3 ways to reparent yourself.

Reparent yourself! Bitch. Reparenting Ourselves: Correcting Imprints

Unintended Consequences In most cases, our parents did the best they could. If they'd known how to do better they would've. If they could've done bettter they would've. They engaged in well-intentioned but sometimes unskillful practices. Often, they were unaware of the negative impact upon us as children. Many parents simply did not have better strategies in their repertoire because such skill wasn't modeled by their parents. Others were in states of stress and overwhelm resulting in unskillful and potentially hurtful interventions. And let's be honest, parenting is the hardest job in the world and sometimes we're just plain exhausted. Inevitably during therapy, personal exploration, self discovery, or a healing process we will uncover gaps or deficits in our parents delivery of their services! However, we don't need to vilify our parents or make them wrong or bad. In fact, blaming simply keeps us stuck in a completely disempowered role of victim. Abuses, to be clear, are a very different situation. That's not to say that feelings of anger, grief, sadness, or confusion don't need to be given space for expression, processing and clearing in order to truly get on with our lives. Growth isn't simply a matter of forgiving, forgetting, and moving on. By-passing important experience, even if painful, awkward, or inconvenient, never works. It only keeps you stuck in the past and prone to perpetuating bad habits. Many people do years of talk-therapy, gain incredible insight into their histories and behaviors but then don't understand why they continue to get triggered and react in the same ways. Likely, there's subterranean experience that hasn't been properly released. Instead of blaming, we can use these discoveries as opportunities to understand how to better support ourselves as adults and how we can be better supported by others. We can learn how to fill in the gaps left behind by the unintended consequences of our parents misguided actions. Imprints These unintended consequences take form in an imprint. This imprint is how our basic beliefs or perceptions of the world, of other people, and relationships have been influenced by our parents practices. We then adapt our behavior to fit theses beliefs and perceptions. Our behaviors become conditioned reflexes, habits. For example, a child growing up with a parent who persistently stepped in to correct them ((perhaps in order protect him from being wrong (ironically), to make sure his son was well-informed (the well-intentioned parenting practice with the unintended consequence of the imprint) always had to be right, always had to be the authority)) resulted in the child becoming incredibly conflict avoidant. Not out of overt fear of punishment but because the child had come to believe (the imprint) at a very deep and unconscious nervous system level that the world was inherently uninterested and would not likely be responsive to any of his thoughts, feelings, opinions. The mere thought of speaking up for himself exhausts the child because thats the way it was growing up. Subsequently, his or her brain and nervous system were trained to understand this. So, naturally, he adapted to "survive". He found other ways of empowering himself and feeling heard, as an adult, often covert and passive-aggressive (i.e., snarky side comments, quietly judging others, distancing in relationships). Reparenting Ourselves So, just how do we reparent, specifically.  We retrain the brain, the nervous system, and the body down to the muscles and reflexes/impulses. We work on identifying the "state". How does the reflex feel in the body, in the nervous system. We get into how the nervous system maps these imprints on a somatic level. The more familiar we get with our immediate experience of the imprint/reflex the easier it is to catch it in real time, the quicker we can recover and implement the new behavior! We also identify the core belief of the imprint.  And then we find the alternative correcting belief, and state.  For example, when conflict arises we notice tthe impulse to avoid, to get away. We feel the impulse. We let it be there. We do not fight it, or "scold it".  We practice talking with the child, letting the child know that his/her voice is inherently valid regardless of whether other agrees or even honors it. We literally practice how we might parent our own son or daughter in the same situation. What would we say to him or her? HOW would we say it? What is the fundamental sentiment and message we would wish to convey to our child?  That's how we engage our wounded child. In addition, we explore how our parents may have come to parent us in such a fashion that would impact us negatively. Typically we discover the reasons related to our discussion above. They meant welll, they were anxious, thats how they were parented, etc. Often, this is where forgiveness arises. A lightness then often develops around whatever the specific issue is.   NOTES: The imprint is the collection of beliefs schemas. The adaptations habits reflexes are the behaviors the physical manifestations of the imprint. Additionally, insight often reveals how in many cases even some of our parents most unskillful interventions led to incredible value for our personalities and adult behavior. For example, an overtly critical parent, which may once have led to paralyzing anxiety and self-criticism can now be recognized as having imparted you with an appreciation of precision, excellence, and a job well done.