If you spend much time on mental health Instagram or TherapyTok, you might’ve come across talk of how to “reparent” your “inner child.” Maybe you rolled your eyes and kept scrolling. Another airy-fairy fake therapy trend, cool. But if you’re here the concept probably intrigues you, and for good reason: Reparenting is a fairly intuitive and actually helpful framework that a growing number of therapists (and their clients) adore.
“It’s gaining momentum in the mental world,” therapist Nicole Johnson, LPC, founder of Oak and Ivy Therapy Services, tells SELF. “But it’s still not normalized and talked about enough, in my opinion.” (Johnson is hoping to help change that—she’s got a book on the topic coming out in July called Reparenting Your Inner Child: Healing Unresolved Childhood Trauma and Reclaiming Wholeness through Self-Compassion.)
So what does reparenting yourself look like, exactly? And how can it help you? Let’s get into it.
What is reparenting?
“Reparenting is a therapeutic technique focused on creating a nurturing and supportive internal dialogue,” psychotherapist Gillian O’Shea Brown, PhD, LCSW, adjunct professor at New York University, tells SELF. “[It] can help you to develop a healthier relationship with yourself and overcome past wounds by providing the care and support you may have lacked in childhood,” she explains.
The approach is closely tied to the concept of the inner child or children, which you can think of as young parts of your psyche that still hold pain or distorted beliefs, largely from the ways your caregivers fell short or mistreated you. “Reparenting and inner child work are like two sides of the same coin,” Johnson says. “It’s like these children are stuck, frozen in time in that experience.”
Because of that, the old beliefs and wounds of our inner children can drive a lot of our unconscious patterns in the present day in ways we don’t realize, Dr. O’Shea Brown explains. Like core beliefs about how lovable you are or tendencies around how you act in relationships, talk to yourself, handle your emotions, and approach conflict.
An example: Maybe your parents got into explosive fights when you were little and you learned to stay safe by hiding in your bedroom. Today, that might show up as withdrawing at the slightest hint of discord. Or if your caregiver sometimes acted annoyed when you expressed a need, you might’ve coded that to mean you’re a burden. And now you’re terrified of expressing needs to your partner, even though you know it’s not “rational.”
The promise of reparenting is that we can shift those patterns by giving our inner children what they didn’t get growing up, Johnson says. By using the nurturing qualities, tools, and capacities you have now, you can help your inner child let go of those old hurts and beliefs. Say your parents were sometimes neglectful when you cried, and to this day you ignore feelings of sadness when they come up. If you start bringing presence and curiosity to those feelings when they arise, that’s reparenting.