Parenting Our Inner Child

Self-Parenting

Have you felt sometimes that fulfillment is very elusive for you to achieve? Have you felt that you seem to be sabotaging your plans the moment that you feel you are about to reach it? Have you felt criticizing your work or activity rather than appreciating it when someone happens to like it?

Then you are not alone. Many have been through that kind of experience and have been struggling to be free from such misery. It is not because you are unworthy of some achievement or happiness. It is because of the childhood training that we have learned from our parents.

This training is more of identification or compliance. Identification is when we live like the model parent - somewhat a copy-cat. And compliance is when we do as we are told -- even if it is against our interest and benefit.

So of this parental training later becomes our internal parent which serves to criticize our actions if it is not satisfactory or appears to be pleasant to us.

To be free from this parental control -- even if after the parent is long gone, we need to re – parent ourselves as if we are gain small children to correct the wrong practices taught to us since we were kinds.

Here are the 12 steps to re – parent ourselves:

1. Surrendering – as a child we are taught that to cry is cowardice, thus as we grow older we control everything in our life. We control our emotions; moreover we need to control others as well. We haven’t realized that we are not in charge, so things go wrong, we’re dumbfounded, confused as to why things go awry. Because what we’re trying to do is beyond us, the best thing for us to do is acknowledge that “we can’t, that beyond us, there is a Higher Parent who knows everything, who leads us. Acknowledging that we are vulnerable allows love to enter into our life, it means we are opening our heart, opening our feelings mean we are acknowledging the guidance of our Higher Parent and the freedom of our inner child.

2. Overcoming Abandonment– We have to admit that we have grown up in families driven by crisis and self – centeredness; thus we learned to accept that our parents can’t take care of us. But we must bear in mind that they too, have suffered as children; they were forced to parent us in the dark. They only did the best they could from what had been passed on to them by their parents, thus, we have a legacy of malfunctioning families. They love us, but they don’t know how to show this love, so put it in our mind that we’re unlovable. This abandonment laid out the foundation of our future relationships. We become self – reliant, we become God as a defense against feeling needy, we create a world devoid of compassion and fellowship, a world of mistrust and fear, a world in which we believe only in ourselves, as a result, we feel hairline rage, helplessness and utter aloneness. This dependence on self replaces dependence in God. Many of us learned to survive with minimal expectations from life, we learned not to expect anything, or from anyone. Our relationships too become empty wells, we choose people who have the same limitations, disappointment is part of our lives, we continue the tradition of being abandoned by others. Most of us do not know how it is to feel our needs meet, we don’t believe that abundance are our true legacy. In order to overcome this, we need to allow ourselves to feel protected and loved by the good people; we need to allow ourselves to have faith again. The way back to our Higher Parent allows us to be guided, we need to understand that our Higher Parent is always available, we have to understand that God did not abandon us, but we abandoned ourselves.

3. Struggling to Trust – Letting go of self – will is very hard to do especially if we have developed self – reliance for it goes against everything that we have learned. We have been taught to be self – sufficient at all costs, this becomes part of our storehouse of compulsive behavior. We come to believe that we can change the past through our own efforts. But this only stuck the inner child in the pain of our childhood the hard pain of denial. Grief and mourning are parts of recovery, our inner child needs to heal, letting go of hatred and resentment and the pain that comes with it by allowing those tears to wash it all away. The path to recovery is a spiritual path that takes us through our pain to a place of healing and forgiveness. Learning to reach out and ask for help, we can begin to live again,

4. Accepting who We Are – Fear immobilizes us by hiding our dark side, it keeps our ego battles and feeds the need to attack others as a way of protecting ourselves. Accepting who we are and facing our dark side are ways to recovery. Our goal here is to transform these negative traits into positive loving traits that will enable our inner child to release the God force within us.

5. Intimacy: Our connection to the World – this is a way of sharing ourselves with the people we trust, as a child we seek love and give love, this develops intimacy to others. But as we grow older we don’t have healthy role models on developing honest and open relationships, many of us believe that showing love is a sign of weakness; thus we become ashamed of our need for love and intimacy. Shame inhibits life, therefore making intimacy possible. The way out of shame is breaking the silence about ourselves; we need to allow our Higher Parent to share ourselves, our feelings and our self – parenting issues. We need to know that it is safe to share ourselves to others. Our hearts are our best teachers, letting our hearts lead the way.

6. Overcoming Perfectionism, - We have birthmarks that make us unique; we must understand that by accepting this is a way of accepting our imperfections. The price paid for striving perfection is death of the spirit, when we look at it this way becomes very expensive and even more expensive way to feel safe. The best way for us to do is giving up the defense of perfectionism; we just have to acknowledge that we have great power over how we choose to live our life by considering how we want things to be.

7. Embracing Our Oneness – There is one essential truth that we often forget – we are all equal. Putting ourselves down or believing that we our superior than others is violating this basic truth. Accepting that God knows what’s best for us is allowing that we are valuable as other people. In achieving this we need to stop comparing ourselves to others. Embracing our true value brings true joy in our life.

8. Learning Self – Forgiveness: Making Amends to Our Inner Child– Changing our life through learning to forgive ourselves and others. There is no use blaming ourselves for the things happened, we need to acknowledge that we have hurt others. It is no use to re – traumatize ourselves by constantly remembering those acts and words.

9. Transforming The Promises – To make amends we must leave behind many of our old ways and embrace our new ways, by healthy self – parenting we can build new bridges, we can begin self – definition, self – ownership of who we are supposed to be.

10. Self – Acceptance: How We Value Ourselves – Oftentimes we develop this black and white thinking, we rush to understand things; we attempt to filter events as to “good luck” or “bad luck”, we do this for us to be ready for the next blow. We need to understand that all events in our life are random; we need to understand that life is within our control. We need to know that we have the power of Self – acceptance; we need to accept that committing mistakes is not the end of the world. Accepting mistakes for what they are frees us, by doing this we become healthy role models for our children and we can see that our parents too were humans and have limitations. Mistakes now can be seen as an opportunity to grow for they represent lessons in life.

11. Living in the Light– We need to approach our Spirituality as a child, like what the Scripture is telling us. we approach God with no expectations. Our Higher Parent is the seat of our intuitive knowledge in which the deeper place within us than our reason. Meditation is the best way to access our Higher parent; it Is the way of stilling the mind so a higher level of consciousness emerge and a launching pad for transcending our ego and connecting with God.

12. Reaching Out– by giving we can now be receiving, by sharing we can now own what we have.