Understanding the inner child

Understanding the inner child
S

sadclown

Registrant
I have seen a lot of reference to the "inner child" through my reading on CSA and even my T has mentioned it a few times now. I have seen some threads here refer to it and I have heard it mentioned in chat. Obviously, its a thing and apparently has some credibility, real or imagined. My question is, simply, what the heck are you all talking about?

That kid is long gone- I can't give him the hug he needed (you know- the kind of hug that doesn't turn into sex), I can't give him the pat on the back, the "good job, buddy!", the adult role model, advice of years he doesn't yet have. I can't take away or prevent a single beating, a single cruel word, a single misplaced blame. I can't take away one hungry night, one lonely afternoon, one night of crying, one moment of sheer terror, or one second of sexual pain. These things all happened, they are done. At my age, I can take solace in knowing I will never get molested again, but I can't undo it or off-set it, or protect kid-self because he isn't here anymore. He doesn't exist- I'm a grown up now and I think, feel, and react in different ways than when I was a kid because I am not.

This isn't the first time I have been told something in this process of recovery that I didn't at first comprehend but later did, so I am not discounting that this is a valid idea. I was hoping that perhaps some of you could lend insight. The idea as far as I understand it at this time seems very bizarre and more like psycho-babble than actual healing.

That is not to downplay, invalidate, or discredit anyone's own experiences; I just don't quite understand and if you do have experiences you can share with me to help me understand this I would appreciate it
 
Under therapy that I went trough "inner child" how I see it is considered as some image of memories and feelings that are coming trough imagination when I would look back in my distant past. It is not something that is easy to reach, there is a need for safe environment, to be relaxed and in appropriate mood in first place. It is not something that is planned in advance but rather something that has suddenly emerged and that I was exploring trough one period of time (how I see it, what is he feeling, what does he like, what not, what would I grown like to tell him etc.).
I've found small boy left aside in loneliness that has built world of imagination where he was living freely comparing to his reality and I felt good when attached with him. Off course that inner boy doesn't exist in reality, we are talking about therapy, emotions, memories, symbols and images...
That was my experience, I hope some other members could share theirs as well.

Pero
 
I too explored the inner child. For me I was told my inner child was wounded and I had "exiled" him from my daily building. He lived within and was exiled to a time and place that only knew the abuse and could only see love through the acts of the abuse. I did not know this part existed within me. I thought I was whole. But as we explored I came to know the child within, was at war with me. For I had deprived a part of me the love of others and of myself. I began to understand why this part of me felt special to the abuser and those that abused me. It had a life of its own when I would retreat. It took time for me to accept this part of me. I guess I exiled the child as a way to deny the abuse and what it had done to me.

Learning to love the child within helped me to love myself and understand denial of part of me was destroying me.

I do believe we all have been parts to who we are. For many abuse victims we fragment ourselves at the time of the act. Some are able to accept, others deny this part of us to avoid the pain of the abuse and sadly others are constantly in internal war. The inner child did not die as I grew, it was a part of me that I did not allow to grow. It was stuck in a time and place I did not want to accept. Acceptance of this part of me has aided in healing and minimizing and hopefully eliminating the need to dissociate or use unhealthy coping mechanisms to escape from emotional pain, triggers and memories of the abuse. Denial of part of us and the past is a dangerous thing, at least for me.
 
Interesting post.

I've always felt like I had an emotionally hurting 13 year old inside me ("an inner child"?) that has unfulfilled needs and whose development froze, in place, at some point in time. Yet, another part of me matured into an adult, married, with children and grandchildren and a well established career.

Many times I've asked myself why do I want to go back to my childhood and adolescence when as an adult I have fulfilled so many of the dreams I had in my youth...or have I?

I've recently began a new round of therapy to explore these issues and hopefully, as you guys describe, "get in touch with my inner child". Wish me luck!
 
Hi Sadclown,

The damaged early places in me are the places that run my life, completely. They wrote the scripts in my brain at the time of damage, and are usually unconscious. So, I'm not even aware that those early experiences of the horror of the abuse I went through are what determines most of my life experiences. A big clue for me was I was so unhappy, so depressed, suicidal, an alcoholic, addicted to anonymous sex, and the list goes on. Years of therapy, medications, and I didn't even begin to remember the abuse from my father until age 53 and the abuse from my mother at age 63.

I began to do some regression work in my mid forties and attended a retreat that involved re-birthing and rewriting from birth to age twelve.

This all, over decades of therapeutic work set the stage for what I'm doing now. Moving back to the feeling level of my infant self, where the substantial damage to my personality was done. So now, as I move into the emotions of my damaged infant self, who only knows attack, attack, attack, I'm able to allow my infant self to express the feelings of terror and attack while not acting out those feelings in the real world. Difficult and new for me. My infant self had to write a brain program that prevented me from feeling the pain and terror I sustained. I had to be able to not feel the horrors from my mother because I was dependent on her for survival. The pattern of my life of aggressive dependent abusive relationships in all aspects of my life was established in infancy.

So, when I talk about my inner child I am talking about real time today now energy that is still trapped and attempting to run my life. It is only in bringing my damaged early infant self into consciousness, and allowing those feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and horror and rage to surface and release while holding my infant self in safety, that my infant self can heal. In other words, not play out the paranoia and fear in the real world. As those buried feelings surface, release, and for the first time not create a self-fulfilling prophecy, my infant self can chill and grow now in real time in a safe and healthy environment. As that happens, all of me shifts into a much healthier place. It is a lot of work.

Don
 
SC,

I don't get it either - and I am resistant to it in many ways.

I don't get what my "inner child" is, but I do, in my case, know I hate who I was as a kid. My T asked me what I would do if 12 y/o me was in the room. I said I would boot kick him in the face... My T seemed to think this was unreasonable and out of character.

So in my case, I needed to work on not hating who I was and developing a more nuanced understanding of rightful blame for shit that went down. Instead of emotionally understanding that people did X,Y, and Z to me because I was an awful person who deserved it, moving to understanding that as a kid I developed poor coping and social skills because X, Y and Z was done to me. Basically my T has been nudging me to re imagine who I was as a child and move guilt away from him(myself) and onto the greater situation/people around me.

I am not getting in-touch, communing, talking or whatever to some "inner child", but I am toying with the major themes and concepts from my childhood through imaginings of myself as a child. As you noted, "he doesn't exist", and nor will he ever get to exist again, but imaginations of him, at least in me, exist, and in theory they affect some of my major concepts of self.

Maybe this helps, maybe not. Either way I hope you are doing well and something on this thread provides you some insight.
 
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Don:

I'm amazed at the power of childhood memories. They drive my ill advised behaviors (addiction,fetishes)that are out of character with my adult self.

I;m just trying to figure out what is it that my "inner child" is trying to go back to, to recreate or relive in some form.
 
Hi Jay,

For me, it is not an issue of what my "inner child" wants "to go back to, to recreate or relive in some form." The issue is my "inner child" is severely damaged, and the damage has run my life. It has required 44 years of acquiring tools. But, as I have been able to work down to the feeling level of the early damaged me, I now am able to use these skills to safely allow my early self to release the feelings while keeping all of me safe and not continuing to repeat the pattern of abusive relationships. That was all my early child knew to do, and kept recreating abusive situations until the past 6 months. I am now able to re-parent my young self and allow me to re-grow in safety, with nurturing, with love. It is still early in the process, but I can observe my thinking changing from negative and defensive to curious and open. Pretty amazing stuff.

Don
 
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I used to think this was a load of BS. I really hated the idea. I hated myself back then, and had no interest in going back or pretending to be nice about my 10 year old self. I'm kind of converted now though.

I think this might be a novel, sorry!

My therapist kept asking me to write a letter to myself as a child, but I could never do it. I hated him and had nothing nice to say to him. The turning point was when I had a flashback dream of a time where I had actually wanted my abuser to do stuff to me. When I woke up I hated myself. I wrote pages and pages about how much I hated myself and about how stupid I was for going downstairs to where he was, or even how stupid I was to be there in the first place and that I was sick and weird and deserved everything that happened to me.

Later I'd injured myself and had to go to hospital for help. (a pretty normal thing for me really). While I was waiting I overheard a conversation where two parents were trying to comfort their two kids. The one who had been injured and the other one who was distressed about it. I have no idea why, but somehow this did something to me. I started thinking about the incident from earlier and discovered that it wasn't me. He set me up, he knew what he was doing. He totally tricked me. And the reason why I went downstairs for a drink of water was because I'd been told not to drink water from the bathroom. Apparently it's different to water from the kitchen..? I have no idea if this is true. My dad has told me many wacky things that I've later found out weren't true. But anyway, because I was a good kid I was just doing what I was told.

I started thinking about myself as a kid more and hating him less. He started to feel more like a separate person to me. I still refused to write the letter my T wanted me to write, but eventually I decided I would do a written conversation. I wrote that I was sorry I'd been so bad to him, but that I was going to protect him now. I HATED writing it.

I could have just wrote back "ok, thanks". But when I picked up the pen I kind of instinctively started writing without even thinking about it. My kid wrote back that he hated me. That I'd treated him worse than anyone else ever had, and he was really disappointed with how I turned out, that I sucked as a grown up. That I was really pathetic because I cried all the time and he never did. And I didn't even own a dog. (One of his life's ambitions.)

I was kind of like, hey I'm trying to be nice here, you don't have to be such a brat! But I think he did have a point and it seemed like the whole thing was going to be harder than I thought. I had some more conversations with him and he'd always be sitting in this grassy hollow where I used to play sometimes as a kid. It's where something abusive almost happened to this little girl I was playing with by her older cousin. Eventually I got him to move out of there to somewhere safer.

My T then recommended this book to me, called Rescuing the Inner Child by Penny Parks. I do NOT recommend this book tho. It's really dated, and maybe ok if you are a woman. But several times it makes reference to how males who are abused can become abusers. I don't like reading abuse stuff so I'd asked my girlfriend to read it with me, and it triggered her to have a huge breakdown over her own abuse stuff. I suppose the actual therapy that the book recommends is fine. Basically it's writing letters between you and your child. Your child writes about something that happened, and then you write back to them as an adult, explaining to them how it was wrong and trying to comfort them. You are supposed to do this over and over until you actually believe it.

My kid was obsessing over something that I never really classed as abusive. The same guy I mentioned above also tried to do things to me. I was 9 he was about 13. I would always try and fight him off. He never really did anything, just attempted to. So since it was a lot less scary than the other things that happened to me I decided to try this letter writing thing with it. It kind of upset me a bit, but overall it REALLY helped. It seems pretty much resolved now.

Next part of the therapy was to write a rescue scene where you as an adult come in and rescue your kid. I was very much against this. It's not like it can really happen, it just seemed kind of pointless. It wouldn't cancel out what happened. But I think it's more of like, a metaphor, or something? Rather than you just trying to re-write history so bad things didn't happen. It's maybe more about you saying, I'm an adult now, I'm in control of what happens to me. I can handle stuff. I think..?

So I wrote the rescue. It's probably overly violent and threatening considering the perp is a 13 year old. But he deserved it. The book says it's totally fine if your abuser gets murdered in the process of rescuing your child..... It also says that when you think of the abusive incident again you will also think of the rescue too. This has been true for me.

I've used the same process for some kids who bullied me when I was 11, and also with a teacher who was a complete jerk to me and it helped a lot. I'm not sure I can go any further with it though. Like to the really bad stuff that happened to me. And I still have a lot of dislike for my 13-15 year old self. The kid is fine now. I'd really like to continue with it, because I think it can be healing. Or at least resolve things a bit. Like make them feel over with and in the past.

I have plenty more to say about it, but since this is my longest post here ever I'm going to shut up now. I could have just made this simple and said that I think it's totally fine if you don't get it or don't want to do it. It's just another way to do things, but not the only way. Some things are right for some people and not others. Maybe the idea might grow on you. Or maybe not. It's definitely not something you HAVE to do.
 
Inner child or adult child work is what brought me here. I was dealing with things in my past, and the way I stopped maturing as a person once things spun out of control.

I too had self hatred for not growing up perfect. I thought I was wrong to the core, but I was just damaged.

It did help me to toss off the false guilt and shame. Some would say Thais the most important step.

I highly recommend it. It worked for me. All part of stopping the inner war and learning to accept myself.
 
It sounded whacky to me too, but it is well worth exploring, the concept has been very useful to me so I would recommend trying it.
I like your description txb.
 
For over a year, my T has been recommending that I get in touch with my inner child, or more precisely my 11 year old self. He kept getting me to think of what that 11 year old kid needed, and how did he respond to the CSA. I fought my T on that one. I thought I'm long past that and I can't get it back. My T kept pushing, although covertly. About 2 weeks ago, he got me to speak to my 11 year old self. Tell him what he needed to hear. Tell him what type of boy he was and give him advice for making it through the CSA. IT was very therapeutic and very transformative. I really got in touch with that part of me that's still stuck at being 11. I released a lot of emotions especially anger when I spoke to my young self. This may not be for everyone, but it was really good for me to go through this.

Dave
 
when I first heard of the concept of the "inner child", I thought it sounded like either a multiple personality condition or some mystical ultra-sentimentalized delusion akin to having an invisible friend. eventually, as I heard and read more, I concluded that it was more like a metaphor or symbol of a stage of development or an emotional state that was frozen in time or lost/inaccessible to memory. I didn't feel a particular need or desire to get in touch with it/him. It seemed a bit far out or wacky. I assumed that at worst, I might be imagining something and that if there actually was anything real, it would end up as some sort of emotional, self-indulgent sob-fest, with little to gain except possibly some cathartic stress relief. I decided not to pursue it.

I have always hated looking at old photos of myself as a child or teen, since they were reminders of a terrible time. Either they showed a false happiness or a wistful, solemn awkwardness that hid pain and loneliness.

What happened took me by surprise. Going through old boxes that had been stored for years, I came across my first passport with a photo of me at 13, at the lowest point of the worst time in my life.

Suddenly, I felt something different for that boy that what I had ever felt before. I had always felt contempt, judgment and self-condemnation for that kid, the same things that everyone else had put on him. For the first time, I now saw him as if he were someone separate from me. I saw him as much younger, more vulnerable, and defenseless than before. Instead of self-loathing, I felt compassion and empathy for him. I felt like I wanted to hug him, comfort him, protect him, and tell him that he was a valuable and worthy person. I wept for him as if he was someone separate from me.

I felt like I needed to forgive him for what I had always blamed him for not doing a better job at handling a humiliating and demeaning situation. I told him that I understood that he had done the best he could without support or resources, he had done the only thing he knew to do in order to survive.

I also felt I needed to ask for his forgiveness. Soon after that photo was taken, we moved and though that change of location saved my life by removing me from chronic bullying, harassment and abuse, it also made it possible for me to leave that boy behind as someone I used to know and did not want to be associated with any longer. I had abandoned and rejected him and tried my best to forget and ignore him. And yet I had felt as if I dragged the shame of his experience around with me like a dead albatross around my neck. I felt like he did forgive me, too for trying to move on with life, that he understood my need to try to be free of the burden of memory and suffering.

It was a strange experience. Not like a vision or hallucination. Almost like a split awareness from both inside and outside both identities simultaneously. And as if a subjective and objective perspective were operating at the same time. It was a reconnection with a lost or isolated or dormant part of myself. An analogy might be putting on 3-D glasses as if everything came into sharper focus and greater depth. There was no rush or climax or crescendo to the experience, more like a gentle increase of awareness. Afterward I felt more whole and healthy than I did before. And now that a few weeks have passed, I know that I have learned to accept and love myself as I never did before. In short, it has been a very healing process. I have to keep reminding myself to be kind and gentle with that younger Lee and ask him to be patient with me and my younger self seems to be grateful to me like a trusted older brother for bringing him along in my life.

LEE
 
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