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.
Spiritual Wanderer Course:
Find your deepest path and purpose in life as a spiritual wanderer. In this immersive course, you get 3+ hours of content, workbooks, meditations, a premium test, and more!
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.
Table of contents
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.
Dissolve the shadows that obscure your inner Light in this weekly email-based membership! Perfect for any soul seeker serious about practicing ongoing shadow work and self-love.
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.
For more suggestions, I recommend you check out my How to Love Yourself guide.
To get powerful, in-depth support, I recommend our guided Self-Love Journal, which is available in our Inner Work Journals Bundle.
Would you like to save this?
We'll email this article to you, so you can come back to it later!
Your information will never be shared.
Here’s what Jerlyn, one of 200+ reviewers, has shared about this bundle: “Thank you for creating this exquisite masterpiece that has significantly improved my life.” You can purchase these three journals here.
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:
Inner Work Journal Bundle:
Ready to take your spiritual practice to new depths? Our highly-rated set of guided inner work journals leads you step-by-step through processing trauma, transmuting pain into power, and finding transformation through deep healing and self-illumination.
- 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. That’s why I created the guided Inner Child Work Journal, which hundreds of people have found to be a powerful and transformative ally on their path.
If you’d like to get started keeping an inner child work journal, check it out here as part of our Inner Work Journal Bundle.
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.
***
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.
Tell me, what transformation do you believe you might undergo if you embark on the journey of reparenting yourself? I’d love to hear below in the comments.
Three paths to inner transformation – here’s how I can help you go deeper:
1. The Spiritual Wanderer Course: Are you feeling lost, adrift, and unsure of your life's purpose? Gain clarity, focus, and direction on your inner path by uncovering the five archetypes of awakening within you. Learn how to navigate the highs and lows of your inner journey and chart your unique path with 3+ hours of audio-visual content, workbooks, meditations, and a premium test.
2. Shadow & Light Membership: Do you crave consistent support on your spiritual quest? Receive weekly intuitive guidance and learn to embrace your whole self, including your shadow side. Cultivate deeper self-love with our affordable, personalized support.
3. Spiritual Awakening Bundle: Ready to embark on a profound soul-searching adventure? Dive into our collection of essential transformative resources! Explore five illuminating eBooks and seven in-depth journals, plus unlock two special bonuses to empower your spiritual growth.
Your articles are such an inspiration and guided affirmation. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much for these affirming words, Sally. I appreciate them and you 💜
Your insight and advise for the inner child is most grateful and humbly appreciated. We as adult humans forget this inner child that is still there. Thank you for your article.
Yes, that’s right, my child does need much more!
I get a sense of being overwhelmed by the mother critic etched into the background of my subconscious, causing irrational fears and doubts that see-saw away. So yes, reparenting is a lifelong love, passion, and demand that I need amongst the crowd of “Exiles” replaying in the frontal lobe of my mind. It often gets full-on with the Ego, to inflame anxieties, to push fears, blocks, lock downs, etc, especially during late-night and early Morning sessions of sleeplessness.
My insecurity, being processed as a post-war child of the early fifties, brought up by one insecure Mother and two older Sisters and a passive Father figure. Which, in my sensitivity, often appears as a female personality, dressed as a small, quiet male body, confused by not keeping up with other males, yet very responsive to the gentler sex in caring and thought process preferences. While inner isolation and loneliness nurtured very creative and imaginative pursuits. from mud pies to visual art.
“What transformation do you believe you might undergo if you embark on the journey of reparenting yourself? ”
If given small initial instructional steps fed gently, within my current capacity to take it in at a reasonable pace, time, age, and intellect, it would be a lifelong process. To peel back the pain, emptiness, isolation, anxiety, and fears to nature and nurture my little exiles to the truth of identity, joy, wholeness, and openness of the mature adult. To feel ensouled, re-aligned, and reconnected to the light of God/Source within. (Agree totally with Jeff Foster’s message -The Joy of true meditation)
” To peel back the pain, emptiness, isolation, anxiety, and fears to nature and nurture my little exiles to the truth of identity, joy, wholeness, and openness of the mature adult. To feel ensouled, re-aligned, and reconnected to the light of God/Source within.” This was so beautiful and touching to read, John. Thank you so much for your vulnerability 💜
It’s not possible to “reparent” yourself after Childhood Trauma. You can’t give your “Inner Child” what you yourself still don’t have and nobody wants to give you. Trying to do that just puts you at more of a deficit
This is why I write in point #1:
“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.”
Dealing with the inner critic is difficult. I have been so programmed! Yesterday I was asked to help with something and I found myself so reactive because I couldn’t help. I was angry at being asked and then I realized it was just like being in school when the teacher calls on you and you don’t know the answer. Guilt, shame, what a bad person I am! At least I caught myself and marveled at the strength of these unconscious patterns and was able to look at this more realistically. My inner critic has been a huge tyrant. Time for a revolution!
The fact that you caught yourself is huge, San. Awareness is key 💜
Isnt it intresting how different people practice and preach the same modalities. What you describe in point 3, i learned last year as the completion process by Teal Swan. I havent been able to practice this method myself yet. I tried to work with a CP- practioner to work on my deep rooted ‘worthlessness’ wound but unfortunately the timming odds where not in our favour. (Or maybe, the journey had another plan all along)
Even though that didnt worked out, there is always another method that works and you can make the progress.
I shared earlier this year about the course in the insight timer app where i was able to recover my innerchild from the abandonment wound. Because my injustice/worthlessness wound showed up last week. I wanted to see if I could do something about it this time. Something that could make a real change in the repeating patterns over and over again. Only sitting with the emotions, writing it all down etc was clearly not enough. Because this teacher only discusses 4 core wounds, abonnement, shame, survival/scarcity and Disempowerment. I was trying to figure out if the injustice/worthlessness wound would fit in Disempowerment or shame. Or maybe has a little overlap. I choose to work on the Disempowerment wound this time. I mean, growing up with a narcistic parent is disempowering in every way possible anyway.
I went back to the akashic records with the same content of this teacher. It was again quite the powerfull experience! Able to recover another 1 of my inner children. It took me some effort! She was locked up as if she was jailed. The light beings were not able to let her out, that was on me. Eventually when we left the records (in this case the castle scenario, the castle you build around your heart) we were walking togheter to/in to my current appartment where we both saw me sitting on the couch as my current adult self and we had to merch 3 back to 1. Quite the experience! Took me a hot second to get myself back together there 😅
I think I already have been tested or seen the first results of change. A situation last night were I indeed, as usuall, almost flipped my s**t when people act as if they are alone on the planet. But this morning it turned out not to be the same result as the previous times in similar situations. That was a pleasant surprise 😊
It sounds as though you’re making some amazing progress, Evelien. Your inner children must be so delighted! Thank you for sharing this special experience 💜
Thank you for this
My journey of this new moon is boundaries and I was struggling to find good standards. This will make a good starting point
I’m happy to hear that, Mari!
Finding the right role model ix the most challenging aspect of reparenting for me
My reparenting is taking time to evolve and involves finding forgiveness for both inner self and others. To forgive parenting mistakes of the past and with sensitive male complexities in old age to untwist
and forgive present inner archetypes. To trust self sufficiently and trust others to read and listen to my wounds. 🧡
Thank you for sharing, John. This process always takes time, and the more intentionally slow you go, typically the deeper the transformation becomes 💜
If you can’t find anyone in your life, look to history. That always helps ;)
Hello Luna and Sol, actually the email about ‘Intuitive Spiritual Guidance for 2025’ is meant for me.
Because I know I have always got dissociated many times this year, until its now that I have realized that my blindspot is that I tend to keep being ungrounded many times to the point of dissociation. I have figured now that I have to practice being grounded each day. However for now I feel like it can be too straining by trying to make sure I don’t get ungrounded for every single minute. So how to keep being grounded effectively and effortlessly and reassured that I will not get dissociated anymore?
Goat carries a peculiar type of trickster energy, making him a special shadow teacher for 2025. He asks you to remember to stay grounded, even when life becomes rocky and perilous.
In a world where we’re surrounded by distractions and unending sources of energy drainage, it’s crucial to stay grounded.
When we feel ungrounded, we experience symptoms of floating anxiety, fatigue, dizziness, and as if we’re not quite here in our bodies. Sometimes we can become so ungrounded that we become numb and disconnected from ourselves (also known as dissociation).
Goat is the master of scaling bizarre heights and still staying grounded – think of the mountain goat who somehow stays attached to the side of mountains!
He points out the following blindspots that you need to be aware of: engaging in habits that numb and distract you from your feelings, having weak boundaries, imbalanced root/sacral/solar plexus energy, and having a rigid approach to life.
Goat teaches you that in order to engage in the playful dance of existence, you need to have both feet on the ground to begin with.
He encourages you to spend time in nature, connect with your body, eat grounding foods, embrace your five senses, and do that which helps you to honor the health and well-being of your body, heart, and mind. Embrace and work with the earth element this coming year!
Questions to contemplate: How do you stay grounded each day? What sources of energy drainage do you need to lessen or remove from life? What ‘emotional hygiene’ practice do you need to engage in more regularly? When life feels intense, what grounding anchor can help you to come back to the here and now?
“However for now I feel like it can be too straining by trying to make sure I don’t get ungrounded for every single minute. So how to keep being grounded effectively and effortlessly and reassured that I will not get dissociated anymore?”
Hi Lupin. The goal here isn’t perfection, or being perfectly 100% grounded all the time. That’s impossible as you’re human and by nature imperfect. It’s normal and okay to be a little frazzled from time to time. Instead of being fully grounded every second, aim for a more realistic goal like 25% more grounded each day, and then increase from there. Besides, getting caught in your head worrying about how grounded you are or not is inherently ungrounding. So embrace where you are and go from there. I hope that helps. :)
Very weird picture for the beginning of summer. Fall and winter suck as hell.
In the Southern hemisphere where I live, it is winter.