The inner Child

March 15, 2005
Reinventing The Past

Healing Your Inner Child

As we tread our individual pathways in life,

we acquire emotional baggage.

Some of it is easy to recognize but some,

the baggage picked up when we were very young,

is often hidden deep within the subconscious.

The inner child or child within can harbor

decades of old hurt that can cause you to react

to situations and people using childhood pain as a context.

This means that sometimes your reactions

have less to do with the situation at hand,

and more to do with things you experienced long ago

but have not forgotten.

The inner child is an important piece of your emotional makeup.

It can be playful, spontaneous, intuitive, and spiritual,

but can also be fearful, distrustful, and critical.

Painful childhood experiences can negatively affect the adult experience.

Healing the inner child

addresses your child-self's wounds

and frees your adult-self to make decisions based on the present.

There are steps you can take to gently begin healing your inner child.

Working with your inner child is very much like solving a mystery,

and the first step to unlocking that mystery is analyzing your own behavior.

Ask yourself why you are attracted to certain people,

why you react the way you do in particular situations,

and what makes you feel helpless, scared, angry, or lonely.

As you do so,

remember that there is nothing wrong with your feelings

and that there is no shame in being influenced by your inner child.

Ask yourself how those feelings have been influenced by past experiences.

Then mentally revisit your childhood.

Visualize yourself as a child.

Feel what your child-self is feeling.

Finally,

approach him or her

and offer comfort in the form of a hug

infused with positive, loving energy.

In doing so,

you are both healing and letting go of the wounded child's pain.

Attempting to discount the fact

that the inner child has an effect on the adult

denies the impact of old wounds and past experiences.

Acknowledging the inner child honors your past self

and can help you recover painful memories that have been repressed.

But recalling specific memories isn't vital to healing the inner child.

It is enough to be aware

that you can change

the way you unconsciously learned to react in your youth

by nurturing your inner child

and, in doing so, foster a loving and wise present-self.

http://www.dailyom.com/articles/2005/378.html