Deep beneath the insecurity, chronic pain, anxiety, and emptiness many of us feel hides the wounded inner child who longs to be seen and loved. 

If you grew up with inconsistent, immature, sick, or abusive parents or caregivers, chances are you have a vulnerable and young inner part known as the inner child who needs healing.

Personally, learning to reparent myself has been one of the most profound soul work practices I have ever committed to doing, and that’s why I want to share it with you today.

I share a bit more in this short YouTube video, including one of my favorite all-time practices:

Reparenting your inner child is a soul work practice because it helps you to gain more access to your inner authentic essence. 

Qualities like joy, spontaneity, playfulness, curiosity, and openness emerge when you take the time to befriend and be the parent your inner child always needed.  

In this article, I’ll share some of the best and most effective reparenting techniques out there. But first, let’s explore a basic definition.

What is Reparenting?

Reparenting yourself is a self-healing inner child work technique that offers the childlike part still alive within you the love and care that was absent or lacking as a child. 

In essence, when you reparent yourself, you become your own compassionate parent. This is a healing practice that isn’t just emotional, but also extends to taking better physical and psychological care of yourself. 

7 Ways to Reparent Your Wounded Inner Child

Learning to live from the heart and feel ensouled, where we feel connected to our innermost True Essence, requires deep and long-term reparenting work. 

There’s simply no way around this fact: if you don’t welcome back home your wounded inner child, they will find a way of getting your attention, usually in destructive ways.

As writer and teacher Jeff Foster writes in The Joy of True Meditation,

All feelings are only looking for a home in you. Unfinished, stuck feelings, energies that have been resisted, pushed away, denied, banished, do not actually disappear. They live on in the darkness of the Unconscious, homeless and hungry for love, pulling the strings in our relationships, our bodies, our work in the world, getting in the way of our joy. Screaming for attention, deep down in the Underworld, they sap and drain our vitality and self-expression, cause us to become reactive, compulsive and obsessive, depressed and anxious, and ultimately affect our physical health … all in their attempts to get us to listen.

We can see these ‘feelings’ that Foster is speaking about as our various inner child parts. Internal Family Systems therapy refers to this rejected energy within us as our inner exiles – not all of our exiled parts are childlike, but many of them are.

The solution to healing these exiled inner child parts is to welcome them back home.

So, how do we go about reparenting our wounded inner child? Here’s how to get started:

1. Build a good foundation of self-love

To be your own loving parent, you must first know how to show love and kindness to yourself. There’s no use trying to befriend your inner child if you have a mostly destructive and self-critical relationship with yourself. 

In other words, if you’re dominated by the inner critic, you need to work with that part of yourself first. You need to learn to detach and disidentify from your inner critic/judge, and only then will your inner child feel safe enough to be seen and reparented.

Self-love can happen through many paths. Reframing your inner self-talk through positive affirmations, practicing meditation and mindfulness, and learning to take better care of your needs are some common methods.

2. Mirror work

As I explored in the video at the top of this article, mirror work is my favorite reparenting technique. Not only does it feel very intimate and direct, but it can easily be incorporated into your daily routine in a quick and simple way.

Here’s how you can get started: 

After showering or taking a bath, gaze at yourself in the mirror and offer kind words to your inner child. Talk to them and tell them that you’re there for them, that you see and care about their needs. Do this with feeling and sincerity.

This is a short and sweet practice that can take anywhere from thirty seconds to two or more minutes – it’s totally up to you and however much time you’re working with.

I’ve been doing this work consistently for about five years now, and the transformation I’ve experienced has been deep and beautiful. 

3. Inner journeying to rescue and protect your inner child

Unlike the mirror work practice I’ve just explored, this inner journeying method is more targeted and temporary. It’s particularly helpful if you experienced a specific painful situation in childhood that you’re struggling to move on from.

Please note that if you experienced a severely traumatic experience (as in the case of sexual, physical, war, or other abuse), you’ll want to do this with a trained mental health professional. Please don’t retraumatize yourself here. Take care, be gentle, and be safe.

This technique helps with a painful experience that led you to feel rejected, worthless, or ashamed as a child. For instance, if you were bullied, left alone for a prolonged period, put in a situation you hated, experienced the divorce of your parents, and so on, this is an excellent technique.

In his book Self-Therapy, psychologist Jay Earley describes how to do this practice, using the term “exile,” which we can see as the inner child in this situation. When he refers to “Self,” he is referring to the calm, curious, and compassionate essence of you that we can call the Soul:

Here is how you reparent the exile: In your imagination, you join the exile in that original childhood situation. For example, if the memory involves being ridiculed by your mother for the way you are helping her in the kitchen, you imagine yourself in that kitchen with that child part and your mother. Make sure that you enter the situation as the Self—with all your adult knowledge and capacities, enhanced by the qualities of the Self, such as compassion and calmness. Be with the exile in the way she needed someone to be with her then. She may need understanding, caring, support, approval, protection from harm, encouragement, or love. Sense what she needs from you in that situation to heal her and redress what happened. For example, she might need to be seen or to be reassured that she isn’t bad —that whatever happened wasn’t her fault. In addition to sensing what the exile needs from you, you can ask her. When you understand what she needs from you, give it to her through your internal imagination, including visual image, body sensing, emotional contact, and talking to her. From Self, you have the capacity to reparent the exile—to be the good parent that she needs.

4. Setting boundaries with yourself and others

Good parenting isn’t just about showing care and compassion. It’s also about setting boundaries, rules, and limitations. While that may sound strict or boring, it doesn’t have to be. 

Without setting rules for yourself, such as how long you’re going to stay up at night, you may not get enough sleep, which negatively impacts your mood and energy levels.

Without setting limitations on junk food, you may gorge yourself and become sick or chronically ill.

Setting boundaries is the yang to compassion’s yin energy. We need both yin and yang energy to help our inner child find balance and healing. 

Here are some examples of boundaries you can set with yourself and others:

• Not overworking or overcommitting yourself to projects to avoid burnout
• Not staying up past 10 pm to ensure you get proper sleep
• Not letting toxic or narcissistic people get too close to you to preserve your sanity
• Not eating processed foods so that you can stay healthy
• Not letting people pressure you into doing things you’re not comfortable with
• Not letting the inner critic overtake your psyche to care for your mental wellbeing
• Not skipping exercise on work days to ensure that your body is fit and strong
• Not being too serious and disciplined all the time, and allowing yourself to unwind

Boundaries are a form of inner self-fathering – or if you don’t resonate with that label, self-parenting. They help you to tune into, protect, and preserve your authentic needs.

5. Keep an inner child work journal

I have journaled ever since childhood, and it has helped to keep me sane, centered, and grounded in some of the most chaotic and traumatising situations. Once I started exploring my wounded inner child and her needs through journaling, I took this practice to the next level.

Keeping an inner child work journal can be as simple as asking each day, “What does my inner child need?” or “How is my inner child feeling today?” 

It can also be as intense as exploring past traumas, unpacking triggers, and learning about the gifts of this vulnerable part of you.

Understandably, this work can feel a little overwhelming to some people.

6. Don’t neglect basic self-care

I mentioned setting boundaries above, and that took into account some level of self-care. But I want to make this a point itself: taking care of yourself on a physical level is extremely healing when it comes to reparenting.

Our inner child needs good sleep, hygiene, food, water, sunshine, exercise, and play to thrive. Are you meeting those basic needs?

Have a look at your daily habits and explore whether you would be comfortable applying most of them to a five-year-old version of you.

7. Find a nurturing role model 

If you lacked attentive and attuned parents or caregivers growing up, the concept of nurturing yourself can feel a little strange. That’s why I recommend finding a nurturing role model, or someone loving, who can show you what genuine self-compassion looks like.

This figure may be a fictional character in a movie or TV show, a grandparent, a public figure, a religious or spiritual being, or even a therapist if you choose to work with one.

Although I’m not religious (and certainly not Catholic), I use the Virgin Mary as a symbol of the Divine Mother and a focal point of my inner reparenting work. In fact, I have about five or six statues of her around my house to remind me of the healing power of love. 

At other times, I have used Buddhist images of Tara and Quan Yin, as well as pagan images of Gaia or Mother Earth, to connect me with my inner mother. As someone who identifies as female, this resonates most with me, but it could be different for you.

Your nurturing role model could be of the same or a different gender than you, or even a spiritual being who is genderless (such as a being of light). Whatever the form, finding an example of compassion to emulate is a profound way of becoming your own loving parent. 

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The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. – Alden Nowlan

Learning how to reparent yourself is a long journey, but a deeply enriching one. It’s a path that can move you from self-hatred to self-compassion, inner emptiness to inner fullness, and pain to a sense of empowerment.