reparenting yourself is how you take your power back.

how reparenting + sinking into community allowed me to nurture my inner child and embrace womanhood simultaneously.

via cosmos

are you stuck in a perpetual cycle of feeling anger, resentment, and frustration towards your parent or guardians for not being, giving, or doing enough for you when you were younger?

do you find yourself constantly wishing away your youth, adolescence and now late 20s, or early 30s and 40s now that you’ve been to therapy and done all the ‘inner child healing’?

have you had a hard time transitioning from the blissful ignorance of your youth into the abrupt and harsh reality of adulthood?

you may be entitled to compensation.

or- you may just need to begin the process of reparenting yourself.

the process of reparenting yourself is how you take your power back. because at some point- you have to realize that you’re not responsible for what happened to you when you were dependent on your caregivers, but your healing journey is all yours. although we thrive best in community and deep-rooted connection, our homecoming is more about autonomy than anything else.

reparenting is accepting the self-agency to rewrite your rules, give yourself a new foundation, practice discipline (or devotion), and provide yourself with the basics to feel safe, seen, and supported—no longer surviving, but truly living.

what is reparenting? exactly how it sounds. it’s the process of becoming the caregiver, guide, and nurturer you needed when you were younger.

it means learning how to meet your own emotional, physical, and spiritual needs with consistency, compassion, and care. it’s soothing the wounds of neglect, abandonment, or chaos by showing up for yourself—over and over again. it’s not about blaming your past; it’s about building a future where you feel whole.

when i started going to therapy nearly a decade ago at the age of 22, i didn’t quite anticipate how much time time i would spend discussing my childhood or upbringing. i often felt frustrated with my therapist for ‘dwelling on the past’ so much, but as it turns out, we were just getting started and she was doing her due diligence to understand who i was as a child, so that who i am as an adult could finally make sense (not in isolation, but in context).

because healing doesn’t begin in the present—it begins in the past, and to move forward, we sometimes have to look back. not to stay there and stuck, but to reconnect with the parts of ourselves that we had to leave behind in order to grow and evolve.

i had your standard early 90s-2000s Black-girl-growing-up-in-the-suburbs of NJ experience. a diverse group of friends, dozens of extracurricular activities to choose from, 106 & Park with AJ & Free on TV as soon as I got home from school. our bedroom bookshelf had scattered subscriptions of Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines which would later be the prelude to social media and the catalyst for every millennial’s tumultuous relationship with body image, media and the ever-elusive idea of worthiness.