138. Re-parenting Yourself
As a kid, you deserved unconditional love, unconditional positive regard, kindness, connection, softness and so much more.
You deserved to be cherished.
You deserved to be delighted in.
You deserved to feel special.
You deserved a sense of belonging.
You deserved to be lovingly educated and cared for.
You deserved gentle teaching and correction when you made mistakes.
And you likely didn’t get all of these things.
Maybe you didn’t get any of them.
What might be different in your life now if you’d been parented this way?
What might you be courageous enough to go after?
What might you be more kind to yourself about?
You can’t go back and change the parenting you received.
But you can re-parent yourself now.
Should it be your job to re-parent yourself? I’m of two minds on this.
On the one hand, no. You were a child. You deserved a certain kind of care. It was not your job to give that to yourself as a kid. (And how would you have even known to give it yourself if no one was modeling that for you?)
On the other hand, you’re an adult now. And you CAN give yourself this care. So why hold it back from yourself? Why deprive yourself of something useful just because another adult didn’t offer it to you when you were younger?
It can be very helpful (and dare I say, healing) to give yourself the things you desire and know would help you, even if you think someone else should have been the one to do it.
So whether you think it should be your job or not, it’s an option that’s open to you.
It’s something you can do that will help you feel more worthy, safer, happier, and more loved.
And all it costs you is learning some new habits. Learning to think differently. Learning to treat yourself differently. Learning to replace the parenting you received with the parenting you wish you received, which is to say, learning to speak to yourself differently inside your own head, because that is where your parenting still lives inside you.
And that is what I will teach you how to do on this week’s podcast. You’ll be amazed what becomes possible for you when you learn to re-parent yourself.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What the work of re-parenting ourselves is all about.
Why re-parenting yourself isn’t about blaming your parents.
How to avoid re-traumatizing yourself as you re-parent yourself.
My framework for starting the work of re-parenting yourself.
How re-parenting yourself applies to your career.
How the patriarchy puts pressure on mothers especially to be superhuman.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb, PhD
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about Re-parenting Yourself.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a lovely day. I’m having a lovely day. And I did something really fun this week and I want to tell you about it. Earlier this week, I hosted a free, small group coaching call. A lot of times I do these just like for people who are current or previous clients, but this one was open to the general public. And I wrote about it in my email newsletter, and I posted about it on Instagram.
And basically, it was a call about re-mothering yourself. And I chose to do it this month, because at the time I’m recording this, it’s May and so that’s Mother’s Day month. I think by the time this comes out, it’s probably going to be June. But that’s what I did this week. And it was a really important offering that I wanted to give the world because reparenting has been something that’s been really meaningful for me in my own life. And so I wanted to share that as a coaching tool with my broader audience.
And I also know a lot of people, personally and as clients, who have a really hard time with their relationship with their mom. And for some of us it’s because our mom has passed on, or our mom is mentally ill or absent in another way. And for some people, their mom is very much present in their lives, but the relationship is just not what they want it to be.
I think it’s an incredibly loaded relationship, specifically with our mothers. And this podcast is going to be about reparenting yourself and I’m using the gender neutral parent. But since this free call was about re-mothering, I’m going to talk about that a little bit.
And one of the things I said in this free coaching call was that socially, we put so much pressure on Mothers specifically. We put a lot of pressure on parents, but really, I think a lot of it comes down to mothers. And I think that’s because we live in a patriarchy, right? And patriarchy basically puts all of this pressure on mothers to be like superhumans, right? To be able to care for their children in a way that goes beyond them just being a flawed human being.
And I think it’s a really hard thing for people to grapple with that moms are just people who had babies, right? And sometimes moms are people who adopted babies, right, obviously. But the role of being a mother, just because you’re in that role doesn’t mean you aren’t a human being or that you have some kind of superhuman capacity.
And all of our mothers are flawed. And if you are a mother, yourself, obviously, you’re also flawed. That’s one of the basic teachings of the podcast is that we’re imperfect, and we can still do really magical things. But I think when we’re talking about reparenting ourselves, we’re also talking about the disappointment we feel in how we were parented.
And I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about how you can reparent yourself, re-mother yourself and give yourself the things that you didn’t get from your own mother, no matter what reason it is that you didn’t get them. But again, I think it would be unfair, honestly, to have this conversation without also taking a moment to bring into consideration the expectations people tend to place on mothers only.
I’ve coached a lot of people who realize in our coaching that they have different expectations for their father, or had different expectations for their father, or they’re less disappointed in their father than they are in their mother. And I think part of that is because of culturally what we are taught that mothers should be able to be.
And it kind of fucking sucks, honestly. I think it really sets everybody up to have an unfortunate experience because that’s so much pressure to have on you if you’re the mother and it’s also so much pressure if you are the child looking at your own mother going like, why can’t you love me the way culture says you’re supposed to be able to? Either what’s wrong with you or what’s wrong with me?
Versus deciding to have kind of a more embracing of imperfection sort of mindset of like, yeah, of course, of course, we’re all going to be disappointed by our mothers. Of course, we’re all going to be disappointed by our childhoods. And by the way we’re parented and by all kinds of things in life because life is fucking hard, even if it’s also fucking magical.
And then we, on this podcast, embrace that multiple things that seem at odds can be true. So then the other thing I also want us to embrace is that you deserved everything. You deserved unconditional love. And when I say you deserve everything, I don’t mean you deserve everything you got. I mean you deserve everything you wanted. You deserve to be loved unconditionally. You deserve to be held. You deserve to be seen in positive regard.
And also pretty much no one got that. So I think that’s just an interesting paradox to hold in our minds, like all humans deserve love and belonging. All humans deserve positive regard. And because we are imperfect people raised by imperfect people, even if we had great parents we probably didn’t get that.
And I think the ability to see that all these things are true versus like, so something’s wrong with my mom or something’s wrong with me. It’s hard, right? It kind of hurts the brain a little, but I think it opens up so much space and so much space for an exploration of how do I be there for myself? How do I re-mother myself? Also imperfectly because guess what? I’m not a perfect person, either.
So even in the act of reparenting, it’s not going to be perfect. And it’s not going to live up to that unconditional positive regard that I deserve, because I’m a human being, right? So that’s like a little bit the framing of what I want us to be thinking about and talking about today.
Another thing that I was mentioning on the free call is that I read a book recently about childhood emotional neglect. And I think I talked about it on the podcast, I don’t actually remember what element I talked about. But when I was reading that book, one of the things that really struck me was I don’t think I know anyone who was parented in the way that the author was talking about as being like the meaningful engaged parenting that she was saying is the good or correct thing to have.
And there were all these different kinds of parenting that she was calling neglectful. And a lot of us probably experienced a lot of them. And it’s not because our parents were bad people, we know a lot of stuff now that they didn’t know in their childhoods, in our childhoods when they were parenting us. And things like therapy and coaching are much more common now.
So I want to be clear that this podcast isn’t about blaming our parents, and part of what it’s about also is understanding how many people are in the same boat with us, right? Like we had that podcast recently, It’s Not You, It’s We, and I think this is very much and it’s not you, it’s we. And it’s not just we people in the same generation, it’s also our parents, right? They probably were also not parented in a way that felt super yummy and delicious and satisfying to them, either. So this is a very common experience.
I think another piece of this is grieving, right? Grieving what you didn’t get. Because even though we know intellectually that we live in this imperfect world with imperfect people, we have hopes and dreams and desires. And we want to be loved unconditionally and held with unconditional positive regard, right? And we didn’t get that, and you may need some time to grieve that. And that’s kind of an important step.
It’s not kind of an important step, it’s a super important step. And it may be really difficult for you to move into reparenting yourself if you don’t give yourself space and permission first to grieve that you didn’t get what you wanted from the person you wanted it from, who is probably your mom, but could have also been your dad or another adult caregiver. Because not everyone grows up with a mom and a dad, right? People grow up with all kinds of adult caregivers, and older sibling caregivers as well.
I think it’s also important that we take a moment to talk about the topic of trauma. When we’re thinking about the things that happened in our childhoods, often some of the stuff we’re thinking about are traumatic events. And if you are thinking about that, I would advise you to at least consider talking to someone who is trauma informed.
And specifically, I mean, like a trauma informed therapist. There are coaches who are trauma informed, but I think therapy has a really great toolkit for this. And when I want to talk about trauma, I turn to therapists. And I just want to point that out because sometimes revisiting things that you’ve been through, even when they’re your own history, can be retraumatizing. And we want to be really careful that we’re not retraumatizing you as we’re trying to help you gain a new toolkit and move forward.
And that kind of leads directly into my next point, which is when I talk about reparenting yourself, I’m actually not talking about spending a lot of time thinking back to how you were parented and thinking about what you would have done differently. I think the concept of reparenting can seem like it’s going to be about how you were parented in your childhood, or it’s going to seem to be about reimagining scenarios and imagining how you would parent yourself differently.
But that’s actually not what we’re doing here or that’s not like what I want to do with my version of this teaching. It may be what other people want to do, I’m not sure. But that’s not what we’re doing here. What I actually want to teach and talk about here is the idea of reparenting as how you speak to yourself inside your own mind, the sort of regard you hold yourself with, like this sort of mindset and perspective you hold about yourself generally, how you handle feelings, and the actions you do or do not take, and then how you talk to yourself about both of those things as well.
So thing one is like, how do you talk to yourself? A lot of us, the way we speak to ourselves, our internal dialogue, comes directly from parents and other authority figures from our childhood. So one of the number one ways I’m talking about reparenting yourself is just shifting how you talk to yourself inside your own head.
And so a lot of us were not parented with that unconditional love and that unconditional positive regard and it shows in the way we talk to ourselves inside our head. So one of the easiest ways to reparent yourself is to think about, how do you talk to yourself inside your head? And is that how you would ideally want a parent to talk to you?
Now, the voice you have inside your head, you might not associate with your parents now. And that’s okay, and you don’t have to. So if the parent frame isn’t working for you, it could just be like, you can use a different frame.
But I think the parent frame can be really powerful because a lot of us when we have this voice inside our heads as an adult, we’re just like, “Oh, that’s just me and I just talk to myself like that,” without any regards as to why do you talk to yourself like that? And how does it feel when you talk to yourself like that?
And so thinking of it through the framework of, how would I want a loving parent – And what I actually call my internal parent is a wise, gentle parent. Wise, gentle parent energy. So I’m like, how would a wise, gentle parent speak to me? And sometimes it’s about like, what am I craving? Like, what would I be craving to hear from my wise, gentle parent?
But sometimes it’s also just imagination. Like, if I can imagine a wise, gentle parent energy, how would she, and for me it’s a she but it can be whatever it is for you. How would she talk to me about this scenario? And one of my basic frameworks for this is, tell me all about it, right?
So, so often in life we’re struggling and then we’re trying to fix it or trying to figure out what to do or yelling at ourselves about how we got into this situation. Versus just, again, giving ourselves unconditional positive regard and unconditional attention, right?
I think so many of us, what we actually wanted from our parents was their attention. We wanted them to listen to us, and to notice us and to see us without lecturing us and without criticizing us and without telling us what to do, right? And so that’s what my wise, gentle parent does. She says, tell me all about it. And she actually wants to hear all about it.
And I have a whole internal vision for my wise, gentle parent. Like she wears those thick, wooly socks with Birkenstocks and kind of loose clothes. And she probably has a shawl, and she has a lot of gray hair that’s sort of piled on top of her head. And in the place where she lives in my imagination, she lives in kind of this cozy cabin in the woods and there’s always a pot of soup bubbling, right?
It’s very much a vibe. It’s not a crock pot, it’s like a pot of soup, like from a fantasy book, right? It’s like over a stove. In my head there’s like a pot over an actual fire, right? And she’s always making scones or making biscuits, or making bread or making cookies. It’s very much a cozy hearth kind of vibe there. And that’s the energy with which I imagine this person when I imagine how I want to talk to myself differently or how I want to be reparented.
And this also goes into the feelings, right? With the feelings it’s like she welcomes all of my feelings, and she wants to know everything about all of my feelings. So for a lot of us, we were only allowed to have positive feelings, or we weren’t allowed to have any feelings, right? So if we were sad, our parents were like, get over it, or stop crying, or like blah, blah, blah, crocodile tears, or like blah, blah, blah, I’ll give you something to cry about, that kind of thing, right?
They didn’t have the time and attention for our sadness. And for fear, same thing. We were often told like, oh, get over it, or you’re such a child or whatever. And then also anger, right? A lot of us, our parents were not like, “Oh, tell me all about your anger.” They didn’t want our anger, right, because it was like threatening the status quo.
So whatever feeling I’m feeling, my wise, gentle parent is like, “Tell me all about it. Tell me everything that’s going on with that.” And what that really does for me, is it allows me to create unconditional positive regard for myself within myself, inside myself. And what that helps me do is come to know myself and it helps me unpack whatever is going on for me.
This is actually something that coaching does, too. So a lot of people when they come to coaching, what they’re getting from a coach, from someone like me, is someone to say, tell me all about it. And I’m just here to like, listen, and hold them in positive regard and maybe ask some difficult questions.
My internal parent, she doesn’t ask difficult questions. So it’s just the first part. She’s just like, tell me all about it. And she just listens. And a lot of times I solve my own problems just by witnessing myself in that energy and in that headspace. And it gives those feelings a place to exist and then I’m able to move through them. Whereas a lot of us repress our feelings, we push them down.
We’re like, I don’t have time to feel that right now. It’s not appropriate for me to feel that way. Nice people don’t feel that way. And then we push it down, push it down, push it down. Guess what? Later it’s going to explode, and we’re going to have a big fight or say something that we’re going to regret, yell at somebody, all that kind of stuff. So that’s what a wise, gentle parent does for me around feelings.
And honestly, for some people, like for me a lot of it’s about negative feelings. But for some people it’s also for positive feelings because if they’re too happy, or too joyful or too positive, that can be something that has been shut down for them before or that they don’t feel comfortable sharing. So maybe your internal wise, gentle parent is also there to celebrate with you and let you brag to them, and give you a safe space for that inside your own head.
Okay, and then actions, I think when we have that wise, gentle parent energy to give us that internal positive regard and to walk through our feelings with, it also opens up availability to all kinds of actions, right? Actions that maybe we wouldn’t normally be taking if we were having an internal parent who’s criticizing and judging and shaming.
So for some of us, that means actions like setting boundaries. But sometimes it means actions like taking a risk because you know you have this unconditional positive regard and this loving internal force who’s got you and who’s going to hold you and be with you, even if you fall on your face or fail or something.
Okay, so that’s basically what I’m talking about when I’m talking about reparenting yourself. But what does this actually mean? And what does this actually look like? And this podcast, while we talk about everything on the podcast, technically this is a podcast about work. So how the fuck does this apply to work? Let me tell you why it really, really applies to work. Because work is an area where we’re trying to do well, and we’re trying to perform, and we care what people think about us.
And a lot of times, actually, people come in and overlay some of their parent vibes onto their boss or supervisor or manager because they’re an authority figure. And so having wise, gentle parent or internal parent energy in this is going to be so helpful because let’s say you have a situation at work where you have a conflict with your manager.
And you feel super uncomfortable, super threatened and in danger because they’re an authority figure, and they’re tied to you having your job, you getting good reviews, all that stuff. If you have your wise, gentle parent internal energy, then you can kind of soothe yourself and witness yourself and be with yourself as you process through the feelings. And then also help yourself be courageous and aligned in how you show up and handle that conflict and how you move forward.
So it’s interesting because humans are social mammals, right? And there’s a lot of stuff going around like the TikTok and the Instagram right now about how we don’t heal in a vacuum and relational things get healed in relationships. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that, like I’ve healed a lot of my relational stuff in my relationship with Alex, for instance, my significant other.
And also, you have a relationship with yourself inside your head. And a lot of us, the relationship we have with ourselves inside our head is not a great relationship, right? That person is super mean to us. So when you can build a new parent, a new loving, wise, gentle parent inside your own head, you also heal something relational internally that I think can allow you to show up to your external relationships in a more grounded, intentional way.
And you have someone who’s always got you. And I think that’s often what we actually wanted from our parents. We wanted someone who’s got us. We wanted someone who believed we were okay and that it was going to be okay. And I realize that can feel like a really difficult thing to give yourself at first, and I think for a lot of us that’s because we don’t trust ourselves, right?
So I think this internal parent is also about a way of building trust and security with yourself. Not so that you can be a mountain and go live in the woods alone by yourself, again, we’re social mammals. I mean, listen, if you want to live in the woods by yourself, do it.
But it’s not that you become so hyper individualistic, you don’t depend on other people. It’s so that you become solid enough in yourself that you can actually interact with other people without people pleasing them or getting taken over by trying to get their validation, or being performative and pretending with them.
It allows you, I think, to actually show up and have real relationships with other people when you are able to have this internal relationship with yourself first. And I think that’s why people who have amazing parenting relationships are often considered to have secure attachment.
I’m not an attachment expert, but my general idea about this is it feels solid to them that they are loved and okay and that someone loves them. And that someone for them is outside of their heads, it’s their parents. A lot of us don’t have that.
And I don’t know about y’all, but for me personally, I refuse to believe that I’m fucked just because I don’t have the thing, right? So I don’t have that kind of relationship with a parent. I don’t have that, and it doesn’t necessarily, again, mean my parents did something wrong. It’s just I don’t have that. There was a lot of stuff going on in my childhood and I just never felt like I had that.
So I don’t want that to mean I have to go through life without it. So instead, I’m going to build it. I’m going to make it for myself. And it’s not a perfect system, but it is really glorious. And it’s also just a very specific directed way of rewiring your brain and rewiring how you talk to yourself.
You can rewire your brain and choose new internal thought patterns without ever thinking about it as reparenting yourself. But for me in particular, thinking about it as reparenting myself has been incredibly valuable.
I don’t want to have children and one of the things I say sometimes to people when they ask about that is like, I’m already parenting someone and it’s me. And it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of energy, and it takes a lot of effort to shift how I show up with myself and to parent myself the way I would like to be parented. And that’s what I’m going to focus my parenting energy on.
And, like I said before, even if we had amazing parents, our parents are all people, they’re all imperfect people. And so there probably are some ways in which you didn’t get parented the way you wanted to be. And there probably are some ways in which you’d like to be reparented, you’d like to reparent yourself and give yourself some of the things you’re longing for, and yearning for and craving.
And this is one way you can do that for yourself. And what I also love about it, is this is a way you can give yourself something you want without expecting anyone else to change. The world is wild, and life is long and sometimes people do change. Sometimes our parents do change. Sometimes other people in our lives go to coaching or go to therapy, or read a book that really impacts them and the way they show up for us and in our lives is different. And sometimes they don’t, right?
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t personally want to wait for everyone else in my life to change in order for me to get to have a different experience. Also, we’re adults now, right? So the time when our parents were parenting us is over. We may still have relationships with our parents, but they’re not parenting us anymore and we can’t go back and change it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the impacts of it and the way we relate to ourselves now, again, because a lot of how we learned to relate to ourselves is from how we were parented as a child. But you’re not stuck with those ways and if they’re not working for you, you have this option.
You can reparent yourself in subtle, slight ways and just make little edits and tweaks. Or you can reparent yourself wildly and basically build a new internal relationship. A new relationship with your internal parent that looks nothing like the one that you inherited from your actual parent. And when you do this, it’s going to have really big impacts, right?
For me, it’s like reparenting myself has allowed me to love myself much more deeply, much more thoroughly, much more calmly. It’s also allowed me to really show up more deeply and connect more deeply in a lot of my actual real life relationships. And it’s also allowed me to let a lot of things go, like things I used to go after because I thought they were important parts of life or something I had to do.
When I reparent myself there’s so much choice of like, what do you want your life to be like? You’re okay. I have unconditional positive regard for you. I love you. What do you want it to be like? And again, that allows me to let go of things that aren’t a good fit for me. And it also allows me to go deep at things that feel really scary to me and I’m not sure if I’ll be a good fit at.
I know so many people who only do things that they know they’re going to be good at. And I get it because I’m fiercely competitive and I like to be good at everything. But a lot of what I want to do in life, I’m actually not very fucking good at yet. And so if I have the courage to be able to try it anyways and learn how to do it and lovingly parent myself through that part where I learn, then I can do fucking anything. And that’s so powerful.
And that’s what I want for y’all. I just want this to be another way for you to love yourself more deeply and for you to give yourself the things you want to have. Whether that’s permission to stop doing things or whether it’s permission to do something you think you’re going to fail at over and over again for three years before you actually are able to take off and do it well.
Also, I want to say one more thing, which is if you missed that free group coaching call, I’m really sorry. I didn’t plan it very far ahead of time. So this is just your sign that you can run a successful multi six-figure business without planning everything super ahead of time. I’m kind of more of a spontaneous creative person, and so I do a lot of things because I’m like, “Oh, I had this idea and now I’m going to do it.” So I didn’t even talk about it on the podcast before I did it.
I had the idea in reference to Mother’s Day. I sent out some emails about it and I posted about it on Instagram. So if you missed it, I’m very sorry. And if you want to make sure not to miss things like that in the future, I would be sure to go sign up for my newsletter. You can sign up for that on my website. And I would also follow me on Instagram, @KoriLinn, because that’s where I post a lot of stuff too. I’m on there kind of all the time.
And if you want another call on reparenting yourself, reach out, let me know. Email me, DM me, because we can do it again or we can do a different free group coaching call on something else. So let me know what you would like to see our next free group coaching call be about.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Have a lovely day, and I’ll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a lovely day. I’m having a lovely day. And I did something really fun this week and I want to tell you about it. Earlier this week, I hosted a free, small group coaching call. A lot of times I do these just like for people who are current or previous clients, but this one was open to the general public. And I wrote about it in my email newsletter, and I posted about it on Instagram.
And basically, it was a call about re-mothering yourself. And I chose to do it this month, because at the time I’m recording this, it’s May and so that’s Mother’s Day month. I think by the time this comes out, it’s probably going to be June. But that’s what I did this week. And it was a really important offering that I wanted to give the world because reparenting has been something that’s been really meaningful for me in my own life. And so I wanted to share that as a coaching tool with my broader audience.
And I also know a lot of people, personally and as clients, who have a really hard time with their relationship with their mom. And for some of us it’s because our mom has passed on, or our mom is mentally ill or absent in another way. And for some people, their mom is very much present in their lives, but the relationship is just not what they want it to be.
I think it’s an incredibly loaded relationship, specifically with our mothers. And this podcast is going to be about reparenting yourself and I’m using the gender neutral parent. But since this free call was about re-mothering, I’m going to talk about that a little bit.
And one of the things I said in this free coaching call was that socially, we put so much pressure on Mothers specifically. We put a lot of pressure on parents, but really, I think a lot of it comes down to mothers. And I think that’s because we live in a patriarchy, right? And patriarchy basically puts all of this pressure on mothers to be like superhumans, right? To be able to care for their children in a way that goes beyond them just being a flawed human being.
And I think it’s a really hard thing for people to grapple with that moms are just people who had babies, right? And sometimes moms are people who adopted babies, right, obviously. But the role of being a mother, just because you’re in that role doesn’t mean you aren’t a human being or that you have some kind of superhuman capacity.
And all of our mothers are flawed. And if you are a mother, yourself, obviously, you’re also flawed. That’s one of the basic teachings of the podcast is that we’re imperfect, and we can still do really magical things. But I think when we’re talking about reparenting ourselves, we’re also talking about the disappointment we feel in how we were parented.
And I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about how you can reparent yourself, re-mother yourself and give yourself the things that you didn’t get from your own mother, no matter what reason it is that you didn’t get them. But again, I think it would be unfair, honestly, to have this conversation without also taking a moment to bring into consideration the expectations people tend to place on mothers only.
I’ve coached a lot of people who realize in our coaching that they have different expectations for their father, or had different expectations for their father, or they’re less disappointed in their father than they are in their mother. And I think part of that is because of culturally what we are taught that mothers should be able to be.
And it kind of fucking sucks, honestly. I think it really sets everybody up to have an unfortunate experience because that’s so much pressure to have on you if you’re the mother and it’s also so much pressure if you are the child looking at your own mother going like, why can’t you love me the way culture says you’re supposed to be able to? Either what’s wrong with you or what’s wrong with me?
Versus deciding to have kind of a more embracing of imperfection sort of mindset of like, yeah, of course, of course, we’re all going to be disappointed by our mothers. Of course, we’re all going to be disappointed by our childhoods. And by the way we’re parented and by all kinds of things in life because life is fucking hard, even if it’s also fucking magical.
And then we, on this podcast, embrace that multiple things that seem at odds can be true. So then the other thing I also want us to embrace is that you deserved everything. You deserved unconditional love. And when I say you deserve everything, I don’t mean you deserve everything you got. I mean you deserve everything you wanted. You deserve to be loved unconditionally. You deserve to be held. You deserve to be seen in positive regard.
And also pretty much no one got that. So I think that’s just an interesting paradox to hold in our minds, like all humans deserve love and belonging. All humans deserve positive regard. And because we are imperfect people raised by imperfect people, even if we had great parents we probably didn’t get that.
And I think the ability to see that all these things are true versus like, so something’s wrong with my mom or something’s wrong with me. It’s hard, right? It kind of hurts the brain a little, but I think it opens up so much space and so much space for an exploration of how do I be there for myself? How do I re-mother myself? Also imperfectly because guess what? I’m not a perfect person, either.
So even in the act of reparenting, it’s not going to be perfect. And it’s not going to live up to that unconditional positive regard that I deserve, because I’m a human being, right? So that’s like a little bit the framing of what I want us to be thinking about and talking about today.
Another thing that I was mentioning on the free call is that I read a book recently about childhood emotional neglect. And I think I talked about it on the podcast, I don’t actually remember what element I talked about. But when I was reading that book, one of the things that really struck me was I don’t think I know anyone who was parented in the way that the author was talking about as being like the meaningful engaged parenting that she was saying is the good or correct thing to have.
And there were all these different kinds of parenting that she was calling neglectful. And a lot of us probably experienced a lot of them. And it’s not because our parents were bad people, we know a lot of stuff now that they didn’t know in their childhoods, in our childhoods when they were parenting us. And things like therapy and coaching are much more common now.
So I want to be clear that this podcast isn’t about blaming our parents, and part of what it’s about also is understanding how many people are in the same boat with us, right? Like we had that podcast recently, It’s Not You, It’s We, and I think this is very much and it’s not you, it’s we. And it’s not just we people in the same generation, it’s also our parents, right? They probably were also not parented in a way that felt super yummy and delicious and satisfying to them, either. So this is a very common experience.
I think another piece of this is grieving, right? Grieving what you didn’t get. Because even though we know intellectually that we live in this imperfect world with imperfect people, we have hopes and dreams and desires. And we want to be loved unconditionally and held with unconditional positive regard, right? And we didn’t get that, and you may need some time to grieve that. And that’s kind of an important step.
It’s not kind of an important step, it’s a super important step. And it may be really difficult for you to move into reparenting yourself if you don’t give yourself space and permission first to grieve that you didn’t get what you wanted from the person you wanted it from, who is probably your mom, but could have also been your dad or another adult caregiver. Because not everyone grows up with a mom and a dad, right? People grow up with all kinds of adult caregivers, and older sibling caregivers as well.
I think it’s also important that we take a moment to talk about the topic of trauma. When we’re thinking about the things that happened in our childhoods, often some of the stuff we’re thinking about are traumatic events. And if you are thinking about that, I would advise you to at least consider talking to someone who is trauma informed.
And specifically, I mean, like a trauma informed therapist. There are coaches who are trauma informed, but I think therapy has a really great toolkit for this. And when I want to talk about trauma, I turn to therapists. And I just want to point that out because sometimes revisiting things that you’ve been through, even when they’re your own history, can be retraumatizing. And we want to be really careful that we’re not retraumatizing you as we’re trying to help you gain a new toolkit and move forward.
And that kind of leads directly into my next point, which is when I talk about reparenting yourself, I’m actually not talking about spending a lot of time thinking back to how you were parented and thinking about what you would have done differently. I think the concept of reparenting can seem like it’s going to be about how you were parented in your childhood, or it’s going to seem to be about reimagining scenarios and imagining how you would parent yourself differently.
But that’s actually not what we’re doing here or that’s not like what I want to do with my version of this teaching. It may be what other people want to do, I’m not sure. But that’s not what we’re doing here. What I actually want to teach and talk about here is the idea of reparenting as how you speak to yourself inside your own mind, the sort of regard you hold yourself with, like this sort of mindset and perspective you hold about yourself generally, how you handle feelings, and the actions you do or do not take, and then how you talk to yourself about both of those things as well.
So thing one is like, how do you talk to yourself? A lot of us, the way we speak to ourselves, our internal dialogue, comes directly from parents and other authority figures from our childhood. So one of the number one ways I’m talking about reparenting yourself is just shifting how you talk to yourself inside your own head.
And so a lot of us were not parented with that unconditional love and that unconditional positive regard and it shows in the way we talk to ourselves inside our head. So one of the easiest ways to reparent yourself is to think about, how do you talk to yourself inside your head? And is that how you would ideally want a parent to talk to you?
Now, the voice you have inside your head, you might not associate with your parents now. And that’s okay, and you don’t have to. So if the parent frame isn’t working for you, it could just be like, you can use a different frame.
But I think the parent frame can be really powerful because a lot of us when we have this voice inside our heads as an adult, we’re just like, “Oh, that’s just me and I just talk to myself like that,” without any regards as to why do you talk to yourself like that? And how does it feel when you talk to yourself like that?
And so thinking of it through the framework of, how would I want a loving parent – And what I actually call my internal parent is a wise, gentle parent. Wise, gentle parent energy. So I’m like, how would a wise, gentle parent speak to me? And sometimes it’s about like, what am I craving? Like, what would I be craving to hear from my wise, gentle parent?
But sometimes it’s also just imagination. Like, if I can imagine a wise, gentle parent energy, how would she, and for me it’s a she but it can be whatever it is for you. How would she talk to me about this scenario? And one of my basic frameworks for this is, tell me all about it, right?
So, so often in life we’re struggling and then we’re trying to fix it or trying to figure out what to do or yelling at ourselves about how we got into this situation. Versus just, again, giving ourselves unconditional positive regard and unconditional attention, right?
I think so many of us, what we actually wanted from our parents was their attention. We wanted them to listen to us, and to notice us and to see us without lecturing us and without criticizing us and without telling us what to do, right? And so that’s what my wise, gentle parent does. She says, tell me all about it. And she actually wants to hear all about it.
And I have a whole internal vision for my wise, gentle parent. Like she wears those thick, wooly socks with Birkenstocks and kind of loose clothes. And she probably has a shawl, and she has a lot of gray hair that’s sort of piled on top of her head. And in the place where she lives in my imagination, she lives in kind of this cozy cabin in the woods and there’s always a pot of soup bubbling, right?
It’s very much a vibe. It’s not a crock pot, it’s like a pot of soup, like from a fantasy book, right? It’s like over a stove. In my head there’s like a pot over an actual fire, right? And she’s always making scones or making biscuits, or making bread or making cookies. It’s very much a cozy hearth kind of vibe there. And that’s the energy with which I imagine this person when I imagine how I want to talk to myself differently or how I want to be reparented.
And this also goes into the feelings, right? With the feelings it’s like she welcomes all of my feelings, and she wants to know everything about all of my feelings. So for a lot of us, we were only allowed to have positive feelings, or we weren’t allowed to have any feelings, right? So if we were sad, our parents were like, get over it, or stop crying, or like blah, blah, blah, crocodile tears, or like blah, blah, blah, I’ll give you something to cry about, that kind of thing, right?
They didn’t have the time and attention for our sadness. And for fear, same thing. We were often told like, oh, get over it, or you’re such a child or whatever. And then also anger, right? A lot of us, our parents were not like, “Oh, tell me all about your anger.” They didn’t want our anger, right, because it was like threatening the status quo.
So whatever feeling I’m feeling, my wise, gentle parent is like, “Tell me all about it. Tell me everything that’s going on with that.” And what that really does for me, is it allows me to create unconditional positive regard for myself within myself, inside myself. And what that helps me do is come to know myself and it helps me unpack whatever is going on for me.
This is actually something that coaching does, too. So a lot of people when they come to coaching, what they’re getting from a coach, from someone like me, is someone to say, tell me all about it. And I’m just here to like, listen, and hold them in positive regard and maybe ask some difficult questions.
My internal parent, she doesn’t ask difficult questions. So it’s just the first part. She’s just like, tell me all about it. And she just listens. And a lot of times I solve my own problems just by witnessing myself in that energy and in that headspace. And it gives those feelings a place to exist and then I’m able to move through them. Whereas a lot of us repress our feelings, we push them down.
We’re like, I don’t have time to feel that right now. It’s not appropriate for me to feel that way. Nice people don’t feel that way. And then we push it down, push it down, push it down. Guess what? Later it’s going to explode, and we’re going to have a big fight or say something that we’re going to regret, yell at somebody, all that kind of stuff. So that’s what a wise, gentle parent does for me around feelings.
And honestly, for some people, like for me a lot of it’s about negative feelings. But for some people it’s also for positive feelings because if they’re too happy, or too joyful or too positive, that can be something that has been shut down for them before or that they don’t feel comfortable sharing. So maybe your internal wise, gentle parent is also there to celebrate with you and let you brag to them, and give you a safe space for that inside your own head.
Okay, and then actions, I think when we have that wise, gentle parent energy to give us that internal positive regard and to walk through our feelings with, it also opens up availability to all kinds of actions, right? Actions that maybe we wouldn’t normally be taking if we were having an internal parent who’s criticizing and judging and shaming.
So for some of us, that means actions like setting boundaries. But sometimes it means actions like taking a risk because you know you have this unconditional positive regard and this loving internal force who’s got you and who’s going to hold you and be with you, even if you fall on your face or fail or something.
Okay, so that’s basically what I’m talking about when I’m talking about reparenting yourself. But what does this actually mean? And what does this actually look like? And this podcast, while we talk about everything on the podcast, technically this is a podcast about work. So how the fuck does this apply to work? Let me tell you why it really, really applies to work. Because work is an area where we’re trying to do well, and we’re trying to perform, and we care what people think about us.
And a lot of times, actually, people come in and overlay some of their parent vibes onto their boss or supervisor or manager because they’re an authority figure. And so having wise, gentle parent or internal parent energy in this is going to be so helpful because let’s say you have a situation at work where you have a conflict with your manager.
And you feel super uncomfortable, super threatened and in danger because they’re an authority figure, and they’re tied to you having your job, you getting good reviews, all that stuff. If you have your wise, gentle parent internal energy, then you can kind of soothe yourself and witness yourself and be with yourself as you process through the feelings. And then also help yourself be courageous and aligned in how you show up and handle that conflict and how you move forward.
So it’s interesting because humans are social mammals, right? And there’s a lot of stuff going around like the TikTok and the Instagram right now about how we don’t heal in a vacuum and relational things get healed in relationships. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that, like I’ve healed a lot of my relational stuff in my relationship with Alex, for instance, my significant other.
And also, you have a relationship with yourself inside your head. And a lot of us, the relationship we have with ourselves inside our head is not a great relationship, right? That person is super mean to us. So when you can build a new parent, a new loving, wise, gentle parent inside your own head, you also heal something relational internally that I think can allow you to show up to your external relationships in a more grounded, intentional way.
And you have someone who’s always got you. And I think that’s often what we actually wanted from our parents. We wanted someone who’s got us. We wanted someone who believed we were okay and that it was going to be okay. And I realize that can feel like a really difficult thing to give yourself at first, and I think for a lot of us that’s because we don’t trust ourselves, right?
So I think this internal parent is also about a way of building trust and security with yourself. Not so that you can be a mountain and go live in the woods alone by yourself, again, we’re social mammals. I mean, listen, if you want to live in the woods by yourself, do it.
But it’s not that you become so hyper individualistic, you don’t depend on other people. It’s so that you become solid enough in yourself that you can actually interact with other people without people pleasing them or getting taken over by trying to get their validation, or being performative and pretending with them.
It allows you, I think, to actually show up and have real relationships with other people when you are able to have this internal relationship with yourself first. And I think that’s why people who have amazing parenting relationships are often considered to have secure attachment.
I’m not an attachment expert, but my general idea about this is it feels solid to them that they are loved and okay and that someone loves them. And that someone for them is outside of their heads, it’s their parents. A lot of us don’t have that.
And I don’t know about y’all, but for me personally, I refuse to believe that I’m fucked just because I don’t have the thing, right? So I don’t have that kind of relationship with a parent. I don’t have that, and it doesn’t necessarily, again, mean my parents did something wrong. It’s just I don’t have that. There was a lot of stuff going on in my childhood and I just never felt like I had that.
So I don’t want that to mean I have to go through life without it. So instead, I’m going to build it. I’m going to make it for myself. And it’s not a perfect system, but it is really glorious. And it’s also just a very specific directed way of rewiring your brain and rewiring how you talk to yourself.
You can rewire your brain and choose new internal thought patterns without ever thinking about it as reparenting yourself. But for me in particular, thinking about it as reparenting myself has been incredibly valuable.
I don’t want to have children and one of the things I say sometimes to people when they ask about that is like, I’m already parenting someone and it’s me. And it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of energy, and it takes a lot of effort to shift how I show up with myself and to parent myself the way I would like to be parented. And that’s what I’m going to focus my parenting energy on.
And, like I said before, even if we had amazing parents, our parents are all people, they’re all imperfect people. And so there probably are some ways in which you didn’t get parented the way you wanted to be. And there probably are some ways in which you’d like to be reparented, you’d like to reparent yourself and give yourself some of the things you’re longing for, and yearning for and craving.
And this is one way you can do that for yourself. And what I also love about it, is this is a way you can give yourself something you want without expecting anyone else to change. The world is wild, and life is long and sometimes people do change. Sometimes our parents do change. Sometimes other people in our lives go to coaching or go to therapy, or read a book that really impacts them and the way they show up for us and in our lives is different. And sometimes they don’t, right?
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t personally want to wait for everyone else in my life to change in order for me to get to have a different experience. Also, we’re adults now, right? So the time when our parents were parenting us is over. We may still have relationships with our parents, but they’re not parenting us anymore and we can’t go back and change it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the impacts of it and the way we relate to ourselves now, again, because a lot of how we learned to relate to ourselves is from how we were parented as a child. But you’re not stuck with those ways and if they’re not working for you, you have this option.
You can reparent yourself in subtle, slight ways and just make little edits and tweaks. Or you can reparent yourself wildly and basically build a new internal relationship. A new relationship with your internal parent that looks nothing like the one that you inherited from your actual parent. And when you do this, it’s going to have really big impacts, right?
For me, it’s like reparenting myself has allowed me to love myself much more deeply, much more thoroughly, much more calmly. It’s also allowed me to really show up more deeply and connect more deeply in a lot of my actual real life relationships. And it’s also allowed me to let a lot of things go, like things I used to go after because I thought they were important parts of life or something I had to do.
When I reparent myself there’s so much choice of like, what do you want your life to be like? You’re okay. I have unconditional positive regard for you. I love you. What do you want it to be like? And again, that allows me to let go of things that aren’t a good fit for me. And it also allows me to go deep at things that feel really scary to me and I’m not sure if I’ll be a good fit at.
I know so many people who only do things that they know they’re going to be good at. And I get it because I’m fiercely competitive and I like to be good at everything. But a lot of what I want to do in life, I’m actually not very fucking good at yet. And so if I have the courage to be able to try it anyways and learn how to do it and lovingly parent myself through that part where I learn, then I can do fucking anything. And that’s so powerful.
And that’s what I want for y’all. I just want this to be another way for you to love yourself more deeply and for you to give yourself the things you want to have. Whether that’s permission to stop doing things or whether it’s permission to do something you think you’re going to fail at over and over again for three years before you actually are able to take off and do it well.
Also, I want to say one more thing, which is if you missed that free group coaching call, I’m really sorry. I didn’t plan it very far ahead of time. So this is just your sign that you can run a successful multi six-figure business without planning everything super ahead of time. I’m kind of more of a spontaneous creative person, and so I do a lot of things because I’m like, “Oh, I had this idea and now I’m going to do it.” So I didn’t even talk about it on the podcast before I did it.
I had the idea in reference to Mother’s Day. I sent out some emails about it and I posted about it on Instagram. So if you missed it, I’m very sorry. And if you want to make sure not to miss things like that in the future, I would be sure to go sign up for my newsletter. You can sign up for that on my website. And I would also follow me on Instagram, @KoriLinn, because that’s where I post a lot of stuff too. I’m on there kind of all the time.
And if you want another call on reparenting yourself, reach out, let me know. Email me, DM me, because we can do it again or we can do a different free group coaching call on something else. So let me know what you would like to see our next free group coaching call be about.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Have a lovely day, and I’ll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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