Reparenting

We are interested in hearing what others think about this terminology. Has anyone ever successfully experienced it? Did it help or hinder? Can one successfully reparent themselves? All input thoughts opinions welcomed. Thanks!

I think it has meant a lot of different things over time, from transactional analysis to current day treatment for borderline personality disorder Beyond the Borderline Personality: Second Time's the Charm - Limited Reparenting

If my T were to use the term, I'd want to know what they meant by it and try to understand their concepts and if I thought that might be something that could work to help me.

thank you for your reply perna definitely appreciate it
its something we are considering but have a lot of hesitation about it right now

I've studied some about reparenting. I would recommend to learn self-reparenting - that can be very healing. However, I'm not so sure about a therapist reparenting the client or a group of clients. Jacqui Schiff's practice shows how very wrong reparenting can go. I'm fine with some parenting-like interactions in therapy and they can be helpful on occasion, depending on the situation. I've experienced some of that. But in my opinion the purpose is always to see a healthy option to self-reparent - not to have that type of relationship with a therapist. I think reparenting in general can be rather patronizing and dismissive of a person's own ability to heal and grow.

I know it's helped others, though, so I'm not saying it can't be helpful in some cases. I'm just very reluctant about it.

For me it's about internalising a 'good object' v the 'bad object'. Which my mother was. Reparenting isn't a description used in my therapy.

From what I've learned about re parenting it is something that has more potential to be harmful than helpful. Like brillskep, I think it is more realistic and healthy to learn self parenting skills. A T parenting another adult promotes, in my mind, a very unbalanced relationship and gives a T way to much power over a patient. Self reliance and self love is where I think the focus needs to be.

I successfully experienced a sense of reparenting, almost spiritual, from a school counselor when I was 14, though I didn't call it that. She made herself available to see me on request. She supported me using empathy, big hugs, and empowering tools. She encouraged me, inspired me, and helped me shift my entire worldview from trapped to free. It was an amazing experience, almost like a rebirth. That experience only lasted a few months, so, it was more a tease of what re-parenting would be like, but it was incredibly powerful. After that, I had the strength and perspective to begin the painful process of breaking away from my dysfunctional family, establish boundaries, and prioritize my needs. I definitely internalized her as a loving, kind spirit, her presence is still very much a part of me.

I continued therapy for a while after that counselor left my school, but the next three therapists weren't helpful. I ended therapy at about 18, but began again last year, after a nearly 20 year break as I was having some parenting issues.

I've been seeing my current therapist eleven months, several times a week, we're basically in almost daily contact, and I've made significant progress in parenting, reevaluating my marriage, finding more passion in my life, and getting back to school to finish my degree. Working with my therapist has been so inspiring.

After seeing her for a while, she began talking about how therapy could be considered a re-parenting experience, with the therapist as "good enough Mother" (concept by Donalt Winnicott if you want to read further). Then she revealed she had been through that experience herself over a span of many years with her therapist. If the way she is with me is any indication, it was definitely a success. My therapist is insightful, deeply caring, sincere, very open, warm and not least, versatile and knowledgeable. After seeing me frequently for the first several months, she told me about her mentor's concept of having a therapist for life, which does not mean being in therapy forever, but always having someone to rely on if I want or need to contact her, an open-ended relationship. She's said she's hoping to be my good-enough mother and will not abandon me no matter what I say.

Working with her is like a limited reparenting: she is excited by my successes, reassuring about my "failures," and makes herself available to me on a daily basis (with a few exceptions for trips and such). When I expose my pains to her and share difficult experiences, she does respond the way I wish my parents could have, with faith in me, comfort, understanding and caring. She never balks at my desire to be in contact with her, and gives (virtual) hugs whenever I ask for them. She even sends me songs to comfort me, she is really big on helping me be kind to myself. Also, she just seems delighted, excited, and honored to work with me.

So, that's my experience of it. It's also been very difficult, challenging, and sometimes painful, but the ups and downs establishing our relationship seem to be easing now and it's very rewarding having her in my life.

(In reply to some of the other posts, I will clarify: re-parenting, in my experience, doesn't mean losing power or not being able to take care of myself. I make my own decisions, I increasingly treat myself with compassion, and consider myself an empowered, successful person. I work a lot, am in school, married, mother, volunteer, etc. You can have a parent without actually acting like an infant, it's definitely not either/or, black or white.

Bottom line: having her to lean on, to be emotionally dependent on, makes me stronger, one case in point: I have been faced with huge bills in the past, some medical (unavoidable) but others, a result of my lack of disclipline, like for trips. Each time, I bailed myself out by withdrawing funds from my 401k, because I felt too anxious to be in debt, even though I could always afford the debt payments. Last year, I was feeling so anxious again, I logged onto the website and considered liquidating my 401k, ending my retirement fund. It was a wrenching moment. Instead, I had an impromptu four hour therapy session. I was in agony. The internal debate about not being able to live with the financial hole I was in versus not wanting to trade away my retirement was hard for me to bear: I had never borne it before, I had always caved in to the easy way out. But my therapist listened and bore with me for four hours, as I sobbed and expressed my great distress.

I didn't cash out my 401k.

It's been several months since then, and although my finances are in bad shape, I am paying all my bills, trying to cut back on spending, and I have not touched my 401k. She helped me be a stronger, better version of myself, able to bear my anxiety better because I could share it.

That's a private story I've never told anyone, I hope it will be helpful.

My relationship with my therapist is not at all like the strange work by Schiff, which I've glanced at briefly and don't relate to at all. It is a very simple, healing, powerful, challenging process of learning that she's committed to me, cares about me, empathizes with me, and will support me unconditionally, being around as long and often as I want. It really is kind of like just having a mom to call and tell about my day and trust to have my best interests at heart. I think it's helpful to think of it as reparenting me from where I am now, encouraging a healthy dependency, showing me what it can be like to not just tell but show someone I'm hurting and not get hurt worse for it but come out better for sharing. As a parent figure, I don't find my therapist patronizing or dismissive at all, but rather empowering and respectful: it was my birth parents who were dismissive!)

I personally don't go to therapy for reparenting. I want to be treated as an equal with mutuality and respect. There are elements of things I didn't get to experience as a child that are present in my therapeutic relationship, especially a kind of attunement and true caring, but I don't experience it as reparenting. I feel I have lacked certain skills and experiences that are normal between humans and I'm finally with someone healthy enough to model that behavior and a healthy relationship. I can internalize that and bring to the rest of my life, but I don't find myself looking to my therapist as a parental figure and would be offended if the relationship were configured that way.

I don't really understand the concept of "self reparenting" because it seems like a contradiction. I believe that we all are relational and intersubjective so how would you be able to pull yourself out of your relationships with others to the extent that you would have a separate relationship with yourself that was like a parent-child relationship? I understand it more in the sense of learning some self-care and other things that maybe you didn't learn at the right developmental stage, but again, I see those things as also influenced by relationships in your life. We work and play in interaction with others. Even if we are alone in one sense or another, we still tend to define ourselves and the world based on other people. I just lean toward a more collectivist sense of people and think that the emphasis on independent individualism is a myth, especially in segments of America.

I'm glad you brought this up Invisible Butterfly, mostly because we all could have totally different ideas on what "reparenting" is and isn't, and this would be a good chance for people to clarify their ideas and meaning about what this means to them. I've seen past conflict about this subject here... I've read in some places that "reparenting" is a therapeutic technique promoted by some outliers in the field that is extreme and damaging. It is a controversial type of therapy to say the least.

I don't even like the word "reparenting". My last T nurtured me a lot, which is, imo, closest to the concept of reparenting as it gets. I needed this because although I wasn't an orphan, I grew up without any real parenting.

I think of it mostly in terms of object relations/attachment like Mouse mentioned. Children develop a self foundation and learn about themselves and the world mostly through relations with others, starting at a very young age.

I think it's rare that a person can grow up with healthy narcissism (eg, self-worth) if the parent looks at you with resentment, anger, and disdain all of the time...abuses you, treating you like an object instead of a human being. All parents have empathetic failures from time to time, but if every time you relate to your caregiver you have his/her negative emotions and negative self experience projected onto you, you are prone to eventually internalizing that as your own or believing that is the way others feel about you. Much of it could be unconscious and acted out through behaviors.

This tiny bit I wrote hardly even begins to describe the concepts, but therapy can be a sort of reparenting/reparative experience in a way that the relationship promotes self-development and individuation (not being dependent upon the others words or actions to feel/think good about oneself). It's done implicitly with the therapist being interested in you and what you have to say, expressing joy in knowing you, expressing empathy towards you, caring about you, and treating you like someone who has worth. I think the person whose development and self-worth isn't affected by very poor parenting is rare, as this leads to deeply-rooted personality traits that no amount of cognitive therapy will reverse. Instead, healing and change has to be experienced in the context of a relationship. That I do regress to childlike ego states does help facilitate the process, I believe.

I have read descriptions of people in therapy who literally have the emotional development similar to an infant where they relate to significant others as an extension of themselves, thinking of them as someone who is there to merely give and provide to them. (this is not the same thing as paying a therapist for a service) They don't see the other as a different person, just like an infant doesn't distinguish themselves from mother and instead, hasn't developed psychological boundaries, and can only think about ending its own pain/hunger/tiredness/frustration/suffering.

I cannot see how any other type of therapeutic experience can correct this. You can't just teach the psychological boundaries to develop in a person's mind. A person with this level of object relations has to slowly learn how to relate to the therapist as a separate individual with needs of their own. This extreme dependency on another is slowly transformed into feelings of agency and worth through the relationship with someone who cares about them. One alternative is that a person becomes and remains extremely rigid in their personality and defenses.

The fact that my therapist believed in me and treated me as a person with worth, expressed through the relationship through his actions and words (to a lesser extent), has helped me become a better person. And there was no advice-giving or telling me "what I wanted to hear" or rescuing. My therapy was largely self-directed, and I was empowered by the new framework of self-worth I had developed by internalizing my therapist. I still have a long ways to go, but at least I have the foundation in place from which to grow.

When I think of reparenting in terms of therapy, those are some of the concepts (eg, object relations/attachment) that come to light.

I'm just reading the replies, and it seems some might as well be describing love, attachment, mentoring, and bonding rather than "re-parenting".

Just speaking for myself here: I'm not sure how I could have possibly developed self-love without first feeling/knowing being loved by another. (Love w/out being needed is the type of love that a child receives from a parent.) I felt this kind of love for the first time in my life-from my therapist.

I suppose I didn't consider reparenting in terms of power differential: my therapist always treats me with the utmost respect as I do her, with very rare exception where I've lost my temper. Rather, I do believe she excels in certain areas where I do not, I do depend on her to help me make sense of my issues, to have insight and to care deeply that I'm struggling and have had unrelieved pain. I'm not sure how we could do therapy without dependence, but it sounds like the difference might be between a teacher and parent- a matter of degree?

The word 'reparenting' kind of makes me want to gnash my teeth, but in a way I suppose all therapy involves an element of it. Unconditional positive regard from a therapist, especially if there's warmth in the relationship, is probably one of the closest things you can get to parental unconditional love, surely?

It would be uncomfortable and bizarre for me to think of my therapist as a maternal figure, but then reading Leah123's post so much of it resonates with me. I think the difference is probably that the archetypal role I think of my T in with me is as a big sister I have a close relationship with. My head and heart are fine with thinking of her in that way.

I'm sure it varies a great deal from person to person, and the type of caring in a good therapeutic relationship can remind people of lots of other relationships: mentor, older sister/brother, teacher, coach, etc., certainly there is some overlap.

It's very easy for me to see my therapist in that parental role because I was cognizant of wanting that when I began therapy: I am estranged from my mother, so as I struggled with being a good mother myself, I always wanted a motherly figure to confide in, someone I could trust for parenting advice, and moreso, someone I could trust to admit that I wasn't a perfect mother.

The facts that my therapist is about 30 years older, has sort of a matronly presence, has had the experience of therapeutic reparenting herself, and idenfities with some of my issues made it very easy for me to see her in that way, at least in part, not as a replacement mother, but a specifically 'good enough mother' one to give me that reparative sense of reexperiencing my painful early years and being there in a loving, accepting, healing way as I do. It's a very deep thing, one that's given me pause at time, incredibly powerful, and affirming.

I guess I don't like to use the term "re parenting" because it implies unconditional love and a dependence that I feel uneasy with. A therapist can provide an environment that is free of judgement and unconditional acceptance, which of course help with the development of self love. They may not always be there, so looking to a T for so much makes me uneasy.

What type of parenting-like interactions would you be okay with? Just curious. This topic is interesting to me and I agree that it can go terribly wrong.

Therapists may not always be there, but who will? Half the population is divorced, parents die inevitably, friends move or friendships fade, neighbors too, so I don't think therapists are necessarily less likely to be around than others. I will say, I don't expect a specific set number of years with my therapist, but I believe in her commitment to me, which is what matters most for me.

However, I don't think reparenting is something many therapists can or will offer, nor do all clients want or need it, certainly. As for me, my therapist has committed to working with me even if she changes the service she uses to do therapy though, and to be available to me as long as she is capable/competent. She has also said she would work with me for free if that became necessary, though I would never dream of that happening. I respect her expertise deeply, and pay well for it, but believe the sacred relationship transcends the payment, that there is something we exchange, in relationship, beyond the payment I make in recognition of her education, years of experience, etc.

She didn't offer those things from the start, it took significant work to get to that point and a connection which I think may uncommon, even among therapeutic relationships. I feel very lucky for it.

Regarding unconditional love and emotional dependence, I enjoy the writings of Dr. Joseph Burgo, a practicing psychotherapist on: Attachment Theory and the Healing Psychotherapy Relationship

That sounds very lovely.

My T seemed to fill a dual role in my life too-therapist and father figure (he was also about 30 years older-had a daughter the exact same age as me). My father died very young, but even before that, he never talked to me or took me anywhere or gave me any bit of attention (not even 1 single hug or I love you) except for some abusive times (csa and he was sadistic sometimes). I had no grandfathers. It was the first adult male I had an intimate but non-sexual relationship with. The first adult male I ever felt safe with. We often interacted in a playful manner; it was endearing feeling like "Daddy's little girl" at times. We were very fond of each other.

I feel fortunate as well. Thank you for sharing your experience.

It does not sound like anything I would want a part of. It seems to help some people from what I haver read, but it also sounds quite tricky and like it can backfire quite badly.
I don't view the therapist as a parental figure, she is not maternal at all as far as I can see.

I agree with you. I also think that the overall risks of therapy are brushed off or minimized. One therapist I saw had risks listed on his intake form, although he did not verbally convey them to me.

Then again, it was no different when I had surgery. Risks were listed on the consent form, but no one initiated discussion about these risks (although I did ask).

While I was harmed from therapy once, I would have never thought to ask about risks. But I might have ignored them anyway if told, who knows.

There is so much emphasis on risk for psychotropics, but it's rare (at least in my experience), to hear anyone emphasize the risks of psychotherapy.

Oh, I and my therapist have had lots of talks about the risks of therapy! I've experienced some of them in previous therapies, so perhaps that's why I'm mindful of them while accepting our relationship appreciatively but not without some trepidation.

I've seen five therapists total, the first three were all short term. Number one, I referred to earlier, number two I saw briefly (couple months) before she changed jobs. My third therapist (I saw her a few months) breached confidentiality in a traumatic manner and also did a piss poor job of managing a difficult case of transference. (She was an intern, but I was 16, and not too savvy about the risks then at all, not to mention I had serious issues on which I was focused.) My fourth (I saw her most of two years) was dismissive, disinterested, and condescending. I ended that round of therapy when I was 18 and didn't go back for most of two decades.

This therapist has been in practice 20 years and her sincerity is persuasive, along with her areas of specialty, experience, and our connection: they make the risk level low enough that I can tolerate it.

Everything worth having is worth risking for. I'm a much better therapy consumer than when I began though, that is for sure! I sorted through a number of therapists, about a dozen, before choosing her.

just had a chance to log back on and see all the replies. it is astounding and so incredibly helpful all the varied and differing responses and definitions-thank you so much everyone!
for us we tend to think that learning ways of "reparenting" ourselves is the ultimate goal but having help from our counselor would be a primary benefit in attaining these goals.