Did you go through a difficult childhood?
A difficult childhood refers to the traumas and events that you underwent during the formative years up until seven years of age.
If you ever face a trauma more than once, then a feeling of seclusion can shake and break you down. When you work with your inner child, it recovers and heals you from a difficult childhood. A difficult childhood can be the outcome of various reasons like neglect by parents, thrashing or beating, divorcee parents, humiliation, accidents, abandonment, molestation, and much more.
Such childhood traumas leave a deep impact on us. The inner child therapy is the practice of communicating, appreciating, accepting, restoring and soothing your inner child. The inner child signifies your identity, your first original self at the time you entered this world or you took birth. Your inner child comprises your ability to experience happiness, surprise, virtuousness, compassion, and liveliness.
It is quite unfortunate that our society force us to “grow up” by curbing and suppressing our inner child. The realization of growing up is vague. By that, I mean, we grow up physically but never really reach the psychological or emotional adulthood. The truth is we just appear to be grown-ups but actually our inner child, still being in the state of childlike angers, fears, and traumas, never really let us grow. Such traumas fester and irritate us in our unconscious mind for decades.
There are various ways that help us with inner child work to heal our wounded inner child:
The Faith or Belief
To help the inner child to come out of his shell, he must have the faith that you will be around and he can trust you. Your inner child searches for non-shaming and supportive ally to validate the traumas he faced like rejection, inattention, manipulation, and enmeshment. The real pain work consist of these first vital elements.
The Validation or Confirmation
If you are prone to reduce or make yourself understand that the pains you faced, the ignorance you received, or the ways you were raised and disgraced by your parents, you will have to accept the facts. Yes, you need to validate and tell yourself that these are the things that are the real reasons for your trauma or injured soul. You need to validate and accept that you didn’t have evil and ruthless parents. They were not really bad but they themselves might be wounded kids and thus, such behaviour.
The Shock
Once you are shocked about a particular incident, you become depressed, and get into a denial mode, which leads to grief.
The Rage and Anger
It is okay to be angry about something because that’s the path to heal your inner child. Even if you are mad and scream for something unintended, there’s nothing wrong in it. For instance, if your parents shout and throw filth at each other, it’s fine because they themselves are wounded child and whatever they did was the outcome of their traumatic inner child. It definitely had bad effect on you. We need to stop holding others and ourselves responsible for what we do.
The Grief
Anger paves the way for grief and sorrow. Grieving is important because if you are victimized and abused and you are holding onto that wound without letting it out, it might affect you worsely. Grieving what we couldn’t achieve- our aspirations and dreams and all the unfulfilled desires are very important.
The Repentance
When we weep for the neglected childhood, we must help the wounds of our inner child realize that what had happened could not be changed or done in any other ways. The pains we faced was for what happened to us and not for what happened because of us.
The Isolation
Solitude and shame are the inmost feelings of sorrow or pain. For example, when our parents shamed us, we felt that it is our fault and we must be very bad that is why they abandoned us. This leads to isolation. But, in front of all we present our false self. Our inner child tries to cover the feelings of being defective and flawed. As such things continue while growing up years, our inner child comes to term with a false identity of us. This part of pain where the inner child is secluded is the hardest layer of grief.
Inner Child Work or Inner Child Therapy helps to overcome the above virtues. It’s very hard to remain at these layers of loneliness and pain. But, as we come to terms with these feelings and embrace them, we reach another side of the journey. We come across the child that we were born originally. We encounter our inner child hiding since years behind the emotional traumas faced by us in the initial years. We hid it from ourselves, we hid it from others. By embracing and accepting our loneliness and shame, we start touching our true and real self.
Check out our Programs to “heal” your Inner Child:
Art of Deconditioning, Stage 1.
