Everyone eventually must contend with the metaphorical challenge of becoming their own parent. It’s a challenge that is worthwhile because it turns you into a more confident and genuine version of yourself. It turns you into the author of your fate, the one who is actively involved in creating it instead of being the passive recipient of it.
For some people, becoming their own parent is a process of mimicking the example that was set by those who came before them. They take the values and beliefs that were instilled into them and carry on with them, using them to inform and guide the way they live. People's values are often the remnants of the care they received from their parental figures. They are links in a familial chain that stretches back to a time before their existence.
But, this linkage rarely goes uninterrupted. It is not easy to transmit values and more often than not, the process of becoming one’s own parent involves unlearning rather than imitating the rules that have been placed on you. At bare minimum it requires an examination of the values that one carries, some of which may have produced painful wounds that one has had to learn to live with.
Healing is more than an emotional term. It is an act of taking responsibility. It demands taking ownership of yourself, which means recognizing that you are the only person that is truly responsible for taking care of your needs. Early in life people look to their parents and caregivers to play this role, but if they are absent or even worse, when they are present but still negligent, resentment can start to set in. Resentment is a hard emotion. It can be inaccessible, and it is difficult to rid oneself of it once you have it.
Becoming your own parent can remedy the urge to beg and plead for help from false sources of support, and stop you from keeping hope alive well beyond what is appropriate or necessary. It is a process of psychological growth and maturation that helps you to become less self-absorbed (self-absorption is always a cover for feelings of insecurity) and become more capable of giving and receiving without ulterior motives.
Understanding the Concept
The idea of becoming your own parent is a metaphor that is rooted in developmental psychology and relates to the work of the attachment theorists like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. From their perspective, parents did more than provide nurturance and care for their children, or engage in idle play with them. Through the quality of their bond, parents were graphing psychological templates onto their children which served as a form of protection for them as they ventured out into the world. It is as if parents are placing their care into their children via some sort of osmosis, which allows children to intuitively call upon this source in moments of turmoil, doubt, and confusion.
There are many examples of this kind of protective bond in fiction. In Harry Potter, the relationship between Harry and his mother Lily is an example of this process of loving transference. The bond they shared by virtue of Lily’s love for Harry served as a form of protection that made Harry impervious to all manner of threats, even when he was not in her presence. The fact that she was gone did not lessen its force because Harry had internalized it and was capable of accessing it at times of need.
Parenting yourself means providing yourself with the boundaries, discipline, love, and compassion that you needed as a child and still need as an adult. All of which are necessary to effectively relate to yourself and others.
People mistakenly assume that boundaries are for other people when they are really for themselves. Boundaries are agreements people make with themselves about what they are willing to tolerate and accept, and when it comes to setting boundaries and standing up for themselves, they need discipline to follow through. They need discipline to do hard things and prioritize their well-being, especially when it would be more convenient not to. And they need compassion because without it people would be too hard on themselves and would never have the strength to take risks and try again when they fail.
Along with strength there is a certain humility that comes with a person realizing that what they wanted from their loved ones at the age of 10, they still want at the age of 30 or 40, or even 60. The beauty of adulthood is that memory allows people to travel back and recognize what unmet needs are still alive in them now, and they can use the resources they now have to give themselves what they always wanted.
This journey back is especially important and arduous for those who have suffered the insults and slights of being raised by the immature, the abusive, and the absentminded. These are the people who are most in need of a new way to relate to themselves, one that is not an internalized image of what was done to them in the past.
Psychological Foundations
People cling to the templates they receive early in life because they are unaware of them and at the same time overly invested in them. They are not, in a general sense, unaware of the fact that people can change, but they act as if this possibility does not exist for them.
Should this assumption be tested, people are loath to admit the error in their thinking, which reveals the depth of their fear more than their stubbornness. It is second nature to protest the lack of love that is available to us while completely ignoring the innumerable sources from which love can be derived and the numerous ways that love can be experienced. It is terrifying to face the reality that love is readily available, through other people, through nature, through art, and through the relationship we have with ourselves.
People stake their entire lives on whether or not they receive love and care from one particular person and place themselves at risk of being shattered if it does not happen. We cannot help but rely on the people around us in our infancy, which may be how we develop our doubts, insecurities, and negative habits, but it is also how we survive. Regardless of how positive or negative a person’s upbringing was, true secure attachment, in the most mature sense, is achieved through expansion and a proliferation of multiple life-giving relationships.
Far too often people isolate and repress themselves instead of reaching for growth and expansion. They force themselves to live in darkness and psychological decay, without warmth or acknowledgement. Parenting yourself is a means of protecting the parts of yourself that are still child-like and in need of help. The parts of yourself that exist in the shadows.
Why Becoming Your Own Parent is Necessary
Adults who are lost children suffer from all the common maladies–they are anxious, they people please and lack boundaries, they are full of self-doubt and lack any positive self-concept. All that is good and potent in them is overshadowed and wrecked by the harmful messages they received in dysfunctional families.
The only way to get in touch with a healthy version of themselves is by learning to provide the security, support, resilience, and trust they need to themselves. No one else can do it for them–not friends or family, not spouses or therapists, and most bitterly, not parents, who may one day be capable of change, but are still unable to change the past.
How to Start Parenting Yourself
The first step in re-parenting yourself is reflecting and identifying the gaps in your experience. No one gets everything they want from childhood (or from any period of life for that matter), but there is a difference between minor gaps in one’s experience that can easily be ignored and fissures that threaten the foundation of one’s life.
Because children are naturally egocentric and assume everything is about them, it is easy to fill those gaps with self-doubt and criticism. Children over-estimate their contributions to the problems they face and underestimate the frailties of the adults in their lives. They take on the tone of a harsh critic and incorporate that voice into themselves, and the inner critic lies in wait, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice and remind people of their defectiveness and the total responsibility they bear for their problems. A person who engages in deep reflection can look at the fissures and the gaps and fill them with care rather than cover them over with self-attacks. They can speak to themselves with a voice that is honest and true, especially about the things that are difficult, but do so from a place of empathy and compassion.
The inner voice is a mixture of the thoughts and opinions of others and in order to change the tenor of this voice one must be mindful of the outside voices they pay attention to and allow into their world.
Learn to say no sometimes. No to unsolicited feedback or advice. No to honesty without tact. No to the harmful projections that people put on you out of their own insecurities and inability to tolerate their emotions. Be intentional about what you seek out and what you allow.
Becoming one’s own parent doesn’t mean staunch individualism and total self-reliance. It means practicing discernment about who you share your life with.