Therapy is opening up the true pain and fear of my childhood. I sat with my inner child while she cried and after I read some of my recent posts and blogs in therapy this morning with Kat, I heard my inner child tell me she often feels fear, especially when adult me abandons her and that the emotions she had to carry were too huge as they belonged to my parents and grandparents and great grandparents. Wow!
I thought of how John Bradshaw says that the adult child reads and analyses but never gets to the truth of what it carries until we let down intellectual defences and can feel the reality. I think of the hundreds of books I have read trying to uncover the truth of my soul that the inner child just reveals instinctively and bodily.. It really is more simple to tune in inwardly and really listen than to seek restlessly outside of your true self for ‘answers’ or relief.
I read a post yesterday that was recommended by another blogger suggested by my post saying ‘you do not have a child living inside you.’ That stole my joy as I feel this child to be real and I know that wounded child is not the only aspect it is also about the experiences of having the true spirit cut off or dampened down. Loss of contact with that inner sense of lively spirit and joy can also lead to soul loss, something mentioned in this connected post by LonerWolf that I read yesterday.
Inner Child Work: 5 Ways to Heal Deep-Rooted Trauma
My childhood was just so goddam lonely, that is what I am realising now and yet a part of me stayed alive despite all the efforts of my culture and family to kill it off. Even at school when I didn’t feel I fitted in that part of me was real, I saw the bullshit that went down at the hands of the nuns but I was careful to stay out of trouble because with two older sisters I saw them both come to grief at the hand of psychotic nuns. In fact all of this nun related trauma was triggered when I went with an AA friend to a monastery in the NSW bush where a group of English nuns were sent to live. I remember becoming so inundated with anger and sadness there I had to run to the chapel when my friend looked at me and said “what’s wrong?” with an angry annoyed look on her facce, just as my mother used to do. I could not articulate it only scream in frustration in the chapel which scared my friend and when we got back home she accused me of ‘being off the programme’ when really I was just tapping into something energetic and feeling frustrated at being stuck in this place my friend thought was so special.
Lots of things about my life make sense to me now. My turning to alcohol and drugs after the harsh treatment at the hands of my father makes sense, my feeling of not fitting into a business and entirely materially oriented family hell bent on appearances and upward mobility, likewise. That said my Dad and Mum were not snobs at all, they never forgot their working class roots but they did try to hide behind the accoutrements of life and my older brother I now know carries a massive emotional neglect/abandonment wound. He is such a softy really and so sweet deep down inside but he found it impossible to always be totally available emotionally for his children and married a woman bent on hiding behind appearances too, that said I see the wounds in the soul to the inner child in each. Dad actually threw my brother in the deep end of the swimming pool to make him swim and made he and a friend of the family smoke an entire pack of cigarettes until they were violently ill after he found them both sucking on some butts left around the house Mum and Dad used to live in while Dad was stationed in Indonesia following the end of World War II when my brother was only about 6 years old. Too too violent, but in Holland in my father’s generation boys were taught to smoke around 10 years of age.
I am grateful for my dog, Jasper who connects me to my inner child. I think of the times I punished him for weeing in the bedroom but the first time this happened it was because my mother talked me into seeing the doctor about a sinus ailment that was all abuse and trauma related anyway and Jasper picked up the stress of it and was upset at the separation as I had to have an operation and it kept me all alone over Christmas my family abandoned me and went away without me. Whenever I got sick it often got too much for my mother and when the breast cancer hit in 2016 that did not (I now believe) warrant an operation as I was listening to a programme today on the over diagnosis of early stage cancers, I got this after my sister pressured me to go for a mammogram two months after her operation for breast cancer in late 2015.
Our bodies, I do believe, just carry so much of our inner child trauma history and the family multi-generational trauma history. The wounding to the inner child is a religious issues too if you trace the evolution of splitting back to those times when spirit and matter were split off. In fact unpacking my books the other day I came across one called Healing The Split : Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill. I would go as far to say that mental illness all comes down to the way we were or were not able to process early experiences of trauma, attachment, neglect, abuse and bonding traumas later in life and how radically separated we become from the ground of a sense of ‘unified oneness’ present before birth. The identified patient or family scapegoat is often the one that presents as mentally ill when really they are just carrying something for the collective that the family or culture or society refuses to own or accept into consciousness. Mental illness is so often a shadow problem and psychotic breaks may not always be only about illness but also some form of spiritual emergency or emergence process as one grapples to understand oneself and ones feelings and insights and visions within a more limited psychological social or cultural framework.
The potential for understanding our past is always present to us, if we have the willingness to do the inner work and face our feelings, the sad thing is that so many of us seek to run from the pain inside that could actually free us.
“The wounded child asks for care and love, but we do the opposite. We run away because we’re afraid of suffering. The block of pain and sorrow in us feels overwhelming. Even if we have time, we don’t come home to ourselves. We try to keep ourselves constantly entertained—watching television or movies, socializing, or using alcohol or drugs—because we don’t want to experience that suffering all over again.
The wounded child is also in each cell of our body. There is no cell of our body that does not have that wounded child in it. We don’t have to look far into the past for that child. We only have to look deeply and we can be in touch with him. The suffering of that wounded child is lying inside us right now in the present moment.
But just as the suffering is present in every cell of our body, so are the seeds of awakened understanding and happiness handed down to us from our ancestors. We just have to use them. We have a lamp inside us, the lamp of mindfulness, which we can light anytime. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, our steps, and our peaceful smile. We have to light up that lamp of mindfulness so the light will shine out and the darkness will dissipate and cease. Our practice is to light up the lamp.”
Source : https://www.wildlyjoyfullife.com/articles-and-information/category/healing-the-inner-child
The way to healing lies in feeling the pain and trusting it contains the kernel of our true self, as the poet Kahil Gibran reminds us. If we want to free the seed of reality that lies hidden within us, tears and anger and fear may be the price we need to pay in order to feel the depth of emotional truth and encounter the reality. The more we run or lack trust the more we lose our way forward. As my friend Alex of Evolution of Self always reminds me, trust the storm, it may be the very thing that washes your aching soul clean.
Emerging From The Dark Night 