Becoming Your Own Mother — Reparenting the Adoptee Inner Child

There's a little one inside you who's been waiting a very long time. For adoptees, she's often younger than words — holding the original loss alone since before you had memory of it. This week, we go inward to meet her.

I'm braiding together three things that changed how I do this work: Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) to understand your parts — the wounded "exile" and the protectors guarding her; Self energy, the calm, undamaged inner parent that's been in you all along; and a real, repeatable reparenting process from Thais Gibson, plus the tender inner-child practice Gabby Bernstein teaches so well.

Then we don't just talk about it — I guide you through an inner-child healing meditation, right here in the episode, so you can meet her yourself.

This is the work that changes everything. Once she knows she's not alone in there — that there's finally an adult in the room, and it's you — the whole system softens. The protectors lay down their weapons. And you get to live as the person you always were underneath the survival.

Inside the episode:

• What the inner child really is — and why, for us, she's often much younger than expected
• Exiles and protectors, made simple: the wounded young parts, and the coping that guards them
• Self energy and the 8 C's — the inner parent no loss could ever touch
• Why the adoptee inner child is especially young and guarded — and how each attachment style guards her differently
• A reparenting process you can use in real time, plus the simple three: soothe, validate, reassure
• A guided meditation to meet her, ask what she needs, and bring her home

"You spent your whole childhood waiting for a parent who could reach the part of you that hurts. The plot twist of your healing is that the parent you were waiting for is the one who's been carrying her this whole time."

Mentioned in this episode:

• Richard Schwartz — Internal Family Systems: Self, exiles, protectors, the 8 C's
• Gabby Bernstein — Dear Gabby ("How to Connect with Your Inner Child") and Happy Days
• Thais Gibson + The Personal Development School — reparenting and Integrated Attachment Theory
• Episode 6 (coping mechanisms, the BTEA loop) and Episode 7 (somatics, the nervous system, the "voo")
• Seoul Tour Guide Alex Kim - https://www.facebook.com/groups/koreatravelguide

Resources & Links:

• Free Adoptee Workshop Sunday, June 28 @1:00 PM EST - The Art of Healing Attachments: You've felt the pattern your whole life — now give it a name. Take the quiz live and finally understand why you connect, and pull away, the way you do. You'll leave with real language for something you've carried for years. Join us for doing the deeper work to heal through subconscious reprogramming, somatics, and sharing with community! Sign up for the workshop by joining my free adoptee community on Skool (link below).
• Join The Empowered Adoptee Circle (free): https://www.skool.com/the-empowered-adoptee-7690/about
• Submit Your Question for Dear Claire: https://forms.gle/Z6mc6CxbY35jxkE5A
• Work 1:1 with Claire: claire@coachwithclaire.com 

Connect with Claire:

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• Join the Empowered Adoptee Circle: https://www.skool.com/the-empowered-adoptee-7690/about
• Work With Me: Website and Email: claire@coachwithclaire.com 
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Transcript

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So maybe you have spent your whole life waiting for a parent who could finally reach the part of you that hurts. Maybe you waited for your birth mother. Maybe you waited for your adoptive mother. Maybe you waited for both. And neither one could quite get there. And maybe somewhere along the way, you decided that the kind of mothering you needed just wasn't coming to you. Maybe you've missed your window. Maybe you'd have to white knuckle the rest of it alone. So here's the plot twist. The parent you have been waiting for is the one who's been carrying her or him or them the whole time. It's you. It was always going to be you. And I want to weave these three things together for you today because each one gives us a different piece. The first is internal family systems, or commonly known as IFS, and this is the work of a brilliant therapist named Dr. Richard Schwartz. This is a model that's going to help us understand what the inner child even is and why all of our coping makes so much sense. The second work is Gabby Bernstein. If you've ever listened to her show, Dear Gabby, you know she does this inner child work so beautifully. And the third is Thais Gibson because her work on integrated attachment theory has helped shape so much of how I work, and she has a reparenting framework that gives us the actual steps, the repeatable process. So we don't just feel the work, we know exactly how to do it. Again, these three parts are going to help us put it all together. IFS tells us who is in there. Gabby shows us how to be with her or him, and Thais gives us the process. And then I'm gonna layer in what's specifically true for us adoptees. I'm gonna also tell you about my trip to Seoul this past week, and it wasn't until I was actually standing barefoot in a river. And welcome, we'll get to it later, I promise you. Okay, let's start with what we even mean by inner child, because I think this phrase has maybe gotten a little fluffy, a little Instagram-y, and I want to ground it for you in something real. Okay, here's the truth. And Gabby, she says this so well. We like to think of ourselves as one solid, consistent adult person. Like I'm 52, okay, I'm a grown woman, I pay my taxes, I run my business, I make appointments. But the reality is we are not one consistent self walking around, we are a whole collection of parts, and a lot of those parts are frozen in time. So you know this is true if you've ever watched yourself react to something and gone, whoa, what the heck? Where did that come from? Maybe this was not your typical 40 or 50 or whatever age response that you are. Maybe you got a certain tone of voice from someone, and suddenly you're back to seven years old and you want to disappear. Maybe your partner takes too long to text back, and suddenly you're not a competent adult at all. You're like this tiny child who is certain that they are about to be abandoned. Someone maybe gives you feedback at work, and the floor like literally drops out. Maybe you're back to feeling five years old again, and you're just wanting someone to tell you that you're okay. That is your inner child, or really your inner children, because there's usually more than one. There's a collection of young parts inside of us that never got the support that they needed, and they didn't actually grow up, they got frozen at the age that the wounding happened. So while you may think that, oh gosh, I'm 40, you might be spending a huge amount of your day just living out of your five-year-old part or your three-year-old part or your newborn part. So I want to tell you a story about myself because this is exactly how it works, and I think it might help you identify what is going on in your own life. Okay, about 10 years ago, I was with my ex uh partner, and one day, like we were just sitting together, chatting. You know, I think we were at happy hour, and just out of nowhere, he announced that he was considering taking a job that was like all the way across the country, and he was like talking about it, like he was going to take this job if he if he got accepted, and he was gonna be going without me, and he was leaving me behind. Now, a regulated 40-something adult would have maybe felt hurt, maybe really disappointed, maybe even angry. Yeah, then she would have gone on to maybe grieve the relationship ending and eventually move through it. But this isn't what happened to me. What happened to me is like I literally fell apart completely in that bar, like I was this grown woman, and I was losing a relationship in my mind, but I felt like I was this tiny child being ripped away from the only safety that I'd ever known, and the grief was so much. Okay, the panic was so much, and it was so wildly out of proportion to just the fact that my boyfriend was considering taking a job that some part of me knew it. Well, even though I was just drowning in all of this, and like it wasn't really about him, it landed on something so much older in me. And let me just tie it back to a memory, a core memory that I remembered later on. This was when I was about five years old, my adoptive mom uh she got very sick, and I was put on an airplane with my brother and sister, and we were sent to stay with my grandmother while she got better. And here's the part that like breaks my heart for that little five-year-old girl, every time I think about her. As a Korean adoptee, I just didn't understand that you're going to go to grandma's for a little while, and then after my mom got better, um, we were gonna come back. But what my five-year-old nervous system understood was I'm being sent away again, and I felt that like core memory, I was on an airplane, I was not really feeling safe, I didn't know what was happening, and I just felt like they were sending me back to Korea, and I genuinely thought that's what was happening, and I thought I was being relinquished all over again. So that five-year-old girl, the one on the airplane, was certain that she was being given up all over again, and she got frozen right there. Okay, this part of her was exiled while she was holding that exact terror and um and fear in her body. And then decades later, like many decades later, when my boyfriend stood in front of me and said, I'm leaving you. That door to that back room just flew open again. It was not the 40-year-old who answered, it was that five-year-old self. That five-year-old me, um, my inner child was on that plane and absolutely certain all over again that she was being sent back. And that is what it means to be stuck at the age of a wound. That is an exile part that is fully activated. And once I could finally see it, once I could go, oh, wait, this isn't um a 40-year-old's heartbreak. This is a five-year-old who thinks that she's on that plane again. Everything changed for me. Because then I could do the very thing that we're learning today. I could turn to her, I could say, darling, we're not on that plane today. We are not being sent back. I am right here. I'm not letting go of you, and he can leave. I'm not going anywhere. And here's the thing about that little girl on the plane. She wasn't even the youngest one in there because this is where the adoptee piece gets even more tender. So let me slow down right here. For most people, when they go looking for their inner child, they find a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, maybe a part that got wounded once they already had words, they already had memories, and already had some kind of sense of who they were. But for us, adoptees, the original wound is sometimes way older than that. It goes back to pre-verbal days, and maybe it happened in the very first hours after being born, maybe the very first days or weeks or months. Um, this loss of her birth mother, you know, her smell, her heartbeat, her voice. And the only environment that our nervous system had ever really known that happened to a body that had no words, no concept of time, no way to understand that this wasn't the end of the world. To a newborn nervous system, the disappearance of her mother is like the end of the world. It's like surviving. Okay, this is like survival-level catastrophe. So when an adoptee goes inward to find her inner child, very often she doesn't find a chatty five-year-old, but maybe she finds this baby who is frozen in a moment of terror and grief. And that's part of why this work can feel so hard for us to access and so scary. Because the part we we most need to reach, it can't speak, so she can only feel, and she can only signal through the body that this panic, that ache, that bracing that we talked about in the last episode about somatics. That's what's happening. And then here's the other layer that's specific to us. A lot of you were then raised by adoptive parents who loved you, who genuinely tried to do their best with the resources that they had, but they were not really able to reach that original wound, that primal wound, either because they didn't know it was there, or because the culture told everyone that a baby doesn't remember, there's nothing to grieve. You you know, you get to work with a blank slate here. So you often got parented. You know, it might have been great parenting on the surface, but the little one underneath, the one that's holding that first loss, she or he or they stayed alone in there, okay, unreached sometimes for decades. Which means the reparenting we're doing today is really not a luxury, it's not this woo-woo self-help thing. This is the work that we need to be doing. It is reaching the child that no one, not your birth mother who couldn't stay, not your adoptive mother who couldn't see her, really truly see her, that no one has been able to reach until now, until you. And before you panic and think, I don't even know how to find a baby with no words inside myself. Just don't worry, we're gonna do this together slowly. And all you have to bring is just the willingness to be open, open your heart up, and the little one inside you is going to do the rest, okay? Because she's been waiting a very, very long time for you to return toward her. Now I've told you about the wounded one, the one on the plane, the baby with no words, and we're going to go to her. And before we do, I have to tell you about a different one that I met just this past week because I almost missed her. Here's the thing that no one told me before about my exiles, and I want to make sure that someone tells you because I think it's really important to recognize this. We don't only exile our pain, we exile our joy too. Think about it. When you're a kid and your nervous system learn that the world isn't safe, maybe that people leave, that love is conditional, that you have to read every room to be good and not be too much. Okay, what happens to the part of you that just wants to play? The part that wants to go barefoot, get muddy and dirty, the part that wants to be loud and just be herself, be silly, and just want to be as big and as messy as she wants to be. Now that part maybe is dangerous and in a survival system because if you let yourself love something, maybe it can be taken away. Carefree maybe gets read as careless, and that little one, that little joyful one, the playful one, the one who belongs in her own body, she gets exiled right alongside that wounded one, sent back to the same room. We are told, not now, you're not safe, maybe never. And for us adoptees, that's an extra layer because many of us grew up performative. We performed gratitude, we were the easy-going one, the good one, the one who didn't make waves because some part of us believe that our place wasn't guaranteed and that we had to earn it, right? We had to earn our worth. Our happy, delighted, joyful little one didn't just get told that Joy was unsafe, she got told there wasn't room for her at all. I know all of that in theory. I've said versions of this on the show, and then when I went to Seoul and my joyful exile walked right up to me and like took my hand, I finally understood it in my body. So let me tell you what happened. The first one was when I hiked Bukansan Mountain. This was a few years ago, and it was just an amazing hike. It was really hard, and I was sweating so much, and because it was summer, yeah, it was summer. I know I'm crazy, right? And my legs were like shaking, and at the end, I was so hot and sweaty and exhausted. I came down to the bottom of the mountain where there's a stream, and there are all these ajamas, these little Korean aunties, the older ladies that were just sitting with their feet in the cold mountain water. You know, they had their pants rolled up on their legs, they were laughing and talking and chit-chatting and eating snacks, and they just kind of like wave me in like I was one of them, and there was no conversation needed. They were just like, come sit here, put your feet in. Oh my gosh. So I did, and I took off my shoes, I climbed down the rocks, I put my bare feet in this freezing cold mountain river next to these women who I'd never met, and we couldn't talk, we couldn't really speak the same language. Um, but it didn't matter. We were just there, feet in the water, smiling, belonging to this experience together. And I want to tell you what came in to me right there because this completely caught me off guard. It wasn't grief for once, it wasn't the wound, it was pure joy, but joy with this memory attached. Because sitting there barefoot in the water, I dropped straight into this core memory of being a little kid who loved being barefoot, who loved being just in nature and in the water and the dirt and just being outside. That little one, she was right there, and I realized that I hadn't let her out in years, maybe decades, and she'd been exiled the same way as I had exiled the hurt one and the shameful one, and here she was with her feet in this Korean river, completely at home. And so there's this part of me that as a Korean adoptee, like I have spent my whole life feeling like it didn't quite fit in. Okay, I was too western to be Korean, too Korean to be Western and fit into the white spaces, and this in-between thing or this gray area that so many of us adoptees live in. I've stood in Seoul feeling like a Taurus in my own birthplace, feeling like a foreigner, but sitting in that river with those ajamas, no language needed, just bodies in cold water on a hot day. Um, this collective experience of being a nature together for the first time in my life, I fit in. I belonged. Not because I was performative, not because I was um, you know, so knowledgeable about uh Korean culture, not because if someone was approving of me, just because I was a body in the water with other bodies sharing this human experience together, and that is the most basic way that I really felt belonging. So let's bring in the reparenting. I didn't plan it, I didn't like do this worksheet and you know, aha moment. It was exactly what I needed. My joyful little one got something that she never really got before, and that was permission to be delighted, permission to belong, permission to want to be in this cold water and laugh and play, and there was no performance required really. So once I saw her, I started feeding her on purpose for the rest of my trip. Like I'm still here in Seoul, and I have just opened up this whole container of like mindfulness about my inner child, and I mean that literally because I noticed all this joy was living in these really small things in me, things that connected me to the culture where I came from. Like I hiked up to the top of um another um another mountain recently, and I it was not as hard as Bukanson Mountain, but I definitely sweated my ass off. Um, my legs are killing me. My calves, I have never felt so sore in my life. But you guys, I went up there and I brought my snacks with me. I had my roasted sweet potatoes, I had the triangle kimp up, and I had my banana milk, and oh my gosh, none of this is like this big healing breakthrough, but every single one of those was me just handing my little one something and saying, Here, this is yours, you're allowed to love this, you're allowed to have these little moments of joy, and this is okay. Another day, oh my gosh, I had the most wonderful day. So, my friend Kirsten and I we got to experience Seoul led by this amazing tour guide, and I will drop the name of him in my show notes, Alex Kim, and he lives here in Seoul, and so he took us to all around Seoul. We saw so many great things, we ate so much good food, and then we ended the tour by sitting in the Chung Gichong Stream, which is in the middle of downtown Seoul, and we just put our feet in this stream with everyone else, and we just sat there and chatted and like felt so good. I had snacks again, of course, and watching myself allow this joyful moment, let in the good, let in the joy. Um, I didn't have to earn it, I didn't have to trade, I didn't have to be afraid that it would be taken away. All I did was let myself be in this water and experience that, and so that moment was just another um really joyful moment for me, and I think I might start crying because I'm so emotional. Yeah, it was it was just wonderful, and I just want to share that experience for me, and so and I just want to say, whatever it looks like for you, you know, whatever your joyful moments were from your childhood, I just really want you to find the permission to be able to allow yourself to have little bits of those joy as an adult. It is so healing, and what I want to do is talk about the reparenting today. I'm not going to go back to comfort just the one who is hurt. I mean, desperately we need that too, but I'm also going back for the one who was told that she couldn't play. That barefoot one, that little five-year-old self, the 10-year-old, the one who just wants to snack and be in the river and doing the silly things, maybe singing a silly song. Um, because a parent who only ever shows up when the child is crying is not a whole parent. A parent also shows up to delight in the child, take her to water, let her play, buy her the banana milk and the little snacks, let her be loud and barefoot and just be at home in her body. So, reparenting is not just saying I'm here, you're so you're safe, and it wasn't your fault. It's also look how wonderful you are. Let's go play, let's explore. So, as we go forward today, hold both. Of them, the one who needs comfort and the one who needs to just let out to live, experience the joy, and be happy. They've been in that room together, exile this whole time, and now you're allowing them to both come home. So now I want to give you the map because the inner child doesn't just live in there alone, she lives inside a whole system. And once you see the system, so much of your life is going to make sense in a way it never has before. So the heart of this internal family systems, IFS, is Dr. Schwartz, um, Dr. Richard Schwartz's work, like I mentioned. And the basic idea is that your mind is not a single unified thing, it's more like a family, a family of parts. And in a wounded system, those parts fall into a few main roles. And the first role is what IFS calls the exiles. Those are the young wounded parts, the inner children. And they're called exiles because we banish them, we lock them away because the feelings that they carry are so painful, they're so overwhelming that our system just decides it cannot afford to feel them again and still function. So it exiles them forever and it puts them in this like back room, um, like in the basement or something, and shuts the door. And the exile sits in there, frozen, holding all that original pain. The I'm unlovable, I'm not enough, I'm not safe, I don't belong, I was abandoned. Those are the core wounds, right? Do those sound familiar? Those are the exact core beliefs that we talk about all the time in attachment healing. Those are the relinquishment wounds put into words, those are the lines that our exile little ones have been kind of whispering in the dark for our entire lives. And remember what I just told you about my um experiences here in Seoul. The exiles aren't only the wounded ones, they're the joyful little one, the barefoot one. They get exiled too. Same basement room because in a survival system, her wanting and her delight just felt as threatening as the grief did. So when you go looking in there, don't be surprised if you find more than just sadness and grief. You might find a kid who is just dying to go play. And now here's the part that's going to reframe your whole relationship with yourself. Because the system, because your system can't have those exiles feelings flooding out all the time. It assigns other parts to like stand guard to make sure that we never have to feel the exile. And IFS calls these parts the protectors. Dr. Schwartz describes two kinds of protectors, and I want you to really listen for both. The first is what he calls the managers. These are the proactive protectors. They run your life in advance to make sure that the wound never gets touched. The managers might look like perfectionism, people pleasing, the overfunctioning, the planning, the controlling, the overachieving, the being good, the being easy, uh, reading every room, like being a chameleon. And um, the managers are exhausting and they often look from the outside like virtues, superpowers, right? The manager is a part of you that decided very young that if you could just be perfect enough, helpful enough, low maintenance enough, then no one would ever leave you again. And here's the thing: the same manager is often the one who won't let the little joyful one out because play is unproductive, play is a risk. The manager keeps her locked up tight alongside the wound. The second type of protector is what we call the firefighters. These are the reactive protectors. They show up after the exile's pain has already broken through, and their whole job is to put the fire out as fast as possible and by any means necessary. The firefighters are like the wine, the scrolling, eating the gummies, the binge, watching shows, the shopping, the gambling, the sex addiction, the rage, all of the things. And firefighters don't care about the consequences. So when the exile's grief flares up, the firefighters' only job is to make it stop. Now, are you hearing this? Because this is huge, okay? Enormous. Everything we talked about in episode six, which was all about coping mechanisms. Um, we talked about the BTEA loop, and all of the numbing out, those are protectors, and everything we talked about in the next episode seven, their survival responses, the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and collapse mode, those are protectors too. Okay, fawning is a manager, the collapse, the numbing out, that's often a firefighter. They're all these parts, and every single one of them, no matter how much damage that it may have done in your life, has only ever been trying to do one thing, and that's to protect a little child who got left, who is never allowed to grieve, and never allowed to experience joy. This is why I keep telling you that the behavior is not the enemy. Okay, um, there's no bad parts. None. The part of you that drinks too much isn't bad. The part of you that can't stop checking your ex's um location or checking their Instagram. This isn't a bad part of you. The part of you that explodes or just shuts down or funs or disappears, they're not bad. They are protecting you, and it took an extreme job because there was this extreme wound, and someone had to keep that baby alive. It has really been doing that job with no time off for like 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years, right? So when we do this reparenting, we're not going to war with our protectors. We don't want to shame them, we don't try to force them out. That never really works. If you've ever tried white knuckling it, you know what I'm talking about. I've tried it and it just makes me want to dig in harder. And instead, what we want to do is something radical. We get to know them, we thank them, we ask them, what are they you what are you protecting? And then gently, slowly, we go in and we reach that exile that they've been guarding because there is a secret there. The protectors only can relax when they trust that the exile is finally safe. When that baby is finally held, when the joyful one is allowed to play, the bodyguards can finally rest. And they've been waiting for decades for backup, and that backup is you, okay? You are the backup, you're the one who is coming to rescue yourself. The day that I remembered no one is coming to save me was a day that I started to be that person to save myself. So, who is this you that's doing the holding? Who's the strong one, the calm one, the loving one, and playful enough to take the barefoot one to the river? That's the next piece, and it's my favorite part of the whole model. So, who is this you that's going to be reparenting yourself? Let's talk about that because this is my favorite part of the whole inner child healing model. The internal family systems, alongside all of these parts, the exiles, the managers, the firefighters, there is something else, and something that is not a part at all. Dick Schwartz calls it the self, the self with a capital S. And here's the most healing thing that I can tell you like maybe in this whole episode, the self cannot be damaged, it cannot be broken, no matter what happened to you, no matter how much trauma you've experienced, no matter how early, no matter how severe, no matter how alone you were for it, yourself stays intact, it is whole, and it's been in there the entire time underneath all of these parts, just waiting. Gabby describes a self really well. She calls it the all-knowing, the loving, the undamaged, the resource, compassionate, calm, collected, clear part of who you truly are. And the entire goal of this work, all of it, is to help you access that self and let that self show up for the wounded little parts inside of you. Now, how do you know when you're in self versus when you're blended with a part, an exile part? Dr. Schwartz gives us this beautiful checklist and he calls them the eight C's. And they all start with a C, as you can probably guess, so they're easy to remember. They are calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, courage, confidence, creativity, and connectedness. I love this so much. When you're in self, you feel these things, okay? You can look at your most painful part with calm and curiosity instead of judgment. You can feel compassion for the little one instead of shame, and you can be present without just being swept away. That's yourself, that's the inner parent, and it's not something that you have to build or earn or become. It's just something that you maybe start to uncover piece by piece. And it was there before the wound happened, before the primal wound. The wound just buried it under this mountain of protector parts. And I'll tell you, when I felt my own self come fully online, it was in that river, the connectedness that I felt. It was sitting with those ajamas with our feet in the water, that connectedness, the calm, the creativity that I feel, even how I let myself just play. That wasn't a part of me that was running the show. That was myself. So if you want to know what yourself feels like, it can feel like that. It can feel like belonging without having to perform. It's holding on to a core childhood memory like that and allowing yourself to be that child again. It's your reference point for coming home to yourself. And I want to say something adopte-e to adoptee, because I know what some of you are probably thinking right now. You're probably thinking, yeah, that's so nice and lovely, but I don't have that. Whatever undamaged, calm, loving things that you're describing, I'm pretty sure that I don't have that. I came out without it. I'm too much of a mess. I'm too far gone. I have too much trauma. The wound just got me too early. Now, okay, I get it. I totally get it. You might think that the self is gone, but it's not gone. I promise you, it can't be relinquished, it cannot be given up for adoption, it cannot be left at a hospital or a subway station or police station or a baby box. It is the one thing that no loss could ever touch. It has been there your whole life, and I want to tell you that the proof of this is that the part of you that wants to heal, the part of you that sought out this podcast, that's doing this work on yourself, the part that keeps showing up for yourself, even when it gets hard, that's it. That is yourself, and you're already in connection with it. You might just not have known what to call it. Okay, let me just share with you the process. This is the actual reparenting process, and I'm drawing this from Tyus Gibson's um work on integrated attachment healing, and um there's a long version and a shorter in the moment version. So I'm gonna give you the in the moment one because that's the one that I feel like we are more likely to use. It's for when you feel triggered, when your little one is activated, when you can feel the old story rising up, the old limiting beliefs and core wounds. You can do this like in two minutes and you can do it from anywhere. All right, step one, we're gonna notice the emotion and name it. So if something happens and you feel the wave of emotion before you do anything else, just name what you're feeling out loud if you can, or in a journal, um, whatever works better for you is fine. Maybe it's I feel abandoned, I feel not enough, I feel unsafe, I feel like I don't belong. Naming it is how you stop being merged with that feeling and start being the observer of it. And the observer, that's the self. The minute you can say, I notice I'm feeling abandoned, instead of I am abandoned, you've already created the tiny gap where this reparenting process happens. Step two, ask yourself, is this mine? Or was this programmed into me? Because nine times out of ten, the belief underneath the feeling I'm not enough, I'll be left, is not a fact about you. It's not the truth. It's like this program that you've been running, and it got laid down in maybe this body that was pre-verbal and had no way to interpret the loss except to make it mean something about you, something about her or him. So you get to ask, is this actually truly about me, or is this just a program that I've been running? And almost always it's the program. Okay, step three, find the need underneath. This is the one that most people skip, and it is the most important part. Okay, the protector, the wine, the scrolling, the fawning, the rage is just your strategy to get a need met. Underneath the strategy is your needs. So ask yourself, what does the little one actually need right now? They don't need wine. The wine is a firefighter part of you. Underneath, she might need comfort or safety or the need to feel seen and heard, or just be told that she's not in trouble, or be told that she's not gonna be left. Get underneath the strategy to meet the need. I learned this part literally this week in soul. So let me add it. Sometimes the need underneath isn't comfort at all, sometimes it's joy, sometimes it's the need to play. Sometimes the little one isn't crying, she's bored or lonely, or starved for this play time. And the firefighter grabbed the wine because no one offered her this amazing river to go play in. So when you ask what she needs, leave a little room for the answer to maybe be I need to go outside, I need to do something silly or get creative or sing, I need banana milk, maybe, I need to feel delighted, and that's a real need too. And meeting that need is reparenting. Step four, okay, and this is really the heart of it. I want you to learn how to speak to yourself the way that you would speak to a child that you love. How would you speak to a wounded child who is in pain, maybe right now? Could you extend that same consideration to yourself? And when you start to speak to yourself the way that you would speak to your own child, you like you would never tell a terrified three-year-old to toughen up or to stop being so needy or just to get over it. You would probably want to get down on the floor with her and with that little one and tell her, I see you, I'm here for you, you're not in trouble, you're not too much, you're not gonna be abandoned. I've got you, and I'm not going anywhere. And then lastly, the step five is to give her the need, actually meet that need. So if she needs comfort, give her comfort. Maybe it looks like a warm bath, hand on the heart, the soft blanket, the deep breath, the safe friend. And if she needs safety, give her safety. Maybe it's doing the Vaux breath or the grounding meditation, or if she needs to be seen, maybe it's just letting yourself be seen by someone who's safe. And if she needs joy, give her joy. Take her out to play, buy her the snack, go barefoot in the grass, or go out in the rain and just dance and sing. You're not just talking to her, you're proving to her through your actions that there's finally someone who follows through. Because maybe that's what she never had before. Someone who came back, and someone who stayed, and someone who saw her for who she is. And then you do it again tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, because you've heard me say this again the nervous system reprograms not through intensity but through repetition and emotion. So one conversation with your little one is beautiful, but it's the daily return that rewires her, it's her learning drop by drop, day by day, that this time the parent doesn't leave. This time, when she reaches, someone is going to be there for her. That is what heals this relinquishment wound. It's not just a single breakthrough, it's not just journaling, it's the pattern of you coming back again and again and again, sometimes to comfort her, sometimes just to play with her. So I don't want to just tell you about this, I want you to feel it too. All right, so if you're somewhere where you can close your eyes and get present um for about 10 minutes, that would be great. If you're driving or walking or doing something dangerous, just listen in and come back to this part later when you can be really fully present and still. I want to take you into a guided meditation to actually go meet your inner child right now. So let's get comfortable and let's go find her, him, or them together. Okay, let's settle in. If you can find a place where you won't be interrupted for the next 10 minutes or so, you can either sit down or lie down, whatever you choose. Um, let your body be supported by whatever is underneath you, and get a blanket if you like one. Um, this is a safe place to just feel and be comfortable. And if at any point this meditation becomes too much, you can always open your eyes, put your feet on the floor, and ground and just breathe. You are in charge and the little one will understand. We never push, we only ever invite. Let's begin the way we always do with one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. And take an easy breath in through your nose. And a long slow breath out through your mouth. Nice. One more in through the nose and out slowly through the mouth. And just feel your own two hands on your body. Feel the weight of them, the warmth. This is you holding you. There is already a parent here. Now gently, I want you to bring to mind a recent moment when you may have felt activated. Not the biggest, hardest thing ever, but just a small recent moment when the old feelings started to rise up. Maybe you felt not enough, or you felt abandoned, or unsafe, or maybe you didn't belong. We're not gonna go into the story of it. We're just noticing where does that feeling live in your body? Maybe it's a tightness in your throat, a pit in your stomach, a heaviness on your chest. Could be a buzzing in your hands. Wherever it is, just locate it. Placing your attention right there. With curiosity, not trying to fix it, just noticing. As you stay with that place in your body, see if it has any qualities. Like, is there a color, is there a shape, a temperature? Just let whatever comes, come. And there's no wrong answer. You're just getting curious about this part of you. Now, very gently, I want you to ask this part a question. We're gonna ask it, how old are you? Don't think about it. Just Let the first answer arrive. And often what you'll hear is five. Or three. Or maybe it's a newborn baby. For many of us, it's a very, very young age, but whatever age comes, just receive it with tenderness. This is your little one, the one who's been holding it all. I want you to see if you can sense her or him near you. Maybe you can picture them, maybe just feel them close. Some of you will see a clear image. A little girl, a little boy, a baby. Some of you will only feel a presence. And both are fine, both are perfect, both are real. Before we go to her, let's just check. Sometimes a protector shows up here. A part that's skeptical or numb, can't feel anything, or says this is silly. I wants you to keep from getting too close. If that part is here, don't fight it. Just think it, say, thank you for protecting me. I see how hard you've worked. Would you be willing to step back, maybe just for a little for a few minutes, so I can be with them? You can stay close. I just need a little room here. And now from your calm, your compassion, curiosity, from the self that's always been inside of you, turn toward the little one and just notice how you feel towards them. Or an ache of love, that's it. That's the inner parent online, that's you showing up. Now I want you to let them know that you're here. In whatever way feels true and authentic to you, um, you might say to them silently, I see you, I'm here, and I came back for you. And just notice, does she or he know that you're here? Can they feel you? And they might be shy, they might be guarded, especially for us that maybe they've learned that people might leave, maybe they've learned that not to trust it at first, but that's okay. You don't need them to trust you all at once. You just need to stay. So let's just stay for a moment, keep your attention on them, soft and patient. And now we're gonna gently ask them the most important question. Ask them, what do you need from me right now? And just listen. The answer might come in words, it might come as an image, it might just come as a feeling in your body. They might need to be helped. So maybe it's just being told that she's safe or he's safe. Maybe they need to be told that it wasn't their fault. Also, they might surprise you. They might not need comforting at all. Maybe they just want to play. Maybe they want to be lit outside, and they might want you to finally just go and have fun with them. Whatever shows up, just receive it and go with it. Now we're going to give it to them. Right now, in your mind's eye, we're gonna do the thing. So if they need to be held, gather them up and hold them tightly. And if she needs to hear the words, say them to her. If he needs to go play, go play and take their hand and take them somewhere wonderful and fun. And so let me give you some words that maybe you can use or you can find your own words. You did nothing wrong. It was never your fault that they couldn't stay. You are not too much. You were never too much at all. And you don't have to earn your place with me. You already have it right here. You're not alone anymore. I found you. You are allowed to be happy, you're allowed to play. I want to have fun with you. I am not going anywhere. I'm your parent and I'm staying for you. And maybe just feel what happens. Maybe you soften a bit, maybe they climb into your arms, maybe they cry, maybe you cry, and maybe that's the most natural thing in the world, the thing that you need right now. Whatever it is, just let it come naturally. Maybe they grab your hand and pull you towards something fun, and maybe nothing traumatic happens, and they just look at you, and all of this is okay. All of this is doing the work, and this is the healing. Now finally, I want you to find a place to be with them, a safe, warm place. Maybe it's a place that you love, a sunlit window, a cozy chair, a beach, a river with your feet in the water, or your grandma's kitchen. Maybe it's a place that only exists for the two of you. And I want you to put yourselves there right now. And let them know that this place is always here, that they can come here with you anytime, that you will come back. Not just today, but tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that. Make them a promise that you intend to keep. Something simple like I'll check in with you every morning, and I'll put my hand on my heart, and I'm gonna find you, and I'm gonna make time for you to play whatever you can truly commit to. And now slowly begin to let the image soften before you let them go. Let them know that you're not abandoning them by opening your eyes. Just tell them I'm not leaving, I'm just going to carry you with me now. You live here in my heart, and I've got you. Bring your hand back to your heart. Feel the surface beneath you. Wiggle your toes, wiggle your fingers, and let's take one more breath in through our nose, out through our mouth. Before we close out today's episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you. Thank you for showing up for yourself today and for having the courage to do this work. Remember, healing isn't just a concept, it's a practice of reclamation. And to make sure that you never miss a step on this journey, please hit subscribe to the care of care podcast. It's also a sign of a commitment to yourself and for committing to doing the work on your journey. I would also be so freaking bring a review to show. It also switched more adoptions are looking for this to kill their attachments and find their way home to themselves and bring more joy and people in their lives as well. Remember, this is a conversation, so if you have a question about your relationships, about your core wounds, about your manifestation journey, please submit it via the link in the show notes. By asking your question, you aren't just helping yourself. You are empowering every other listener who is likely struggling with the exact same thing. I'm so honored to be on this path with you. I cannot wait to do more of this healing work together. This is the Dear Claire podcast, and I'll see you next time. Much love.