Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about reparenting yourself.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so many of us growing up didn't receive the security, the parenting, the caregiving, the love, and the foundation for feeling seen and safe.

That maybe we wish we would have or that we actually most needed as human beings.

This can be a severe forms of abandonment, but it could also be smaller forms of maybe having parents or caregivers who were misattuned to us, or different needs that weren't met, or just this sense of perhaps having to be a certain version of someone in order to get love, or to be accepted.

And this can play a big role in our mental health and what unfolds from childhood.

If some of these basic needs weren't there for us, we may find ourselves caught in patterns where we're trying to get certain things from other people, or we don't trust people because we didn't get it from the people who we were supposed to trust the most, or we have a complicated relationship to things like intimacy, or love, or expressing boundaries.

Or sharing our needs. And as I said, a lot of this stems from some of those early years in our life.

So what do we do about this if we've had this experience, and perhaps we're not able to repair some of those relationships with our caregivers, or the damage was done so to speak.

And now we're left with what happened in the residual of that in some of these patterns.

If we're not able to get that parenting in the way that we most needed it, what are we left with?

Well, the good news is there are many people who have had this experience, and have come out the other side stronger, and have developed equality of stability and safety within themselves.

And I've worked through maybe some of the patterns that have arisen in relationship to other people and their needs and their boundaries.

And it didn't involve getting in a time machine and going back in time.

It often involves the process of reparenting ourselves, becoming our own parent, becoming our own form of a secure attachment as stable home base, a point of safety.

And so in those early years, we have these needs, and we depend on someone else to help meet those needs or teach us how to meet our own needs.

For hungry, it's met for us. For crying, we're consoled. If we feel scared, we're nurtured.

And in this way, we learn how to take care of ourselves through someone else doing that for us.

Well, if we didn't get that, we can still become that for ourselves.

Now, I don't want to simplify all of childhood healing and trauma healing into just this one episode.

But what we are talking about here is foundational to so much of developmental trauma healing.

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