Self Reparenting | Self
Parenting | Reparent Yourself Dr. Jay Kantor, 10 Wilsey Square, Ridgewood, NJ 07450, 201-461-7347 Self
ReParenting . Com
Long-term
emotional, mental, relationship, and even health problems can originate
in the psychological structure and functioning of the mind.
The mind’s structure and functioning are created, starting in
childhood, through the parent-child relationship.
We internalize various versions of our own developing personality
and the personalities of parents and other authority figures as
“parts” in our subconscious mind.
This process goes on automatically, outside of our conscious
awareness. Healthy,
mature, and loving parts – both child and older, adult parts – are
necessary for a person to have a happy, success life.
Parental maltreatment, neglect, and inadequate parenting create
subconscious parts of the mind that are traumatized, dysfunctional, and
immature. When
a part. created due to trauma, is activated by something in a person’s
life now, the person experiences and reacts to the world from the mind
of the child who went through that trauma.
Since the person is not conscious of where these feelings,
thoughts, and behaviors come from, they erroneously attribute their
cause to what is present in the environment now. The
hurt, wounded, scared, and often angry subconscious
parts of a person are the real clients in psychotherapy.
These are the parts of a person’s mind we must relate to, heal,
and transform to create lasting change in a person’s life.
Rational conversation about the origin of a psychological problem
does relatively little to transform the subconscious mind, which is why
talk therapy may leave powerful, disturbing psychological responses,
still in place. In a similar
fashion, prescription medicines do little, if anything, to specifically
address the thoughts and feelings being held by a traumatized part of
the mind. Drugs numb all of
our feelings, good and bad alike. How
Self Reparenting Works In
Self Reparenting, we work
directly with the parts of the mind that need to be healed, nurtured,
and transformed. The most
basic work involves three types of normally subconscious parts: child
parts, adult-child parts, and a higher self or witness part. The
psychological reality of the parts is acknowledged by making them real,
visible, and “tangible” in a process called Inner Psychodrama. Each
part of the mind we choose to work with is literally given its own
physical seat in the room. This
helps a person re-cognize what
is going on in their mind as it switches from enacting one part (or
role) to enacting another part, in the course of time.
Parts of the mind are in relationship to each other.
A child part in one chair has a very definite relationship with
an adult part in another chair, as they both do as residents in the same
subconscious mind. We
acknowledge, respect, value, listen to, and heal each part of the
person. Treating each part
as a valuable person in its
own right is crucial for self reparenting to be successful. A
person coming for therapy is often lost in a distressed child part when
they arrive, although they may not recognize that fact.
When I ask the person what is going on in their life that brings
them into therapy, they often express how bad they feel – how hurt,
depressed, anxious, or angry they are.
And how their relationship with someone is making them feel that
way. This process is allowed
to go on for a few minutes. This is a distressed child part sitting in
the chair. I
then ask the person to take a few breaths and relax for a moment.
Then I ask them to change chairs to the chair that is facing
where they are sitting. I
remind them – play back, if you will – what they said while they
were in the other chair, as the child.
I then ask them to respond to what they just heard themselves
say, as they sat in the original chair. Do
you think most people are supportive or are they critical?
Are they cold and rational or are they loving and nurturing? Unfortunately,
most people are critical of the person – of the distressed child part
– sitting in the other chair. They
do not want to hear about and deal with his or her problems.
This almost always the case when a person has psychological
issues that they cannot resolve on their own. The
reason that a person cannot regulate their own emotions is that they
were never taught how by a mature, supportive, loving adult.
Emotional self regulation is an important outcome of healthy
parenting. Since we
internalize our parents and the way we were parented, as parts of our
own mind, we treat ourselves – the child parts of ourselves – the
way we were treated as children. If
parents failed to do what was necessary to help us meet the
psychological and emotional challenges we faced, we never learned how to
do this for ourselves. In Self
Reparenting, a person develops a mature, loving parent part that is
capable of helping traumatized child parts to heal and to grow up, so
they no longer have to suffer from having their unresolved trauma
reactivated. I hope you found this brief introduction to Self Reparenting interesting and valuable. You will find more information on this and related topics at http://NurturingTheMind.Com , and http://DrJayKantor.Com. To find out about Rapid Emotional Healing go to: http://EFTNJ.Com - Emotional Freedom Techniques. I
have a private practice located at 10 Wilsey Square, Suite #280,
Ridgewood, NJ. You are
invited to call me at (201) 461-7347 with your questions and comments.
A FREE 15 MINUTE PHONE CONSULTATION Dr. Jay
Kantor
has spent the past 22 years 1) helping people to overcome the long-term
effects of childhood trauma and 2) developing new natural and holistic
means for eliminating trauma and empowering people to reach their
spiritual potential. He
holds a Doctorate in Psychology from Columbia University and is
certified in many forms of holistic healing.
He is an expert in EFT, practices Rohun Spiritual Psychotherapy,
and is certified as a Medium by Delphi University in Georgia.
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