On Orphanhood & Reparenting Oneself Through Recovery

How losing my parents helped me to find myself.

When I was a kid, my favorite game was “orphans.” The game goes like this: you start with a tragedy. It’s best if you can get your parents to participate. Lie on the floor, you might command them, pretend to be dead. Put on your mother’s black charmeuse dress and resist blinking so you can cry real tears. Float around the house with a broom and a duster, and make sure to look beautiful and sad. Harvest milkweed and bluegrass to make a soup, and pretend to drink it like you are starving. Rub ashes from the fireplace onto your cheekbones. Tangle twigs in your hair. 

The game ends when you grow into an adult. Because adults, you reason, aren’t meant to have parents anyway.

But the reality of orphanhood was different from what I had imagined. I was 25 years old when I became an orphan, and despite my years, I felt no more prepared for it than if I had been a child. Adults, it turns out, need their parents just as much as children do. 

My father’s untimely death kicked off a long and convoluted period of depression, reflection, and self-exploration. I was three years into my recovery, and in the absence of alcohol, I had come to rely on my father for emotional support and validation. Now, he was gone. I was alone. The world seemed impossibly vast, brimming with threats unseen. 

I set out, as I always do, to find the answers in books.

I read everything and anything about orphanhood that I could get my hands on. As it turns out, orphans are everywhere: in Disney movies, 19th-century literature, and modern-day TV shows. Despite the singularity of the experience, orphanhood has captured the public imagination–and there are good reasons for that. Orphanhood represents both our greatest fear and our secret fantasy: to become ahistorical, to create something of ourselves independently of the influences that fashioned us. The orphan is a uniquely American trope: a paradigm of reinvention and self-determination. She is resourceful, resilient, a challenge to her circumstances. She is an archetype of freedom and autonomy—contextless, ahistorical, she appeals to the sort of magical thinking that undergirds so much of the American mythos. It is every child’s dream and nightmare to untether herself from the fetters of heredity, to come of age independently of adult influence. The orphan is the embodiment of that fantasy: a cipher into which we encode our own enduring dreams of potential and possibility. In this way, the orphan is precisely the kind of rags-to-riches, triumph-over-circumstance story to which we are most drawn—a clean, contextless narrative over which we are free to transpose our own. 

It occurred to me then that recovery is a kind of orphanhood: a sudden break from the past, a fearless leap of faith into the future. We are asked to abandon that which has comforted us and kept us secure for so long in the interest of facing the world alone. We are asked to recover something of who we are and create something of who we wish to be. And we are asked to leave everything we have known behind. It’s shocking, really: how much of recovery turns out to be grief. 

We all become orphans at some point–whether in losing our parents or in losing the things we have replaced them with. And that’s why recovery is a creative act; an act of reparenting ourselves, and in so doing, of raising ourselves anew. The question that matters isn’t how do I survive this but rather how do I embody the version of orphanhood that lives in limitless possibility?

The Work of Grief 

My mother died when I was fourteen. For the next ten years, I committed to the work of addiction rather than tackle the work of grieving.

By the time my father died, I had a different set of tools to draw from–or at least, I should have. What I hadn’t counted on was how much transference had occurred between my father and I–how much of myself I had invested in him. How much my faith in him had eclipsed my faith in myself. 

Because what happened was this: when I lost the substances that kept me feeling safe, I latched onto my father instead. And when I lost him, I was left with nothing but myself.

I tell my clients all the time that recovery is not a process of addition but one of subtraction. Before we can usher in the new, we must clear the old. And what I had done in early recovery, rather than clearing away the addictive behaviors that kept me codependent and insecure, was to transfer them into my father. 

In order to become the recovered version of myself I wanted to be, I had to commit entirely to the project of grief–the project of letting go and leaving behind. 

The orphan is at once a destructive and creative character; a creator and destroyer of worlds. The critic Nine Auerbach calls the orphan “a solitary wanderer destroying great houses.” In order to embrace her potential, the orphan must learn to grieve the version of herself she once knew, a version that exists now only in the past.

Learning to grieve what we have left behind is a critical step in the recovery process. We can let go of what no longer serves us, but if we do not grieve it, we will never fully move forward. From the orphan, we can learn to grieve. We can learn to let go–and to make room for the new.

How to Grieve

The grieving process is difficult and rarely linear. But if you don’t grieve the loss of your addiction or habit–and in so doing, grieve the loss of your former self–you won’t find the sort of profound, lasting change you are looking for. 

Here are a few tips to help you grieve your former self.

1. Give Yourself Time and Space: Grief operates on its own time. Be sure to leave yourself ample time and space to allow grief to happen. This means scheduling periods during which you give yourself nothing to do. 

2. Engage in Ritual: Rituals lend us closure–and closure is the great aim of grief. Consider enacting rituals to help you let go of your former self. Toss a few items you no longer use, for example, or burn an old picture of yourself. 

3. Talk About It: There’s nothing like talking about grief to put it into perspective–and to empower you to learn from it. Talk to someone you trust, 

4. Seek Support: Grieving isn’t something we are meant to do alone–it’s a burden we share. If you’re looking for support in letting go of your former self, consider booking a free session with me or joining our weekly support group here. 

The Work of Rebuilding 

The artist Anna Craycroft, whose 2008 installation The Agency of the Orphan, consists of graphite portraits of famous orphans—Webster, Dorothy, Anne, all arranged around two ceramic busts of children, their faces downcast, water spilling from their mouths and into stone tubs—asks us to imagine orphanhood as a state of being rather than a product of material conditions. Orphanhood, she explains, “is the discovery and declaration of autonomy as an adult through a reunion with one’s child self [... the realization of a true individual and independent self through a concomitance of adulthood and childhood,” a state she refers to as “regressive individuation.” The orphan is a kind of artist, tasked with observing the world as it is and arranging and articulating her impressions “with the wonderment of a young mind and the sagacity of a visionary.” L’enfant terrible; the irreverent, the champion of truth against tradition. 

The orphan as tragic artist is a sub-trope of the genre. The orphan is liberated from the context of conformity, the tethers of heredity, and released into the project of individuation and self-actualization. In her investigation of the orphan trope, “Incarnations of the Orphan,” the critic Nina Auerbach maintains that metaphorical orphanhood is a necessary precondition for creativity. She imagines the orphan as a “picaresque artist,” pointing to such examples as Stephen Daedalus from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a character who chooses self-exile in the interest of pursuing aesthetic impressions untainted by inherited judgment, seeking to capture “the essential nature of a thing.” Dorian Gray is also a picaresque artist—a lowly character whose faith in aestheticism compels him to leave the natural world behind, to live in a realm of fantasy, which itself quickly becomes a landscape of horror. For such characters, creativity is a desperate gesture, a scrambling against the threat of destruction and self-effacement, the only means of defense against obsolescence. Orphanhood becomes a kind of necessary impetus for the creative act. To create before one is destroyed. 

Once I had grieved the loss of my former addicted self, it was time to become someone new. When my father was still alive, I avoided reconstruction, preferring instead to fall into the same old patterns by a different name.

But once he was gone–and all tethers to my past were severed–I had no choice but to embrace creativity and remake myself anew. Here are the steps I took to do that.

Embracing Creativity 

1. Envision: The first step in any journey of creativity is developing a vision. When I was still in the dense haze of grief, I created a vision for my recovery–what I wanted my life, eventually, to look like. I recommend doing the same thing. Create a picture of your ideal life—down to the last detail. Tape it somewhere you’ll see it each day.

2. Experiment: Embracing possibilities looks like exploring those possibilities in full. Every day, I do something I’ve never done before–something spontaneous. Sometimes, it’s as small as ditching my morning routine for a walk. Sometimes, I scrap the whole day and play hookey. Find ways to experiment in your daily life to boost your creativity.

3. Reflect: Each morning, I write three pages in my journal and meditate. Implementing such exercises allows me to open myself up to my creative potential and receive guidance from my highest good.

4. Learn: Creativity can only come from the acquisition of new information. Find ways to endlessly enlarge your intellectual and creative life. Go to a museum. Meet other creatives. Learn a new hobby. In the process, you will learn something of who you want to be.

5. Build Community: Building a community of like-minded folks was the best step I ever took for myself in my journey of self-development. If you’re interested in finding one of your own, consider joining our weekly support group for bad habits and addictions.

How to Reparent

The inescapable truth is that, if nature takes its course, we will all, without exception, be orphans one day. Losing a parent is a near universal experience–but it need not completely upend our lives. 

After my Dad died, I spent a lot of time in Adult Children of Alcoholics, a program that provides resources to those who grew up in dysfunctional families with the aim of teaching them to reparent themselves. To become one’s own loving parent is to become self-sustaining, to integrate the disparate parts of ourselves into the whole. It is to provide one’s inner child with a strong, loving foundation. It is to respect one’s boundaries, to provide basic needs for oneself–but also to encourage healthy development and self-actualization. It is to show love to oneself and to others, to model good behavior, to serve as a metric for accountability, to provide unwavering support.

Learning to become one’s own loving parent is a lifelong endeavor–and it isn’t easy. But it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Because once we do, we need never be orphans again.

Becoming your own loving parent looks like: 

1. Having Fun: I tell my clients that the most important aspect of a lasting recovery is fun. If you aren’t living a life worth living, you won’t want to stick around for it.

2. Practicing Self-Care: Self-care isn’t bubble baths and face masks. It’s setting and maintaining boundaries. It’s making hard decisions and trusting yourself with the outcome. It’s surrounding yourself with people who love and respect you.

3. Communicate Kindly to Yourself: Most of us struggle with this one, but self-compassion is key in the parent-child relationship. Talking to myself has been one of the most invaluable tools of recovery. Talk to yourself as though you were a kind parent speaking to a child–it really works.

4. Protect Yourself: A loving parent protects their child. Set and maintain healthy boundaries, stay away from toxic people and situations, set up accountability measures for future progress. Look out for yourself. 

In Conclusion 

In the end, orphanhood turned out to be nothing like I imagined it to be. But then, I too was unrecognizable by the time I fought my way through grief. I was recovered, renewed. I trusted myself and was confident in my decisions. I protected myself from harm and loved myself into healing. I ceased to define myself according to the demands of others and learned to listen to my innermost desires. I surrendered the past and embraced the creative future. I was free. 

For more information on my process, book a free session with me. And until we meet again, may you fight your way through grief and meet me on the other side, where wholeness is more than just a promise.