If you want to know how to reparent yourself, you can read the extensive article here.
You do not need to connect with all these points to benefit from reparenting. Even resonating with one point should signal to you that reparenting yourself can be extremely healing.
This isn’t to point fingers or place blame on your parents. Rather, it’s to offer direction and insight into pieces of your life that have felt off, but you couldn’t put your finger on why.
Much of how we’ve manifested our present-day lives can be traced back to what our childhood was like. When healing, the first place to look is usually your relationship with your parents or original caregivers.
In this article, I’m walking you through several signs that show that you would benefit from reparenting.
1. You grew up in a chaotic home.
Chaos doesn’t always mean pandemonium, but it could. Maybe that was your household: lots of yelling and screaming, things being thrown, emotions everywhere.
As a child, chaos can also take form as an emotionally absent parent, a parent that makes you the parent, a parent that emotionally shits on you.
Chaos can look like parents and/or caregivers that had unpredictable work schedules. Parents who rarely kept their word to you. Parents who were neglectful or parents who were overbearing.
Essentially, “chaotic home” refers to any home that didn’t feel like a safe place to be emotionally (or physically) and required you to deny some part of yourself (your needs, thoughts, likes/dislikes, etc.) to survive.
2. You have a hard time setting boundaries.
Setting boundaries for you isn’t just uncomfortable. It makes your insides scream. It feels so unnatural and scary to do so that you typically don’t set boundaries at all because it feels wrong.
When you try to set a boundary, you feel like a bad person who is depriving others and forcing them to live in misery for your own sake.
Feelings are not the same as facts. Setting and maintaining boundaries are the key to healthy relationships. You are not wrong for setting them. You’re also not wrong to feel guilty afterwards. That’s a totally normal experience.
Post-boundary guilt doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It’s just how you’re processing your experience in the moment. Try not to place a set-in-stone judgment on that feeling.
Instead, read more on setting boundaries and how to become more confident doing so:
- How to Set Boundaries
- How to Set Boundaries with Your Parents
- How to Set Boundaries in Your Relationship
3. Your self-worth is dependent on others’ opinions.
A common survival mechanism when you live in a chaotic home is people-pleasing. “Keeping the peace” so to speak.
When you live in a place that doesn’t feel safe, you may start to become hyper-vigilant and observant. It normally happens on a subconscious level. You may not even realize how attuned to others you are until you try to become intentionally aware of it.
As a result, the decisions you make, how you behave, and the opinions you have start to ride on the approval of the audience in front of you. You have a hard time distinguishing between what you actually want and what you want because someone else wants it for you.
This isn't to point fingers or place blame on your parents. Rather, it's to offer direction and insight into pieces of your life that have felt off, but you couldn't put your finger on why. Click To Tweet4. You have no self-care routine.
It’s hard to develop a self-care routine when you feel like you had to take care of everyone else first. It’s hard to develop a self-care routine when you feel like you weren’t a priority as a child. It’s hard to develop a self-care routine when you didn’t have parents who effectively attended to your needs.
Yes, a self-care routine can include bubble baths and face masks. But the best self-care routine is living your life in such a way that those things are niceties, not life-savers. If you want to figure out your self-care routine, read this.
5. You believe you have no control over your life.
It feels as though everything just happens to you and you’re just trying to keep pace.
That feeling is a huge indicator that you’re in reaction mode, not response mode. Reacting looks like flying by the seat of your pants, letting your emotions run the show, and often feeling like, if you had the time, you would have done or said things differently.
Reacting is often done on autopilot. When you react instead of respond, it’s usually because you’re in a state of survival instead of present to your life. When you focus on grounding yourself, honoring your emotions, and giving yourself space to mentally process your experiences, you can start to live in your power.
You always have a choice. You always have a next move. Everything can be figured out. Your voice, your ideas, your opinions matter.
6. Having an opinion and making decisions feels unnatural and overwhelming.
Your more comfortable being told what to do. If you’re told what to do and when to do it, then there’s little room for error. The requester will be pleased. Peace will be maintained. Everyone can get on with their content, calm lives.
Except there’s nothing peaceful about a lost sense of identity. There’s nothing calm in feeling like the worst thing you can ever be is wrong. It’s not contentment to be living your life according to what will keep other people’s emotions at bay.
The biggest hurdle here is learning to sit with the feeling of disappointing others. Let other people have their emotions.
I know that’s a terrifying statement. But it will set you free.
You do not need to connect with all these points to benefit from reparenting. Even resonating with one point should signal to you that reparenting yourself can be extremely healing. Click To Tweet7. You struggle with strong negative self-talk and self-sabotage.
A lot of our inner dialogue comes from our childhood. We are built for self-love. It’s how we survive.
However, in some cases, we were taught that we were not lovable. Those words and actions stick to us, especially if they were present during our prime developmental years where we attached our identity to our caregivers.
When you start to hear your inner critic come loose and mean words flinging in your mind, pause and ask yourself, “Who’s voice am I hearing right now?”
Rarely it’s your voice. Usually, it’s a parent, caregiver, teacher, or someone you revered as an adult when you were younger.
Change your self-talk and self-sabotage by bringing in your voice. If you were to talk your 5-year old self through hard moments, what would you say? What would you do?
8. You have trust issues.
Trust issues are surface issues. Most people pose them as the big issue underneath it all. In reality, trust issues are a blinking sign that there’s something more there.
You’re going to have a hard time putting trust into others and your life if you grew up in an unstable household.
You’ll struggle with trust in your relationships if your parents didn’t feel reliable, used emotional entrapment and blackmail, and/or their words didn’t match up with their actions.
You’ll struggle with trusting good things in your life if your parents used fear-mongering as a means of control, projected insecurities onto you, and/or didn’t create a predictable routine and schedule for you.
You’ll struggle with trusting yourself if your parents dismissed your pain, treated your struggles as a nuisance/burden, never believed your honesty, and/or encouraged you to ignore your reality in favor of their comfort (such as “don’t cry”, “you don’t really feel that way”, etc).
9. You keep running into the same types of (unhealthy) relationships.
You will keep repeating your relationship with your parents in every current relationship until you heal the elements that hurt.
In some cases, repeating that relationship will bring you healthy, loving people. However, if there were/are damaging aspects to your relationship with your parents, those elements will be magnified in your current relationships.
For example, if your father would belittle and talk down to you, you may consistently find yourself in relationships with men that treat your experience like an annoying detail.
If your mother was constantly making cruel comments about your body, you may find yourself with girl friends who are judgmental and critical.
Heal those painful parts by examining them, acknowledging how they effect your life, and meditating on how you’d like to show up to your life.
Remember, if you resonated with any of this, this step is here when you’re ready.
