The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: Re-mothering yourself is not a performance of self-care or a way of bypassing grief. It is the slow, attuned practice of becoming the steady internal presence you did not have growing up. We heal relational wounds in relationship, and that includes the relationship we build with ourselves. This work is not a replacement for what was missing. It is something new, growing alongside the loss, that gradually changes the location of where care comes from.

When people first hear the phrase re-mothering, there is often a small flinch. And I get it, terms like this have frequently been co-opted by wellness influencers without the knowledge or training to back up the practice and all that it entails. But trust me when I say that re-parenting yourself in any form can be a crucially important practice that helps you to build self-trust and a sense of belonging with yourself. Sometimes the concept of re-mothering will bring about fear, because it’s hard to imagine that you’d know how to do something you’ve never been taught, and sometimes the idea of re-mothering can bring about hope that you might be able to feel differently than you have long felt. 

Both reactions make sense, and here are some important things to know about this process. Re-mothering is not a script, or a checklist of activities you can complete and then tick off as evidence of healing. It is something more abstract and harder to package. It is the slow, ongoing work of building, inside yourself, the kind of presence you needed and did not have when you were small. A presence that notices and responds. A presence that does not leave when things get hard.

To understand why this matters, it helps to remember what was supposed to happen developmentally, when you were young. In our earliest years of life, we are not yet capable of regulating our own emotional states. We rely on a caregiver to do that for us. When we cry, someone comes. When we are scared, someone soothes. When we are overwhelmed, someone holds us until the wave passes. Through thousands of these small moments, we begin to internalize a sense that distress is survivable, that needs are not dangerous, that we are worth showing up for. That internalization becomes the foundation of how we relate to ourselves for the rest of our lives.

When that attuned presence was inconsistent or absent, something different gets internalized. Not a clear thought, but a felt sense. A felt sense that our needs are too much, that distress is something to be hidden or solved alone, that no one is coming. This is not a belief we choose. It is a body-based conclusion drawn from the available evidence. The hopeful thing, and this is supported by everything we know about the nervous system, is that what was learned in relationship can be relearned in relationship. Including the relationship we build within ourselves.

Dear one, this is the soil in which re-mothering grows. Not in grand gestures, but in the small, repeated moments where you choose to respond to yourself differently than you were responded to. You feel a wave of sadness rise up in the middle of an ordinary day, and instead of pushing it down or shaming yourself for having it, you pause. You put a hand on your chest. You say, internally, this makes sense, I make sense. You stay with yourself for the thirty seconds it takes for the wave to crest and recede. And y’all, this is how we begin to re-mother ourselves. It may not look like much from the outside, but on the inside, it is everything.

It is the moment you notice you are exhausted and let yourself rest, instead of pushing through because resting felt unsafe in your family of origin. It is the moment you cry and do not immediately try to talk yourself out of crying. It is the moment you set a limit with someone and do not abandon yourself by apologizing for it afterward. It is the moment you catch yourself speaking harshly to yourself, and you choose, gently and without hesitation, to speak differently. 

These moments accumulate. They are not impressive in isolation. They become impressive only when you look back over months and years and realize that the internal voice that used to be sharp has softened, that the body that used to brace at the first sign of difficulty has begun to settle.

There is also something important to say about what this practice is not. It is not a way of pretending you did not need anyone in the first place. We are wired for connection, and no amount of internal work eliminates that. You still need people. You still need relationships in which you are seen and met and known. What re-mothering does is change what you bring into those relationships. When some of your care is coming from inside, you are no longer asking other people to fill a bottomless need. You can show up from a place of having, rather than only from a place of lacking. It is also not a way of letting your original caregivers off the hook. 

Acknowledging that you are now the one who tends to you does not mean what they did or did not do was acceptable. The grief and the re-mothering happen alongside each other, sometimes in the same week, sometimes in the same hour. One does not cancel out the other.

What I notice in my work is that this practice tends to feel awkward at first. Almost embarrassing. People tell me they feel silly putting a hand on their own chest, or speaking kindly to themselves, or pausing in a hard moment to ask what they actually need. That awkwardness is not a sign that the practice is wrong for you. It is a sign that it is unfamiliar, which makes sense, because no one taught you to do this. You are, in many ways, learning a language you should have been raised speaking, so give it, and you, some time. What replaces the awkwardness is something steadier – an internal sense that there is someone home. That when you fall apart, someone catches you. That when you are tired, someone makes space for the tiredness. And that someone is you, turning toward yourself with the kind of attention you always deserved.

If you are early in this work, please be patient with yourself. The wiring you are working with took years to form, and it does not unform overnight. Small choices, repeated, are what change things. The way you spoke to yourself this morning matters. The way you respond the next time you feel overwhelmed matters. None of it has to be perfect. It just has to keep happening. You are becoming, slowly, the one who stays. This is both sacred and ordinary work, and you are so deserving of building this relationship with yourself.

Thanks for letting me see you,