Reparenting Your Younger Self—How to Stop Seeking Approval From Others & Find Inner Security
Episode Notes
Today, we're diving deep into something that touches so many of us—why we seek external validation and approval from others, and how healing our younger parts can set us free. If you've ever found yourself people-pleasing, perfecting, over-performing, or seeking approval from others, this episode is for you.
We’ll explore:
✔️ Why younger parts of us drive our overfunctioning tendencies
✔️ How unmet childhood needs shape our patterns of guilt and perfectionism
✔️ The difference between external validation and true inner security
✔️ My own journey of reconnecting with an 8-year-old part of me (and how it changed everything)
✔️ Simple, practical ways you can start reparenting your younger self today
Whether you're longing for more joy, play, and vitality—or you're ready to step off the hamster wheel of approval-seeking—this episode will give you tools to start reconnecting with the young parts of you that have been waiting for your attention.
Resources:
- Episode 138: Breaking Free from Overfunctioning—Discover the Hidden Costs of Always Being 'The Responsible One’
- Episode 140: If You Struggle with Guilt and Second-Guessing Yourself, This Will Set You Free – How to Stop Blaming Yourself for Things That Aren’t Your Fault
- Boundaries For Your Soul Series on Youtube
- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
- Matthew 19:14
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 6: Do I Really Have an Inner Child? What It Means to Reparent Yourself
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled you're here this week. It's again, just me today. I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with you. They are related to what we discussed in Episode 138, when we explored how over-functioning can stem from our unmet needs and unresolved emotions. These are often rooted in patterns going all the way back to childhood.
Then we discussed in Episode 140 about how false guilt can develop as a way to try to manage our own feelings of helplessness or even sorrow for things that are actually not our responsibility. Both overfunctioning and false guilt are connected to parts of us that learned how to cope by over focusing on others, taking more than our fair share of responsibility.
All of that activity that we do to over-focus on others, to take a lot of responsibility, it’s almost always a cue that there's a young part of us that needs our attention. Today that's what I want to focus on. I want to focus on how we begin to locate and discover these young parts of us.
Once they receive the care and parenting and attention and validation that they needed but never got, that we are now capable of giving them, what it does is it helps soften all of that overfunctioning, all of that perfecting, all of that performing, all of that taking responsibility for things that weren't ours to take responsibility for in the beginning to begin with.
As we begin to learn how to find and locate and care for these young parts inside of us, it shifts how we show up in the world around us with other people. So today we're going to talk about how to reconnect to these young parts of yourself and how, when you do that, it can not only reduce some of our compulsive responsibility taking, our compulsive perfectionism, our compulsive pleasing, our compulsive guilt tripping and self-blame, but also can enrich our inner lives with a renewed sense of wonder and vitality and joy.
These young parts of us, that's what they're all about. Once we discover them and re-parent them, they just bring a wonderful source of playfulness and light. That is what I want to give us just a glimpse of today. To get started, I want to share with you a story recently that happened to me where I was able to reconnect to this eight year old part of me, this young girl.
I've done some of this work for a while, so I kind of have a sense of this part of me and what it feels like when she's active inside of me. But boy, I didn't realize how much I had been exiling her as a result of a lot of overfunctioning, a lot of taking responsibility for things that were not mine to take.
It all started with a trip that my husband had to take for work and invited me to go on with him. It was a trip to London. To be honest, I know this is going to sound crazy, but there was a sort of curmudgeonly overfunctioning part of me that was like, you shouldn't go, you've got too much responsibility. There are too many people who rely on you. You've got too much work to do. That would be really selfish to go on this trip.
It’s this guilt tripping part of me. Gosh, the truth is, there was no reason I couldn't take some time away to go on this trip. I hadn't been to London in maybe 25 years, and I was barely there when I was about 18.
So this was sort of a dream, to be able to do this, and those kind of curmudgeonly parts of me almost weren't going to let me do it. Thankfully, I didn't listen to them. I went on the trip and the truth is, I did have the freedom to go. I'm basically an empty nester. While yes, there are people who rely on me, they will be fine without me.
So I did that work inside my soul. I went on the trip. So imagine, I'm over there. I was kind of trying to figure out, what does this feel like, to be so far away? What do I think about this? One day my husband was doing work and I took a walk down. If you've ever been in London, this really buzzy kind of cool street, it's called Regent street.
There are lots of stores and lots of people and lots of old buildings, and even some cobblestone streets where it's this kind of old world feeling. I was actually walking toward Hyde park, which is close to Kensington Palace. I was kind of taking it all in and trying to figure out, what do I think about all this? How do I even feel about all this? What is happening?
It was just a walk. That's all I was doing was taking a walk. And I began to notice just this sense of almost overwhelming energy, kind of like when you're learning how to ride a bike, like the little kid energy of, I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe we're walking down the streets of London! I need someone to know about this.
That was sort of the overwhelming feeling. I need someone to know about this. Part of me was like, well, what does that even mean? I can't really pick up the phone and call someone because there's a huge time difference. I'm not even sure my phone works here. I don't really want to post on social media because to be honest, I kind of want to be in the moment and be enjoying this.
So it was very confusing to me, this sort of energy of, I need someone to know about how exciting this is. It was, again, this young feeling inside of me. Again, I've been doing this work for a while. So I used these tools, these skills, that I'm constantly trying to teach you about. I decided to get curious about it because again, that overwhelming urge didn't really make rational sense.
I was like, can't I just enjoy this walk? Why do I need to tell somebody? Why do I need to shout it from the rooftops? I felt the energy where it’s like, I need to shout it from the rooftops that this is what's happening. And yet I'm just walking down the street in London, and that didn't really make sense to me. So I decided to get curious about it.
Sure enough, I started to notice this feeling. This overwhelming energy in my body began to feel like a young eight year old part of me. The minute I began to do what we call “differentiate” from her, I realized she wanted me to know about this amazing trip. She didn't need anybody else.
The minute I began to notice her and say, this is exciting, this is amazing, adult me began to give this young part of me that internal validation, it's almost like she calmed down inside my body. It's as if a young little child, this young little part of me, crawled up on my shoulders and could see the sights even better as we're walking down the street.
I know this can sound kind of crazy, but it's real. Imagine your own child, crawling up and just being so excited to see everything. It was like she was with me, and suddenly that urge to tell somebody, to externalize, to get some sort of external validation for what was happening left, because I was there.
I was there, present with this part of myself, noticing with her, yes, this is amazing. I'm so thrilled that we are here. Suddenly it became almost a spiritual practice. Not only am I so thrilled that we're here, there's a sort of gratitude welling up in my soul. I'm giving thanks to God for the joy and wonder of this walk down a random street in London.
Suddenly, there we are, a trio. This young eight year old part of me filled with awe, filled with wonder. There's me there, validating that as an adult, saying yes, this is really, really cool. And, God the Father is there, just delighting in our delight and wonder and sheer joy at this experience, which is the heart of gratitude.
Oh, this is a good gift, God. I am fully present to it right here with God, with me and with this young part of myself. There was this beautiful family with God, with adult me, and this young part of sheer joy inside of me, and man, this was a profound moment that occurred literally just in a walk down a street.
Now, granted, it was a really cool street, but I will tell you, you do not have to go all the way to London to have an experience like this. Since reconnecting to this part of me, I begin to notice her everywhere. I noticed her driving to my local YMCA the other day. I reconnected to her, and now she's a part of me that I've begun to notice and attune to, so that she can bring some of that vitality to me in other contexts.
This experience really made me reflect on and think about how to first of all understand these young parts of us, and why we tend to exile them, shove them aside, and lose contact with them. This is a little bit about what I think Jesus was saying when the disciples were trying to shove the children away from him.
Jesus said, no, no, let the children come. There's something about that childlike heart that exists inside of all of us that is precious to God, and yet parts of us that kind of feel curmudgeonly and have lost that sense of childlike wonder try to shove these parts of us aside. Why do we do that?
Then I want to leave you today with just a couple of practical ways you can begin to reconnect with these young parts inside of you, not only to restore that beautiful internal connection with these young parts, but also to tap into all that they have to offer us.
So let's talk about understanding these young parts. What are they? Where do they come from? Well, if you think about the Internal Family Systems Model of Therapy, IFS, which we talk about a lot on the podcast, you can go back and check out some older episodes of the podcast if you want to get more of a deep dive into the model.
I did a whole series called Boundaries For Your Soul. So if you go to my website, dralisoncook.com/podcast, and look in the search bar for “boundaries for your soul” or “internal family systems”, you will find those episodes. It's a wonderful way of understanding your internal world, these different parts of your own soul.
But one of the types of parts that this model talks about are these young parts of us. These are the parts of us that carry our youngest memories, our deepest vulnerabilities, our deepest curiosities. They also often carry some of our deepest fears, some of our deepest heartaches, from when we were wounded when we were young.
So they carry a lot on our behalf in many ways. They're sort of the blueprint for how we relate to the world and to ourselves. So in the context of over-functioning, these young parts often represent unmet needs for care or attention, unmet longings, which we often attempt to fulfill by taking care of others excessively or simply overfocusing on others.
We might look constantly for external validation from other people, looking for that validation externally versus finding and discovering the joy of that deep down contentment within our own souls.
This battle of scaling back the overfunctioning, the hyper-responsibility, is a two-front war, if you think about it. On one hand, we're trying to curb that impulse to take responsibility for others that is not ours to take. We're trying to scale that back.
On the other side of it, we're trying to reconnect to that young part inside of us that actually does need our care and attention. If you think about my example of that story where that over-responsible part of me was like, I can't take a trip, I've got too many people to care for, I had to scale that back and give myself the gift of a vacation, a break.
Then that allowed that young part of me a window to make herself known to me, that she wanted my attention. It opened up the other side of it, that I could pull her in closer and give her some of that care that I'm so often busy giving out to other people.
I think so often about many of you who are parents out there, where it's so easy to fixate on all the needs of all your kids. It almost feels overwhelming to think, man, I've got a young child inside of me who also needs my care and attention. There's a young eight year old inside of me who I have to find a way to create some space for, and when I can give that young part of me some care and attention, I promise you, we all become far better parents to our children in real life.
I'm going to give you some practical ways to make space for her. But that's part of this process of beginning to heal from some of that over-functioning, from some of that incessant guilt tripping, from some of that taking so much responsibility for other people, from some of that perfectionism, where we're trying to be perfect for others, instead of learning to pull in closer those young ones inside of us who just want our undivided attention in sometimes very random, peculiar seeming ways.
These parts of us sometimes will lure us into an old bookstore where we find an old book that makes some part of us feel alive. They take us on what can feel like side trips and bunny trails. But really, they're trying to invite us back into some wonder and play in our own lives apart from other people.
So why do we push these young parts aside, if they're such a source of wonder and awe and vibrancy and curiosity and playfulness? Why would we push these parts of us aside?
Well, these are survival strategies that other parts of us have learned, to cope in the world. These protective parts of us that want to overfunction, that want to perfect, that want to perform, think that that's our best strategy for survival, for staying connected with others.
They mistakenly seek that external validation from others when what we really need is that inner witnessing, that inner validation, of I am so connected deep within myself with God and with these different parts of me, that I could not feel more full, more vital, more alive inside my own soul.
Yes, while it would be lovely if someone also externally said, that's really cool, if they do, great, but if they don't, I am also okay. That is so often the piece that we're missing. It's great to get external validation. It's great to get approval from others. It's great to get an “attaboy” from a boss.
It's wonderful when our kids or our parents or a spouse say, wow, you did a great job, or thank you, but if we're dependent on that from them, we're going to be on a hamster wheel constantly trying to get their approval, when the more important, deeper, more satisfying road to peace and contentment and joy is from finding that within ourselves.
So when these young parts were never fully parented or seen or securely attached, they tend to drive us to seek fulfillment or validation or approval in other people or places that are never ultimately going to fulfill them or approve them or validate them. We can never fully get that from other people.
But as you learn to reconnect to these young parts of you and become that wise inner parent, that wise loving adult that they so longed for all along in partnership with God, there's a co-parent, there's adult you and God, who come alongside these young parts of us, healing them and restoring that sense of connection.
You create this incredible reservoir of inner safety, of inner security, of inner validation, that is an absolute game changer as you walk through this life. As you do this work, when you get external validation, it's great. You're grateful for it.
If someone says, thank you, if your kids tell you how much you mean to them, or if your spouse really sees you in a certain way, it's wonderful. It's a bonus, but you don't need it so much anymore, because you have learned the joy of finding that within your own inner family.
There are three things that these young parts of us need that we are often not in touch with. Because we are not able to meet their needs, they often drive us to get these needs met externally. Here are the three needs that these young parts have.
Number one, they need connection. They need to feel connected. Often they've been exiled, where they feel lonely and isolated and unseen and invisible. In my case, walking down that street right in London, that part of me was like, I need someone else to see this. It's as if that part of me felt like if no one else saw what was happening, it wouldn't be real.
The minute I could connect to that young part of me, it's like my whole system relaxed. They have a need for connection. Many of them hold attachment wounds, where they didn't feel seen at critical moments, so they're searching for someone, anyone, out there to validate them.
Sometimes these young parts will want that external validation that they're making the right decision. I need someone else to tell me that I'm doing the right thing. That is often a way these young parts show up. I've got this really big, hard, scary decision to make. I need someone else to tell me it's the right thing.
When other parts of us are like, this is my decision to make. I've got to figure out how to make it, that's a cue that there's a young part of you looking for external validation.
Sometimes these young parts search for validation for their feelings. Instead of being able to feel what we feel internally, regardless of whether someone else fully gets it, we search for someone else to say, yes, you should be feeling sad. We search for someone else to validate our feelings.
Now, listen, it's wonderful when a friend, a spouse, a parent, validates our feelings. Also, it is as wonderful, if not more wonderful, when we can learn to witness and honor these feelings inside of ourselves.
Number two, these young parts of us need to feel safe and secure. They are very fearful. They're fearful of rejection. They're fearful of being cut off from other people. So again, when we are not aware of their fears, these parts of us can look for external sources to make them feel safe or secure instead of learning how to find that safety within our own souls.
Again, we do need to feel safe with other people. Also, sometimes other people let us down. Sometimes other people reject us, turn us down, say no, and walk away from us. While that hurts, when we learn to be present for these young parts of our souls and we parent them through that pain and say yes, this is hard and no, you did not deserve that cruel treatment, but I am with you and I will never leave you and God is with you and God will never leave you, we develop a sort of internal security that is not dependent on the whims and on the sometimes erratic behavior of even the best of other people, let alone cruel other people.
These parts of us need to feel safe and secure, and they need most of all, to feel safe and secure inside of us, even when other people let us down.
Number three, these young parts of us need to experience joy and spontaneity and play and curiosity. They do not do well in the context of shame or judgment and criticism. They just wilt like little flowers on a vine. They light up in the presence of unconditional love, in the presence of delight, the delight of the father and the delight of our own selves.
Again, I really love this co-parenting model where we have God, the father, and we have our adult selves, who come alongside these young parts. These young parts of us were often shamed and they carry those burdens, so they need to learn that it is not shameful to show us the things that bring them joy, that bring them delight.
It felt kind of weird to me, when I'm walking down this random street in London, to just be filled with this joy. I'm like, why am I so delighted? But the minute I stopped shaming myself and just let that joy waft over me, I became aware of a young part of me that just delights in the wonder of the fact that I was walking down a block that reminded me of books I had read as a child, those Noelle Streitfeld books about dancing shoes and ballet shoes.
It was like all these young parts of me were lit up with joy. I decided to go with it instead of trying to shut it down. These young parts thrive when we let them play and create and find freedom to explore the world with wonder, when we don't try to exile them out of embarrassment.
When their needs are suppressed, we might find ourselves feeling stifled or joyless. When we stifle these young parts of ourselves, they'll go seeking out a sort of adventure in maybe a relationship that is exciting, but that isn't actually healthy for us. Maybe it's got a lot of drama, but it's ultimately not healthy for us.
Or they'll seek it out in other ways. But when we engage these young parts in activities that spark genuine happiness and allow them space to be playful, we help heal and integrate these parts into our adult lives.
So again, these young parts of us, they want connection, they need safety, and they need to feel a sense of wonder and play and joy.
When you begin to understand the needs of these young parts of you, you can begin to cultivate habits and rhythms and spaces where you can reconnect with them intentionally and begin to heal some of that connection internally, so these parts of you feel seen and validated from you. They begin to get those needs met in healthier ways.
I want to close today's episode with a couple of really practical ways that you can begin to re-engage these young parts of you. Now, I do want to give this one caveat–Aundi Kolber and I touched on this in last week's episode, Episode 141, but sometimes if there's a deep reservoir of pain, reconnecting with these young parts can feel overwhelming because there's a lot that they're holding.
If in doing some of these things, you notice, whoa, this feels overwhelming, or, oh, this feels like too much, notice that. That is a cue that maybe there's a backlog of pain there. Maybe there's a Pandora's box there that you need to get professional help with, perhaps a therapist or a trusted advisor, so that you're not taking that journey alone.
Here are four ways that you could begin to reconnect with the young parts of yourself.
Number one, this I got from the wonderful Julia Cameron who wrote a beautiful book called The Artist's Way. I highly recommend it as a way to reconnect with these young parts. But she calls it taking yourself on a date each week. What if you could take yourself on a date and notice what would genuinely feel fun to you?
Even if you only have a half an hour, even if you only have an hour, what would genuinely feel fun? Is it a walk through a park? Is it a jump in a pond or in a pool at the local YMCA? Is it taking a run? Is it listening to a particular song that makes you feel a certain way?
The point of this exercise is to simply notice, if I could take myself on a date, this young part of me on a date, what would she want to do? Let her take you down that rabbit trail. Don't analyze it. Don't try to make it rational. Just notice what would kind of feel fun. Maybe I want to go into the town library and pull out some old books that I used to love, and just kind of indulge that part of me that used to love reading certain kids books.
It could be that simple. This does not have to be lofty, but think about what would you do if you took younger you on an excursion once a week. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. Notice what would feel fun to you.
Number two is building in some time for creativity in your week, maybe letting yourself draw without structure, without rules, without pressure on an outcome. Just draw or play with clay or even dance freely to your favorite music. These kinds of unstructured creative activities allow our young parts to express themselves in sometimes surprising ways. I'm going to just draw for 20 minutes and see what comes out of me. You begin to kind of tap into those young parts inside of you.
Number three is creating comfort rituals. Now, many of us do this already, but I mean doing this with intention. Establishing a ritual that is soothing and comforting, such as rocking yourself in a rocking chair with a blanket that you love, or snuggling up in the sunshine with a soft blanket, maybe with pets if you have them.
Notice what that feels like to the young part of you. Again, many of us have these rituals already, but we're not necessarily doing them while mindful that this is something we're doing to nurture an eight year old us. When I retreat to my favorite couch at night and I pull up my blanket and I feel that feeling of, this is my moment, no matter how short it is, I'm trying to be better about becoming aware that I'm doing this for her.
I'm doing this for eight year old me. I've spent much of the day taking care of other people. This is a moment where I'm taking care of this young child inside of me. There's a way in which, when I do that mindfully and intentionally, some new details come to mind. Oh, she really does like that blanket, not this blanket.
Oh, she loves this rocking motion, or actually she likes that chair, not this chair. You begin to be really specific about this young part of you and her needs for comfort and for feeling safe and secure.
Lastly, and this is one that can conjure up some painful emotions initially, but it can be so revealing, is to find a photo of yourself from when you were young, maybe eight years old, seven years old, nine years old, just a photo that kind of speaks to you and put it up somewhere.
Notice how you feel toward the young person in that photo. Notice if you feel any criticism or shame or negative feelings. Those are coming from other parts of you, because this younger version of you is precious. She is precious. There is no other way to behold her but with pure wonder.
That is how God beholds her and that is how you, when you are living from that wise adult place inside of you, can learn to behold her. So no matter what you notice when you take a look at that image, just pay attention to that and see if you can connect to that younger part of you through that image with compassion, with curiosity, with even a sense of that love or that joy in your heart.
If you can't, that's okay. Just notice that too. That's a cue that there might be a little bit more work to do because there's some shame there. There are some wounds there, where you've been disconnected from this younger version of you, and that's okay. That's a journey you can take to heal.
Looking at that picture, begin to notice what it feels like to reconnect to her. You can imagine how it feels when you look at pictures of your own children and the love that you feel in your heart toward your children in real life, if you have them–that joy that you feel when you look at them and, and that parental affection that wells up when you see photos and images of your children when they were younger.
If you don't have children, if you have a niece or a nephew or a family member or a friend, and you see that image of them as a child, just the joy that you feel to behold them–that's what we want to feel when we connect with these younger parts of ourselves. They are worthy of that.
That is how God sees and experiences and beholds these young parts of you he adores. Your 8-year-old self, he sees her as beautiful. He sees this young one inside of you as precious. He says, I want her to draw near, and you can begin to see her that way too.
So notice what it feels like to connect to her through that photo and see if you can begin to build that connection with her that way.
When you engage in these activities, like taking yourself on a special date, a special excursion, indulging in playful creativity, establishing a really specific comfort ritual, or really looking at an image of yourself at a younger age with eyes of love and compassion, you are consciously and intentionally developing that connection with that younger part of you.
You're fostering a healing environment where that younger part of you can begin to thrive and trust that you are the adult in the room, and that you have what it takes to meet her needs. You have what it takes to care for her, to nurture her, to honor her, to protect her, to comfort her.
No matter what happens in your external world with your relationships around you, you have what it takes to show up for her.
Reconnecting with these young parts of ourselves isn't about indulging in foolishness or childlike antics. Instead, it is a crucial part of integrating these parts with our adult selves. We need these young parts of us to be reunited with our internal families. As we scale back on over-functioning for others and shift even a little bit inside ourselves to caring for the young one within us, we become more whole, more vital, and more vibrant.
We become better equipped to show up in our adult lives. These young parts of us that lure us to seek external validation, external approval, learn that they have a resource inside of you that is far better equipped to help meet those needs in partnership with God than anyone else is.
You begin to live your life with more authenticity, with healthier boundaries in your relationships, with realistic expectations of other people, where you are delighted when other people get you and see you and honor you, but you are also not rocked when they disappoint you and don't get you and even turn away from you.
Because you know your worth, your value, and your belovedness at the deepest parts of your being. Remember Jesus' words found in Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”.
That little young child inside of you is precious and she is worth your efforts to find her, to see her, and to bring her back into a beautiful, vital relationship inside your internal family.