Are You Abusing Your Inner Child?

                When I first heard about my “Inner Child,” I immediately dismissed the idea as a load of crap, mumbo-jumbo, psycho-babble, b.s., call it what you want… I wasn’t buying it.  Mind you, I was raised by a woman who was raised in a generation where emotions were generally dismissed.  They surely weren’t something to be given any real consideration, let alone acknowledged, dissected, analyzed or – God forbid! – talked about. That, combined with my experience with the mental health community back in the early 80’s, did nothing to convince me that dealing with my feelings would be beneficial.  By the age of 14, my emotions had been labeled as nothing but trouble, boxed up and abandoned to the back of my mind where they could be ignored.  It wasn’t until my best friend was killed by a drunk driver seven years later when all of those ignored emotions would come crashing down around me.

                It was in Recovery where I was finally willing to give this Inner Child idea another look.  This time, I was able to do it with an open mind.  It didn’t take me long to discover the connection between the issues I was struggling with and unmet needs from my childhood.

                Before we go any farther, I want to re-iterate something I expressed in an earlier post.  I DON’T HATE MY MOTHER! My mother was just as much a product of her environment as I am of mine, just as her mother was before her and so on and so on and all the way back to Adam and Eve.  We are flawed people, having been raised by flawed people, who were raised by flawed people.  Hate and blame accomplish nothing.  The best we can do and the only way to honor the efforts of our parents is to try to learn from their mistakes and be better parents.  You will never hear me advocate for hate, blame or unforgiveness; those things are just baggage that keep us from living free. 

                When I started doing Inner Child work there were a few questions that needed answers.

1. What is an Inner Child?    Cambridge Dictionary defines the Inner Child as “the part of your personality that still reacts and feels like a child.”  The words I want to emphasize are “the part of your personality.”  Your inner child is not a miniature version of you that resides somewhere between your liver and kidneys.  I’ve come to understand that my inner child really is the core of my personality.  “She” is the key to all my beliefs.  In short, all the good and bad things I believe about myself and the world originate with her.
2. What’s wrong with her?  The same thing that is wrong with everyone else’s inner child.  She made decisions about things she didn’t understand without the wisdom or experience required to properly make those decisions.  For a variety of reasons, she doesn’t feel safe, loved, or valued.  Trust is difficult because she believes that sooner or later, everyone will abandon her.
3. What does she need from me?  She needs me to understand that there are gaps between what she needed and what she got.  She needs me to fill in those gaps. She needs me to protect her.  She needs me to love her, not abuse or abandon her when she fails to meet some expectation.  She needs me to put her needs before anyone else’s wants.  She needs me to help her heal.

When I met my second husband, his wife of almost twenty years had just died a few months earlier, leaving him to raise their 11-year-old son.  The whole situation was just horrible.  My (now) ex didn’t want to give up his job as an OTR truck driver to stay home and raise his son.  His son was living with Grandpa, Grandpa’s wife and her two sons that were in the same age range of his son.  Did you get all of that?  I know, it’s confusing.  Anyhow, all I could see was this 11-year-old boy whose mother just died and instead of anyone helping him deal with the death of his mother, he was now lost in the shuffle of a very busy household.  All I could see was the pain that child was in and I went into rescue mode.

Over the next few months, I had what I thought were all the important conversations that I needed to have before getting married again.  He had all the right answers, but it wasn’t long before I started seeing discrepancies between word and deed.  All sorts of red flags started popping up, but I was so laser-focused on rescuing his son that I either completely ignored them or rationalized them by blaming the grieving process.

I had been married for exactly a week when I knew that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.  I got married expecting to gain a husband and step-son.  He got married to give his son a new mom.

I’m not going to go into all the details that eventually led to the decision to leave.  In evaluating the whole situation after it was said and done, I realized that there had been plenty of evidence to support the fact that this marriage was wrong for me.  Evidence that I ignored because I put his son’s grief before my need to be loved, valued and respected.  His son’s grief wasn’t my responsibility, but I was the only one who seemed to be concerned about it.

Deep down, I knew this marriage wouldn’t work.  I knew I would end up getting hurt (that we would all end up getting hurt), but I did it anyway.  In doing this, I effectively told my inner child that my step-son was more important than her.  No wonder she doesn’t trust me.  Do you blame her?  If I want her to trust me, I’m going to have to show her that I will protect her, that I will not hurt her to help someone else.

The process of helping your inner child heal is called “reparenting.”  This can be done with a therapist or independently.  I didn’t know this could be done with a therapist until I started doing research for this post.  Suffice it to say that the work I’ve done has been independent.  The idea is that we can trace our issues back to a trauma in our childhood, define what need wasn’t met and meet that need for ourselves now, effectively healing the damage.  We can’t undo the damage, but just like a scar forms over an abrasion… we can heal.

When I stop sacrificing myself at the alter of everyone else’s wants and needs, I will stop sending the message to my inner child that she doesn’t matter.  When I extend grace to myself for perceived failures – instead of launching into a tirade of self-loathing – I will be sending the message that’s it’s okay to not be perfect and love isn’t dependent on performance.  When I stop allowing other people to abuse her, I’m sending the message that she is worth protecting.

I want you to notice that the above paragraph is in the present tense.  I’m still working on this, I haven’t mastered it yet.

Have you done any inner child work?  I would love to hear about your experiences.