Unmet needs and reparenting yourself.
Often we pin our unmet needs on our parents as children.
Rightly so. Parents are responsible for their children, for their growth, for preparing them adequately for adulthood, for loving and protecting and guiding them. This is the job a person signs up for when they have children. This is why choosing to be a parent is not a light-hearted affair. It's an 18 year (minimum) slog where you are often thanklessly, tirelessly, ushering your child through one initiation after another, all so they can reach their highest potential (read, not your greatest vision for them but their highest potential) in this lifetime. All so they can grow into a secure, sovereign, healthy, adult.
When things go awry in childhood, when we do not feel secure, we carry those expectations of how we should've been parented and the needs we should've had met (and the spite associated with those needs not being met) into adulthood, continuing to expect our parents to compensate for their shortcomings years ago, when we were fully dependent on them, still. Continuing to fixate on the injustice of it all.
We want them to start being the mom or dad we never had, the mom or dad they never were, even long after we have come of age. And when they don't, we blame them, and become resentful at them.
And that resentment reveals itself in every other relationship we have, including and especially any relationship where there is perceived authority or intimacy.
Without understanding how and why it happens, we inadvertently recreate the very dynamics we abhorred from our childhood, and pin our unmet needs from our childhood and the expectations we have about intimacy onto our partner(s), instead.
This is usually the turning point, where a person realizes something has got to change and actively pursues it (and usually gets outside support of some kind), or succumbs to indifference and starts to go numb.
Here's the thing. Once you become an adult, it is your responsibility to parent yourself. However tragic this may seem when you're in the thick of it, it's rather good news!
If your parents didn't show you how to do that well, chances are likely they didn't know how (and probably STILL don't know how), and then your work as an adult is to find out.
Find out what you need.
Find out how you want to relate.
Find out what you want to do with your one precious life.
Find out how you want to live.
Find out what works for you.
Find out what doesn't.
Find out who you are, underneath all those ideas you formed about yourself along the way.
This is not a quick-fix situation. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's a life-long experiment and experience with no conclusion. It's perpetual, unending, research. There is no one right way to go. Each individual has their own unique needs. Each individual has their own path to discover.
This is the biggest part of a personal growth journey, and it's also powerfully healing BECAUSE:
Once you feel confident in your ability to meet your own needs—ones you formerly thought your mom or dad were responsible for—and once you begin to have some clarity about who you are, you'll be able to approach your relationship with mom or dad from a completely different place. You'll be able to see her for who she is, beyond mother, and him for who he is, beyond father, and it will open up enormously vast landscapes in your relationship to each of them, and in your relationship to yourself which is represented by your ideas of man or women or something in between, and of course in your relationship to everyone else.
The mom or dad projection—and the healing from the mom or dad projection—is an incredibly powerful journey, for everyone involved, whether they are actively participating, or not.
Your parents don't need to be alive to do this work. You don't need to be young to do this work. I have watched elderly adults blaze this trail in themselves and radically change their lives long after they've raised their own children and retired. I did it with both of my parents, too, and this singular transformation continues to rock my world.
It's a journey that will change you to the core of your being, and will continue to change you until the day you die.
This is the work we do, together, on the UNBOUND journey. Unbound is a healing, reparenting, transformational journey that puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life. Learn more.
Photo by Autumn Goodman on Unsplash