Do you need reparenting?

Once you become trauma-informed and understand your parents, while well-meaning, were fighting their own battles, you start seeing the need for reparenting everywhere.
Your parents didn’t have to be addicts or abusive.
If any of the following characteristics speak to you, you may want to start looking into becoming your own inner family.

“The solution is to become your own loving parent.”
– Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA)

I will be drawing on ACA literature for this list which has proved incredibly insightful for me.
As Adult Children, ergo people stuck in childhood due to the lack of fully emotionally available parents, we fall into two archetypes.
You may very well relate to bits from the two different lists!
Do you see yourself in any of these two?

Type A: The Wallflower

1. You become isolated and afraig of authority figures.
2. You seek approval and lose your identity in the process.
3. You are frightered by angry people and criticism.
4. You become an addict, marry one, or find another way to fulfill your abandonment needs.
5. You view yourselves as a victim and form your relationships based on it.
6. You feel overly responsible for others and worry more about them than yourself.
7. You feel guilty when you stand up for yourself.
8. You confused love and pity and choose partners you can rescue.
9. You lost the ability to feel for your childhood and are stuck in denial.
10. You judge yourself harshly and have low self-esteem

Type B: The Tyrant

1. You become an authority figure who frightens others out of fear of people and dread of isolation.
2. You become rigidly self-sufficient to avoid the approval or help of others.
3. You belittle others and abandon them before they can leave you, hence isolating yourself.
4. You view yourself as a victimiser and choose your relationships based on it.
5. You are irresponsible and self-centred with an inflated sense of self-worth.
6. You make others feel guilty when they stand up for themselves.
7. We hate it when others play the victim.
8. We abandon anything that feels threatening to our independence.
9. We refuse to admit there has ben family dysfunction or destructive behaviour.
10. We act like we are nothing like our family.

As you can see they are both different sides of the same coin.
Personally, I identify with the first list. Way less now that I’ve been on my healing journey for years, but I can still see remnants of the shy quiet girl who believed the world was out to get here.
If you’ve just identified a need for reparenting, do not despair!
The path to becoming your own parent who approves, supports, and loves you is beautiful.
Patterns that I thought were forever part of me started to soften and make way for my true self.

Let me know if you learned something new from this post, I’m very happy to share what worked for me!