Inner Child – The Child In Us
The Inner Child A Cautionary Story
This is a story about the inner child within us, very much alive and kicking and we’re not talking about pregnancy. It’s the inherent nature of who we were as children and which never dies. The part of us that loves to have fun, be creative, play and be spontaneous. It doesn’t get bogged down by time, money, should and shouldn’t.
It just is. In the present moment. Being.
However, if while growing up, our caregivers are stressed, unhappy, under pressure, abused or abusers we, as children, internalise the cause of their problems as something we ourselves have done wrong. We internalise the blame to maintain the essential narrative that our caregivers and in fact adults around must be all good, all happy and all well. They know everything and are all powerful so if something is wrong we, the child, must have done something to upset them so we must therefore work harder, be funnier, be prettier, be more successful, be better, be less demanding, less talkative, less hungry, whatever it takes to restore the happy balance.
It’s our fairy story, our fabrication, because as children we can’t yet know that our caregivers are part of a long line of ancestors with their stories, wounds and experiences all passed down to us and that we are the last in that line to carry those stories into the next generation.
So the messages from the stories we are told or pick up instinctively through feelings, actions and body language become fixed as a mantra we totally believe and repeat unconsciously through our WHOLE life, from our inner child. With consequences. Unless we stop and notice.
Here’s a case study of how this happens and starts to run our life.
“You’re too demanding”, Geoff was told one day when he was trying to tell his parent something who was busy doing something at the time. A common situation. He just recalls that he couldn’t get their attention but had something he wanted to share with them that was important to him. Later, at school or on the TV or somewhere he overheard someone being called ‘too demanding’ and remembered thinking ‘oh, that’s like me’. Then it started to set in stone, become a thing, a truth he started to believe so he began to not ask for things or input much into conversations. There was always this sense that he would be considered too demanding. He started to keep himself from being seen or heard. Added to which his grandmother used to tell him not to tell people about his achievements as they might think he was bragging. He remembers how in the company of friends and relatives as a child he felt that he was ‘shutting in all his feelings and couldn’t say what he thought’. It reminds us perhaps of the oppressive legacy from the Victorian age of social niceties and good manners where no one spoke their truth.
“So Geoff gradually became invisible and kept himself under the radar and just like a background radio or TV his narrative played imperceptibly every day.”
He really started to believe that as a person he was too demanding every day in every way, taking up too much space, asking for too much and thereby shouldn’t be here at all. His behaviour may have been demanding at that first moment but he internalised the comment as intrinsically describing his very nature. This wasn’t his parent’s intention but, this is how it was perceived and illustrates how an offhand comment can trickle into our thinking process and gradually become a problem.
A Comment Can Trickle into our Thinking Process
When Geoff started therapy as an adult in his forties, he was suffering with depression as his relationship was falling apart and he had lost his job. He felt that no one would want him, that he was a loser and shouldn’t be there. On top of that he felt shame about himself and a sense of guilt that he was to blame, but he wasn’t sure what he had done. It seemed as all the evidence stacked up to prove what he believed about himself, that his narrative was true after all. That he was just too demanding, too much.
After identifying this core belief about himself, we did some deep inner child work and after a few months his relationship started to pick up, he could begin to communicate how he was feeling and their connection felt deeper and more nourishing than before. Together with his partner he also made a plan to start a new career working with young people and is now doing his training and feeling ‘renewed and really fulfilled’.
Geoff’s story is typical of how often we can pick up beliefs about ourselves through childhood, and the inner child, which can start to run our lives without us realising, unless we are conscious of what’s happening. It happens to many of us, and hopefully we receive plenty of messages which affirm our existence as wanted, loved, valued beings to balance out the negative ones. But often we don’t, through no fault of anyone, but because the narrative wasn’t affirming for our caregivers growing up and so it goes back through our ancestral lineage. If we are unaware or unconscious of what is happening, it’s as if our lives run on automatic. Our self-beliefs steer our life patterns and everything seems to fit in to support it. Other people unconsciously help us to maintain our narrative.
“As like attracts like it’s as if our own deep rooted internal experience is reflected back to us in those around us.”
The thing about the unconscious is that it’s outside of our awareness unless we become aware of it and then it becomes conscious. Much like the 99.9% or so of the universe we live in, which is dark energy and dark matter and which scientists know exist due to the effects they produce on the remaining 0.1% or so of the visible universe, similarly our unconscious exists because of the behaviour and emotions it produces in our conscious daily behaviour. Sigmund Freud and his followers in the early 20th century introduced us, in the West, to the notion of the unconscious and how many of our thoughts, feelings and emotions are kept in the dark because they are too threatening. On a primordial or basic level, if we take Geoff’s example of having unconsciously created a narrative that he was too demanding, starting with a comment that became internalised, it began to threaten his very existence until he became aware of it. Then he had choice, then he had agency, then he changed his life. Any of us at any moment can exercise some sort of choice, even if first it is just to stop.
Exercise a Choice Even if it is to Stop
Take a moment to consider an issue or challenge you have, maybe start with something small. It could be in relationship with someone or in work or anywhere. It could be a feeling you don’t like in yourself, or something that really bothers you about society.
“All our reactions and experiences can be sourced back to what is happening inside us. Even our reactions to something on a TV programme, traffic on the road, in a social setting or even how we wake up in the morning.”
Take a moment to stop and breathe and relax and gently focus on that issue or challenge.
Do you feel it in a tension in your body, if so put your hand on that place?
Do you get a picture of a situation in your mind or hear words or conversation around it? Or is it a memory?
Can you remember when you first felt the way you are feeling now?
Keep relaxed and breathe fully.
Can you just sit with it without trying to analyse or fix or change it.
What is underneath that challenge or issue, is it anger and injustice, grief and loss, feeling isolated and unsupported or something else? Does it make you distracted or numb? Try and stay with the feeling underneath and feel it in your body or vision or sound or memory, whichever is easiest.
Can you get a little deeper with it, and get a sense of where it came from?
Just staying relaxed with it and accepting of whatever you feel right now in this moment is the beginning of making it conscious and changing the effect it has on you. This is the beginning of reconnecting with our inner child and bringing ourselves back to the wholeness and joy of our adult being. This is the moment we begin to change the ancestral narrative we have inherited and create a new one. Our birth-right.