Everyone Is Talking About Reparenting Right Now
For a sneak peek inside Nicole LePera's new book, click here.
Nicole LePera, PhD—best known as “the holistic psychologist” to her 9 million followers on Instagram—has always been an over-achiever. She’s chased intellectual and athletic accolades. She’s aware of her perfectionist tendencies.
So, when she sat down to write her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, she wore a locket that contained a picture of herself as a baby. Every time she’d find herself worrying whether every word was perfect or caught herself spiraling about what the future book reviews would be, she’d open the locket and gaze at her little baby face.
“Looking at that picture was a reminder of why I have my perfectionist tendencies, and that that child was and is still perfect,” says LePera. “It was a daily reminder that I am worthy and enough.”
This is what it looks like to reparent your inner child—something LePera did as she wrote her latest book. And she’s convinced that now, more than ever, all of us need inner child healing. Curious about what this work entails, whether you need to do it, and where to start? Read on.
A CONVERSATION WITH NICOLE LePERA, PhD
The concept of reparenting your inner child has moved from therapy rooms into mainstream conversation. What does it mean—and why is it striking such a chord today?
First, I think it’s important to understand the concept of the inner child. This is the part of us that learned to cope earliest in life. It’s how we learned to handle unpredictability, conflict, and our unmet needs. Many of us can relate to having some insight and awareness about our childhood, yet we continue to find ourselves repeating habits and patterns that we can’t change.
Reparenting is acknowledging this part of us and showing up in a different way—as a steady, connected, caring, compassionate caregiver. The kind of caregiver that very few of us had in our own childhood.
The truth is that very few of us had our needs met. We didn’t have attuned caregivers. Some of our parents lacked information, some lacked resources. It wasn’t until the 90s that we started talking about the need for emotional attunement and the fact that children can’t soothe themselves on their own. The result can be that we continue to find ourselves driven by old, unhelpful patterns and dysfunctional habits that don’t serve us. Now more than ever we need to not only understand how our childhood continues to impact us, and have the tools to begin to create new responses in those moments.
Why is this work important, even for those of us who had great parents and a happy childhood?
I am a prototypical example of this. I had an intact household with two parents, and my mother was home all the time caring for me and my siblings. In a lot of ways, I checked all the boxes. However, I didn’t have an attuned caregiver or space for emotions. There was no repair on the other side of disagreement or disconnection, so conflict greatly impacted me and created a pattern of obsessive overachievement, which is celebrated here in our Western culture. Achievement gave me so much validation. When my mom only paid attention to me in those moments where I was successful, whether it was academically or athletically, I was able to secure her attention.
It took me many decades to realize that not only was I not fulfilled by all this achieving that I was doing, but that I was disconnected from why I was doing those things. It took me years to realize that it was my inner child desperately trying to achieve. I was still trying to secure attention to avoid even mild criticism or feedback, because again, there was a child in me that only felt worthy if someone else perceived me in a very achievement-driven way.
That’s just one example, but I think there are a lot of ways where we begin to wear these adaptations as parts of our personality that can be very much celebrated for some time. For me, ambition and achievement were how I secured attention. For others, it might be independence. We tend to pride ourselves on not needing anyone for anything. For a lot of us, that came from a time and a place where that was protective because we didn’t have anyone to rely on, or when we tried to reach out and connect or get support, we were met with disappointment or rejection.
For parents and grandparents, how does reparenting yourself change the way you show up for your own children?
First, I want to send compassion and grace to anyone parenting out there, because it is in those moments where our inner child gets challenged, often out of nowhere. I don’t think there is any greater role than to be in full care of a dependent, developing human. Those are the moments where the vulnerability of the child—the fact that they need us endlessly to take care of them—can activate our own unmet needs, especially if we didn’t get those needs met when we were kids.
Even the vulnerability of being needed can result in a reaction that can prompt shame or anger. We lash out at a child who’s crying, not because we are mean but because we are so dysregulated that we can’t show up. This is why I always talk about where habits and patterns come from. With awareness and some new tools, we can get centered and grounded during our own moments of dysregulation so that we can show up as a grounded, calm, contained caregiver who’s responsive to the unique child in front of us.
And now we know that epigenetically, the cycles that so many of us are committed to breaking and that are inspiring us to show up with more attunement and care for our children can actually create such deep-rooted change that it literally becomes wired into us. It changes how our genes function in future generations.
How do we look back at our childhood without getting stuck in blame or resentment?
I think it’s important to make space for all the different emotions that can come up as we become aware of our needs that have gone unmet. I say this because there’s a tendency to minimize the importance of emotions. Emotions are real. They’re physiological experiences in our body, and they send us very important messages.
Let’s say you become aware that you didn’t have emotional attunement in your childhood. It would be quite natural to feel sad. You lost that opportunity to connect with and be intimately known by your caregiver. It’s completely normal to feel sadness and loss when you realize that something important to you did not happen. Anger is also a normal response to boundaries that are being violated or needs that are going unmet.
It’s important to make space for your feelings as you gain this awareness, but to also expand and create a little space for the “and.” You can be upset and say, “Now I have an opportunity to do something. I didn’t have boundaries in my childhood, so I will create them in my relationships now.” You can create change through action. But as I said, it’s also important to give ourselves the space to feel the sadness, loss, and anger.
Where do we start when it comes to reparenting ourselves?
The foundational step of any change is safety, because without safety, we can’t create change. In moments where we don’t feel safe, our body is going to rely on the old habits that we learn, because they’re predictable and familiar, and therefore they feel safer—even if they carry with it dysfunction.
To know if we feel safe, we have to tune in to the body’s signals. Throughout the day, I carve out time to redirect my attention to my physical body, noticing my breath, noticing my heart rate, noticing the tension in my muscles. Those are three of the areas that begin to shift the more unsafe or threatened we feel. If I notice my heart is racing, I’m holding my breath, or I’m tensing my muscles, I can begin to take some new actions: I can slow my breath by elongating my exhale; I can release some of the tension I’m holding in my jaw or in my fists that are clenched. The more I create moments of safety when my body is otherwise feeling stressed, the more opportunity I have to choose a new response in any given moment.
And instead of shaming myself in those moments, wondering what’s wrong with me or why my body is sending signals that I’m stressed, I might ask my inner child, “What do you need to feel safe?”
Your book is filled with practical tools and exercises to help us reparent ourselves. What’s one exercise you’ve seen create the most immediate shift for people?
If you have access to your family photo albums, look for a photo of yourself from your childhood so you see yourself in a small body, so vulnerable. It is so much harder to shame, to minimize, or to make that little child too dramatic or whatever it is that we’ve created—the current belief about ourselves. Doing this can shift us from the logical mind into actually being that child.
If you don’t have access to a picture, call to mind a childhood home, maybe a particular room that you spent a lot of time in. Call to mind the color of the tile on the kitchen floor or the smell of your mom cooking dinner. Become present in the sensory experience. This can help you shift out of insight analysis and help you access the deeper thing that we’re talking about here, which is that all of your sensations, emotions, and instinctual reactions were formed in that place.
What do you believe becomes possible—for individuals and for the world—when more people begin to reparent themselves?
I feel like this work is life changing. So many of us live so much of our lives dissociated, disconnected, living life for someone else. This work gives you an opportunity to connect with yourself, to rediscover who you are, to see all of your habits as a survival-driven function of where you came from. But they don’t have to dictate or determine the rest of your life. With this comes more authenticity and more ability to develop true emotional intimacy, which is the ability to be known. Not to be seen as perfect, but to be seen in all of our messy imperfections.
This work allows us to re-access our creativity. Not in the traditional sense, but rather in the sense of being able to access and connect with ourselves, our perspectives, our purpose, and our passion.
Ultimately, I think this work allows us to not only reconnect with ourselves and to others, but in the deeper sense of belonging. It helps us see that we are all part of the natural world around us. And I think all of that leads to us not only changing our lives and breaking cycles for future generations, but it also creates a situation where we have the opportunity to change the world around us.
For a sneak peek inside Nicole LePera's new book, click here.
Nicole LePera, PhD is a leader in holistic psychology and the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work and How to Be the Love You Seek. You can pre-order her new book here.
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