Taking care of our Inner Child : today’s reflections on recovery

Not all of us got to live and love our true Inner Child growing up.  Many of us learned instead to self abandon, to put our needs and true feelings behind us or bury them, especially if we were raised in a non nurturant or non mirroring home.   I have found enormous help with my own abandonment wounds and trauma by reading books by Susan Anderson.  I was guided to second hand bookshop shortly after my husband left me in 2004 and I found Susan’s book The Journey from Abandonment to Healing : Surviving Through and Recovering from – the Five Stages that Accompany the Loss of Love.  It really helped me enormously to validated the feelings I went through as each of the five stages : Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalising the Rejection, Rage and later Lifting played out in my life.  I still return to that book at times for insights.

Last year I also bought her book Taming Your Outer Child : Overcoming Self Sabotage and Healing from Abandonment, but due to the death of my Mum I didn’t get very far with reading it until lately.  It also is a mine of information and insights into the dynamics of trauma and emotional abandonment patterns effects on the brain and on our behaviour.

The Outer Child Susan refers to in the title of the second book mentioned is the defensive part of us that turns against our Inner Child who it comes to believe is needy and powerless and then engages in self destructive behaviours or actions which only serve to push what our Inner Child or True Self really needs further and further away from us.  Susan teaches in this book a method for our Adult (or Big) Self to take the reigns of power back from the Outer Child getting it to turn back towards the Inner Child and give it love and as sense of value and esteem from within, not by avoiding relationships or triggers but by looking further at the part we play in keeping the dysfunctional reactions to triggers going when we ‘act out’ defensively instead of integrating the feelings Outer Child’s reactions are guarding against and taking care of ourselves in the midst of them.

There are ways to dialogue with our Inner Child which are similar to what Margaret Paul has developed as a form of Inner Bonding which means we are left less alone internally.

Susan recommends a practice of each day listening into what our Inner Child or lively self needs and making a commitment on a daily basis to engage in practices which feed this part of our self (or our soul).  This may included singing, listening to music, painting, dancing, taking a long drive with the windows down, walking our dog, spending time in nature, having a massage, connecting with a loving friend or any other activity that is designed to bring us joy.  If we make a daily practice of this as well as connecting in, we will gain the connection to our Inner Child.  And when we start to listen to him or her we may get a fair serve of anger if for years we have been neglecting his or her needs.

I engaged in some dialogue with my own Inner Child yesterday and she told me how angry she was for my promiscuity in my early adult years.  She told me she wished I had learned how to listen to her and protect her and not give myself away by getting involved physically with men until I had learned more about who they were and whether or not they were safe or healthy or trustworthy.  This was quite a shock to me but it enabled my Inner Child to really express a lot of her anger and grief and I now know when I finally have my next embodied relationship with a man I will not give myself away as easily.

There are other things I know I also learned to do to try and win the love of emotionally unavailable parents and siblings when young which included giving myself away, putting my needs and feelings last and then engaging in addictions to medicate the pain. I will never be able to make up for the years loss but at least now I can own the truth of how much it hurt and how destructive it was while having a lot of compassion for myself and my degree of unconsciousness.  Its interesting to me that this is all coming to light as Venus in Scorpio moves closer and closer to my natal Neptune in the third house while squaring Natal Sun and Moon in Aquarius as transiting Mars moves towards it and just off the conjunction with my natal Saturn.  Everything I now see is right in line with Universal timing because I could not have gained this awareness more quickly if I tried, it had to grow and develop organically through a lot of searching, reading, therapy, busts ups in relationships and pain.

I am committing to my own Inner Child support practices on a daily basis which include time spent walking in nature, sitting with Jasper under a big old Pine tree in our local nature spot reading, listening to music, connecting with Scott and working to keep the connection with my sister who is struggling at present.  I feel my sister’s pain deeply as she has had no therapy but I still want to reach out from time to time at the same time as I keep my distance.  We all suffered in our own ways from the family disease of multigenerational separation trauma and addiction but I am the only one who has chosen a conscious path of recovery that does not include medicalisation, for that I am extremely extremely grateful.

Susan’s second book can be downloaded for free here apparently.