Every
person on this planet has within them a wounded inner child. It is next to
impossible not to have one. What I mean by the wounded inner child, is that
part within us that felt helpless and dependent on our parents when we were
small. Inevitably, we wouldn’t have gotten our needs met – whether it’s from a
parent who made us cry to sleep by ourselves because they were too tired, or
something worse like touch deprivation or physical abuse. Everyone has some scar of abandonment, shame
or neglect imbedded into their psyches – the level of intensity and trauma is
based on the scale of how a person was treated consistently.
The wounded
inner child is the part of us that acts out, sulks, rages, and becomes overly
emotional or reactive to our adult situations.
This is the area that most therapists try to address tenderly in their
sessions. It is necessary to feel and
process the wound out in order to gain inner strength. Often, though, we have
no idea where to even begin to address the issues.
From a
spiritual perspective, I believe we are all here to grow in giving and receive
loving presence, first towards ourselves and then towards others. We incarnated
as souls full of love, peace and harmony, born into a world of chaos and violence.
As little beings, we had to face our families which were full of subtle and
overt rejections, making us believe that our needs don’t matter and we are
fundamentally flawed or unlovable.
Our
spiritual job here on Earth is to make our ways back home to ourselves as
beings of love and peace, and to share that with others. Unfortunately, many of
us have severe wounds from growing up that have made us forget our true, divine
nature. We treat ourselves poorly and then treat others poorly. This is how
intergenerational trauma happens and extends itself in warped and unexplainable
ways.
For
example, a grandfather may have been an alcoholic and toxified the house with
anger and abuse. The son looks to the father and says “I will never be like you”
and becomes perfect in all areas of his life – except he walks around with the
wound of bitterness and seething anger. Then his son internalizes it, believing
he is a bad kid and ends up taking drugs and dropping out to prove that it is
true. On the cycle goes.
When we do
the inner work of facing our inner child, we are taking great leaps of courage
to face our souls and discover how many illusions of feeling small we have been
living under. When we dig in and see the false beliefs and perspectives we have
been carrying about ourselves, the world and other people, then we are
effectively liberating ourselves from an endless cycle of suffering. We can
then open up to a new reality and really experience life in a fuller and more
enriching way.
For
example, I knew a woman who had severe trauma in her childhood. Her parents
were abusive in the worst ways. Her traumas were deep and huge. Because she
hadn’t unpacked her pain and stuff, she kept attracting men who would abuse her
and deny they did it, making her the crazy one. She then became suspicious of
everyone – of course because that’s the way of protecting herself from getting
hurt again. Her world was a terrifying place to live. The sad part, though, is
she pushed away and blocked out people who wanted to help her and support her.
She ended up in a life of loneliness and isolation. She hadn’t grown up emotionally because the
traumas were so deep and she really didn’t seek or get the help to face that
lonely little girl inside of her. Her life would have been very different if
she had done the inner healing to break out of the illusion that everyone is a
monster working against her. Many would say she has mental health issues, she
needs psychiatric help, etc. That may be
the case as a short term solution, but they aren’t helping her with getting to
the bottom of the problem – deep down she believed that she deserved this
treatment and she was a bad person because these things kept happening to her.
When the truth is that she just had to learn to set healthy boundaries and to
love and care for herself first. It is not her job to be a servant to her
parents or to others in life. It is so
unfortunate that many therapists don’t help their clients find that inner void of
loneliness, fear and feeling unlovable. They will listen, advise and help release
emotions. But they won’t face the very obvious and simple question: “what did
you believe about yourself because of this?”. To me, this questions is the
foundation to help the client self-empower and break out of the prison of their
own suffering and unhealthy relationship patterns. Once a person realizes they
don’t deserve to be mistreated, then they can naturally create healthy
boundaries, be assertive, and sense their own self-worth.
Many people
have become mistrusting of therapy because they feel like it is going to cost
them a lot of money and they have no idea what it is they need to work on. I have gone to therapy myself and I would say
that a true therapist is one who understands the importance of trauma processing,
inner child work and is not afraid of emotions.
Therapists who can’t or won’t go there are just dealing with the
superficial and you will waste your money. That said, even with a great
therapist, it is important to do the self-empowerment work that coaches and
transformation facilitators offer. Otherwise you can wallow in your past pain
without moving forward.
When you
get into the heart of the issue and really uproot what is going on from a
perspective of being loved or not, it is actually quite easy to see the solutions
that are needed. Asking a few simple
questions can do wonders for awakening us from under the spell of confusion and
inner child wounds. One of the questions I like to ask someone struggling with
relationships is: “What do you need to feel loved?” Sitting with that question can bring up
remarkable insights and aha’s for someone.
When I was
asked that question, I responded: “I need to be believed.” That was a shocking
response for me – I had no idea that because of a childhood wound of not being
believed about abuse, I had felt unloved. The truth is that the adults had
their own issues going on with denial and they didn’t have any emotional
availability to take my fear and anger seriously. They just saw me as a cute
kid who was upset. Even though my truth
was my truth, I took in the way the adults around me responded as deep
emotional abandonment, believing that no one in the world will ever hear me or
get me – I am all alone with the pain. To this day, if there are people around
me who don’t believe or validate me emotionally, I detach from them quickly. Yes,
there may be deeper emotions I need to process with a therapist around this,
but the simple awareness that I have a fundamental need of being believed and
validated, has helped me understand how much I have created my whole world from
that wound. Who I chose as friends, enemies and causes I took on, came from
that place of the wounded inner child. If I could have just simply validated
myself and just believed in my truth, I may not have had to spend a ton of
energy feeling lonely, abandoned or betrayed.
I invite
you to really examine your inner child’s wounds and needs whenever you notice
yourself over-reacting or under-reacting to something. As the Adult Children of
Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families program says: “We need to take a
blameless inventory of ourselves and our parents. We can become our own loving
parent”.
