What is your 'Inner Child'?

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Understanding why we all have an Inner Child:

What is an Inner Child?

We are very complex creatures us humans. Many theorists will talk about the concept of 'plural selves' or multiple aspects to us that make up our whole being. Gestalt therapy will teach you that we are the sum of all our parts - Gestalt means 'whole'. The term 'inner child' is a psychological way of labelling that 'part' of you that is your younger self. This part of you is the part that carries all your unprocessed childhood experiences, particularly the difficult ones. This is also the part of you that holds your imagination, playfulness, innocence and some would argue, your true identity before you were socialised (your authenticity).

Your inner child is often a very neglected part of you and is usually the part of you that you repress and is thus situated largely in your unconscious. That is because many of the memories you have as a child are still in a feeling state rather than an intellectual or cognitive (thinking) state. As actual children, our cognitions or thoughts are one of the last areas of our brains to develop. We are guided by our emotions and felt sense of the world. When experiences happen that we fail to understand and make sense of, we have no place to put them. We need someone to teach us about our emotions and what they mean in order for us to process what has happened to us. We know this now to be called 'emotional regulation'. 

Each time we experience something difficult and have no understanding of it or how to integrate it into our reality, we develop an emotional trauma. We then have a part of our childhood self that gets 'locked' or stuck in this point and time, unable to move forward from this. As we grow older, we develop many of these trauma's and as they are unconscious to us on a cognitive level, particularly the very early trauma's, they make up a part of us we have come to label 'The Inner Child'.

How does our Inner Child affect us?

Most of us have a basic knowledge of the unconscious. Freud coined this term and identified that we have drives, wishes, reactions and motivations that come from a place outside of our awareness. Our dreams are a good example of how our unconscious works. It is not something we understand. The minute we do, it has become conscious and within our control. Our unconscious may feel like that part of you that you feel 'at the mercy of'. Those feelings and reactions that appear to come out of nowhere. We call those 'triggers' (please read my blog on 'Emotional Triggers' to learn more). Triggers are like overreactions to put it simply. Everyone has triggers because everyone has unprocessed emotional baggage. Unprocessed emotional baggage is another way of looking at our Inner Child. Dreams and triggers, therefore, are an attempt to bring our unconscious into our awareness, particularly if this is something that has been at the foreground of our reactions. Our bodies are actually designed to heal not suffer. Most things we have termed suffering is actually our trauma re-emerging in order to alert us to areas that need healing. Unfortunately we often have to re-experience those difficult emotions such as shame, fear, anger, disgust and sadness in order for us to release them and heal these wounds. This is not easy and many of us develop many defence and coping mechanisms to resist this process. Most of the time we do this unconsciously.

These emotions come back up when we have been triggered by something in our present lives and therefore, as the trigger is often unconscious, we assume the experience has made us feel this way. We react to the experience in the present and repress what is really going on (without even knowing it most of the time). We then add the new experience to the trauma which reaffirms our false belief about ourselves and carry on until the next trigger emerges. There is no escape. Our triggers will continue to emerge and occur until we address the core experience and heal the wounds of the inner child. Most people are forced into finding help as life becomes more and more difficult. This is where you see mental illness developing, escapism such as substance abuse and addictions, broken relationships, inability to feel happiness and patterns that seem to repeat in cycles.

We are all unique

Everyone is unique and will be affected in different ways. This is due to a number of factors such as your level of emotional regulation and how you were attended to as a child on an emotional level. The level of 'attachment' you had with your parents or parent (the person looking after you) is also very important. This is the bond between you and your parent and the level of emotional safety and unconditional love and nurturing within this relationship you received. Your environment and stability in the home comes into play. Other traumatic experiences outside of your family may impact you as a child. Your personality and gender, your extended support and interactions, exposure to certain stimuli (TV, games, cultural practices, pets, activities etc) may also effect you. We are all made up of many layers, experiences and social influences/conditioning. Thus the more difficult your upbringing and personal experiences of situations, the more emotional trauma you will develop. The more experiences that have been left unprocessed, the more triggers you will have and the more wounded your inner child will be. That is why child abuse and neglect have such long term, harmful affects.

Childhood Emotional Neglect

Certain theorists and practitioners such as Dr Jonice Webb (author of 'Running on Empty: Overcome your childhood emotional neglect') will tell you that you can have childhood emotional neglect without child abuse but you cannot have child abuse without childhood emotional neglect. Basically it is possible to have childhood trauma without coming from what most people would term an 'abusive' family life. The reason for this comes from a 'lack' of emotional regulation where emotional needs have not been met to some degree. For most parents, this is not deliberate and it appears to be a cyclic process where parenting is generational and influenced by how people were parented. The emotional neglect transfers from generation to generation and people are largely unaware of this even occurring. Think about it, you can't know what you need if you have never experienced it and have no conscious awareness of how it 'should' be. With other forms of abuse, even emotional abuse, something is 'done' to you. You have something tangible to identify, to explore, to question. If you are unaware of emotional needs, you are unaware of the areas of struggle you may be faced with. Your coping mechanisms ensure that you are in resistance to your difficult and traumatic emotions and your emotional needs start to play out in present day experiences. You start to believe it is the present day experiences and your current relationships that are the problem and don't identify the root causes. Thus your triggers persist and patterns are formed and repeated.

Understanding your Inner Child is key for deeper healing and positive change

To end off I will leave you with these thoughts. Your inner child is not only made up of emotional trauma from childhood. This is also the part of you that is able to feel joy, happiness and freedom. This is the centre of your creativity and authenticity. To shut out and repress your pain is to shut out and repress these other parts of yourself too. The more cut off from yourself you are emotionally, the more unhappy and uninspired you will thus become. Some, like myself, believe that there are links between physical illness and unprocessed emotional trauma. There is growing research on the links between the mind, body and spirit (emotions); these parts of us are all connected.

Think of your inner child like an actual child. Children are free from social stress and pressure. They want to play and have fun. Children tell it like it is and react to their needs without talking themselves out of them. They honour their true feelings and do not see all the systems and categories we have constructed in our societies such as race, class, gender etc. They are pure of heart and innocent with a fundamental drive to trust and love. This is something inherent in each and every one of us. Many of us suppress this part of ourselves because of the trauma we have endured and the pain we experience when allowing this trauma to surface for healing. We are built to heal and in order to heal we need to work with our wounds. The more we run from ourselves, the more suffering we will endure. Often we become our greatest abusers and would never treat a child in the same way that we treat our inner child. The judgement, dismissal, ridicule, punishment and avoidance that we put our inner child through is often larger than we even realise. 

Always treat yourself with kindness, there are very relevant reasons why you behave and think in the way that you do. Give your Inner Child a voice and start getting to know this part of yourself. You may be surprised at just how beautiful and special you are inside! 

Much Love
XX Paula

Tackling MY feelings Before MY Behaviour

Wow, it's been a while since I took finger to keypad and typed out a blog! Where do I begin...

It has been a journey, I'll tell you that. The kind of journey where you thought you had most big things figured out. Then BAM you learn the harsh reality of the term 'false belief system'. I was running blind, swallowed up by my own rules and nonsense. Riddled in defence mechanisms and holding on for dear life to people and things that made me feel some semblance of safe. I mean, where the hell did all this anxiety in the big wide world come from?

LOOKING BACK...

I remember thinking certain things when in my early teens and struggling my way through hormones and heartache. I remember noticing that some days I felt on top of the world and others I felt as if no one liked me and the world was against me. I managed though. I more than managed, I wore the biggest mask around. So big was my mask that even those closest to me had no idea what I really went through. The shame, humiliation, embarrassment, fear, insecurity and anger that stewed inside me and had no healthy outlet. I am a loud, extroverted presence and I was never invisible physically (I made sure of that). Love me or hate me, you notice me. This mask bit me in the ass because people were so busy seeing the loud, falsely confident Paula, they had no idea that a scared, insecure little girl was crying out for help.

This damn defence mechanism got misread to my disadvantage again and again. I was seen as a bully because I was always the spokesperson for the group, or I was acting out. To me it was a get them or they will get me thing. I was seen as strong. I was seen as someone who didn't feel very much. I was seen as happy and cheerful. I was seen as whatever mask I chose to wear really. Most teenagers go through this in some way, it's a time when difference is feared more than anything else. It got so bad that I didn't know any other way to be.I desperately wanted to be liked, desperately wanted to be helped and blocked the very things I needed with my behaviour.  I became a people pleaser. I suppressed my needs and found it easier to do the things my friends enjoyed. This got out of hand too and I found myself in crowds I didn't fit into, at places I couldn't afford, wearing clothes I had had to borrow. I gave in to peer pressure and had so much freedom and zero structure. I got drunk, walked the streets at night, smoked cigarettes, hooked up with boys, got into verbal fights etc. During the day I captained the tennis team, sang in choir, visited my grandparents, turned pages for my piano teacher at charity concerts, spent time with friends, worked hard in school etc. I changed like the tides, trying to find myself, trying to fit in, trying to be accepted and feel loved. My shame was growing. Shame in myself, in my mum and her lack of control in the situation (I have learnt that she did it really tough and there were so many reasons for this). The real shame though, is the shame I turned inward. The shame I had in myself. To be honest this is still a work in progress.

I WAS NEVER A STRANGER TO EMOTIONS...

I am highly empathic and understand emotional experiencing better than I do any other sense or system. I am able to read shifts in people, the mood and atmosphere, people's deeper pain. Other people have always been easy, what I could never master was my own emotional experiencing. I felt like my control over my emotions was paper thin and the hard ones were deeper than I could conceive. As I delved into psychology and counselling I developed a name for this part of myself that held all my deeper emotions and pain. I called this my vault or squishy middle. I spent a lot of energy and time fearing this unknown entity inside me. So much went into the vault that I lost sight of what had gone in there. It became overwhelming. But I ploughed on.

I ploughed through incredible adversity, grief and trauma. I have always recognized my teenage years as difficult. My mother struggled and I became more of a parent then a child. I had no idea what my mother was growing through, I had no words, no support and no one to talk to. I was programmed to hide things from my grandmother and the world. I think my mum always wanted my Granny to be proud of her. My lovely Granny loved us more then anything but love was not expressed verbally. She was very critical but meant it in love. Needless to say I kept my mums secret, it became my secret, we were drowning. Financial, physical, emotional...you name it, we were in strife. I started to resent my mum and rebel in a way. At the time I would never have seen it as rebellion. Awful part of my rebellion, I was always guilt ridden and overly sensitive to my mum's feelings. I could never bare to hurt her, or worry her. I confessed almost all sins. I soon learnt that I was unguided. I was so convincing that I was in control that my own mother did not see how out of my depth I was. How much I needed her to take over and let me be a child. This way of life may have been what saved me in years to come...or the very thing that undid me.

On 3 December, 2002, I went off to celebrate the end of the school year with an old friend. I said my goodbyes to my mother and said our usual 'I love you'. That was the last time I saw my mum. That night some adolescent boys broke in and gagged her too tightly. They never meant to kill her, only to rob us blind. They came through my bedroom window. It was a blur. I learnt this from my friend the next morning, her mum got a call. My whole world stopped turning. It was like a dream, a horrible,sick dream. No one seemed to be able to comprehend my level of loss. On the second or third night after she died I was still staying at my friend's house (I wasn't ready to face my Gran's pain). I was crying in the middle of the night once again. Every time I shut my eyes I saw my mum's face and my heart broke again. I was terrified. I had no idea what would happen to me,where I belonged, where I wanted to be outside of my own home. I had all this emotion and no where to put it. My tears were gut wrenching, my soul was shattered. It was as if someone had severed off a limb. My friend, who had her own grief, cracked under the pressure and blurted out a conversation she and her mother had planned to have with me the following day. At midnight she told me that she thought I needed to find somewhere else to stay, it was too much for her. My pain was too much for her.

I didn't think I could sink any lower. I was wrong. I learnt some very hard lessons that night. I learnt that I had been 'right', people wont want to be around you if you are yourself. Even if you lose your mother, people will not cut you slack, allow you to sob, allow you to grieve. If only I had known then what I know now. These childhood masks, defences, they keep coming back to bite you. Long after they have been rendered useless. People cant be there for you because they don't know how to be there for themselves. So many of us are running blind.

I PUT A LOT OF EMPHASIS ON MY GRIEF...

I thought it was the reason for pretty much most of my problems. My anxiety namely. I was well known for being stressed. I suffered from bad back pain my whole life which was never diagnosed or treated adequately. I was used to chronic pain and tension (I still am). My energy levels are often a struggle. I couldn't tell where my back began and the anxiety ended. As the years went on my struggles with anxiety, esp the physical tension side of anxiety increased. It started to effect my work. Working with children became my thing but it kept bringing up memories and emotions I had no idea how to process. I moved to Australia and studied Masters in Counselling. This level of training forces you to unpack yourself quite heavily and confront how you tick. I confronted the edge of my inner vault time and time again. After uni I started to work with families. My clients had an array of issues with high levels of risk and trauma. Slowly but surely I became more and more impacted. It was becoming clear, families and child abuse were more than upsetting to me, this was traumatic for me and triggering a trauma I had no idea I had. I burnt out.

IT DIDN'T MAKE SENSE...

The theories didn't fit me. My mum and I were so close. She never ever forgot to tell me she loved me. She would have taken a bullet for me. She did so much for me, encouraged me, watched my tennis games, talked to me about school, always listened. Why, oh why are the signs pointing to neglect? EMOTIONAL NEGLECT!!! It didn't make sense. I started seeing a therapist who was my teacher. I would trust no-one else (I have been through many therapists, I am a tough cookie to counsel). I admire my therapist so much, professionally and personally, and listen when he talks. He identified attachment trauma. I wont go into that here if attachment is a bit foreign (I urge everyone to look it up though). My issues stem from my early childhood - my formative years. My mum, my beautiful childhood, my entire world view...aaahhhh! It was a very very difficult pill to swallow and took many sessions of revisiting this to get my head around it. I finally made peace with it when I allowed myself to start looking back at well known memories. These memories were often the fond ones. That is why I could never see this. My happy memories were still happy, they just held some vital clues to opening my vault. They helped me to finally see the roots of my problems.

CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL NEGLECT...

It was never what she did to me. What she did to me was nothing but loving. Everything she did was intended to give me love and life lessons. The problems were in what she didn't do. Dr Jonice Webb identifies this as C.E.N - Childhood Emotional Neglect. She feels all abuse has CEN with it but not all CEN accompanies abuse. In fact most families have some degree of this because it is a generational problem. It travels from generation to generation unknown and powerful. We couple this with so many passed down and outdated parenting beliefs and systems and have become so far removed from the reasons why we do things and if they are in line with our intentions.

My mother believed with all her heart that the best way to parent was to give strong discipline like spanking etc in the early years. I remember her telling me that she hit me very early and this is why I am a good girl now. She saw my incessant guilt and obligation that was way beyond what a child my age should have felt as me being special, good and with a good head on my shoulders. I saw it the same way too. I didn't see this as being a problem. I didn't know any other way to be. Hitting me early would have translated to me that I am being punished for trying to communicate my needs. I have had these patterns with people in my life again and again because I gravitate to what I know, mistaking that for what is safe. I have recently discovered that it is not my feelings that are the problem, it is my behaviour. I am so busy trying to be a certain way, to feel in a certain way, I have lost sight of how I actually feel. I have started a new relationship with the real me and have had to confront many demons and unhealthy dynamics in the process. This has been so painful but so necessary.

I REALISED THAT I HAVE A GIFT...

I have a deeper understanding of emotional experience through personality, academia and life experience. I am passionate about parenting and helping children through helping parents. I believe that parents are the very best people to help their children. Trauma, attachment, emotional regulation and strength based work should not be elitist knowledge for the educated and professional. It is not as fancy and complicated as it sounds. It is a way of seeing the world. It is about understanding emotions and how powerful they are. It is about understanding the role parents need to play to tackle these growing societal problems, mental health issues, bullying, youth substance abuse, suicide, crime etc. It is ridiculous that this is something only certain people have access to for various reasons. I want to give this gift out for free. I want to create awareness and empower parents. Break the cycles, end the bad patterns and give people something better and healthier to try. I want the world to 'Tackle the feelings before the Behaviour'. Stop blaming children as if they are not a part of a system. No child is born evil. Some have challenges and disabilities. Some struggle with biological challenges. This does not make them evil. Lets take control back. Have the courage to see your own parents and grandparents as human. Love them through their faults so that you may see them as real and learn how to be real with your own kids.

I hope there is something in my story that is helpful :) I am proposing a parenting approach but I am not a mother. My challenge was always a tricky one. I am not coming from the side of a parent though. I am giving your children a voice because I have built a very strong relationship with and deeper understanding of my own inner child. I am also pretty trained up in this area and am not the type to stop learning. This is me, warts and all. Thank you for reading XXX

I am now helping parents to understand the importance of emotional regulation! Lets work together to prevent C.E.N.