The Role of Your Nurturing Parent in Healing Your Inner Child
In the journey of personal development, the roles we internalise from our early life experiences play a significant part in shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and our subsequent behaviours. Among these internalised roles, two stand out in stark contrast: the Nurturing Parent and the Critical Parent. Understanding and balancing these aspects within our psyche is essential for fostering a healthy self-concept and achieving personal growth.
But first, let’s take a step back to understand the Critical Parent and its relationship with the Inner Child. As children, when faced with persistent critical parenting, our inner child experiences trauma and feels wounded. Our inner child harbours these negative feelings that combine with implicit memories of their wounding experience to form negative core beliefs. These self-limiting beliefs then get pushed out of our awareness into the subconscious mind. The critical parent’s behaviour also gets embedded into our psyche and gradually forms a codependent relationship with the Inner Child, which mirrors the original parent-child dynamic. Ironically, when we have a wounded inner child, as part of a protective survival strategy, clients can deny their own intrinsic nurturing parent and take on the role of caring and nurturing others. And because our Inner Child lacks nurturing experience and believes they are worthy of nurture, clients decide they can’t give that nurture to themselves. Why? Because it risks disconfirming their inner child’s belief that they are not worthy of nurturing love and belonging, and if they stopped taking care of their parent/s, they fear they would be abandoned! The Critical Parent subconsciously then reinforces this Inner Child belief. This keeps the Inner Child-Inner Critic dynamic, and the inner child’s self-limiting beliefs, in play.
I learned the concept of the Nurturing Parent and the Critical Parent from my Transactional Analysis training at the Berne Institute. The Critical Parent, as its name suggests, is the internalised voice of parental authority that judges, criticizes, and imposes strict standards, mirroring the parental behaviours. It is the voice that also tells us we are not good enough, that we must work harder, be smarter, or conform to societal expectations. While the Critical Parent can sometimes drive us to achieve and adhere to necessary boundaries, it often does so at the expense of our self-esteem and emotional well-being. Left unchecked, the Critical Parent can lead to perfectionism, self-doubt, and a paralyzing fear of failure.
In contrast, for those children who have experienced nurturing love and belonging, the Nurturing Parent represents the compassionate, supportive, and affirming voice within us. It is the internalised version of those who have cared for us, encouraged us, and shown us unconditional love. The Nurturing Parent soothes us in times of stress, reassures us when we doubt ourselves, and motivates us to take care of our emotional and physical needs. It is this voice that reminds us that we are worthy, capable, and deserving of love and belonging. So, with a history of critical and neglectful parenting, personal growth involves cultivating a strong Nurturing Parent within our psyche to counterbalance the often overpowering Critical Parent.
In therapy, we have to find ways to reach into the client’s psyche to nurture their Inner Child, teaching the client how to nurture themselves, and at the same time, push back on their Critical Parent. Therapeutic skills are used to dissolve the psychic codependent relationship and replace the negative energy of the critical parent with the positive energy of a new developing nurturing parent. To further strengthen the burgeoning Nurturing Parent, we encourage the practice of self-compassion.
Treating ourselves with the same kindness and understanding that we would offer to a friend. When we make mistakes, we understand that we live in an imperfect world, and acknowledge our humanity and use the experience as a learning opportunity. Self-compassion also involves recognizing our achievements, no matter how small, and allowing ourselves to celebrate them.
We can develop the Nurturing Parent through positive self-affirmation. By consciously replacing negative, self-critical thoughts with positive, affirming ones, we can gradually shift our inner dialogue. For example, instead of thinking, “I can’t do this, I’m not good enough,” we might say, “I am capable of learning and growing; I can take this one step at a time.”
Mindfulness practices can also help in this process by increasing our awareness of the internalised voices that influence our thoughts and behaviours. Through mindfulness, we can learn to observe and push back on the Critical Parent without becoming entangled in its negativity, allowing the Nurturing Parent to have a stronger presence in our lives.
The role of the Nurturing Parent in personal development is to maintain a healthy balance within our psyche. By cultivating this compassionate, supportive aspect of ourselves, we can admonish the Critical Parent's harsh judgments and create a more nurturing internal environment to keep our inner child safe in the way s/he wasn’t protected growing up.
Here are some video I have done on the subject:
