Parenting Yourself

– Taking responsibility for your life

By Shawn McAndrew

Why do people come to the Process? There are as many reasons for this as there are participants. But one thing is certain: along the way in a person’s childhood, there was most likely a breakdown in how one was parented. From the moment we are born we should have love, care, attention, sustenance, and affection. Whether we received these or not, they are what we should have – then and now.

If you could have a childhood do-over, what would you want? How would you have wanted your parents to treat you, to parent you? I can think of many things – less yelling, more guidance; less deriding, more praise; less hitting, more affection; less victim, more care.

The Starting Point

Taking stock of what happened – or didn’t happen – as well as how you would like to be as an adult is the starting point for parenting yourself, for becoming a well-adjusted person who thrives in life. To do the Process, we all had to fill out what seemed like endless paperwork just to get to the nub of what wasn’t working in our adult lives, and why. Now that we know this information, the majority of the work is done. The exciting part – the payoff – is getting to treat ourselves as we would have wanted to be treated as a child.

To do this, we have lots of options. Parenting yourself is just another way of saying, “Take care of yourself.” We learned many ways to take care of ourselves through the practices that we took away from the Process.

Practices such as appreciation and gratitude, left road-right road, the Quadrinity Check-In, visioning, the hand-on-heart exercise help us reconnect and refocus from acting from negative patterns to being the positive, spiritual selves that we are inherently.

So, if you had to raise yourself, what would you do? How would you go about ensuring that you had the most love, attention, care, sustenance, and affection that anyone could ever have? Would you berate yourself? Would you question your thinking? Would you allow yourself to eat unhealthy food or use drugs or alcohol to excess?

Parenting Yourself

Or would you get enough sleep when you needed it? Would you eat wonderful, healthy meals? Would you be open to love both from others and from yourself? Would you pamper yourself when you had tough days, finding healthy ways to wind down and give yourself a break?

What can you do to feed and nurture your Quadrinity – intellect, emotional self, body, and spirit? How do you want to feel?

With so many ways to positively parent yourself, you owe it to yourself to have the best childhood ever, no matter how old you are. Start today by doing something loving for yourself. Knock those dark side messages on the head and let them go. Have fun! Be appreciative! Be kind to you!