Why Reparenting Yourself Isn’t Enough — And What True Healing Requires

Pei-I Yang
May 29
5 min read

Updated: Sep 9

The concept of “reparenting yourself” has become a popular buzzword in personal growth circles. It suggests that by healing your inner child, you can overcome adult challenges.

There’s some truth here — our childhood experiences do shape who we are. But what's often overlooked is that they're not the only thing that shapes who we are.

There are many forces at play:

The family system we grew up in
The culture that raised us
The relationships that formed our self-worth
The society that rewarded or silenced us

Imagine your life like a tree:

The roots are your early attachments, cultural values, and family patterns.
The trunk is your formative years — shaped by people in various systems around you, i.e. school, friends, .
The branches are your adult relationships, parenting, career, and the habits you carry every day.

When we focus only on inner child work, we’re pruning a few leaves — maybe even a branch. But the real issues? They're often deep in the soil.

What Reparenting Missed in My Own Journey

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I made a few poor choices in romantic relationships. I struggled with asserting my own boundaries. I said yes when I meant no. I was praised for being kind — but inside, I was exhausted, confused, and hurting.

Everyone — including my own academic training (yes, 3 Master’s degrees at the time) — gave me the same answers:

“Heal your inner child.” But this only focused me inward, back to memories I had already replayed thousands of times. I wasn’t healing.
“Forgive your parents.” It became a loop: I blamed them, then forgave them, then felt guilty about blaming them. It built resentment, not relief.
“Practice self-compassion.” I tried. I truly did. But telling myself “be kind to yourself” a hundred times a day didn’t shift the deeper pattern.

It wasn’t that these practices were wrong. It’s that they were incomplete.

What Heals Us Is Not Just Inside Us

Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in relationship.

When we hurt, it’s often because a relationship has ruptured — with a parent, a partner, a child, or a sense of self shaped by others.

And when we heal? It’s usually because a new, safer relationship shows us another way to live.

This is the core of systemic family psychotherapy — the approach I now use in all my work with families (both therapeutic parenting coaching and family therapy)

It asks:

What system is this behaviour responding to?
What emotional blueprint is being repeated?
What unspoken rules are guiding this family?
Who benefits when this person stays “broken”?

And more importantly — how do we disrupt it, gently but permanently?

Your Emotions Are Not Just Yours

In systemic work, we understand that your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours don’t live in isolation.

They're shaped by:

Your upbringing and unspoken family rules
The cultural narratives around gender, success, failure, and love
Your partner’s story
The collective stress of your community
And your role in the emotional landscape of your family

You might feel anxious not because of “childhood trauma,” but because you're still carrying everyone else’s regulation in the present. You might feel disconnected from your child not because you’re doing it wrong, but because your family of origin never modelled connection without control.

Why This Matters for Parents

Many of the parents I work with are doing all the “right” things — teen/group therapy, boundaries, communication — but their teen is still struggling. Aggression, shutdowns, depression, drugs and alcohol, school refusal — none of it seems to change.

What I often see in families is this:

There’s a long history of not talking about emotions — not out of malice, but because it was never modelled.
Everyone’s trying their best, but honesty feels risky. It’s safer to avoid, minimize, or “just get on with it.”
And slowly, one person — often your teenager — becomes the emotional outlet for the whole family. Their behaviour might look like defiance… but it’s actually a signal.

That’s why surface-level strategies don’t stick. Because what’s happening in your home is often a reflection of deeper patterns — not just what’s happening today, but what’s been carried forward, silently, for years.

The good news? These patterns can change. And when they do, everything shifts.

From “What Happened To Me?” → “What System Am I In?”

This isn’t about blaming your family, or excusing harmful behaviour. It’s about asking a more useful, healing question:

“What patterns am I still loyal to — even when they hurt me or my family?”

Whether it’s perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, or always walking on eggshells — these traits didn’t come from nowhere. They were protective. They were once adaptive responses in the systems you grew up in.

But now? They’re likely keeping you — and your family — stuck.

This is why systemic thinking has become a core element of my therapeutic parenting coaching. It goes beyond traditional child development, psychology and psychoanalytical thinking— which focus on what the child is doing — and instead zooms out to ask:

“What kind of emotional environment is this behaviour happening in?”

Because behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum as mentioned earlier.

Systemic work acknowledges that children’s emotions and behaviours are deeply shaped by the relationships, roles, culture, and communication patterns around them. When we address both the behaviour and the emotional system that holds it, that’s when families start to see real, lasting change.

And that’s exactly what I bring into every parenting programme I deliver.

Real Healing Is Relational

The greatest shifts I’ve seen — in my own life, and in the families I support — came not from more self-analysis…

…but from safe connection, clear relational boundaries, and being witnessed by someone who understands the full map.

This is what we do inside Restoring Harmony — my 90 day bespoke programme that guides families to stop survival-mode parenting and build emotional safety, leadership, and peace.

It’s also what we do in Family Reset, a 30-day private container for those needing direct intervention and structured strategy now.

Final Words: It’s Time To Stop Blaming Yourself

You didn’t cause the systems that shaped you. But you can change how they live on in your family.

Don’t settle for half-truths or outdated advice. Come learn what’s actually keeping your family stuck — and how to step into the kind of leadership that heals.

Want to experience what true relational healing looks like in your home?

👉 Tap here to book a Family Consult Call before joining Restoring Harmony] — or

👉 Book your private Family Reset support here

Let’s stop pruning the branches and start nourishing the roots.

Pei-I

🌈There's always hope, endless hope.