Therapy for Adult Children
Learn how to reparent yourself with love, patience, and understanding.
What is an Adult Child?
According to the Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families organization (ACA), an Adult Child is “someone whose actions and decisions as an adult are guided by childhood experiences grounded in self-doubt or fear.”
Common traits of adult children can include:
Fearing authority figures and angry people
Feeling guilty when setting limits and boundaries
Being overly critical, judgmental, and shaming towards yourself
Taking responsibility for other people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, or not taking responsibility for your own
Being addicted to drama and toxic relationships
Struggling to identify your feelings
Assuming a caretaker role in relationships, acting from a place that’s trying to “fix” or rescue your partner
Identifying your childhood home or upbringing as dysfunctional, with the possible presence of a caregiver’s mental or physical illness, or drug and/or alcohol abuse
What is reparenting?
Reparenting yourself is the process of healing your inner child from the effects of a traumatic or dysfunctional childhood. As an adult you learn to to take responsibility for your own life, grieve the life and relationships you had (or sometimes didn’t have), and release old default ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are rooted in shame and blame from childhood trauma.
Reparenting empowers adult children of emotionally immature parents and adult children of alcoholics to meet their own emotional and physical needs in the ways that they went unmet in childhood. Sometimes referred to as inner child work, learning how to reparent yourself can lead to a new level of self-trust, self-esteem, and self-compassion. As you learn how to reparent yourself, the action and work that you put into healing can transform your relationships, help you gain more peace and presence in your life, and allow you to reimagine the life you create for yourself.
The combination of therapies that I practice and offer to my clients provide a roadmap on how to reparent yourself. Both EMDR Therapy and IFS Therapy provide you with the opportunity to go deep, confronting the earliest wounds and hurts of your inner child so they have a chance to heal; Resource Tapping, trauma processing, and parts work can also help to strengthen your sense of resilience, self-trust, confidence, and overall self-acceptance. Coping Skills and Relationship Coaching will allow you to learn and practice new tools in your relationships with others, as well as in your relationship to yourself.
I can tell you that there is no magic pill, and there is no overnight fix. Doing the work takes mental, emotional, and material resources, and will at times prompt discomfort and difficult emotions, and may take a toll on your relationships. However healing is possible, and as you expand your capacity to feel and tolerate uncomfortable and sometimes painful emotions, you can simultaneously create the same depth of capacity to feel and hold positive emotions like joy, serenity, and love.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”
- Kahlil Gibran