Even if you had the very best parents or caretakers you could possibly ask for, chances are there were things they missed while you were growing up. There are messages you could have gotten wrong, or things that happened that caused you to feel “less than” others, and perhaps not good enough to measure up to the expectations of parents, teachers, and other figures in authority. 
 
Certainly, clients who come for therapies frequently point out that something was missing from their childhood lives. Often, their feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, irrational fears, and repressed anger are allowed to fester over the years, making adult life difficult, and often unmanageable. 
 
Whether the issues clients bring to their therapists are mild or severe, the need to reframe the messages they got in childhood is obvious. This is where reparenting comes in. According to this article from the CPTSD Foundation, reparenting gives the client opportunities to give themselves what they didn’t get in childhood. The symptoms a person in need of reparenting carries are numerous, and they include everything from addictions and eating disorders to codependency and hoarding. 
 
When a person has a younger childhood part that didn’t get what was needed from their parents, they often act out in these ways. The adult person may not have any awareness of the needs of these younger parts, but once they gain awareness of it, and work with reparenting, they can begin to heal. 
 
Issues that indicate the need for reparenting to help people to function more effectively have multiplied in recent years. With the pandemic and its aftereffects, plus the economic and geopolitical instability people face, therapists are overbooked with clients seeking relief from the consequences of their compulsive behavior. 
 

The first thing that therapists must realize is their role and its limitations. It is not appropriate for the therapist to actually do the reparenting. The therapist needs to assist clients in learning to reparent themselves. 
 
Before this can be accomplished, the therapist needs to assess what “age” the child part that is acting out is, and what developmental stage was deficient. Once this occurs, the therapist can encourage the client to initiate a dialog with the child part or parts, to discover what is needed. 
 
For example, if a child was restricted, during the toddler stage, from exploring the environment so that a sense of autonomy and mastery could be developed, there may be a lot of anxiety about approaching new situations. The client can begin the task of reparenting by  
recognizing when that child part is acting out its unconscious impulses, and 
“telling” that child part that it really is safe to explore, and that s/he is capable of discovering new things in the environment safely and competently. 
 
Obviously, this simple example is just a beginning step toward understanding how reparenting can work for clients in therapy. Some questions stand out, as well. How does the therapist help the client identify the child part, and how can that child part be addressed with developmentally appropriate encouragement and affirmation? 

Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy™ can be a very fast and effective way to identify the child parts that need reparenting. Further, it can be used to set up communication between the conscious adult self and those parts, so that reparenting can take place.  
 
Here’s how it works: 
- The client is relaxed into a light trance state. 
- The client is invited to bring up a recent event that involves the problematic behavior. 
- The client identifies and expresses the underlying emotion connected to this event. 
- The therapist invites the client to go back to the source of this emotion, to another point in time. 
- In this regressed state, the client identifies the faulty message that was received, due either to parental shortcomings, or misinterpretation by the child. 
- The therapist coaches the client in discovering what the child needs. 
- The client creates affirmations and new behaviors that take care of the needs of the child part, and help to pre-empt unwanted behavior. 
 
Treatment with Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy™ sets up communication between the adult client and the inner child swiftly, gently, and with compassion. Parenting is not punishing, and it’s very important to give clients the chance to parent themselves with consideration for how young they were when traumatic events occurred. This way they can learn to “grow up” that fearful, angry, or sad child part, and overcome obstacles, even in the confusing and stressful world we find ourselves living in now. 

There’s no reason to be concerned that learning hypnotherapy will take large chunks of your time. When you enroll in the Six Day Hypnotherapy Training and Certification Program, you will learn how to conduct hypnotherapy sessions in less than one week! What’s more, you’ll become part of a worldwide network of therapists who use this powerful modality to assist their clients. CEUs are available in many cases, and you can continue your training with further programs. 
 
All training is conducted online, with live teachers and a peer group. You’ll receive didactic training in real time, and get hands-on practice under the supervision of experienced Heart-Centered Hypnotherapists. 
 
There’s every reason to find ways to help your clients benefit from the art of reparenting, and hypnotherapy training at The Wellness Institute is a sure-fire way to gain the skills you need. 

Enroll in the Six Day Hypnotherapy Training and Certification Program at The Wellness Institute.