It’s a painful but liberating insight, the beginning of compassion for those who seemed to have failed you. From a wider perspective, we can see that in this broken lineage of dysfunction, those who hurt us were only passing on the pain they once endured themselves. Their inability to love began with the inability of those who came before them. It is ultimately no one’s fault — only everyone’s responsibility to repair what has been lost along the way.

Many of us stay stuck in anger toward our parents — furious at their coldness, their blindness, their absence. It’s an understandable anger; the child in us is still standing in front of the sink, hands outstretched, waiting for water that will never come.
But that sink isn’t even connected. The water line — the lineage of unconditional love — was broken generations ago, and no one ever taught them how to fix it.

So there’s no point in waiting for it to flow. The task now is to repair the connection yourself — to reconnect love and nourishment to their true source inside you.

This is where the work of reparenting begins.
It’s not about replacing your parents or pretending the past didn’t hurt. It’s about becoming the mature, emotionally available presence your younger self never had. You begin to meet your own needs the way a mature parent would: with patience, presence, consistency, and care.

When fear arises, you learn to hold it with steady trust.
When pain surfaces, you stay with it and hold it with compassion.
When shame speaks, you listen without judgment and rest in your own center of unconditional self-acceptance.

You become your own mature feminine — able to say softly, “I’m sorry you have to go through this,” with gentleness and open vulnerability.
You become your own mature masculine — the power and confidence that will not abandon you until you’ve made it through whatever comes.

In the beginning, I didn’t feel it. But I kept saying, “I’m sorry you have to go through this,” again and again — until I really meant it.
The same with not leaving or abandoning myself, or collapsing when things got hard.
It takes patience to make mistakes without turning them into self-punishment, and to see them instead as stepping stones toward mastery.

Over time, this steadiness rebuilds trust inside your body and mind. The nervous system learns what safety feels like. The inner child begins to relax. The war within starts to quiet down.

These inner parents need not look down on your inner child; they can meet it eye to eye and let it stand on their shoulders to grow and surpass them. In this way, the inner child doesn’t need to be locked away in shame for its helplessness. You can keep that source of innocence and creativity alive — and stay flexible, curious, and open no matter how old you become. The rigidity and bitterness we often see in adulthood stem from losing that connection — a loss that becomes unnecessary once we know how to tend to it.