How I re-parented my inner child
In this week's blog, I am going to explain how learning to parent my Inner child supercharged my transformation in the weeks and months following the split (and later divorce from) the sociopathic ex. It opened up so much healing that I could get to a balanced place very quickly and my life continued to transform in the most incredible and happy ways!
So if you decide to commit to healing your inner child, it is my hope that you will be able to become the best parent you never had! It may be the beginning of your incredible personal transformation too.
How I re-parented my Inner child
If you are trying to rebuild your life after divorce and especially after narcissistic abuse, I don’t want you to stay stuck with the memory of the horrors of what you have been living through. Maybe like me, you want to live your best life and don’t want to waste any more time feeling bad just for existing!
This article is a transcription of my next video upload, as in all of my videos and newsletters, explaining the road maps I used to get a fast transformation way beyond narcissistic abuse and to help you too. We deserve to be happy no matter what!
Stay tuned to catch my new uploads every Friday! Maybe even subscribe to my brand new channel so you don’t miss any notifications. You can do that here.
Mistreatment was our normal
At some point in our lives, we learned it was ok to accept mistreatment and worse. It was not our fault. We trusted people who didn’t know how to keep us safe and validate us. That was in our past and we have been living with the shadows of that trauma in our present adult lives.
After divorce, we are in the process of rebuilding our life and that means we have to learn what ‘gaps’ in our early development made us think mistreatment was normal.
Our childhood environment was crucial for our development of understanding of ourselves and others and if we didn’t receive the right messages, there may well be gaps in understanding and awareness of how our needs should be met healthily by our caregivers.
So to progress with healing our inner child, it's logical we should have a good knowledge and understanding of how to meet a child's needs. We may already be parents and have some really good grounding of some of the foundations, even if our childhood was ‘less than ideal’ but we should make sure we have an excellent understanding of children’s needs if we are to step up to the mark and help our inner child.
She deserves no less.
The upside (and there are many) of doing this work is that we become better parents for our own children, even if they are adult kids now!
How do children form their beliefs?
A child's primary need is for safety. Utterly reliant on our caregivers to provide all our survival needs.
Children are like sponges, they soak up experiences and form beliefs about themselves in response to their lived experiences. They are wired to learn in this way to help them develop and navigate their world and create safety by connecting to their adults. It's literally about about staying alive. Going against our caregivers in any way, means a lack of safety in the group and therefore we might die if we do this.
So when the primary adult doesn’t meet those needs at any time, the child internalises a belief that there must be something wrong with them or that they are not good enough. They make these beliefs because they need to stay connected to the caregiver, no matter what. It's life or death.
These are survival beliefs. They may look like these examples:
It must be because something is wrong with me that I don’t meet my needs.
It must mean that I’m just not a good enough child, so I don’t get my needs met.
These beliefs if repeated over time become core identity beliefs that stick and are still fixed beliefs in adulthood. Our beliefs create our realities.
We know how that went, don't we? Especially when relating to how we came to attract narcissistic partners.
Our inner child is still present
In terms of recovery from narcissistic abuse is that our inner child didn’t go away, she is still there. She is likely to feel the following:
She is feeling wounded and unloved.
She thinks that relationships are harmful and unhappy.
She doesn’t think she is deserving of any of the good things in life
She doesn’t feel lovable
She just isn’t good enough to be loved
So she guided herself.
In some ways she was very clever and resourceful to find a way to survive, despite everything.
The thing is we want to do more than just survive. We want to thrive. We want our lives to be way better than before. This is our transformation beyond abuse and mistreatment.
You are a great parent
If you have children, you will instinctively know how to be a nurturing, wise and patient parent, especially if you had a rough childhood.
As a mother, I knew I had a rough childhood and I didn’t want to repeat it for my children.
But it really is worth thinking about, even writing a list can help to focus your mind on what you and your inner child needs. You are helping yourself become a wise and loving parent. Maybe like me, you are discovering this knowledge almost for the first time. It’s ok, if we didn’t have good parenting role models, how were we to know?
So what are children’s needs?
Physical, food, shelter, clothing
Safety protection from danger
Emotional love and belonging, connection to others, validation
Self-esteem - celebrating uniqueness, creating confidence, respecting and understanding others and ourselves - boundaries and preferences are understood and respected, understanding others' preferences
Spiritual - play and creativity, awe and wonder, connection to life and higher power
This can be tough to realise that quite often our needs were not met and additionally, that our primary adults hurt us. But I promise you that dedicating your role to become loving parent to yourself will SUPERCHARGE your healing beyond merely surviving, but you will be thriving in a much shorter timescale than you can imagine.
This is how I got a superfast transformation, relatively quickly my life turned around. It’s a lifelong process too.
How do I communicate with my Inner child and become a loving parent to her?
I now regularly dialogue with my inner child. Especially if I sense that something doesn’t feel right. I check in with her. She trusts me enough to let me know what’s bothering her and then we have a conversation about how I can support her to feel better. I take action on those things and this is how we have built a trusting relationship. That was a novel idea for her at first. She had been betrayed and let down so many times and few adults were safe for her. But now it’s different. She has me!
What I can give her:
Validation Recognition of her emotional pain or confusion
Help to regulate her emotions
Soothing her fear and offering reassurance
Encouraging her
Asking her what she needs to feel happier
Facilitating actions that respond to her needs, creating safety, supporting wellbeing
Guiding her to make decisions that help thrive in life
Assisting her to manage her thoughts and beliefs about herself
I usually communicate and check in while in meditation or most often I will journal and ask her how she is feeling and start a written dialogue with her and we will journal together. It’s a beautiful experience. It has helped me so much on my transformational journey. It’s like creating a childhood you never had. Just because we weren’t born into a feathered nest doesn’t mean we should suffer in the here and now.
I hope this helps!