Reparenting The Mother Wound

The degree to which you were able to form a secure attachment with your mother (or other primary caregiver) will dictate how much or how little you are able to let others in as an adult.

The problem is, this was never fully under your control. Because forming a secure attachment takes two.

And if your mother didn’t have the emotional maturity or wasn’t - as a result of unprocessed trauma - able to regulate her own system enough to have the capacity to hold space for, mirror and validate your feelings, you may have been prevented from creating the secure attachment that you needed.

This means that you may have learnt to rely on yourself or upon addictive and harmful coping mechanisms in order to calm yourself down (such as alcohol, medication, cutting, sex, exercise, eating disorders etc).

And you may find it hard to connect with or be vulnerable with others (including your partner and children) because your lived experience was that this led - in the past - to you being let down or to your needs being dismissed (in other words, emotional or physical pain).

The good news is, that it is never too late to learn how to regulate your own system.

Which is exactly what reparenting is for.

And by nurturing a bond between the part of you that still craves to feel emotionally safe and soothed, and an imaginary parent who loves you unconditionally as well as consistently, you are learning how to let go enough to allow yourself to be co-regulated by the part of you that knows how to love (however badly this may have been role modelled to you as a child).

This will transform the foundation for the expectations of others that you have in relationships.

Because slowly, your inner child will begin to feel safe enough to share her needs with others and to show her authentic self, without being blocked by her fear of being betrayed or hurt.

So that you can begin to replace wound-driven self-sufficiency with robust boundaries, and harmful coping mechanisms with healthy connections.

As a child, your relationship with your mother may have set the tone for your future relationships.

But as an adult, you can reframe these limiting beliefs by giving yourself what you needed from within.

You are then able to recalibrate the dynamic by which you wish to open up to and connect with others, reframe your capacity to give and receive love within them and replace the love language that you inherited - damaged through generations of past trauma - with your very own.