How to Parent Yourself

all of us were parented for many of us it went well we were loved our views were respected our needs were tended to it helps to make us the more or less same people we are now but for others among us things went really rather badly wrong perhaps there was unreliability anger humiliation violence or worse if there was were liable to have been deeply marked we may even if it all happened quite a number of years ago now keep noticing new ways in which the past is getting in the way of a good life in the present our inadequate parenting experiences undermine our ability to have sound relationships the right sort of confidence and to extend adequate nurture to ourselves we would like of course to move on there is something unbalanced and deeply cruel in the idea of the first 12 years determining the next 50 we cannot change the past but it does remain open to us to correct at least some of its repercussions we may learn to do this through a neglected and yet deeply powerful process we call re parenting how our parents behaved will have laid down a template in our minds about how we should respond to challenges but we don't need to remain forever stuck with a kind of care which we imbibed in the early years we by nature have an ability to parent ourselves what this means is an ability to comfort ourselves at moments of difficulty to interpret the troubles that beset us with imagination and kindness to encourage ourselves in the face of anxiety and loss and to reassure the more fragile agitated parts of us by drawing upon our experience and our serene aspects all this is what good parents naturally do for their children but if this didn't happen to us we can still in adulthood step in and do it for ourselves one part of the mind can speak to the other one part can act as the sane resilient counterweight to the bruised and more immature side of the self we can figuratively put an arm around our own shoulder our experience of the shortfalls of our own parents offer us an expertise that is wasted if it stays stuck at the level of just criticism it should become the template for a far more useful project the creation of an inner ideal parent who acts in all the ways in which the real thing should have done but didn't quite knowing so much about what we did not have enables us to be experts at what we need and should believe we can provide for ourselves we already have the perfect inner parent it's simply in many ways the opposite of the one we had though childhood is a one-off event in material time in psychological time it's endlessly requiring the eight-year-old us is still there and we can talk to it and respond to it in a way that allows it to mature and strengthen in the way it always should have done we can dare to make use of a much underestimated capacity that of re parenting ourselves if you liked this film please subscribe to our Channel and click the bell icon to turn on notifications follow the link on your screen now to see our range of books games and gifts all about self-knowledge

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 538,396

Rating: 4.9168286 out of 5

Keywords: the school of life, education, alain de botton, philosophy, wisdom, talk, secular, improvement, curriculum, big questions, wellness, mindfullness, psychology, botton, self love, putting yourself first, priorities, parent, parents, how to parent yourself, growth, what do I want to do, help, PL-SELF, self parenting tips, نصائح الأبوة والأمومة النفس, dicas de auto-educação, स्वयं पैरेन्टिंग टिप्स, conseils d'auto-parentalité, 自我教育技巧, selbst erziehende Tipps, parenting, family, reparenting, raising kids

Id: ZBXZojt6dpM

Length: 3min 43sec (223 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017