Umm, I don't see anyone arguing that this 'reparenting' miraculously undoes all childhood damage, but surely if it repairs more of it than alternative approaches, or even if it just makes the same degree of repair accessible to more people, then I'm all for it.
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Originally Posted by feileacan
My thoughts on this topic:
1) Limited reparenting is an intrinsic part of any long-term relational psychotherapy (person-centered, psychonalytic, ect). This involves teaching stuff in the relationship via experience - emotion recognitition, emotional regulation, trust, setting boundaries, self-reflection etc etc. Essentially all the things that parents teach their children via just having a parent-child relationship with them without perhaps ever explicitly talking about this teaching taking place. These same things also happen in every long-term relational therapy (and don't get started about psychoanalysis - I don't believe that you will find an unrelational analyst knowadays), without just calling it a fancy name.
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I can see this being the case, but I think the fancy name has more substance than this implies. My understanding is that it covers a willingness to display outwardly parent-ish behaviour, even if it's at the expense of 'neutrality', which is traditionally frowned upon by the psychodynamic folks. Like, sure, maybe the 'blank slate' PD style will lead in some roundabout way to effectively being 'reparented' for those whom it works for (and I have no idea about psychoanalysis), but an actual parent acting that way would only end up raising future therapy clients..
Admittedly, I don't have a solid enough idea of the current and historical development of psychotherapeutic schools, but it seems to me that there's some value in making this specific approach a thing, though maybe the terminology could be clearer (and less cringe-worthy).
For example, my ex-T is psychodynamic/analytically oriented, but due to some combination of her personality and previous experience (and maybe counter-transference, sometimes?) she does a lot of this instinctively. And when she's in a good place, she does it well, and despite my ultimately negative experience, and a lack of clarity about what went wrong, I suspect she's altogether a reasonably competent T at least. However, towards the end of my therapy, she pretty much lost her footing, and ... well, one of the Ts I tried out afterwards was a schema therapist, and she was like 'well if [exT] knew schema therapy then she would have reacted in the way you needed' ... and that's an over-simplistic take on it I think, but maybe if 'reparenting' as a valid approach and a set of techniques were part of her practice, maybe that'd have played into her strengths more and shored up her weaknesses better.