Reparenting the Wounded Inner Child

     A technique I am using to help me heal my wounded inner child is called reparenting. Reparenting is an immersive meditation where you imagine you are with your inner child at a particularly traumatic moment. You take the place of the absent parent who should have been there to help you, soothing your inner child with your own parental tenderness. You become your own parent in this crucial situation, which has the effect of continuing the development of emotions that became stagnant as a consequence. For me, this experience was a breakthrough on a magnitude that surpasses all the therapy I ever took and all the books I ever read on mental wellness.
    What helped me discover my wounded inner child was going through a checklist and noticing almost every single criterion for it matching my situation. For most of my life, there has been an inexplicable emptiness in my heart, a pain that has never gone away, slightly alleviated by getting married. My shrinks would have called it a mental weakness or a chemical imbalance in my brain, and my mother would be the first to believe them, perscribing me to medications as one solution. I found out early on these were bad solutions and I have not been to therapy since.

    In reality, the pain in my heart stemmed from emotional memories of neglect from when I was an infant and my parents would let me "cry it out". These aren't actual memories, for I was too young to have them, but it is the way they did things. I have an earliest memory of crying and crying and no one coming to help, my stepfather storming into the room to scare me so bad that I would stop. Often, he would hit me. He did not care enough to comfort me in situations where all I needed was a little love and tenderness; rather, he turned an already traumatic situation into something worse.

    My biological father told me that after I was born, my mother wasn't naturally gifted at breastfeeding, growing frustrated that I wouldn't latch on. So, I was given the bottle and trained to reduce contact with her. My mother has told me that she only had me because she "wanted someone to love her", meaning I was groomed to be her emotional support at every twist and turn of her life, through adulthood and up to last year when I discovered she had narcissist tendencies. That was another breakthrough on a similar level. It was so bad that she had all my shrinks and even her family fooled. I remember her loving me, but only when it was convenient fo her. It didn't matter when I needed intimacy, so when I finally got it from her needing it, there was a vast sense of relief, a desperate surrender of my needs to hers, teaching me that I was only there to serve her feelings.

    In my meditations I have soothed my inner child by saying affirming things like "I'm here for you, I'll never leave you, you deserve to be loved, your parents are neglectful but I'm not, you are secure in my arms, I love you because you are kind and beautiful, you aren't worthless". The most radical moment came when I talked to an angel who assisted me by entering my soul, finding the source of that pain, and swarming it with loving grace. I haven't felt that desperate pain since my angel healed it. Why didn't she do it long ago? Because I didn't understand its source. Only when you understand something can an angel assist you, and I never even asked it where that feeling was coming from. I highly recommend reaching out to an angel, if you can, for even faster relief than reparenting, though both seem to work.

    I believe this emotional memory had a profound effect on my life because I never developed emotionally from it. It negatively impacted my confidence, my self-esteem, my sensitivity to rejection; my chest posture, chest tension, or a possible weight imbalance; the way I react when getting upset; overeating, especially sugar; and needing excessive contact with my kids as a weird vicarious remedy. It explains the lingering emptiness in my heart chakra when meditating on it. In a sense I have been a neglected infant for all 41 of my years, and I am just now finding the path to overcome.   

    Reparenting is a great tool for sealing those heart wounds that never mend. They are worse than the pain of garden-variety rejection or a breakup because they are deep seeded in infancy, where it is far more difficult to remember, making it seem like an innate quality of your psychology. Many depressed people are unaware why they have this feeling that never goes away. If this sounds like you, project yourself into the earliest memory of your trauma and give reparenting a try.