Recognizing our inner child
David (
Dominica
)
Recognizing our inner child – David’s goosebump moment
“Hi! This is David from Dominica and today I am going to share with you my goosebump moment. It basically happens every time I acknowledge and nurture my inner child. That little kid that is deep within myself. I have always believed that it does not matter how old we grow, it does not matter the kind of experience, wisdom, and knowledge that we gain over the years, we are still that little kid that we used to be so many years ago. We still need the same emotional support and unconditional love that we needed back in the day, so many years ago. So, what I do is that I take a look at one of the pictures that I have of myself when I was 5 years old. I look at that little kid and I tell him: “David, you know what, everything’s going to be okay”, “It does not matter the kind of mistakes you make. It is okay to make mistakes”, “It does not matter if you have imperfections. Nobody’s perfect”, “I’m going to be there for you. It does not matter what happens at the end of the day”, “You should not fear because I am always going to be there for you, unconditionally” What I do is that after that, I imagine myself hugging that little kid. It is so reassuring. Every time I do that, I cannot help but to start crying. It is so tension-releasing. Every time I feel anxious, depressed and down, that helps me a great deal. It is really therapeutic. Hopefully you can practice it as well because it helps me a lot, and I think it is going to help you too. That was my goosebump moment. Hopefully you enjoyed it! Take care of yourself. Bye, bye!”
We all have an inner child
Do we all have an inner child? The answer is yes, but we often fail to listen to it and connect with it. The inner child is related to emotional harmonization and thought integration.
Only if we learn to listen to it, we can develop the way to love ourselves, and reconcile ourselves with the set of our own experiences, eliminating the blockages developed and closing as much as possible the wounds that were left open along the way.
What does it mean to have an inner child?
The inner child is the retrospective image that each person has formed of the child he or she was at different times in their development. We all associate childhood with spontaneity, innocence, and sensitivity. This image allows access to these past dimensions of oneself.
Human development from birth, in the process of civilization of the baby, its birth to language and its further psychic and emotional evolution, involves a series of losses and sacrifices that are not without crisis, trauma and suffering. This is true for everyone, but in many cases, we must add personal and family dramas that constitute deep traumas in the development. The memory of the individual is organized around these experiences of pain and the reaction to them, that would be the dimension of the inner child.
Learning to listen to the inner child is important because rejecting one’s emotions and running away from oneself has repercussions on emotional coherence and capacity. Instead of running away from what hurts and scares us, to avoid facing it, which impoverishes our life possibilities and confines us in patterns of preventive avoidance of experiences, this therapy proposes the connection with those conflicts through the inner child.
Listen to the message your inner child wants to give you
If you want to move forward on your path, you must listen to the child you once were and that still exists within you. That nice, cheerful, jovial child, capable of having fun, but who also suffered on many occasions for something that was done to him or her, that was not so pleasant and that marked his or her life, but that, at the same time, through the years, we block those memories because of what hurts us.
Although we cannot change the past, nor how we reacted at the time -doing the best we could-, we can move forward and recognize, heal over everything that affected us and move on. That is why it is vitally important to embrace and heal our inner child to trust in love and to be able to have a full life in the present having healed our past.
The child is the authentic part, and the authentic part within us is the one that suffers because it wants to come out. We put on masks, which prevent us from seeing our authentic self and our spontaneous part that struggles to emerge day by day.
Love for oneself is love for our inner child, for that natural part of us that we are born with before culture is put into our heads. It is an instinctive desire for happiness.
How the inner child expresses itself
In general, we do not usually pay much attention to it, but it continues to speak to us in many ways through physical, emotional, mental, and even spiritual symptoms. On the physical level, the adult, for example, can suffer from autoimmune diseases among others.
It is expressed through emotions: emotional hypersensitivity, emotional poverty, extremes, emotional manipulation… For example: someone who is constantly driven by an anger, an aggressiveness is often an expression of the wounded emotional child.
The child tries to express his emotional needs however, the adult judges them, he does not want to recognize them because he wants to depend on the other; the adult, as when he was young, always waits for the other to satisfy his emotional needs, the other can be his children, his grandparents, his parents if they are still alive, or his spouse, his friends, waiting for the other to satisfy our emotional needs is endless.
More about inner child:
- What is an inner child and what does it know?
- Finding and getting to know your inner child
- 8 ways to start healing your inner child
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