The phrase “getting in touch with your inner child” may seem like fun and games (literally). You might assume that it’s all finger painting and playing adult games of tag, but it’s not quite that simple. Really, inner child work goes hand-in-hand with a process called reparenting, which is all about healing emotional wounds from childhood and getting the chance to parent yourself now in the way you needed as a kid.

The fact is, your childhood greatly shapes who you become as an adult, and has a significant impact on your mental health. Research¹ shows strong evidence of an association between childhood trauma (including things like bullying, emotional abuse, or maltreatment) and mental illness later in life. Even if you had a great upbringing, your parental figures may have passed on some of their own unresolved trauma or unhealthy behavior patterns (think: a hot temper or always saying “I’m fine!” even when you aren’t).

“Reparenting is the process of rewiring our earliest beliefs and feelings, and healing early attachment and developmental injuries,” —Noah Rothschild, MA, LMFT

These lingering wounds from childhood can happen even if you had amazing parents. Remember, children are completely dependent on others—namely, their parent(s)—for all of their physical, mental, and emotional needs. Meeting all of those needs is extremely difficult, particularly in American society, where parents have all the responsibility without much meaningful support. Come adulthood, dysfunctional patterns you may have picked up in your earlier years can prevent you from thriving in everything from relationships to your career. And in those cases, you may benefit from reparenting yourself.

What is reparenting?

The American Psychological Association defines reparenting as “a therapeutic technique in which individuals are urged to provide for themselves the kind of parenting attitudes or actions that their own parents did not provide.”

Eric Berne, MD, a Canadian psychoanalyst, is often credited with creating the concept of reparenting. It was part of a psychological theory he developed in the 1950s called transactional analysis², which focuses on how social relationships impact a person’s behavior and beliefs.

Your inner child—a concept credited to psychotherapist Carl Jung³ that today means an inner connection to your childhood self—is the target of any reparenting work. “Reparenting is the process of rewiring our earliest beliefs and feelings, and healing early attachment and developmental injuries,” says Noah Rothschild, MA, LMFT, a psychotherapist specializing in inner child healing.

All children need something called limbic attunement⁴—aka a loving, emotional connection with a parent or caregiver, Rothschild says. “This is akin to a sense of unconditional love and receiving the right attachment and bonding with a primary caretaker.”

Reparenting can allow people to take the “empowering” step to raise themselves with the unconditional love that they may not have received in childhood.

When good attunement exists, a child feels that their parent can understand and share their feelings. When this attunement is interrupted or unavailable because a parent is MIA, neglectful, abusive, or just disconnected, a person may unwittingly spend their life trying to get this feeling of unconditional support and understanding from others, Rothschild says. (The concept is closely related to attachment theory, which suggests that you develop a secure or insecure attachment style based on your early-childhood parental relationship.)

The critical window for receiving this messaging of attunement is during the first few years of your life. “When we are a young child, our developmental stage and mental development allows us to take in the messages and love from our primary caretakers,” Rothschild explains. On the flip side, “this is the same developmental stage that can cause us to blame ourselves for events and circumstances that have nothing to do with us,” he says. (Say, your parents’ divorce or financial troubles.)

Self-reparenting allows you to override any of those negative messages with more positive ones now that we aren’t dependent on others to get them. “Research on cognitive therapy and neuroplasticity [your brain’s ability to rewire itself⁵ based on new experiences] shows this is truly possible,” Rothschild adds. Reparenting, he says, allows people to take the “empowering” step to raise themselves with the unconditional love that they may not have received in childhood.

What does it mean to reparent myself?

At its core, reparenting is about giving yourself what you didn’t get as a kid, and allowing your inner child to feel seen, heard, and valued for their authentic self. In this process, you’re tapping into your wise inner parent to care for your wounded inner child. (If you couldn’t tell already, it involves a lot of deep, internal work.)

The process starts with witnessing and affirming your feelings (rather than judging or dismissing them) and allowing yourself to explore new ideas and opportunities, says Tirrell De Gannes, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist at the Thriving Center of Psychology. You’ll need to work on silencing your inner critic, practicing self-compassion, and trusting yourself. “Over time, it becomes taking on new challenges and interacting with the world in a different way — hopefully for the better,” Dr. De Gannes says.

What are the four pillars of reparenting?

Nicole LePera, PhD, a trained clinical psychologist, breaks down the four pillars of reparenting in her bestselling book How to Do the Work: emotional regulation, loving discipline, self care, and rediscovering our childhood sense of wonder. In her book, Dr. LePera describes these pillars as practices that help ground the work you do when reparenting. (However, she’s careful to note that the process is different for everyone and doesn’t have distinct linear steps.)

1. Emotional regulation

Emotional regulation is the ability to manage or moderate your emotional state. (This isn’t the ability to not feel any negative emotions at all, but rather your ability to process those emotions in a healthy way.) Many people weren’t taught as children how to manage their emotions properly, so that’s an important skill to develop during reparenting work. In her book, Dr. LePera recommends practices such as breathwork, meditation, journaling, and yoga, which can help you learn to regulate your body’s stress response, non-judgmentally witness changes in your body’s sensations, and notice patterns in your internal narratives.

2. Loving discipline

Not quite the same as “tough love,” loving discipline is all about creating boundaries for yourself—and then maintaining them. Many young children inherently understand and respect their own boundaries—they usually don’t hesitate to say “no” or that they don’t like something. However, many learn over time that they need to override those instincts in the name of “love” or in order to be “good” or “polite.” (For example, giving a hug to Grandma even when you don’t want to, or being forced to clean your plate despite feeling full or not liking the food.) Dr. LePera says in her book that this can create adults who ignore their own needs, limits, and intuition—which in turn can breed anger and resentment in relationships.

Practicing loving discipline means making and keeping promises with yourself, whether you’re creating daily routines and habits that nourish you, or learning to say “no” to requests that you can’t take on (or don’t want to). This step is key in reparenting because it helps develop resilience and confidence, and reinforces the idea that you’re worth showing up for. Dr. LePera says the key word is loving; creating boundaries or rules that are unforgiving or rigid will only guarantee failure and likely result in destructive patterns, she says.

3. Self care

We’re not talking about wine, bubble baths, and skin-care routines (although we do love those too). The self care that Dr. LePera discusses in her book is about taking care of your needs on a deeper level—moving your body, meditating, spending time in nature, and spending time with people you love. Practicing self care helps you become more self-aware, reinforce your self worth, and reconnect with your body’s needs and wants — especially those that you learned to ignore or deny in childhood. If you were always taught to push through illness or injury, for example, an act of self-care as an adult will be to actually take that sick day when you’re not feeling well.

4. Rediscover a childlike sense of wonder

This pillar is the ultimate goal of the work, according to Dr. LePera. It’s a state of being that involves creativity, joy, spontaneity, and playfulness. Many people were raised in homes where this sense wasn’t nurtured, supported, or even tolerated. As a result, as adults, we don’t know how to be creative, seek joy, and do things just for pure enjoyment—not to perfect it, turn it into a source of income, or any other external reason.

What are the benefits of self-reparenting?

“Anyone can benefit from reparenting, but especially people who have had absentee parents or parents that appeared to teach life lessons with malicious intent,” Dr. De Gannes says. Reparenting is often viewed as a way of undoing or replacing bad or insufficient parenting, he continues.

Reparenting can be used to help people overcome difficult childhood experiences or traumas that resulted in inner child wounds. It can also help people break and unlearn unhealthy patterns in communication, behavior, or relationships that they may have picked up in childhood. If you were forced to grow up too fast, for example (sometimes called parentification, a type of mother wound), you might be very self-sacrificing. Self-reparenting can help you learn to honor your needs.

Whatever was done to us or however we were wounded, we tend to repeat it with ourselves and with others, Rothschild says. “If we continue to allow this to play out, it [could] affect all important areas of our adult life: our health, our relationships, our career, and our finances. The child inside of us will find the same people and circumstances repeatedly because that’s all they know,” he says. Reparenting can help you finally show up for that inner child and create a powerful new story.

Reparenting can also help reduce stress and anxiety and help you develop a sense of accomplishment that perhaps you weren’t allowed to develop at a younger age, Dr. De Gannes says. “Though reparenting yourself can be dubious and difficult, it can also be quite rewarding.”

All that said, reparenting (including self-reparenting) work is based on theory rather than hard scientific evidence. Some of the treatments used to help people reparent, however, have more demonstrated effects. For example, Rothschild uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in his inner child/reparenting work with clients. CBT is widely considered⁶ the “gold standard” of psychotherapy, with proven effectiveness for depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug use problems, marital issues, eating disorders, and severe mental illness.

How do I start reparenting myself?

The actual process of reparenting will look different depending on your needs and what you use to guide you—whether that’s a book like Dr. LePera’s, or personalized guidance from a licensed therapist. The latter is sometimes called reparenting therapy, where you’ll use the therapeutic relationship to better learn life skills and be the parent to yourself that you wish you’d had growing up, Dr. De Gannes says.

Rothschild likens the stages of inner-child healing and reparenting to the stages of grief. “We move from denial and bargaining to feeling sadness and anger to acceptance and empowerment,” he says. Here’s a rough outline of what’s typically involved with reparenting yourself.

1. Acknowledge your inner child

Like with many things, awareness is the first step. Reparenting yourself starts with consciously welcoming your inner child into your life, Rothschild says. “One way to do this is to get a stuffed animal or doll to physically represent our child self, so on a tactile level we feel the bond of committing to reparent ourselves,” he says. Other examples of connecting with that inner child include writing letters or journal entries to your inner child (and letting your child self write back), or looking at pictures of yourself at the different ages where wounding occurred.

2. Face the hurt

At this point, “we make a list or timeline of the significant injuries, wounds, events, and traumas that shaped our inner child and created core beliefs in our body and mind,” Rothschild says. This step may bring on sadness and anger (what Rothschild calls the “heavy lifting”), but it’s important not to blow past those stages of grief.

We have to be willing to let go of the denial and beliefs that have kept us stuck in the past, he says. Without proper support—namely, the help of a therapist or mental health pro—many people want to give up at this stage. “Others want to [jump to] later stages of making a play date with their child self in an attempt not to feel the pain. However, if we skip through feeling the wounding, we’ll never uncover our greatest gifts that were buried a long time ago, because no one was there to support or witness them,” he explains.

3. Rewire the connections

“We then go back and, with cognitive tools and somatic practices, begin rewiring through the stages of inner child healing,” Rothschild says. Essentially, this means noticing unhealthy or dysfunctional thought and behavior patterns, and trying to replace them with something new. In his practice, Rothschild uses a somatic therapy called Integrative Body Psychotherapy, which works with the relationship between the mind, body, and psychological past. Some somatic practices include breathwork, somatic experiencing, and Gestalt therapy, a type of psychotherapy that focuses on the present moment rather than the past.

If you’re doing this work on your own, this is where some of Dr. LePera’s four pillars of reparenting can come in, including consistent self care, loving discipline, and learning to identify and regulate your emotions. You’ll need to notice how past hurts manifest in your adult life and pinpoint the unhealthy coping mechanisms you rely on. For example, if you dealt with a parent who exhibited volatile or unpredictable emotions when you were a child, you may find yourself hyper aware of the emotions of friends, bosses, or romantic partners as an adult (called emotionally monitoring). Recognizing that may require you to then learn how to properly recognize and state your needs, and create and respect boundaries for yourself.

4. Find joy and empowerment

This is where you get to reconnect with the positive parts of your inner child. “As we move out of the heavy lifting and into acceptance, our child self can feel safe knowing that we’re committed to fully supporting them in a way that nobody did back then,” Rothschild says. “This is where amazing breakthroughs happen.” You can schedule “play dates” with your inner child: try new things, get messy, dance and sing, and be spontaneous. The only requirement is that the main purpose needs to be enjoyment, and nothing else.

When you’ve finally reached the empowerment stage, it’s “where our adult self and child self work together to bring out the fullest expression of who we are in all important areas of our adult life,” Rothschild says.

When to seek professional help

It may be called self-reparenting, but healing your inner child is not something that’s easily done on your own—especially if you’re currently struggling with your mental health or have significant trauma in your past. Though you can make strides with self-awareness and education, nothing will come close to working with a mental health professional.

“I believe anyone who really wants to heal their inner child and successfully reparent should have someone that they work with to guide them,” Rothschild says. “There are pitfalls along the way if we don’t have support, whether it be a therapist, coach, or inner child mentor.”

How do you know when a therapist is warranted? “When you feel overwhelmed or don’t know how to act in various aspects of life,” Dr. De Gannes says, or “if you notice a long history of confrontation, failed connections, and a disdain for the world around you, professional help can be life-changing.”