How to Re-mother Your Exile Parts & Build Inner Attachment For Parentified Adult Children
Your Self-energy can hold everything in you in need of mothering. Here are 5 IFS-inspired, attachment-informed reminders for your young parentified parts.
It's Mother's Day, and if my therapy career has taught me anything, it's that today brings up a mix of feelings for parentified adult children, especially if you are a mother yourself.
Today can feel complicated. It's allowed to be.
You might you feel a sense of obligation to celebrate your mom, but guilt for not fully connecting to feelings of appreciation as you reflect on your mother wounds and history of emotional neglect.
You might experience gratitude for your children alongside grief that you lack the closeness to your mother that you cultivate with them.
You might feel longing for your own children alongside fear about what being a mother might mean for other areas of your life and parts of who you are.
And you even might miss your mom, even as other parts of you feel angry and disappointed, and wonder if it's your mom you're missing or what your fantasying parts idealized as the mom they needed rather than the one they got.
Allow all of you to exist, exactly as it is today, and trust that it all makes sense.
Part of healing from experiences of parentification involves treating all parts of us with the compassion and protection of a loving parent. In doing so, we become the loving parent we needed when we were younger and grow ourselves up. We mature into what founder of the NARM approach for treating developmental trauma Laurence Heller calls "healthy adult consciousness.” We can sit with our experience without indulging in reactivity. We can validate our emotions and still take in other perspectives. We can make decisions that are right for us even when they're not what every part of us wants.
We can lead with what IFS deems our Self-energy, the deeper awareness inside that can hold all of our parts. In my experience, young parts are hungry for connection to Self and are responsive to invitations to befriend them. When young parts, or what we call exiles in IFS, are traumatized, they exist in heightened emotional states and distorted core beliefs. But before exiles were traumatized, they connected you to your vitality. They carried gifts of connection and creativity, tenderness and vulnerability.
The work of healing is the work of unburdening these young parts from their traumatized states. And in unburdening them, you receive the gift they were suppressed from giving when they were traumatized.
How to unburden young parts? We start with befriending them.
As you navigate Mother's Day and your journey of healing, here's how you can hold your young parts with the grace and love of a mother, and in befriending them, re-mother yourself:
REMIND YOUR YOUNG PARTS THAT THEY ARE WANTED
Dr. Gordon Neufeld says that belonging is one of the six core attachment needs of the young child. Young children want to feel a sense of loyalty from you. They need to know that their company is wanted and presence delighted in. Your young parts need this reminder: no matter how big their feelings are and scary their fears are, no matter what other parts think about them and what other people have said about them, you know that they belong in your system and you want them to be present.
REMIND YOUR YOUNG PARTS THAT THEIR PERSPECTIVES MAKE SENSE
Children rely on adults to make their experiences coherent, or digestible and understable. Young parts are frozen in time in their age state, and thus have very young, outdated perspectives. In order for these parts to integrate with the rest of your system and access the adaptive information that your adult self holds, their perspectives need to be acknowledged first. See your parts' experience through their eyes, and help them connect the dots. Your young parts need this reminder: they have good reason for seeing the world the way that they do, and you can help them live in your world now where they are safe, wanted, and loved.
REMIND YOUR YOUNG PARTS THAT THEY CAN FEEL EXACTLY HOW THEY FEEL
Research shows that when emotions are named and validated, the amygdala, or the part of the brain responsible for the fight or flight response, deactivates. When young parts are validated for how they feel instead of convinced out of their feelings, they relax, coregulate, and become open to the wisdom of your healthy adult awareness and move out of their frozen perspectives and overwhelming emotions. Your young parts need this reminder: their feelings are completely welcome as they are, and you can hold them until they feel safe again.
REMIND YOUR YOUNG PARTS THAT THEY HAVE GIFTS TO SHARE
Before young parts internalized negative messages about their qualities, they embodied and expressed gifts of aliveness. Exile parts are sensitive, tender, and loving. They are curious, open, and creative. They are connected, spiritual, and reverent toward life. These gifts still exist underneath the layers of trauma and negative messages they've absorbed about their worth. Your young parts need this reminder: they bear gifts that help you connect to the pleasure, beauty, and purposefulness of life and you are committed to retrieving and celebrating their gifts.
REMIND YOUR YOUNG PARTS THAT THEY ARE LOVED
This is the most essential core attachment need: all children need to know that they are completely and utterly adored, that they have someone who will do anything for them, and that they are loved for who they are and rather than what they do or how they perform. When young parts are traumatized, they absorb messages that they are unlovable and alone. Your young parts need this reminder: that you love them fiercely and believe in them, and that you will always love them, exactly as they are and for who they are.
Your young parts can count on you to be their best bet, and in showing up for them, you will discover that you are the loving parent they needed when you were younger.
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Thank you for writing this! It gives me better insight and understanding in what I’m trying to do with parts work. It resonates a lot—because I see and feel it working as I acknowledge and welcome back those exiled parts. In doing this work I feel calmer, more peaceful, grounded, and integrated.
I found this post so helpful and it made me think/feel all those innate qualities that make me who I am, yet had to suppress in order to feel loved. As I navigate my way through my own personal journey, I can sense the 'real me' showing herself a little more each day. It feels scary, as if I could be shouted down any minute, but I'm keeping going! Thank you for such an interesting and helpful newsletter 🤍 Karen