1. You deserve a love that is safe and doesn’t make you compete.
2. Love isn’t chaotic. It’s a hot chocolate during the cold season; It is kind and compassionate. Love doesn’t control your behavior. Love is respect. Love takes two to tango.
3. You are not your thoughts. You are the thinker of your thoughts.
4. What other people do to you is not reflective of who you are as a person. Change is inevitable, you must learn how to embrace change.
5. When you feel like crying, allow yourself to do so. You are not any weaker by crying. Learn how to accept help from other people and learn how to reach out. It’s okay to be vulnerable sometimes.
Lots of gifted kids have childhood wounds from bullies, teachers, and adults who harmed their self-esteem. Lots of us also had parents and teachers who didn’t fully understand how to nurture the gifted children in their care. Furthermore, studies have shown that gifted children suffer more from childhood emotional abuse and neglect--but are also capable of healing more quickly and fully when given the tools to do it. You can re-parent yourself and heal the wounds of your childhood! If you’ve seen me talking about reparenting and fixing the mistakes of our own parents on previous posts, this one explains how to actually do that reparenting. What follows are passages from The Tao of Fully Feeling by Pete Walker, an excellent source on recovering from childhood abuse. Under a cut because long post is long.
Self-compassionate reparenting is a term I have coined to describe my approach to remothering and refathering the inner child. When we practice self-compassionate reparenting, we identify and provide for the unmet needs of our childhood so that we can grow into more complete, life-loving human beings.
...Many survivors are uncomfortable with the concept of the inner child because they were forced at an early age to become miniature adults and to hate their childlike characteristics... Survivors who do not like their inner children, or children in general for that matter, are often those who were not liked as children.
Many of us were so traumatized for being and acting childlike that we had to move from toddlerhood to adulthood in astoundingly brief periods of time. Various combinations of shame, punishment, and abandonment forced us to forfeit childhood and to act like grown-ups even before we were ready for school.
...When a child is not allowed to be a child, she abandons her child-self and banishes it to her unconscious and tries to behave like an adult. Many of us find it difficult to get an authentic sense of our inner child because that part of ourselves is still hiding somewhere out of awareness... The child-self often stays sequestered in the unconscious because the adult survivor, like his [abusers], reviles it whenever it emerges into awareness seeking help or attention. ...Self-compassionate reparenting begins with the decision to love our inner children and protect them from self-abuse.
...We will focus here primarily on the emotional tasks of the reparenter. These constellate around two crucial goals: the recovery and ongoing development of our inborn sense of self-acceptance, and the reestablishment and strengthening of our instinctive sense of self-protection. ...[These are] the two key processes of emotional caretaking: unconditional love and unrelenting self-protection (which has its roots in the emotion of anger).
...
Reparenting begins with forgiving the inner child. It sometimes seems outlandish to me that we need to forgive the children in us who were so innocent and undeserving of blame. What a cruel irony that we need to forgive the blameless, yet we must let our inner children know that we forgive them because, like our [abusers], we have been blaming since time immemorial. ...Forgiving our inner children is a powerful avenue into self-forgiveness. In the words of self-esteem guru Nathaniel Branden:
When we learn to forgive the child we once were, for what he or she didn’t know, or couldn’t do, or couldn’t cope with, or felt or didn’t feel; when we understand and accept that child was struggling to survive the best way he or she could--then the adult self is no longer in adversarial relationship to the child-self. One part is not at war with another.
Our inner child’s heart, broken by a dearth of compassionate [acceptance], begins to heal when we turn inward with unconditional love and forgiveness. We add substance to this [loving self-parenting] by offering the child ongoing tenderness, listening, affection, and unconditional love. Consistency in such practice is what allows our inner child to feel truly forgiven.
We also enhance forgiveness by championing our inner child in a parental way. We do this by using anger and blame to fight off internal or external aggression. Such actions prove to the child that she is not only forgiven, but also no longer subject to unfair blame.
The efficacy of our reparenting is further enhanced by providing our inner children [with] verbal, spiritual, and emotional nurturance... When we give our inner children love, understanding, and protection consistently over time, they begin to shed their horrible burdens of fear, shame, and emptiness.
As we become more successful in resisting the shaming and terrorizing attacks of our internalized critical parents, our inner children begin to feel safe enough to come forth in all their vital wonder and beauty. Normal qualities of human existence that like joy, peacefulness, friendliness, spontaneity, and playfulness naturally begin to reemerge as we master the practice of reparenting.
Talking to and for the inner child
We heal ourselves with self-protection when we use our anger and blame to challenge inner messages of shame and self-hate. Speaking up in a protective way for the inner child makes it safe enough for her to once again inhabit consciousness. ...If I [realize that I] have numbly repeated the lies and shamings of old authority figures, I apologize to [my inner child] and recommit to eliminating this old self-destructive habit.
I usually supplement my self-protection with the kind of love that feeds self-esteem with positive and supportive statements. I imagine my inner child sitting on my lap or resting in my heart. I remind him that he is absolutely and eminently lovable just as he is. And then I soothe him with words of this nature:
I love to have you near me. You are such a joy to me. I love it when you talk to me and tell me how it is for you. I want to hear everything you have to say. I want to be the one person you can always come to whenever you need help. You can come to me when you are hurting, when you just want company, or when you want to play. You are always welcome. You are a delight to my eyes, and I always enjoy having you around. You are a good child, very special and absolutely worthy of love, respect, and all good things. I am so proud of you and so glad that you are alive. I will help you in any way that I can. I want to be the loving mom and dad you were so unfairly deprived of, and that you so much deserve. And I want you to know that I have an especially loving place in my heart for you when you are scared or sad or mad or ashamed. You can always come to me and tell me about such feelings, and I will be with you and try to soothe you until those feelings run their natural course. I want to become your best friend and I will always try to protect you from unfairness and humiliation. I will also seek friends for you who genuinely like you and who are truly on your side. We will only befriend people who are fair, who treat us with equality and respect, and who listen to us as much as we listen to them. I want to help you learn that it really is good to have needs and desires. It’s wonderful that you have feelings. It’s healthy to be mad and sad and scared and depressed at times. It’s natural to make mistakes. And it’s okay to feel good too, and even to have more fun than mom and dad did.
...I reassure him that I will never allow anyone to abuse [or bully] him again. No one will be allowed to slap him with a hand or with words. I remind him that I have a healthy anger now that can be summoned up to ward off, or “write off”, abusers.
When we consistently give our inner children this kind of support, we suffer less and less paralysis from toxic shame. We become skilled at transforming the inverted anger of self-hatred into a defense against [our internalized bullies]. [Our abusers’] rulership of our psyches gradually dissipates, and we are able to treat normal mistakes as learning experiences rather than as proof of our defectiveness. The demon of perfectionism loses its grip on our psyches, and we begin to cherish our differences and imperfections as the unique treasures of character and being they are.
I have been so healed through this process that I now value many things about myself that were formerly perpetual sources of shame... What I used to disparage as “my moodiness” now strikes me as emotional richness and flexibility. My need for considerable introversion, which used to be my all-time greatest defect, has now become the much appreciated matrix of my rich inner life. My “streak shooting” in basketball no longer sends me down the drain of toxic shame, although I will probably always prefer the hot streaks to the cold ones. Moreover, I can now savor my few remaining addictions: nonstop gum-chewing, long telephone conversations, daily grilled cheese sandwiches, writing with ink in books, and crying at sentimental movies.
I can also graciously accept the moans that I occasionally evoke in others via my habit of telling bad jokes. Even my feelings of inferiority about my appearance have almost totally vanished. I now really like the imperfections that for many years made me feel so ugly that I wouldn’t dare approach the opposite sex. ...And perhaps best of all, I now frequently hear a voice that automatically says “I love you” instead of “nice going, klutz” whenever I accidentally drop or bump into something.
I have also noticed that since my inner critic lost its job as boss of my consciousness, I am far less critical and perfectionstically expectant of others. I believe this has made me safer and more comfortable to be around. Others seem to be able to be more authentic and vulnerable with me... [and] allows me to make new friends on an ongoing basis.
As new friends come into my life, my sense of belonging increases and now begins to feel like something comfortingly tribal. I feel as though the enormous loneliness of my loveless youth is largely dissipated. And it continually decreases as my social network expands though meeting good people from all walks of life.
...One of my greatest delights in being a therapist is witnessing my clients making similar gains in their lives through reparenting. Many develop trustworthy relationships for the first time in their lives. Many awake from years of stagnation to become wholeheartedly excited about new endeavors or old reclaimed enthusiasms. How wonderful it is when a client comes in proudly reporting that over the weekend she flew a kite, made a friend, climbed a tree, took a dance class, started a garden, went roller-skating, frolicked on the water slides, enrolled in an arts and crafts class, or identified fifteen different wild flowers on a camping trip!
If you would like me to post more on re-parenting through self-compassion and self-protection, please let me in the notes or in an ask!
Self-parenting is a form of self-care and inner healing that can help you to reconnect with your inner child and nurture your emotional well-being. It is a powerful tool to address the traumas and… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories
