Tending to our younger parts

How parts work can help us become the loving parents we may of never had.

In last week’s writing, I shared the invitation to build a bigger basket. The intention to expand our window of tolerance and be present with the sensations in our bodies.

One way to build this bigger basket is to sit with ourselves. This could be in meditation, or through journaling, or anyway that allows you to be with yourself and whatever is happening in your body.

For years, I could not sit with myself and let myself experience the sensations in my body. I am still learning how to be with what I feel. I would go into narrative mode and write the story of what was happening instead of feeling what I felt. This was protective, feelings weren’t safe to feel in my childhood home.

I am learning to stay with sensations in my body. I am learning to listen to the parts of myself that need tending. If you have never hear of parts work, this is what I share in the vignette below. I am sitting with a smaller part of myself and dialoging with her.

If this feels wildly foreign to you, I understand. I remember the first few times my therapist posed the question of “how old do you feel right now?” and I had no idea what she meant. But this question has been one of the most used tools in my journey of building a bigger basket.

How old do I feel right now?

This helps us get an understanding how who is present inside of us, what parts of self are coming to the forefront in the experience we are having.

It happens all the time the shifting of small parts to the forefront of our being, but when we aren’t slowing down to ask the question, we think it is our irrational big feelings guiding us through life, when often it is a smaller part who is in need of something only you can give them.

Often the need is your presence, your words, your attention. Sometimes there is an ask of you in the name of this part. Sometimes the part needs a witness like in my example below.

I sat with myself in meditation and I saw myself around 4 years old. She was sitting in the living room on her big comfy couch with her cosy and baby doll. She was watching tv. Her mother was ignoring her and set her up in front of the TV until dad came home.

Dad came home later than mom wanted and she was mad, they argued for a minute before dad found my younger self and gave her a big hug. Then he left to shower, but first he had a smoke. And mom went to the bedroom to cry. Younger me was left alone again.

Holding these memories, I felt full of sadness and grief. The little one inside of me felt restless and scared. She desperately wanted love and she wanted love to stay for more than a few minutes at a time. She asked me for chocolate milk and I gave it to her. She tried to comfort herself with her favorite belongings and her show on the TV. But it was not enough.

In my mind, I sat with her. She grew so uncomfortable, I held her and rocked her. I sat on my cushion holding her in my mind’s eye. She cried, I cried. She eventually settled enough to tell me she wanted to sleep.

I took her to her room. The room with no doors, open archways and the ABCs stenciled on the walls. Her white plastic kiddie bed in the middle of them room, on top of it laid her Little Mermaid comforter. We laid down there together, I cuddled her as she fell asleep.

I felt these words rise up in my throat…“there is nothing you could ever do to make me stop loving you.”

I cry and these words soothe her to sleep. Words I tell my son every night, words not even of my own creation but something I once read on Instagram and they rang true to me so, I started saying them to my son each time I put him to sleep.

As I sat in meditation, repeating these words to my inner child, I felt a profound sense of grief and recognition. How much I never felt loved, how inconsistent it felt, how fleeting, how hard it felt to come by, how I had to contort myself in knots for it, how I was left alone with my big feelings, how the adults in the room never made sense of anything for me.

Love felt inconsistent and ripe with conditions, rules, and expectations. I was not loved for me, I was not loved for being myself. I sat with this and I held it all.

As I sat with this memory in meditation, I was reminded of how much my father worked, and I did not get a lot of time with him. He died when I was 12 years old. He felt safe, his love had less conditions than my mother’s, but it was not freely given.

There is nothing my son could do that would ever make me stop loving him. There is nothing he could do that would change the way I feel about him. I long to give him my love freely. I long for him to feel accepted as he is. I long for him to emerge into his teenager years feeling like himself and not dismembered.

And it starts with me. It starts with my tending to my inner child. It starts with me learning how to love myself, specifically to give love and recognition to those wounded parts of self. It requires me to sit still and feel.

Until this experience, I didn’t hold these memories in my consciousness but feeling the energy of this inner child in my body, she brought it all back to me.

I cannot change our experiences, but I can sit with what arises. I can sit with the grief of my inner 4 year old. I can tend to her, I can tell her the things she never heard and still desperately needs to hear.

There is nothing she could ever do that would make me stop loving her.

There is nothing she could ever do that would make me stop loving her.

There is nothing she could ever do that would make me stop loving her.

Because my love is unconditional.

This is how we reparent ourselves by tending to our inner children. This is how we give ourselves the love and recognition we craved as children by listening to our inner children. This is how we make space in our bodies to parent our children with a clear perspective. This is how we see our children as they are and not as small versions of ourselves.

This is how we do things differently.

I once had a therapist tell me there was nothing I could ever do to change the experiences I had with my mother. There was nothing I could do to change my mother into a loving and nurturing parent. Nothing was going to change the initial wounds I received.

This was freeing information because I spent a lot of energy trying to fix the original wound. Reparenting and tending to our smaller parts is not about changing our experiences. It is about nurturing ourselves and giving ourselves what we needed in those moments.

What was lacking when I was four?

I was not feeling seen and I needed attention. My attention to this part of myself acted as a healing balm to the wound. It did not change my experience but it changed what the experience feels like in my body now.

When I think back on being four, there is grief and sadness, but there is less tension. And I can see my adult self there now, I find this to be true with any part I work with. Once I go in and tend to a smaller part of myself, the adult me is also woven into that memory. It is healing and it is freeing.

I could write forever about how this work, not necessarily parts work although I am a huge fan, but any work that tends to ourselves, our wounds, and moves stagnation through our bodies, is a necessity as mothers.

This sort of work creates more space in our bodies and it gives us more room to be present. When these inner children are not attended to, they show up and they influence our parenting (I will be writing more soon about my experiences of this). I have made choices for my son but I was really protecting smaller versions of myself.

The more we tend to the smaller versions of ourselves, the more we can see our living small humans with clarity. We can seem them alive, whole, and themselves in this moment. We can free them from our projections. We can parent them in the way they need, not the way we may have needed.

This practice is not about trying to change the past, but releasing the tension and grief that are longing to leave the body.

How can you tend to younger versions of yourself?

How can you tend to your adult self?

How does your child’s needs differ from the needs of your younger parts?

I find this work is never ending in a beautiful way.

I need less tending to then I have in the past. The more I presence myself in my life and in my body, the more I am here in my adult self. I know the ability to be embodied came from spending time with my smaller parts…learning them, listening to them, holding them, helping them move through their feelings.

This is one way we can heal. This is one way to build a bigger basket. This is one way to find more ease in our bodies and space to be in motherhood.

Please, share with me your thoughts and reflections in the comments, I would love to hear from you.

Love,

Emma

Thank you for reading and if you are new here, welcome! I invite you to read this to learn more about this space and how to contribute. Here, I explore mothering, healing, shifting patterns, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood.

If you know someone who is on the journey of motherhood and healing, I invite you to share this with them. It means so much to me when you share my words with someone you love.

Recent writings you might have missed…

• Let’s build a bigger basket, together - how tending to ourselves, understanding our window of tolerance, and breathing can shift how we be in motherhood.

• Unspoken Words: Volume 11 & Volume 12 - sharing mothers experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.

• All the versions I was before - claiming my path as a writer

• Have the strength to look - what I wish someone would have said to me before I became a mother.