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.
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