Reparenting yourself. I am really glad you're here today.
Because if you are watching this video,
you are ready to take charge of your life, to empower yourself,
to give yourself what you need right now.
So reparenting yourself is about developing a new relationship with
yourself.
It is about giving yourself the love that you deserve as a unique
human being on this planet.
And what I'd like to do in the video today is to give you a framework for
working through this, because this is a huge topic.
There's no way this topic could be covered in one YouTube video.
Reparenting yourself takes a fair amount of work and quite a bit of time and
might require outside help.
But I'd like to give you a framework that makes it manageable to really think
about which areas of reparenting would be best for you to focus on first,
which ones do you need the most and which areas are you pretty good in?
All right, so let's get going.
So there are two connected overarching themes of this reparenting work.
Now, one of them is that we are on a fact finding mission,
not a fault-finding mission.
So last week I released a video on reparenting where I talk about
the main role of a good enough parent.
Like what does a good enough parent do for somebody that helps them grow into a
happy, fulfilled, productive adult?
And the reason to go through that is not to blame your parents.
The reason to go through that is to identify where you did not
receive the parenting you needed so that you can know what parenting
would be most useful to apply to yourself.
So I've heard people say about therapy,
that it's all about blaming your parents and people spend years in therapy
blaming their parents. No, that's not what therapy is about.
Therapy is a fact finding mission, not a fault finding mission.
So we go back into those critical developmental years, zero to 10,
zero to 15,
even zero to twenty-five and look at what the environment was like,
what the influences were,
why you may have developed certain self-concepts or concepts
about the world. We look for it to find the facts,
so that then we can rewire what's going on in here.
We can rewire how we are functioning now.
So that is one overarching concept.
And the other very connected concept is that reparenting yourself is about
developing a new relationship with yourself.
It is not about anybody else changing.
It is not about your parents changing so they can give you the parenting you
needed way back when.
It is not about anybody else changing at all.
And it is not about anybody else healing you, right?
So often I do recommend that people do this work in conjunction with
a psychotherapist, a clergy person,
a life coach, somebody who can assist you on the journey,
but the journey is yours. And the work is yours. This is empowerment work.
This is truly moving in to your own agency.
It's moving into your own power, your own ability to take care of yourself.
So those are two overarching themes.
So I am going to pick up here on the five areas of questions that I discussed
in last week's video, but you can definitely watch this video without,
right now, going back to that one.
There are five main areas that are useful to think
through in terms of where you need to focus your reparenting.
The area of needs. Are you allowed to have needs?
What are your needs? What are your wants?
How do you balance your needs with other people's needs?
That is a key area to think about as you reparent yourself.
Another one is emotional validation,
whether or not you validate your own emotions.
Then there's emotional regulation. How do you regulate your own emotions?
And then the area of self-talk. How do you speak to yourself?
Are you critical of yourself all the time?
Do you speak to yourself as a good parent might or do you speak to yourself in
sort of an abusive, derogatory way.
Changing your self-talk is key.
And then the fifth area is reasonable self-discipline.
So let's delve into each one of these a little bit further. Needs.
So basic needs . A role of a parent is to take care of the kids' basic needs,
for sure. Right? And now that you're an adult,
your job is to take care of your basic needs. So do you get adequate sleep?
Do you get adequate exercise?
Do you take care of yourself in terms of nutrition? Those are all basic needs.
And then we also have a need for protection, for staying safe.
Do you protect yourself?
Do you protect yourself and set boundaries with people who are
toxic or invasive or simply not healthy for you?
Do you have healthy boundaries with the people you love?
Are you able to open up,
be vulnerable and develop intimacy with those people who are safe?
That's sort of the opposite of what most people think of about boundaries,
but that is important as well. And that goes to the need for connection.
And then we have higher needs as well.
We have needs for good self-esteem for self-actualization.
We have all sorts of needs.
So today I'm going to be linking or mentioning a number of my other videos.
And then these are also things you can search in Google and find more
information. There's so much information available,
but I will link here a video on self care and Maslow's hierarchy of
needs because sometimes we don't think we deserve those higher level
needs. So the whole area of needs right? Could be an entire course.
So it's hard to cover it like a little pull up in a video,
but I want to put this into the framework for you to begin to think about how
you take care of your own needs. Because right now, it is up to you.
It is up to you to take care of your own needs. When you were younger,
you probably needed somebody to do a better job than they did,
and you needed that and you maybe didn't get it, but now you no longer need it.
Now doing it for yourself is the core of the
reparenting. So area number two, emotional validation.
Do you validate your own emotions when you get upset?
Do you keep telling yourself I shouldn't feel this way.
I shouldn't feel this way. If you do, let's change that theme.
How would you speak to yourself?
If you were talking to a friend who was feeling what you're
feeling, let's say you get angry,
you get angry at a coworker who didn't do what they said they were going to do,
and then lied to you. So you get angry at them. Totally understandable.
If you're telling yourself I shouldn't be angry.
Think about that same event happening to somebody else.
And what would you say to your friend?
And this is something else you can just journal about this.
So for emotional validation,
make a commitment to yourself that when you are feeling difficult emotions,
you will first take some time to validate them. And remember,
emotions are separate from behavior. So when you're angry at that coworker,
you can feel that emotion and feel that anger without acting it
out, right? Acting it out,
may not accomplish what you actually want to accomplish,
but validating the feeling, exploring it. , know you have reason to feel it.
And from there you can figure out what I would call "skillful means." It's a
Buddhist term,
but skillful means is how do we take these emotions that we're feeling that we
can process and validate,
and then move into the world in a way that actually accomplishes what we
really want to accomplish. Emotional regulation.
How are you at regulating your emotions?
Do your emotions get overwhelming and out of control?
Do you shut down? Do you get numb? Do you like block emotions?
What's your relationship to your emotions?
So the first step for emotional regulation is actually what we just talked
about, which is emotional validation. So that's where I would begin on this one.
Now for people who have a really, really hard time with emotional regulation,
to the point where it is impacting relationships and work and all sorts of
things,
there's a therapy technique called DBT dialectical behavior therapy that
really targets the main focus of DBT is
emotional regulation. So you can Google that. You can look it up.
It is not a therapy that I practice, but I highly respect it.
It has great research.
And it is probably the go-to therapy technique for people who have
extreme volatility in their emotions and act it out.
But basically emotional regulation is something that we all need.
So even if we don't struggle that much with the volatility of emotions,
emotional regulation is something most of us need.
So I'm actually going to create a playlist to go with this reparenting video,
because I do have a couple of videos that are very helpful
for emotional regulation,
which include diaphragmatic breathing and grounding techniques.
I'll link those here, but I'll also develop a playlist.
If you want to go through all the different videos that I have that connect to
this topic, because as I said, this is,
this topic really covers so much ground,
and we're doing a little bit of a summary framework. So you can say, okay, yeah,
this is really the area where I would like to focus right now.
And then I can look for the tools and techniques that go with that.
The fourth area for this framework is self-talk.
How do you speak to yourself?
Do you speak to yourself in a supportive and encouraging",
you can do it" kind of way,
or are you very harsh and self-critical,
and always judging yourself and putting yourself down and really talking to
yourself in a way that you would probably never speak to somebody else?
So many people for whom reparenting is a really helpful exercise,
have very negative self-talk.
And the reason for that is that children take on negative
beliefs about themselves in order to stay
connected to their attachment figures.
So I want to talk about this a little bit more here,
because this is a very difficult concept to grasp,
but basically if a child grows up in a dysfunctional family,
the child's survival is dependent on staying connected to that
family, to those parents, to the one parent,
it is a survival based issue for a child.
And the way to stay connected to a parent who say blames you for
everything is for you to take that blame on yourself,
for you to align with the parent and judge yourself harshly.
And then that same concept applies no matter what the situation is in a
dysfunctional family, even if it's just a family with a lot of chaos,
the children growing up in that will probably take on
responsibility for that chaos in a way, which as an adult,
looking at the situation we know is not that child's fault or
responsibility, but that's what happens.
And we internalize that voice to stay connected to our attachment
figures.
So that negative self-talk voice is actually trying to protect you,
but it's trying to protect you from a situation that doesn't exist anymore.
So the way to heal that voice is to acknowledge that kind of like a little bit
about, okay, thank you.
Thank you for protecting me as I grew up and you can rest
now. You can retire. You can enjoy life.
So rewiring that negative self-talk is a key
thing to do. And again, very complex topic.
I do have a webinar, Rewiring Your Brain for Joy and Confidence,
that talks about this.
Rewiring this voice takes a lot of work
and most likely takes some outside help because solving the
problems in here with this doesn't always work.
We very often need somebody else to help us reframe how we're looking at
things.
So developing a positive inner parenting voice
is your job. Now it's your job. You may have gotten to this point in your life.
You might be in your twenties, your forties, your seventies.
I've worked with people of all ages who have a hard
time,
really believing that the negative self-talk they have much later in
life is tied to what happened to them in those early years. But it is.
Our brains for most of our emotional brain is forming between zero and
10. We're absorbing everything.
And our brain is being programmed during that time. So we have to reprogram it.
It takes a lot of work, but the work can be done at any age.
Just want to throw that out there, reassure you.
And the last area of this framework is reasonable self-discipline.
So what do I mean by reasonable self-discipline.
If you're somebody who pushes yourself all the time,
if you take on way too many responsibilities, you work too much.
You care too much. You do too much.
You're always feeling overwhelmed by how much is on your plate.
Then that would fall into the category of pushing yourself too hard,
which I would not call reasonable self-discipline.
Reasonable self-discipline is yes, accomplishing what you need to accomplish,
but it's also knowing what's your responsibility.
What's not your responsibility. What do you have agency over?
And what are you powerless over?
What actually is a responsibility that belongs to another adult?
Reasonable self-discipline would include an adequate amount of sleep and
rest and eating meals on time in addition to
accomplishing what you need to accomplish, to function.
And then totally on the other end of reasonable self-discipline would be
somebody who can't motivate themselves at all, who can't function,
who can't follow through, who can't move forward in life.
If self-discipline feels like a harsh concept,
then this is probably an area to work on because self-discipline can actually
be connected to joy.
Self-discipline can actually be connected to feeling good about oneself,
to self-esteem, to enjoying the world. Right?
When we learn something new,
we need some element of discipline to push through,
get through a certain amount of frustration, achieve something.
And that feels good. It isn't about whipping ourselves into shape.
So reasonable self-discipline connects to the self-care that we talked about
earlier. It also connects to the self-talk issue.
How are you speaking to yourself?
So I do really wish you all the best on this healing journey.
And I hope you take advantage of some of the free resources that I've mentioned.
And then I also have links below here for other ways you
can access help. So check out the notes underneath this video,
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