1. Learning how to have your own back and being able to offer yourself guidance and support.
2. The loving art of reparenting.
3. How to look after ourselves when we are triggered so we can behave the way we want to behave.
4. Self-soothing and reparenting skills offer additional tools and ways of coping for when we hit difficult times.

What We Covered This Week:

Week 23 Round Up

In today’s Weekly Round Up I discuss how to have your own back, comfort yourself and be able to offer yourself guidance and support: I talk about re-parenting.

The way I work is very re-parenting in nature. Advising you to behave with dignity, to emotionally regulate yourselves, to be proud of yourselves and to be gentle – all of that comes from a parental part of me.

I want to help you grow, and I want it to come from a place of love. A part of therapy is learning how to parent ourselves.

My self-soothing posts speak to this – looking after ourselves so we can behave the way we want to behave. And to do that we need to treat ourselves with the same tenderness and care we would a fearful, unsure child. Because that is emotionally where we are sometimes.

I want to help you grow, and I want it to come from a place of love. A part of therapy is learning how to parent ourselves.

In our self-awareness we can beat ourselves up because we see where we may be going wrong. That is the opposite of what I want you to do! I want you to develop a strong sense of compassion for yourself.

For example: we can recognise: “Oh, that’s why I can get anxious when someone goes silent on me” and we can have compassion for ourselves because we know that comes from experiencing silence when we were younger which was very painful. And we can soothe ourselves through that remembered pain now.

We can bring insight and compassion to our own story, recognising we are very ‘young’ when we’re triggered. And we need to look after that young part of us. “What parenting do I need now?” is a useful question to always be asking ourselves.

Often we look to our partners to parent us. Whilst that can be a beautiful healing aspect to relationships, we need to parent ourselves first and foremost.

So too we can either be ‘parentless’ or we have a critical parent in our heads being negative and judgemental. I invite you to develop a wise, loving, nurturing inner parent.

Combined with self-soothing, we then have so many more tools and ways of coping when we hit difficult times.