“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. Poets will help us find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable, immobile world.” – Gaston Bachelard
“Never had a problem till I stood face to face with me
And I wish there was a way for me to go inside so I could see
All the faces of the people who have torn a piece of me
As I grew from a seed to a tree.”
– Lyrics from ‘Seed to a Tree’ by Blind Melon
Why you need to do Inner Child work?
The purpose of doing the inner child work is to improve the quality of your life .
As Cathryn L. Taylor says in The Inner Child Workbook, “If you react strongly to an interaction with someone, it is usually a sign that an old issue has been triggered. If as a child you were told you never did anything right, then as an adult, when that message is inferred, it will bring up the pain of the past. If in your current relationship you find yourself forever haunted with the fear that your partner will leave you, you may be reacting to an old experience where one of your parents left the other or left you. In other words, if you’ve been hurt in a similar way before, the hurt from the past as well as the present will emerge. If you find that no matter what you do you have a recurring reaction to a specific issue, it is most likely related to your childhood.
“Numerous examples could be given, but it is most important to understand that you react strongly to people, places and things for a reason. When you find that reason, and heal the circumstances that created it, you are then free to respond to your present interactions, not react to them because of your past. You may not be able to change the facts of your past, but you can change the way you relate to those facts. You may have to rework each scene many times. The repetition will alter the experience, and each time your children within are rescued, they have more trust in you. The more trust they have in you, the less they will influence your adult life.”
Inner Child therapy or healing is a process that helps you to resolve these past experiences, healing inner child issues so that they no longer consciously or unconsciously control your present behavior. I think of healing the inner child through Inner Child work as a process of dredging up the original memories from each stage, or at least creating symbolic images, pictures, voices, sounds, etc., and then replacing them with healthier ones.
“We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal. We are taught to repress and distort our own emotional process. We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.
We form our core relationship with our self and with life – and of course with other people – in early childhood in reaction to the messages we get from the way we are treated and the role modeling of the other people in our lives. We then have no training to help us let go of the old programming and learn a different relationship with our self and life. So, we build upon the foundation laid in early childhood.
As adults, we react to the programming of our childhood. To contend that our childhood emotional wounds have not affected our adult lives is ridiculous. To think that our early programming has not influenced the way we have lived is to be in denial to an extreme.
“When we are reacting out of old tapes based on attitudes and beliefs that are false or distorted, then our feelings cannot be trusted.
When we are reacting out of our childhood emotional wounds, then what we are feeling may have very little to do with the situation we are in or with the people with whom we are dealing in the moment.
In order to start be-ing in the moment in a healthy, age-appropriate way it is necessary to heal our “inner child.” The inner child we need to heal is actually our “inner children” who have been running our lives because we have been unconsciously reacting to life out of the emotional wounds and attitudes, the old tapes, of our childhoods.”
Quotes are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
We have an age of the wounded inner child that relates to each stage of the development process. It is very important to start getting in touch with these parts of ourselves and building a Loving relationship with each of them. It is extremely important to start paying attention to our inner children. It is dysfunctional to deny that our childhood wounds have affected our lives. Our emotional wounds have been dictating our lives and keeping us from Loving ourselves.
We have been an abusive parent to ourselves. We need to be the Loving parent who can hear the child’s voice within us.
We need to learn to be nurturing and Loving to the wounded parts of us. We can do that by actually working on developing a relationship with those wounded parts of us. Life can be an exciting, enjoyable adventure if you stop reacting to it out of your childhood emotional wounds and attitudes.
BENEFITS:
Inner child healing is a lot of work and it takes time, but it is worth it. It can create the freedom to be able to let go, to be happy and Joyous in the moment, no matter what is happening in our lives. It leads to empowerment, serenity, and the ability to have a more Loving relationship with self. Nothing you do in your life will be more rewarding or have more far reaching consequences than healing your wounded soul – which is what your wounded inner children represent. We are – you are, I am – Lovable and worthy.
Inner child healing is not some fad or pop psychology. Inner child healing is the only way to empower ourselves to stop living life in reaction to the past. We have been ignoring history and repeating it for centuries. If we are going to have a chance to reverse the self destructive patterns of human kind, it is going to come from individuals healing self. By healing our inner child wounds, we can change the world.
The quotes are taken from ‘heal your inner child “ by Robert Burney.