How “Self-Parenting” Saved My Life
By: Remy Benjamin
Tags: Self Improvement, Depression, Psychology, Mental Health, Parenting

How “Self-Parenting” Saved My Life

Our lowest moments demand that we show ourselves a parent’s unwavering care.

Photo by Konstantin Christian, Shutterstock

One cold night in November, in the pitch black of my bedroom, I felt like I was at the bottom of a pit.

This pit swallowed me whole. There was no opening to escape from, no light streaming down from above. I was trapped, and what’s the only thing to do when you’re trapped?

Weep. I wept for hours that night, all alone and for reasons that my brain had created for me.

This might sound familiar if you’ve struggled with depression — the feelings of being trapped, of suffocating, of drowning. I hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but that night was the night I realized that I didn’t want to live like this anymore.

I couldn’t afford therapy, so I started to crawl up from the bottom by doing the bare minimum — something that everyone can do.

It saved my life. If you’re struggling like I was, it could save yours too. And even if you’re not, it can still be crucial practice in regularly tuning up your mental health…

I started to parent myself, because no one else was there to parent me.

Insecure Love, Insecure Life

Photo by Stefan Spassov, Unsplash

What is self-parenting? Well, to explain that, I need to explain where my depression came from and how I chose to address it.

I grew up as a “gifted kid.” I was used to getting all my validation from my achievements, especially from my parents.

That way of getting love worked when I was a kid, but nobody cares about your grades or your trophies when you’re an adult. After college, my entire sense of self took a nosedive.

I was used to feeling conditional love, admired for how well I performed, instead of unconditional love for who I was. Instinctively, I thought that if I slipped up in any part of my life, then the people I cared about would leave me.

I couldn’t connect with anyone authentically. I was afraid that they would reject me if they saw me as anything less than brilliant. I bragged about my accomplishments but couldn’t show them my weaknesses, and that meant I couldn’t show them my whole self either.

Instead, I was obsessed with perfection: I needed the perfect career, the perfect style, the perfect body.

All it did was make me hate myself: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be perfect, and I bullied myself for falling short.

I felt worthless, alone, and most of all, stuck. I felt permanently broken, like I would always be a failure at life and would never get the love I needed. For a brief time, I thought that life must not be worth living if this was all it had to offer me.

But there was one person in my life who could love me the way I needed to be loved:

Me.

Even if other people would leave me, I would always be around. Even if I had only received conditional love from my parents, I could make up for their mistakes and treat myself the way I wished they had treated me.

Even if I didn’t like myself, I could do things for myself that looked like love: the kind of love a parent shows a child.

Parents don’t always like their kids. But they take care of them anyway, because that’s what you do when you love someone unconditionally.

And that’s what you do when you love yourself unconditionally: You treat yourself with the basic care and dignity you deserve simply by virtue of being human.

Habits Make Health

Photo by Content Pixie, Unsplash

Above all, being a good parent to myself meant that I had to take care of myself regularly — and to make a point of doing it.

Oftentimes, when we don’t like who we are, we don’t take very good care of ourselves. Subconsciously, we think we don’t deserve it, and our brains will resist forming healthy habits.

But you don’t have to feel good about yourself to start loving yourself, because love is more than just how we feel, it’s how we act. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words.

And if you want your self-love to be unconditional, then your actions have to be unconditional too.

I made a checklist of basic needs that had to be met every night before bed: shower, brush my teeth, floss, clean my room, lights out at eleven. After all, a good parent wouldn’t let their child go to bed without cleaning themselves, and definitely wouldn’t let them stay up until ungodly hours of the night.

More than that, though, I made a point of doing this no matter what.

Even if I was tired and just wanted to sleep, I always kept up my hygiene.

Even if I was hanging out with my roommates, or hooked on a show, or in a flow state while writing, I always hit the bed at eleven.

If you want to take really good care of yourself, setting firm boundaries for yourself is key. It can be hard to be so strict with yourself, but think about it another way: You want to set high standards for yourself because you’re worth nothing less than the highest standard!

Keeping a physical log of your habits is also important: not only does seeing your whole agenda laid out in front of you help keep you on track, but checking off every last item on your list satisfies the goal-oriented part of your brain. It’s a built-in reinforcement mechanism, and accomplishing your goals, even small ones, is another boost to your self-esteem.

The Road to Self-Love

Photo by Giulia Bertelli, Unsplash

Most important, though, is to remind yourself why you’re doing it. Every night in the mirror while brushing and flossing, I would quietly think, I’m respecting my body, and I’m respecting myself.

And over time, that subtle messaging becomes a reflex. After a month, I started to do my routine not because I was forcing myself to, but because I wanted to. It felt good to feel taken care of, and to feel like I deserved that kind of care and respect.

Feeling secure in myself also helped me form more secure relationships: I didn’t fear rejection anymore because I knew I could always find love in myself. When I finally felt stable enough to open myself up to others, I met the woman who would soon become my girlfriend. We’ve been going steady for six months.

Science shows that we’re more defined by our habits than anything else. The things we do automatically have an immense power over our lives because we don’t even know we’re doing them — things like buckling your seatbelt or washing your hands require so little effort, but have profound consequences on our health.

The power of habit applies to mental health too — the more you tell yourself that you love yourself, the more your brain will do it for you without you trying. You don’t have to start out loving yourself to get there.

Like anything else, it’s a product of practice and repetition, and the results are beyond valuable.

It’s just not worth feeling shame, fear, or hopelessness. They don’t help us at all, even if they give us the illusion of help. It’s easy to fixate on what we don’t like about ourselves and try to get rid of our “deficiencies,” but like it or not, you can’t hate yourself to a better life.

And whether you’re struggling or not, it’s important to remind yourself that you deserve your basic needs: not only your regular hygiene and healthy habits, but also the self-worth that comes from them.

It’s about learning that you are worthy of being nurtured and cared for.

It’s about reminding yourself that even in your loneliest moments, you can always find love.