Heidi Bruce was walking through Target one day, when one of her favorite songs came on.
The 27-year-old recalls how she felt an immediate urge to start dancing − something that initially terrified her. What would people think if they saw an adult woman dancing in Target? Would something bad happen to her if she did?
These fears, Bruce says, made clear what she had to do: Face those anxieties head on, let loose and dance, right there in Target. After all, it wasn't really her dancing − at least not her adult self, anyway. It was her inner child, she says − the childlike version of us that still lives in each of our psyches.
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"The part of you that lived through childhood is still within you today," Bruce says. "Whether you had a horrible childhood or a great childhood, now it's our role to be able to take care of ourselves now."
Bruce is part of a community online of people striving to "reparent" themselves. As Bruce explains it, reparenting involves talking directly to that childlike part of yourself, listening to your needs and then becoming the loving parent that you may or may not have had growing up. Bruce herself has been documenting her reparenting journey, sharing videos online that have gone viral. In one of them, she jumps in the air, celebrating her inner child's accomplishments. In another, she has a heart-to-heart with her inner child in the car.
In some of her videos, Bruce does unorthodox things to make her inner child happy − like dancing in the aisles of Target, wearing a cape and crown.
"You are allowed to dance here," Bruce says in one of her Target videos, which has 6.9 million views on TikTok. "I am safe in my body. I am safe to express myself in the world, even when I feel weird. Even when I'm scared. And I'm still safe."
Reparenting has stoked plenty of conversation online. Some commenters are supportive, others less so. Regardless of what people say, Bruce believes that by sharing her journey she can encourage others to foster healthier relationships with their own inner children. And mental health experts say she and other reparenters may actually be onto something.
"It's more about knowing that you can have fun and nothing bad is going to happen to you from having fun, waiting for the other shoe to drop," says Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist specializing in ADHD and anxiety. "The more that people practice this, the more they tend to feel like their authentic selves."
What is re-parenting?
Bruce says she was an anxious kid growing up.
She hated going to school. She had a lot of anxiety around sleep. She started therapy at an early age, but it didn't help much. Through her teens and early twenties, she says she suffered from depression.
Then, as an adult, Bruce started reading books on somatic therapy and the inner child. One in particular − "No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model," a book by therapist Richard Schwartz − really struck a chord, she says, and launched her reparenting journey.
For Bruce, reparenting started with getting curious about feelings that would arise in her day-to-day life. Checking in with herself, she says, allowed her to get in touch with how her inner child was feeling. Eventually, these check-ins gave way to full-on conversations with her inner child.
When Bruce began this process, it became apparent to her just how bad her self-talk was. You're so awkward, Why did you say that?, You don't look good in this frequently played in her head. All these phrases, she says, boiled down to one message: You are not enough.
"I noticed that I talked to myself with a lot of self-criticism," Bruce says. "I would never talk to a child that way."
Now, when Bruce has these feelings, she listens to her inner child and asks her what she needs.
"From there it can be, 'Oh, I need to take a deep breath. I need a hug. I need to call a friend. I want to go outside. I want to dance,' " Bruce says. "I personally love dancing. Dancing for me is just so healing and so therapeutic."
Those controversial Target videos
As a psychological concept, the inner child, Sarkis says, isn't anything new, and reparenting has been an important topic in the Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families community for a while. The aim of reparenting, Sarkis says, is to replace negative self-talk with the voice of a loving parent.
But a loving parent, Sarkis adds, doesn't acquiesce to all of their child's whims. Sometimes, love looks like telling your kid "no." The same, she says, is true when reparenting.
"A loving parent voice isn't always one that says, 'Go you, you're great,' " Sarkis says. "It's also the one that says, 'Hey, that gallon of ice cream, maybe we need to stop eating that right now.' "
During her first six months of posting reparenting videos, Bruce says, the feedback was mostly positive. Then, as more people found her page, more haters started pouring into her comments sections. The Target dancing videos have stoked plenty of derision in particular.
At first, it was frightening to have so many mocking her online. But, to Bruce, the reaction proved she was striking some sort of chord − and it's motivated her to keep posting, no matter what others think.
"I literally was like, 'I can either delete the video and pretend that that never happened. Or I can go into Target, level it up with the cape and a crown and just dive into this,' " she says. "I remember that choice point. And I decided to literally, the next day, put on a cape and a crown. Level it up."
When Bruce dances in Target, she says she stays out of the way of other customers and remains respectful of employees. She doesn't have any current plans to return and dance again, but she's not ruling it out either.
"If I'm in Target and I like the song that's on, I will face fear again and dance," she says.
No matter how idyllic your upbringing was, the truth is, no one gets out of childhood entirely unscathed. Psychological and emotional wounds from early life can be activated anytime − whether while walking through Target, or just before hopping on the phone with a reporter. Bruce admits she checked in on her inner child and did some quick reparenting before her interview with USA TODAY.
"Yes, I totally did," she says. "I was like, 'OK,' you're nervous. And I can hold your nerves. I'm not nervous because you're nervous. I can hold this all.' So yeah, I definitely did."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: She dances in Target in a cape. Meet the viral woman 'reparenting' herself.
