, and to varying degrees of reliability. After all, another grown adult can support us, but they can't manage all of our fears and needs.

So even if healthy relationships provide some of what we need, there remains a fragility and terror that we can't quite resolve. We wonder "If I lose this relationship, am I to lose all safety?"

If you've been repeatedly hurt by relationships, you may doubt whether a safe lasting relationship is possible for you, even if you also deeply fear being alone.

And like a song on repeat, the pain of your old wounds will keep recirculating back around until you learn to respond to it in the ways that are needed. The Vulnerable/Angry Childs calls will keep out crying to you on repeat, until you become that loving, capable and safe person.

This process of becoming that loving, capable and safe person is called Reparenting.

Reparenting is the learning and use of healthy attuned parental responses to our own pain.

Reparenting is showing up to receive our pain with genuine care, concern, validation, providing real world support, and creating boundaries so that the suffering Inner Child within us is able to be both vulnerable and safe at the same time.

It's turning towards ourselves with the loving eyes of the kind of parent who gazes down at their child and knows they would fight the whole world to keep them safe, who loves and respects their child deeply, and who steps up willingly to care for them and meet their needs.

To experience the kind of love that awaits you when you learn to both give, and receive, such care and support within yourself, is directly restorative to your sense of safety, belonging and enoughness in the world.

Reparenting does not eliminate our feelings, it wraps an arm tenderly around them and says “I’m right here listening. Tell me what’s happening for you right now?”

It means caring for yourself in a way you may never have been cared for, (or in the ways you care for others, but feel shouldn't apply to you). It is a sacred unlearning of all the untrue myths about you, those beliefs that you are somehow 'the exception' to love, nourishment and care.

It's learning the reparenting skills of radical self acceptance, compassion, attunement, validating feelings without fixing, and stepping in to interrupt the patterns of self abandonment, bullying and survival strategies that were once used.

Reparenting in action

Reparenting is the act of responding, rather than a prescriptive set of behaviours.

Much like a new parent learns how to respond to the evolving needs of their child, we develop in the reparenting process better discretion and judgement what kind of response we need to give to our Inner Child. This could be as simple as placing a hand on our racing heart to say "I'm right here, I've got you", to getting off social media and putting ourselves to bed at a reasonable hour, because we know our mental health is supported by good sleep.

So whilst I'll offer here some examples of healthy actions which would be compatible with reparenting, it is much more than this.

When we begin to rebuild a better relationship with ourselves, we teach ourselves that our needs are safe to be known, reliably heard and responded to, by us.

Before we learn to respond to our pain, it arises as a roar of terror and urgency that we fear will consume us. After practicing reparenting for some time, our most vulnerable emotions become less catastrophic, intolerable, and existential.

The intensity of the Vulnerable/Angry child gratefully leans into the consistent care of the Healthy Adult, trusting that its softer cries and needs will be kindly met in a reasonable way. From this place, we build that essential inner foundation of safety and support.

The feeling of safety we were trying to grasp somewhere outside of us, when built within us, is available everywhere that we are.