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How to Parent Yourself





We cannot change the parents we had – but there is always an option, in later life, to learn to care for ourselves in new and perhaps better ways. In other words, there are opportunities to learn how to reparent ourselves.

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FURTHER READING

“All of us were parented. For many of us, it went well. We were loved, our views were respected, our needs were tended to. It helped to make us the more or less sane people we are now.

For others among us, things went really rather badly wrong. Perhaps there was unreliability, anger, humiliation, violence or worse…”

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41 thoughts on “How to Parent Yourself”

  1. I can't get this to work unfortunately. Either the attempt comes across as sarcastic, or emotions are basically discarded – which can be adaptive in the short-term, but does nothing to foster emotional development

  2. Alice Miller books gave me the map to do this. If you need to know how get some of hers. she's genius. For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not be Aware were the ones I used…and don't expect it to be easy

  3. She says at the end, "If you like this film…." It's a video. Not a film either literally or figuratively. But it is a useful video, if watered down for what many children suffer.

  4. Reparenting ourselves for those of us, which is most of us, with bad parents, is essential but what these reparenting videos don't talk about is the effects of trauma, abuse and neglect and the corresponding mental illnesses they create. Reparenting is an essential tool but most of us need more help than that. Reparenting fails when we can't release the trauma or the affects of neglect.

  5. I’m of a mind that as adults we can move past the inadequacies of our parents to realize that they were neither exceptionally good or exceptionally bad people, but flawed as we all are. Certainly we can remember the hurtful nature of something our mother or father said or did, but we don’t let it have to mar our present existence. To say that we have no control over what influences us today is self-defeating and frankly, illogical.

  6. This is a nice video but it doesn't explain how to reparent ourselves, which is the title. It just keeps stating that reparenting will help us.

  7. I like this video, however the content tells us that we CAN reparent ourselves but doesn’t actually tell us HOW to reparent ourselves , therefore the title is misleading. If your going to put out a how to video then some reparenting techniques should have been included.

  8. One of the hardest things on re-parenting ourselves is about knowing that we have been bad-parented. Sometimes we grow up in toxic family and we don't even notice. We consider their mistreatment as normal and blame ourselves for not being good enough.

  9. I assume that when you have the word "how" on you video title you will show us some techniques to practice the video's subject. Here we have a video called "how to parent yourself" but the video only says that "we can parent ourselves".

  10. I'm 34 and have been in and out of therapy since the age of 19. The anxiety and self-loathing I had for close to 15 years came about when I realised the power of the unconscious and how it can wreak havoc when it is not brought into the open. I have, with, perhaps despite of, the extreme anxiety, lived a full and interesting life – full of travel and adventure. This self parenting has been an extremely effective tool for me and I am now anxiety and depression free. Of course, I have my bad days. It's about breaking the cycle so that I needed burden those around me with it. It's the most important thing we can do to understand ourselves. During lockdown I wrote and published a book (my friend, the migrator) all about my experiences in therapy and what I learned. I am still working on myself, but it is getting better.

  11. Sometimes I really wish I had a healthy and good childhood, although I blame my parents for that, but at tge same time I don't want to because I still love them.

  12. the video uses so many hard and sometimes confusing vocabularies. so, can you guys tell me how to parent ourselves in simple english?

    in my interpretation, how to parent ourself is to give positive self-talk whenever there are trouble arises.

    PS. my level of fluency makes it hard for me to get the nuances of the videos 🙏

  13. "Though childhood is a one off event in material time, in psychological time, it is endlessly recurring." I truly needed to hear this. It reminds me that my recurring emotions I have had in childhood, do not mean that I am emotionally immature. It's simply my inner child signaling to me that a need is not being met and that I can step in as the compassionate parent type self, and help resolve the situation in the best way to both selves thrive.

    This also reminds me that I never have to worry about my childhood being one fleeting part of my life that is gone. It is always there for me to cherish and nurture.

  14. V helpful! The best part really is that God wants to parent us, & he is perfect. But if u had religious trauma, know that God has been terribly represented for u. It hurts really deep. Look up books by Philip Yancey.

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