94. Self-Reparenting: Practical Tips

Welcome to another episode of The Good Mood Clinic Podcast!
Schema Circle Membership - Join Now! 

Reparenting is at the heart of schema therapy and you can learn how to do it yourself.
In this episode Gemma and Justine discuss how to start reparenting yourself and provide several practical suggestions for how to get started.  Reparenting is central to psychological and schema healing.  The more you practice, the easier it gets and the  psychologically integrated and connected you will feel. 

fdsf

Transcript

old intro - need to be changed
Speaker A: Thanks for joining us at the Good Mood Clinic podcast, where we get to the heart of the matter about what makes us humans tick. We're Justine Corrie and Gemma Gladstone, two clinical psychologists and schema therapists. And we're passionate about helping you break unwanted life patterns and finding new ways to understand yourself and those tricky people around you. Life is way too short to be derailed by our schemas, by self sabotage, toxic relationships, or a lack of self worth. So let's tackle this together and help you reclaim your life and who you really are.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Gemma Gladstone. I am a schema therapist and coach here in Sydney, Australia. So today I'm sharing with you a segment from one of our Q and a coaching calls in our online membership called the Schema Circle. In our schema circle, we have three monthly touch points with our members as well as the other content that's in there. Every month we deliver a deep dive into a particular schema. And when we get through all the schemas, we'll be moving on to other things, like schema modes. For example, we also have a schema skills session that we do once a month, where Justine and I discuss the practicalities of using a particular skill to address your schemas and deal with schema triggers. And then the third thing we do is a general Q and A, where pretty much members can ask us anything about schemas or anything that they're dealing with in terms of their schema journey. So today I'm presenting to you a response to a question that Justine and I got about reparenting. It's a pretty important issue. Schema. Reparenting is at the heart of schema therapy. It's something that we can do within the therapeutic relationship, but more importantly, it's something that we can do ourselves alone, you know, and for ourselves, and we can develop a habit of reparenting. So we hope today's clip from our Q and A is illuminating for you. On the issue of reparenting.

Speaker C: Which one shall we start with? Do you want to start with the reparenting one or.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: I don't actually have the questions in front of me.

Speaker C: Okay. So I can just read the question. So we have a question from. And she says, I'm pondering the question of reparenting and how it works in schema therapy. I don't know the first thing about it. Okay. We also have the deep dive on healing the vulnerable child as well. If you haven't caught that one up so if you're interested in finding out about reparenting, please do that deep dive. So she says, I don't know the first thing about it, so basic information would be grateful. How does it work? How do I continue it on my own if I don't have a current therapist and the do's and don'ts to be aware of? And are there any useful links, etcetera? And then she says, narrowed that down into two questions. How to get inspiration, strength, confidence from re parenting exercises. And does it get easier as you practice it? Right. So great question. Thanks for that question. It really is the big question. It's a big question. It's important, though, we know that just to take back a step, schema therapy, like a few other therapies, you know, has this concept that we have just more than just one part of us. So we have the vulnerable child part, or we can call it the inner child, you can call it the wounded child or the abandoned child. You can call it anything you like. But it's basically the sort of, it's a representation and the house of where all our early childhood unmet needs reside, all our wounds reside emotionally. And it's the part of us that often gets really triggered when we are triggered by a schema. And so it's the part of us that feels the strong emotion and the vulnerability. And so we know that that's that part getting activated because we can feel an exaggerated response or we can feel very, you know, for example, if you have an abandonment trigger and you really have a big, big reaction to that and you feel terrible and you feel very breathed, this is the vulnerable child. Right. So it's important in schema therapy. So we can do things with a therapist to help with reparenting, and you can do things on your own. And also check out the meditation that I did a while back on our, on our podcast. On our podcast, right. So where I do a meditation for this very purpose. Jump in.

Speaker D: You keep going. I'm just listening.

Speaker C: I'll just go off on a tangent. Okay. So, yeah, so that's the general, the concept. And the thing is that the danger of not reparenting is very important because think about when you have early trauma or you have any kind of early, very compromising thing, whether it's early loss, early abandonment, whatever it is. What we tend to do as children and adolescents, as we move on in life, is we don't want to know about our early wounds. So what we do is we put all our energy into pushing them aside, because who wants to be in touch with that feeling, right? So we push it aside. And when we do that, right, when we deny painful emotions, when we don't want to look at things that have caused us a lot of trauma or whatever, when we push these aside, what we're effectively doing is we are denying a very important part of us. That's the wounded child part. Now, when we do that, there's problems, right? So because this part of us doesn't go away, think of it like a satellite orbiting around our. We are the main planet, and there's different satellites orbiting around us is how I describe it to my clients. So that vulnerable child part is always orbiting around you, wanting to come back in, right? But you deny it. We deny it because it's just an adaptive response. We don't want to know about it, so we cut it off. But that's not helpful because healing involves bringing that orbiting wounded part back into us. And when we do that, we essentially say to our wounded part, I love you. I see you. I care about you. I'm sorry you were hurt. I'm not going to abandon you again. So re parenting is the antidote to self abandonment, because when we reject our wounds, we abandon ourselves all over again. And this is the antithesis of schema healing. We can't heal our schemas, probably those really cool ones, especially if we don't. So that's just a long way to give you the background on it. But basically what reparenting basically means is that we're identifying a part of us, and we call it reparenting. Because, like, okay, let's assume that there's a healthy part of you, right? The healthy adult. And let's assume that we've got this vulnerable part, the vulnerable child. So we want to re parent ourselves and strengthen the dialogue between the part that knows how to nurture. Right. And if you're a parent, you can draw on the strength from that. You don't have to be a parent to do this, of course. You know, we all have a healthy part of us. It's just that we may need to develop that more. So we want to nurture the connection between the healthy part of us, the strong nurturing part, the part that's self compassion, etcetera, and the part that's hurting. And there's very various ways we can do that, really simple ways. A really simple way would be, for example, writing a letter to the vulnerable part of you. You know, you could call it dear little me. Or if I was to write it, I could say, dear Gemma, or. And so I'd get a representation of a wounded part of me in my mind, so I might imagine myself as a little girl, get out a piece of paper, and I'd write to myself, dear Gemma, I'm sorry. So the element of what you're communicating to, that is just validating, because all children want to be validated, even our inner child. So that's all we're doing. We'll be validating the experience, what we went through. We might want to do some reinfor relearning, such as saying, you shouldn't have been treated like that. You know? So when we're reparenting, we're assuming that the vulnerable part of us is trapped somewhere, stuck in the past. Stuck in the past, not up to speed with the current, our current life. Right. Because that's what happens when we cut ourselves off. That's why we're stuck in the past, because we've cut ourselves off. So we want to make a connection between the healthy part of us and the part that's stuck. And so letter writing is a good example. We can talk more about that if you have a specific question. Simple things like using a childhood photo of yourself. Just get it out, have it there, right. Pick it up. What do you notice? What do you feel towards the little person in the photo? We're working towards feeling some compassion towards that part. So we can do lots of these reconnection exercises. We can do them in imagery with a therapist or coach, or we could do it by ourselves as well. We can do it with meditation. So reparenting also means just taking good care of ourselves as well. What do I need? Asking yourself that question. What do I need? Because many times you might have been through your whole life without actually asking yourself that question. What is it that I need? So try to bring it back to core needs. Do I need connection? Do I need to talk to somebody? Do I need to pick up the phone? Do I need rest? Do I need to just eat nourishing food? Do I need to do some exercise? What do I need to keep myself well and healthy? So, yeah, there's quite a big definition of it, isn't there? What do you thoughts?

Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. So there's exercises you can do, and it really. It's the part doing the reparenting is the healthy adult mode, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker D: Yeah. So it's allowing your healthy adult mode, which will get stronger as you go more into your schema healing journey, so it can rise up when you're vulnerable and meet your emotional, physical needs in the way that it should have when you were younger, I suppose, isn't it? Because when you're a little person and you've got unmet needs and schemas form, generally, you're just left alone with all these. The feelings from those unmet needs, they're big and overwhelming. All children need to have their emotions, as jemma said, validated, regulated, soothed by an adult. But that's just a totally normal thing when that can't happen, as jemma said, you just cut them off. Children are great at compartmentalising and looking like they're not bothered by things when they actually are. And so what you don't get is an opportunity to internalise a parenthood, a loving, caring parent, seeing your vulnerability and helping you through that feeling so you're not alone with it. And that's when it actually legitimately leaves your body and you're not dealing with any traumatic residue or anything like that. So if you didn't get that when you're little, when something difficult or awful was happening, it's like we have to create that part of you in a post hoc fashion as an adult. But really, it's. And that's those exercises. But really, it's about cultivating a very caring, accepting, non judgmental, safe space for you to be in yourself when you're vulnerable, when your schemas are triggered, it's meeting that need as an adult. So you've got this part of you that's almost like a good parent, that's what your healthy adult mode is. And it's how you talk to yourself when you're triggered and how you approach your vulnerability when you're triggered. And so re parenting becomes a very sort of fluid, ongoing, day to day experience once that part of you can kick in, that's what we're aiming for, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker D: Yep.

Speaker C: I remember reading this somewhere. I don't know whether it was a client said this to me or we had an email or something like that, and someone wrote in and said, you know, I'm really confused, because I feel that the aim of the therapy I'm having is to make me independent enough to meet all my own needs and the repair, that kind of thing. Now, the thing is, because we're human beings, right, we come into this world, we have innate needs, and some of those needs are attachment needs, right? We're not an island. So even though as a. As an adult, we want to develop all these healthy skills, we want to develop our healthy adult. So we can co regulate with our wounded parts we want to repair in ourselves. But no man or woman is an island. So it's not about learning to be alone as such and not needing anybody, because we get needs met from interdependence needs, right. So that's just to say that we also need other people or even, you know, animals or whoever we have. Therapist, someone in your life, you don't have to have many, you just have to have a couple people for different seasons and so forth. But it's not about just creating. Sometimes people think re parenting is that I just have to be this island. And no, it's. The flip side of it is we also want to learn to be healthy with other people, give to others and to receive as well. Right? So that's important. And that's why some people really do need a long term therapeutic relationship. So the therapist can help them reparent. Right. And be an instrument in that re parenting. And good friends can help do that, or a good partner, or, you know, a good family member or somebody, right. But we also want to cultivate that in ourselves. What's a representation of our. And if we find it really hard to do it ourselves, we can start with a symbolic thing. For example, you might have an aunt who you loved and. And. Or the grandmother or somebody in your teacher, all right, a teacher maybe, or somebody like that in your life who you really thought was pretty good and they were there for you in some capacity. Right? You can use that in your mind. You can think that, okay, this person, what would they say? Okay, I'm going to imagine little me and I'm going to try to get some wisdom from this person that I've internalized so we can use other people to help us reparent ourselves. But yes, like Justine says, it comes down to the fact that we want to develop. Very importantly, we can't do reparenting unless we have some sense of self compassion.

Speaker D: Acceptance, non judgmental, loving, allowing, allowing. We don't allow enough of our internal vulnerability generally. And so it can't pass through us like emotions, you know, comes the word motion. It's meant to kind of flow through us. So we have to kind of sit with it and allow it to do what it's meant to do rather than blocking it, which is when it's bad for you and your mental health and your physical health. So, yeah, that part of you is very allowing. Not badly gives our permission just to, you know, but just that internal stance towards your vulnerability is very allowing and kind and calm.

Speaker C: Yeah, because we're never going to be able to get rid of it. So we may as well be allowing of it. And all that means is that we're not taking a punitive stance towards ourselves or our own feelings. Remember, feelings are different to actions and behaviors. We're going to have our feeling. We can't do much about it. It just arises within us. Our actions is what we can control. Our feelings, however negative, positive, neutral, whatever you want to call them, they're going to be there. We're human, they're going to arise within us. And so we have to have a stance that is validating towards them. So the more you recognize that there might be a part of you, or several parts of you, who have been hiding kind of in the shadows or orbiting around you, waiting to come in, the more you realize that that is the case and do some of these exercises, then the more acceptance you will have and the less need eventually you'll have for coping strategies. Right? Yeah. Why do. Why do people have coping, negative, maladaptive coping strategies? Because they don't want to feel the pain of the vulnerable child. That's it. And so if you recognise that you do have this unspoken pain, the more you recognize that part of you, validate that part of you let that part of you feel, then you're actually going to feel a lot better over time. So it does work? Yes, it does. And it does get better with practice.

Speaker D: Can I give an example? Actually, once this popped into my mind with a client about how this plays out in practice. So this client, big defectiveness schema had quite a very difficult, critical mother.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: That's kind of the bit that's relevant for the story. Has a very intense job, lots of responsibility, and there was something at work that day that did not go well. And to be honest, she probably misjudged something and had to clean up the mess, sort of thing. So that's fine. But then obviously her defectiveness schema was really triggered in that moment. Full on shame bomb, full on inner critic hammering her. Got home. Now I've been seeing her probably for about, I would say, long term client, and we've been working a lot on helping her deal with the shame. And this was a moment of, I suppose, change where she recognized that actually she had a choice to do something different.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: So she got home and she said, you know what? I then was by myself with this awful feeling. And I realized I could do one of two things. I could go into a spiral of complete and utter despair and beat myself up and go to bed and just, you know, sit in there and try and detach, which is what she normally does. And then that usually kicks off quite a bit of a depression, actually. She can get quite depressed for a couple of weeks. Or I could think, what am I feeling and what do I need? And that's what she did. She thought, what do I need? Okay, well, I need connection. I need to be talk to someone I know who cares about me and just talk through what's happened. So she brought a really good friend, and then after she had the conversation with the friend, who was very caring and kind and, you know, she said, I felt a bit more myself. And then I chose to go out to my favorite restaurant for myself for dinner. But it was felt very caring and nurturing, and I was choosing to value myself and take care of myself rather than write myself off and crawl into my depression hole, as she calls it. Yeah. And, like, even though that sounds really simple, like quite a. The thing that really has enabled her to make that decision was realising she had those choices. She could see it. She could step back from the feeling that was going. At the same time she had all the shame and the inner critic going off. She's got a really nasty one. But she knew if I give in to that, I know where I'm going to go and I'm going to feel awful. And actually, it was a Friday night, so she was kind of thinking, do I want a weekend in bed? Because that's where this will go. Or do I want to actually have my weekend as a break from what happened at work and I take care of myself so I can make that decision and have a nice weekend with my partner and everything. He wasn't at the time, so she was going to be alone for the night. So it was stepping back and her healthy adult mode. And then she reparented herself. And a lot of self development goes into doing that.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: But that's an example, I think, like a one in action.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's good. That's really good.

Speaker D: And then she did some journaling later on when she got home and, you know what I mean? She processed it.

Speaker C: So essentially she asked herself sort of, what do I need?

Speaker D: What do I need? What am I feeling? And what do I need? And, you know, and then the feeling was shame. I'm feeling shame. Okay, well, I know what that is. I know where it comes from. So she didn't do any sort of real cognitive stuff. Then she just acknowledged, okay, this is my thing. This is where I go.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And she would have acknowledged the part of her that was feeling the shame.

Speaker D: Well, yeah, like, she didn't talk about it in terms of the vulnerable child, but just that she knew. It was almost like she knew she needed to be taken care of.

Speaker C: Right. She recognized it as kind of hardly.

Speaker D: I'm vulnerable right now. I need to be taken care of, not rejected and shut away.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is what is the normal.

Speaker D: Where she goes, Jimmy.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's right. I think. I think with any kind of strong emotion, if you're having a big, big reaction and you're feeling all those. If you're feeling very, you know, lost or a bit childlike or you're feeling overwhelmed with your feeling, you know, that in many cases, that that's kind of like the vulnerable child tapping you on the shoulder for some recognition. And so you can symbolically address that just by, you know, like I, for example, said to clients, if you. If you're struck with an overwhelming kind of emotion like that, sometimes with abandonment and things like that, you know, a little practical thing to do is actually warm up a heat pack and put it on your chest and hug it and feel the vulnerable child and give and know. Recognize that this is coming from a wounded part of you and what you want. The message that you want to give that part of you is, like, really simple. The message is some variation of this. Like, I see you, I recognize you. Right? I want it. So you want to do the opposite of what you've been doing for years or what other people did. The opposite is to say, I see you. I know you're feeling like this. I get it. I get why you're feeling this makes perfect sense. You even might take it one step further into say, like, I'm sorry, I haven't really recognized you before, but now I see you and say things to yourself, like, I'm feeling this to heal it. Right.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's part of. It's part of the process. You imagine little you and giving them a hug at the same time. Right? What do children need? This is what you ask. What do children need? They need to get to feel someone gets them to see them. Warmth, safety, security. This is all the stuff you're giving yourself when you're reparenting. So that's kind of the essence of the core of it. And then you can do lots of other things, and you can ask yourself, yeah, what do I need? And you can put those things in action. But, yeah, asking what do you need? Is a crucial question. I think, yeah.

Speaker D: And just knowing, knowing you've got a choice, I think that's the, how you respond, isn't it, to your vulnerability when you notice it. What am I going to do now?

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: I'm feeling awful. Even just labeling your emotions as re parenting, that's kind of saying, I see you. Okay, right now I'm feeling.

Speaker C: Exactly. That's repair. That is the essence of it.

Speaker D: Yeah, that's it. That can be that simple. That's actually, you could start there and I wish I'd copied the paper. But you know, even just accurately labeling your emotions in the moment, saying I see you to that vulnerable part, reduces your distress by about 20%.

Speaker C: Exactly. And that's, I mean, like we've, we sort of, we talk about this in the deep dive and the co regulation between, you know, you know, an ideal world, we get that from our mother or caregiver when we're little, right. And someone witnesses our distress, labels it for us, soothes us, right. We feel good. We feel like we can hold whatever we're experiencing and so that we can do that for ourselves. So to be able to simultaneously feel the vulnerability and the hurt and to label it and soothe it at the same time is the essence of reparenting. And then on top of that you can then do all these different things to kind of help yourself. And that does make a big difference. So if you do that, it will make a difference because the vulnerable child doesn't stop putting their hand up or tapping you on the shoulder. It will do it for life. The minute you stop avoiding it, looking at it. You may need help for this. I think some people do need a lot of help, you know, and that's okay. But the minute you stop avoiding it and responding, the minute you start feeling better, it does work. So I recommend it.

Speaker D: And it's capacity you build over time.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: So it's just something that once you start, becomes easier and you get a nice momentum and then it just becomes what you do. You know, the brain changes. So when the vulnerability rises up, the part of you that reparents, that part of you can rise up at the same time.

Speaker B: Well, I hope you enjoyed our discussion. Now just some final words on the topic of reparenting. It really is something that is fundamental to psychological healing and schema. Healing. Healing any difficulties or any traumatic experiences from the past. Healing old abandonments, healing old losses. Any approach to healing has to really incorporate reparenting. And the essence of re parenting is really that we have a healthy part of us that acknowledges and takes care of a vulnerable part of us and validates the existence of that part of us. And the more we do that, the less foreign that part will become and the more integrated it will become into our psychology, really into our self. One of my favorite tips, really, for just getting a handle on reparenting. I mean, there's so many things you can do, right? So many different practical things. But one simple thing is that you can just reframe the idea of when you have a strong triggered emotion of any sort and you think, gee, this is coming from, this is quite intense, or this is really coming from my childhood, or at least it has threads to my childhood. Then try to see that emotion not as a pathology or not as something to worry about, but see it as basically an emotion that is coming from your vulnerable child part, the inner child, the child within, who is, is suffering. So see a triggered emotion in terms of really a tap on the shoulder from that part of you. And instead of pushing away the emotion or trying to escape the emotion. And there's a time and place for, you know, distraction, obviously. And, you know, we can all take refuge in different things. There's nothing wrong with getting a bit of distraction. We don't have to be feeling everything all the time, but we ultimately do have to feel painful emotions to let them pass through us and to dissipate. So instead of pushing away the emotion, if you're prone to do that, instead find a part of you that is nurturing, kind, loving, and respond to the emotion from that stance instead of a neglecting or a critical stance. So give that feeling some recognition and validation. You might speak to that feeling as though it is you, as though it's little you. You might address it as it is, as if it is little you or a part of you. Essentially, the message is that you want to just normalize and validate what that part of you is feeling. Right. The more we do this, paradoxically, what we normally find is the emotion can move through us a lot more quickly and it won't get stuck. Whereas if we put a lot of effort into resisting something, it's not really going to go away. It just sort of rebounds. Right. That's true for so many different things that we know about. And emotions are no different. So really there's no getting, you know, getting, getting through it, right. John Cabot Zinn said, you know, a great saying, the only way out is through. And that's pretty true, really, when it comes to our experiences and our emotions. So there's a time and place granted, and we're not always in the place that we can feel our feelings, but when we are, see it as something normal. If you have a strong triggered emotion, for example, see it more as coming from your vulnerable child and less about a pathology, and soothe it and validate its existence and try to understand where it's coming from. Don't intellectualize it, just understand it in terms of giving it validity, like you would do if you were validating a small child's feelings, if they fell over, or if they were hurt or someone picked on them in the playground. Right? So you're not trying to problem solve and be intellectual with this child, you're just naming what they feel, you're labeling what they feel. You're helping them understand it, you're validating it for them, and you're saying that it's normal for them to feel this way. And if we hear that, if we hear that message, and if our vulnerable childhood hears that message, we are instantly soothed. We can have a general calming effect on ourselves. So try it and see how you go. Obviously, if you're dealing with something quite traumatic or very distressing, then you probably need help with a, you know, professional mental health provider. And so I recommend you get that. But if you're not at that place, or you're in therapy, or you've had therapy, and you do have some internal resources, then I suggest that you do give a reparenting a go. And like we discussed today, there's a few other things you can do. Letter writing, you can use child photos of yourself. You can even do your own nurturing and reparenting imagery. And you might have learnt that with a therapist, and that's something you might also be able to do on your own. So good luck with all that. Let us know how we go. We love receiving your emails and all the best. Until next time.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with others. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notifications when new shows are released. You can visit us at the podcast for more information. You know this podcast is intended for learning and entertainment purposes, and we really hope it achieves that. But because it's not a substitute for personal therapy, we'd like you to consult a qualified mental health professional for tailored support. Bye for now.