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Reparenting to Heal the Wounded Inner Child
Learning to Be Your Own Parent
Human children are born without any means to defend themselves or face the world. Children are totally dependent upon their parents for love, acceptance, and shelter. Sometimes parents fail to provide the emotional, psychological, and physical shelter required for healthy children. This results in adults who are stuck in trauma-time who remain forever ruled by an inside force, the wounded inner child.
There is a method for adults who were traumatized and not parented in childhood. It is called reparenting. This article will explore reparenting as a solution to the many damaging effects leftover from original parenting gone awry.
The Wounded Inner Child
The inner child lives in each human and is the core of who they are as people. The inner child is molded by the directions we receive in childhood that teach us how to parent ourselves. Painful, traumatic experiences, along with a lack of nurturing by dysfunctional parents, leave deep wounds in the inner child, and this, in turn, contaminates adult behaviors (Kneisl 1991).
These inside parts of ourselves have a significant impact on how we see ourselves and how we behave as adults.
