Reparenting Yourself — Healing The Critical Voice Inside

Many people have an internal monologue, and that internal monologue gets shaped and ‘taught’ by influences outside of us when we’re young. For many of us, that inner voice is a harsh critic that we struggle against. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

A few years ago I was walking and talking with my roommate at the time.

He and I each had a Very Toxic Parent (TM) and the associated trauma of that. We had both been on our own respective journeys of healing, but we got talking about it one day.

I was talking about how I had this voice in my head that said I wasn’t good enough and how much it impacted my life in many different ways.

He replied ‘you know that’s not your voice right? that voice was implanted into you’.

Cue the record scratch.

It was one of those things where sometimes you kind of know something in your gut, but then someone says it out loud, succinctly with words, and it just suddenly gives you this new framing that makes an old problem so much more approachable.

I knew that voice inside me saying I wasn’t good enough was wrong. But once he said that it went from being ‘my internal monologue’ to ‘the internal saboteur’.

In other words, reframing it from ‘a part of me insists that I’ll never be good enough’ to ‘I was taught not to trust and love myself, and just need to teach myself the opposite now’, made a massive difference.

It wasn’t my ‘fault’ so to speak.

And he was right. Between my dad, playground bullies, and society at large, I’d internalized a TON of negative self talk, self-image, self-worth, etc.

I was basically a stack of a dozen insecurities in a trenchcoat masquerading as a human being. I’m sure many people reading this will relate to that.

It’s very similar to how I’ve heard it said that abusive/manipulative people teach their victims to devalue/not trust themselves, and then those victims go on to repeat the abuser’s messages to themselves even when the abuser isn’t around. Which is awful, but sadly true and common.

One really good antidote to abuse is therapy. A good therapist will help you learn to see and know the good in yourself, regardless of what anyone else says. They will help you learn to set boundaries to respect, protect, and take care of yourself.

That way when someone tries to manipulate or abuse (ie disrespect) you, you can identify it and shut it down, or walk away. Or to try and help teach friends and family if/when they need it. (Of course you can only help someone who is willing to be helped, but that’s another article).

Now as it turns out, if other can implant a negative voice into you, then it stands to reason that a positive voice can also be implanted, right?

A few years ago after I went through a really traumatic and destabilizing breakup, that negative voice inside went into overdrive.

I was a mess. I had had major codependency issues, had very minimal understanding of boundaries, and a whole lot of other unhealthy personal and relationship habits. So when that relationship ended, I questioned everything. I felt like a total idiot and an utter failure (even though I knew I wasn’t).

I kept telling my therapist ‘It’s so frustrating that I can know something is false, but I still feel like it’s true, and my nervous system is reacting to what I feel, not what I know’.

I knew I had childhood trauma and that was being majorly activated. I didn’t have enough of the right kinds of support in my personal social network, so I was kind of left trying to deal with a situation that made me super agitated and I didn’t know how to deal and was just emotionally flailing.

My therapist introduced me to a new concept called ‘Internal Family Systems’, which includes reparenting, and we started working on it.

Basically the theory goes that inside of us we have these ‘parts’ that play different roles make up a kind of family inside of us — there are managers, firefighters, protectors, etc.

When things happen to us, different parts can get activated, and while maybe it seems like certain parts are ‘better’ or more desireable than others, the best results will come from a team effort. Different situations call for different reactions, right?

And as my therapist put it, sometimes someone on the team thinks they’re helping, but they’re actually not.

Maybe we’re really anxious and our protector part activates a lot and makes us shut down and avoid things. It’s trying to protect us, but avoiding everything means we can’t learn how to deal with the thing that is making us anxious, which means we can’t grow.

That can be useful in temporary situations where you don’t have the time and space at the moment to deal, you do need to be able to slow down and deal with some things, sometimes.

So she recommended that I get familiar with my parts. Start having dialogues with them, and asking them what they wanted and needed. At first this was such a new and unusual concept that I really struggled with it.

I struggled until the next time the whole team got called into action again. The next major trauma in my life.

A few months ago, I went through a really traumatic experience suddenly that hit on pretty much every one of my insecurities and fears.

It was very destabilizing. Luckily I had just enough therapy under my belt at that point to really understand what was happening. Even so I wobbled really intensely, and am still wobbling a bit.

Through that disruption my parts all got activated, and suddenly instead of just dealing with a part here or there, I had a room full of parts that were all running around trying to act and ‘fix’ the situation at the same time. It was very chaotic.

But given a bit of time, the chaos died down, and two key parts emerged. I‘ve named them for convenience.

‘Sadie’ is the name I’ve given to my traumatized inner child part, which is literally the negative voice I was talking about earlier. She is the equivalent of a lost and scared 5 year old with no parent — sad, lonely, afraid, insecure, little to no impulse control, basically looking for anything or anyone who can help her and make her feel safe.

I’ve been carrying her my entire life, and she can be a lot!

But the other main part that emerged, I have named ‘Rosie’, for her ‘rosy disposition’.

Rosie is the opposite of Sadie. Rosie is calm, secure, confident, self-assured, stable, loving, independent, and wants the best for others and for herself. She is a parent, teacher, caretaker, therapist, manager, and more.

Sadie is what I started as from toxic parenting, playground bullies, and critical societal messages. Rosie is the person I’ve been growing and shaping myself into. Rosie is the positive voice that has been ‘implanted’ into me from years of therapy, and efforts at personal growth.

When I had this revelation, I mentioned it to my therapist and I said ‘I wish I could be Rosie all the time!’

And she replied ‘remember, we don’t want to only embody one of our parts all the time, it needs to be a team effort’.

Dangit.

The fact that this childhood trauma part still exists, means I’ve still got work to do.

For years and years, Sadie was all I had, and Sadie had no parent. I was the parent and honestly I didn’t know what the bleep I was doing. No wonder I struggled so much at times.

If you tell a child you’re going to take them for ice cream and then instead you take them to the playground bully, they’re not going to be happy. And if you do that over and over again for years, not only are they going to stop wanting ice cream, but they’re not going to trust people who ask them if they want ice cream.

That’s a really clumsy metaphor for rejection.

Because I wasn’t taught self respect and self worth to start, the only way I knew how to take rejection was ‘well they’re telling me i’m not good enough and I have no one to tell me otherwise, so that means they’re right’.

That was how I felt growing up and even into young adulthood. I only really started to be able to combat that thinking in my 30s, and it’s still not consistent.

Much as realizing that negative voice wasn’t mine, realizing that I now had a counter voice was a huge relief, but not a miracle cure. Sadie is still there, and she largely still feels the same as always. She’s just not alone anymore.

I had done a very kind and loving thing for myself by going to therapy and sticking with it over the years. I didn’t realize it until this revelation, but i’d been slowly implanting and training a supportive, loving voice into myself.

Now Rosie can help be Sadie’s parent, and Rosie serves as my therapist’s proxy. I can ask Rosie ‘what would my therapist say/do here?’

And like I said, the struggles aren’t over. I’m in the process of teaching Sadie to trust and listen to Rosie.

Sure, rejection still sucks, and hurts, but it doesn’t shut me down the same way as it used to. At least not every time. Sometimes it doesn’t even phase me at all.

But sometimes it does still cut right through to my deepest insecurities and throws me back into ‘Sadie’s corner’ where that playground bully is waiting for me and I feel paralyzed and there’s nowhere to run. And that’s where I call on Rosie to try to help.

So I’m learning how to rebound from that more quickly when it does still happen, by teaching Sadie to love and trust herself more again.

People who meet me in person most often see me being Rosie — confident, positive, wise, a helper, a leader — because that’s the version of myself that I am striving to be as much as possible.

People tend to think you’ve always been the way that you are when they meet you, sometimes that’s the case and sometimes not.

I share this story both so that you can see how even the most confident seeming people can still have deep vulnerabilities and insecurities, but that when we are growth oriented, not only can we help ourselves, but we can help others too.

“Do not just slay your demons, dissect them and find what they’ve been feeding on”
-The man frozen in time

Thank you for reading.

Lacey Artemis is an artist, writer, comic, storyteller, musician, and more. You can find all of her work online at www.laceyartemis.com.