Emotional Sobriety: Friends & Lovers » Reparenting

“In It’s Never Too Late to Be Happy: Reparenting Yourself for Happiness, Muriel James, coauthor of the 4-million-copy best-seller Born to Win, presents a clear, layman-friendly self-reparenting program through which the reader can actually create a new internal parent–one which is fully functional, supporting, encouraging, and loving–to replace the old parent figure, whose negative psychological messages consistently thwart one’s hopes for happiness.”

“In the field of psychology, self-reparenting is recognized as a highly effective strategy for pursuing happiness. Thousands of people worldwide have used it successfully to discover what went wrong in childhood and throughout their lives that restricted their freedom to succeed and be happy to move from discontentment to happiness–reparenting themselves for a fuller, happier life.”

“It’s Never Too Late to Be Happy presents coherent, straightforward insights into how personality is developed during a person’s early years, how parents use and misuse the parenting skills that influence personality, how children react to negative or inconsistent messages, and many other issues that work together to prohibit both satisfaction and happiness in later life. Combined with chapter by chapter self-analysis exercises, these insights will lead any reader through the reparenting process which will invariably lead to greatly increased happiness–at any age.”

(2) Self Parenting: The Complete Guide to Your Inner Conversations by John Pollard

Product notes:

“Self Parenting: The Complete Guide to Your Inner Conversations is the classic and original how-to book defining the concept of “self-parenting.” Many of us grew up within a parental environment that did not support our childhood needs for love, support, and nurturing.”

“As adults, we mentally continue the same patterns as an “Inner Parent” that left us feeling alone and abandoned as a child. By beginning the daily practice of positive Self-Parenting, the negative outer parenting patterns taught as a child (and subsequently internalized as an adult) can be recognized and reversed.”

“The foundation of the Self Parenting is the daily practice of the Self-Parenting Exercises, a thirty-minute session of cognitive interaction between the Inner Parent and Inner Child. During these daily half-hour sessions Illustrated In the book, the reader learns how to love, support, and nurture his or her Inner Child as well as increase their awareness of the profound implications of their Inner Conversations in the “real world.”

(3) Growing Up Again-Parenting Ourselves by Connie Dawson and Jean Illsley Clarke

Product notes–

“Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson provide the information every adult caring for children should know–about ages and stages of development, ways to nurture our children and ourselves, and tools for personal and family growth.”

“This new edition also addresses the special demands of parenting adopted children and the problem of overindulgence; a recognition and exploration of prenatal life and our final days as unique life stages; new examples of nurturing, structuring, and discounting, as well as concise ways to identify them; help for handling parenting conflicts in blended families, and guidelines on supporting children’s spiritual growth.”

(4) The 12 Steps to Self-Parenting for Adult Children by Patricia O’Gorman and Philip Oliver-Diaz

Product notes–

“If you are the child of an alcoholic or an adult child who has experienced a traumatic childhood, you can give yourself a second chance for intimacy, fulfillment and joy by Self-Parenting. 12 Steps To Self-Parenting, based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, will guide you to nurture your Inner Child so that it may grow into healthy self-acceptance.”

What is Reparenting and How Do We Use It?

kberman — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 01:46:47 +0000

I have believed for years that addiction is cured only when we learn how to reparent ourselves, This includes not only healing our inner child but also healing all the children we have within.

I have written the following posts about the inner child and/or reparenting:

Our Inner Child is our Eternal Child

Your Childhood Pain was a Gift

Reparenting Your Inner Child

Learn to Listen and Guide Your Inner Voices

Helping Others to Learn Reparenting

Books About Reparenting

According to Dr. Tian Dayton, children who grow up with alcohol or other drug abuse may experience:

• Loss of Trust and Faith Due to deep ruptures in primary, dependency relationships and breakdown of an orderly world.
• Distorted Reasoning Due to convoluted attempts to make sense and meaning out of chaotic, confusing, frightening or painful experience that feels senseless.
• Easily Triggered
• Development of Rigid Psychological Defenses When this person develops long term ‘character armor’ to defend against letting pain in.
• Desire to Self-Medicate When this person attempts to quiet and control their turbulent, troubled inner world through the use of drugs and alcohol or behavioral addictions.This can be part of how addiction gets passed down through the generations.

When Words Matter

Avoiding the Shut Down Mode

Photo credit.

More Help From Self-Parenting Books

kberman — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:41:06 +0000

Strawberry Schoolhouse by kevindooley

(1) The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook

“Trauma can take many forms, from witnessing a violent crime or surviving a natural disaster to living with the effects of abuse, rape, combat, or alcoholism. Deep emotional wounds may seem like they will never heal. However, with The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, Dr. Glenn Schiraldi offers a remarkable range of treatment alternatives and self-management techniques, showing survivors that the other side of pain is recovery and growth.”

Live your life more fully-without fear, pain, depression, or self-doubt

Identify emotional triggers-and protect yourself from further harm
Understand the link between PTSD and addiction-and how to break it
Find the best treatments and techniques that are right for you

“This updated edition covers new information for war veterans and survivors with substance addictions. It also explores mindfulness-based treatments, couples strategies, medical aids, and other important treatment innovations.”

(2) Reparenting by Dr. Larry Gilliam, Deborah Freeman, and David Majors

Product description:

“Deep inside you, there is a part of you that still thinks, feels, and reacts like a child. This is true because time alone does not heal all the wounds of childhood. There are actually steps and a process you must go through to nurture and heal the child within you. This process is called reparenting, and this workbook is the first of two volumes designed to walk you through it.”

(3) Stories That Heal: Reparenting Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families by Lee Wallas

This book has many stories about each phase of childhood growth.

(4) When Love is Not Perfect: Discovering Gods Reparenting Process

No information available.

(5) Reparenting Yourself by Art Martin has a subtitle of “Growing Up Again–Recovering Your Lost Self.

No information available.

Helping Others to Learn Reparenting

kberman — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:24:09 +0000

Hello Ladies by EriknCharlton

I am beginning a study that I hope to be developing as a series of talks for prisoners. America spends so much money of incarceration and so little on rehabilitation, that I want to take a program to prisoners about reparenting.

Having been an addictions counselor for years and in my personal recovery since 1976, I know that healing comes from within. It usually begins with someone realizing that another person is loving them unconditionally. What is unconditional love? It is love from one person to another without ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we usually experience unconditional love from new people in our lives.

As children, we are taught hundreds of ways that we are unlovable. Transactional analysis states that we have over 20,000 hours of negative feedback about ourselves that we are continually rebroadcasting to ourselves.

After we learn how to shut off this committee of negative voices in our head, we begin to see how our real self is vulnerable to such attacks from our mind. The mind is best used a the switching station for our thoughts. If it is allowed to dominate and control, it will choose to keep us submissive by negatively. I always say that our mind is out to get us. But, in reality, we simply have to learn how to use the mind and begin relying more on the soul as our guide for our lives.

To help prisoners to learn about themselves, I have chosen reparenting as an avenue to help them to not only learn how to parent but also to learn how to be better parents to themselves. Personal growth is like the grass, as Walt Whitman wrote in his poem about war, “I am the grass, I cover all”. When I was at Guantanamo Bay, from my office I looked down on the air field below me that was unused and covered in wild grasses. And I understood that as a living creature, I was either living or I was dying. Grass doesn’t get to a certain height and then stop growing. It is either, as on of favorite bloggers says, in a quote from Dylan, “he not busy being born is busy dying“.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to another is an avenue to help them to help others. If you have a negative self-image, you don’t believe that you have anything to give. Teaching prisoners how to parent– which is what reparenting is–teaches them skills to help anyone. As we help others, we learn how to love ourselves.