If you've been following me for a bit, you may have noticed a transition in the work that I'm doing and how I’m supporting our neurodivergent community.
Through my work, education, and personal experiences, my perspective has really been shifting from focusing on supporting the kids to supporting the mothers- because they are truly the root.
As mothers, when we can embody:
Our higher selves
Our imperfections
Our differences in a way that we radically accept ourselves.
It allows us to then radically accept our children. It allows us to create connection in a way that is deep and meaningful and present.
When we're in denial or we're ashamed or we're hiding or masking or conforming to feel approved and loved by people based on a version of us that isn't us. We're going to pass that inauthenticity down to our kids.
Unintentionally, we're going to then support them in doing the same because kids do what we do, right? What we're modeling is so much more powerful than our words. It's like we can say: “Be true to yourself” and if we're not true to ourselves- nothing will change.
This ADHD community holds a lot of shame, a lot of pain, a lot of grief, I feel from feeling:
Misunderstood
Alone
Like we don't really fit in.
And really feeling unseen in our experiences.
And that's painful.
And so as adults, we carry these wounds, whether they came from our parents, society, our culture, our school settings, from our teachers or all of the above. We carry these things within ourselves on some level, whether we're fully aware of them or not, and it impacts us:
It impacts the way we feel about ourselves.
It impacts the way we show up in the world.
It impacts our nervous system.
How we respond to environments and situations and relationships.
It really impacts everything.
And so this idea of reparenting ourselves as mothers, I feel, is the path of least resistance to truly heal ourselves and then inadvertently (without a whole lot of effort) heal our kids and our kids' kids.
Really shifting this generational experience that we're having within families and within our collective that's harmful.
How do we reparent ourselves?
So how do we do this? How do we show up for ourselves in a way that wasn't modeled for us? How do we heal these wounds that we, with our minds intellectually understand, we want to be different, but maybe have no idea how to actually create change in our lives?
I know for myself, in real time, that process has taken me years because I get these nuggets of understanding. But then it takes me a long time to embody this new way.
And this is where reparenting myself has really come in as a game changer in my life.
Reparenting Defined
As neurodivergent people, we are highly sensitive and we're picking up on all the things in this deep intense way. And as an added layer of that, many of us in my generation, I'm 45, who are mothering with kids still in their household- we're coming to this realization that the way we were raised, the messages we received- they're not right. We're all, like: “There's something wrong with this? Something’s amiss?”
But at the same time, we weren't given the tools and nothing was modeled for us as far as:
How to create healthy attachments
Or how to consciously parent
Or how to regulate our own emotions so that we can co-regulate with our children.
None of that was shown, modeled, or received. And yet we're intellectually in this place of understanding that that's important.
Reparenting is: giving your adult-self the self-regulation tools, emotional encouragement and support, and healthy boundaries that you didn’t receive as a child.
Reparenting puts us really in this interesting position of needing to give these things that we never got ourselves while also feeling this responsibility to shift cycles, heal, and pass this new way down to our own kids.
It's such a wonderful opportunity. And yet it's also hard, right? Because we're the first trying to do it in this new way.
As you know, Mothering is hard and a huge responsibility- period. And then you add this other layer of reparenting yourself as a human and giving yourself the things that you never received as a child. And it just adds a whole other component.
And this isn't to shame or bash previous generations, because it's like, you know, what you know, when you know it, right?
I think it's just part of the human evolution and that we're becoming more conscious from generation to generation. We're supposed to be growing and evolving with every generation. I just think that, those of us mothering right now are in a really unique position where we have an awareness that generations before us didn't have. But we're the first generation to really have that awareness and so we are literally reparenting ourselves while we parent our own children.
Creating Healthy Boundaries Between Our Past and Present
And so, as cycle breakers, how do we begin to understand the history of others, of our parents or whatever adult you've felt some trauma from- and having compassion for what brought them to their journey? While understanding our own history and compassion for our experience….. without losing ourselves in that?
Prentis Hemphill, said:
Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.
And I love that. I think it's so beautiful. And in order to do that, it takes:
Showing up for ourself as that adult we didn't have as a child.
To hold us through that experience that we are safe, even when we aren't perfect.
We are safe, even when we disappoint people.
We're safe, when we say no.
We are safe, when we listen to our bodies, even if we don't understand it with our minds, because we trust ourselves.
Building Our Self-Trust
And I think that has really been this turning point in my own life. In building my own self-trust and my self-confidence. And in being able to let people in. Because I know I can keep myself safe.
It's about, how do we find safety within, while being radically committed to never abandoning ourselves and maintaining this compassion for ourselves and others.
I feel like that is where it's at. And it feels so empowering and loving. The duality of that: feeling empowered and loving towards myself and others while being unapologetically committed to having my own back.
Redefining the Way We Talk to Ourselves (and Others)
Because it's really this flip, right?
We need to reframe what is strength?
What is what is healthy?
Because what we've been taught has actually been of disservice.
And now we're in this position where we want to support our children in being emotionally healthy and becoming emotionally mature, literate adults. And so in order to provide that for them, it starts with us, right?
We have to reparent ourselves first and create that safety within our own body and have these tools and skills to self-regulate our own emotions and befriend our own nervous system so that we can then hold the space to model how to do that for our own kids. And how to be there as a safe space for them. And not shame them for having their big feelings and their experiences and trying to solve and fix and make all the things go away.
And instead allowing all of us to feel what is.
That is what I want for me and my kids.
And I feel like as women, when we're able to step into that for ourselves, that's when we can so effortlessly model and pass that down to the generations after us.
They say, if you can pass down trauma, you can pass down healing.
So this topic of reparenting is just fascinating to me. And I think we're in this really pivotal role and time.
Reparenting is a beautiful gift for our future generations. But for those of us who are trying to break cycles and show up differently, it also means we need tools, support and community and it needs to be okay to talk about.
We need to find other like-minded people who are also consciously parenting ourselves and our children and are wanting to shift the narrative- for our own emotional well-being while we walk this path.
If you haven't checked it out yet- I've been sharing my favorite go to’s for emotional regulation:
Creating your ‘Self-Regulation Toolbox’ is not about finding ways to make the big feelings go away and never come back, but is instead about having the tools to be with what is in ways that feel safer in our body.
So if you haven't checked those out- those are in there for you too.
Let me know which are high payoffs for you, or if you have other strategies that you find help you with moving through the big feelings and the challenges that come up with reparenting ourselves as ADHD moms. I'd love to hear from you.
P.S. Want to create your own self-regulation toolbox and work on reparenting yourself together? I’d love to support you in my paid community for ADHD Moms. Click here to learn more
What is reparenting?