Heal Your Inner Child Quotes

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

You cannot trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. We may say we know this but ours is the culture of the deal-making mind. From infancy, we have breathed in the belief that there is always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. Eventually, we believe, if we do the right thing, if we are good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, work hard enough, we will be rewarded. There are different verses to this song - if you are sorry for your sins and try hard not to sin again, you will go to heaven; if you do your daily practise, clean up your diet, heal your inner child, ferret out all your emotional issue's, focus your intent, come into alignment with the world around you, hone your affirmations, find and listen to the voice of your higher self, you will be rewarded with vibrant health, abundant prosperity, loving relations and inner peace - in other words, heaven! We know that what we do and how we think affects the quality of our lives. Many things are clearly up to us. And many others are not. I can see no evidence that the universe works on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happen to good people - all the time. Monetary success does come to some who do not do what they love, as well as to some who are unwilling or unable to see the harm they do to the planet or others. Illness and misfortune come to some who follow their soul's desire. Many great artist's have been poor. Great teachers have lived in obscurity. My invitation, my challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.

Your inner child is waiting for a genuine, heartfelt apology.

The more you don’t want to be like your parents, the more you will resemble them.

Your pain needs to be recognized and acknowledged. It needs to be acknowledged and then released. Avoiding pain is the same as denying it.

Our abusive parent didn't give us the gentle, encouraging nurturing we needed. But healing invites us to give our inner child the kind of loving empowerment that will help us reach our potential and celebrate our spirit. Move past what you wished you could have experienced and embrace the uncommon, sweet possibilities of being your own best parent.

all misbehaving children are dis-couraged. Having lost heart, they believe they must manipulate in order to get their needs met.

a person who never learned to trust confuses intensity with intimacy, obsession with care, and control with security.

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your perceptions need you, your feeling needs you. The wounded child in you needs you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it.

The Wounded Inner Child is the primary gateway to healing and integration. When you invite your woundedness out of subversiveness and into your awareness you finally begin to honor the past pain. You also minimize its contractive influence on your life. And you begin to offer yourself the potential of something more.

When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.

Think pleasantly; Think of how beautiful you are. Think of the families you are blessed with. Think of the dreams you have to achieve.

If you can see your mother as a fragile five-year-old girl, then you can forgive her very easily with compassion. The five-year-old girl who was your mother is always alive in her and in you.

If you want to be a good parent please heal your own wounds, heal all of them and be confident that you’ve done so before you seriously consider having children. The unresolved child within you is the real child you need to embrace and heal and raise.

They say that when you meet someone and feel like it’s love at first sight, run in the other direction. All that’s happened is that your dysfunction has meshed with their dysfunction. Your wounded inner child has recognized their wounded inner child, both hoping to be healed by the same fire that burned them.

You have to practice going back to your wounded child every day. You have to embrace him or her tenderly, like a big brother or a big sister.

Without our anger we become doormats and people pleasers. In childhood you were most likely severely shamed and punished when you expressed anger.

The concept of the best possible version of me is not merely an intention, it is an action. It is the daily practice of taking full responsibility for my thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and actions.

Acknowledge your inner child. Even though we have found the light in ourselves today, we sometimes forget to heal old wounds of our past. Your inner child still needs to be loved in order to heal the complete self.

When you hate your parents or dislike certain traits that they have, you are actually giving them more attention and directing your energy toward them. They occupy your headspace, so how could it not affect your choices in life.

Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows—the total incarnation of sleeping when you’re tired and eating when you’re hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.

There is an absolutist quality to rage. Being angry all the time and overreacting to little things may be a sign that there is a deeper rage that needs to be worked on.

When you climb a beautiful mountain, invite your child within to climb with you. When you contemplate the sunset, invite her to enjoy it with you.

Jung said it well: “All our neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering.

When you were young and experienced traumas or attachment injuries, you didn’t have enough body or mind to protect yourself. Your Self couldn’t protect your parts, so your parts lost trust in your Self as the inner leader. They may even have pushed your Self out of your body and took the hit themselves—they believed they had to take over and protect you and your other parts. But in trying to handle the emergency, they got stuck in that parentified place and carry intense burdens of responsibility and fear, like a parentified child in a family.

So many moments of potential holiday joy got buried in the pain of our abuse. Now these days offer us a chance to give our inner child the gift of caring. Sometimes it's as simple as asking, "What do you want?" Most often the answer is a small thing. Be a Santa to your wounded child and feel the healing passed forward to you.

The wounded inner child contaminates intimacy in relationships because he has no sense of his authentic self. The greatest wound a child can receive is the rejection of his authentic self. When a parent cannot affirm his child’s feelings, needs, and desires, he rejects that child’s authentic self. Then, a false self must be set up.

Be careful! Your inner child will always hope that your parents will finally change and offer what you’ve always longed for. But your job is to keep your adult outlook and continue relating to them as a separate, independent adult. At this point, you’re looking for an adult relationship with them, not a re-creation of parent-child dynamics, right?

Are you attentive when your inner self-speaks to you?

You can do it because this time you will do it for yourself, for your inner existence. For that child who was not able to stand up, because no hand of rescue came on.

Our schools and prisons are the only places in the world where time is more important than the job to be done.

all of us have a child within who never received all the love and appreciation we deserved. We can’t go back and fix the past. But we can take responsibility to heal ourselves now by giving ourselves the love and appreciation we once craved. You can help heal your own inner child.

I bumped into my shadow on the way to thorny feelings she whispered to me: ‘You can’t rush your healing Its time is not measured in seconds but steps some forward, some backward then forward again

when we disconnect emotionally and refuse to recognize our own feelings, our Adult abandons our Inner Child. However, when we recognize our feelings and are willing to experience them, we have chosen the intent to love and to learn about ourselves. Then our Adult is connected with our Inner Child. The

Little girls are taught fairy tales that are filled with magic. Cinderella is taught to wait in the kitchen for a guy with the right shoe! Snow White is given the message that if she waits long enough, her prince will come. On a literal level, that story tells women that their destiny depends on waiting for a necrophile (someone who likes to kiss dead people) to stumble through the woods at the right time. Not a pretty picture!

Our society has long diminished the importance of feelings, worshiping logic while downgrading the wisdom that comes from feelings, touting the left brain while ignoring the right. And this has created a terrible imbalance — the power of logic without the power of wisdom. Wisdom is the accumulation of all our experiences stored as emotion. When you cannot feel what is true, then you cannot utilize your wisdom.

Thornton Wilder’s one-act play “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” based on John 5:1-4, dramatizes the power of the pool of Bethesda to heal whenever an angel stirred its waters. A physician comes periodically to the pool hoping to be the first in line and longing to be healed of his melancholy. The angel finally appears but blocks the physician just as he is ready to step into the water. The angel tells the physician to draw back, for this moment is not for him. The physician pleads for help in a broken voice, but the angel insists that healing is not intended for him. The dialogue continues—and then comes the prophetic word from the angel: “Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.” Later, the man who enters the pool first and is healed rejoices in his good fortune and turning to the physician says: “Please come with me. It is only an hour to my home. My son is lost in dark thoughts. I do not understand him and only you have ever lifted his mood. Only an hour.… There is also my daughter: since her child died, she sits in the shadow. She will not listen to us but she will listen to you.”13 Christians who remain in hiding continue to live the lie. We deny the reality of our sin. In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others. We cling to our bad feelings and beat ourselves with the past when what we should do is let go. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, guilt is an idol. But when we dare to live as forgiven men and women, we join the wounded healers and draw closer to Jesus.

This intellectual approach is a good first step, and it can provide important information, but since it is based on guesswork and theory, it can’t give you a full, nuanced understanding of a part. And even if your guesses are right, it will be difficult to heal the part since you aren’t in direct contact with it. Full transformation requires direct experience of a part and a trusting relationship with it, something we will see clearly as the book unfolds.

But the healing place is within you. Healing is a gift you were granted at birth, just as you were granted others. Use your gifts, child. Use the beauty, the courage, the hope and the love that is in you. Call upon your strength. Use compassion and faith. Even during sad times joy is within you. Bring it forth. Wisdom is there to guide you. Use any one of your gifts and you will rouse the power of your healing place. Use all of them and you will sustain it.

charm and attraction, and it is the core of their innocence. Children live in the now and are oriented to pleasure. They accept life’s “queer conundrums,

Their “strange Divinity” results from their lacking any sense of right or wrong, good or bad.

Children are natural believers—they know there is something greater than themselves.

A grownup is a child with layers on” — WOODY HARRELSON

When peace walked through my door My inner child sighed That kind of sigh that says You’re here…at last Copyright: JL Keez: 2015

Awaken to Beauty. Get to know you, everyday more. Teach your children the same. The earth delights in her beautiful flowers. You are a beautiful flower. Will you bloom?

If you stay aligned with your inner child, you’ll always feel forever young.

Transform your future by healing your past.

A healthy and conscious relationship is one in which we know we are entirely accepted, cherished, and wanted, even for the parts of ourselves we once considered unlovable.

It is some bit of my father I keep not seeing. I cannot remember years of my childhood. Some parts of me I cannot find now.… Is there enough left of me now to be honest?…

I can simply tell you that all of us need to be aware that trauma has a twofold potential: it can be the catalyst for creative change or the cause of self-destruction.

We need to teach our inner child that problems are normal and that he must accept them.

I could not heal my being with my doing. To be who I am is all that matters.

Rejection should be seen as a sign of redirection, not a label for self-identification. We must accept accountability for our actions, focusing on behavior rather than questioning intrinsic worth.

The abandoned Inner Child is constantly afraid of being wrong because it believes that being wrong is what leads to rejection. Therefore, it strives to find the “right” way to be in the world. It becomes addicted to “shoulds” and rules as a way to control rejection. It develops a need to be perfect and a belief that it is possible to be perfect. Perfectionism and the fear of being wrong are symptoms of the internal disconnection between the Adult and the Child.

Even though no one else can give you what you missed as a child, this doesn't mean you are doomed to never receive it. There is one person who can give you what you missed on- what you so desperately need and desire. That person is you.

Loneliness is the only pure pain. All other pain is born of it. It alone ultimately fathers every conceivable protection against it. We begin to wither at its mere mention. It is the ultimate Separation of the soul from humanity. It is what we fear we cannot survive, For it is the hurt we alone Cannot repair. Loneliness is a fissure of the heart that can be bridged only by another. We inflict it, despise it, and deny it, Never realizing That in its presence We are forced to move forward… Loneliness is the book we refuse to read… Our deepest loneliness, which is “bridged only by another,” cannot begin to be healed until we first create the bridge within ourselves, the connection between our Adult and our Child.

You may wonder how parents can manage to train a child to go against his or her gut instincts and life-affirming impulses. It occurs through a process I call parent-voice internalization. As children, we absorb our parents’ opinions and beliefs in the form of an inner voice that keeps up an ongoing commentary that appears to be coming from inside us. Often this voice says things like “You should…,” “You’d better…,” or “You have to…,” but it may just as frequently make unkind comments about your worth, intelligence, or moral character.

When a child is deprived and neglected, he has a much harder time delaying gratification. Our wounded inner child believes that there is a severe scarcity of love, food, strokes, and enjoyment. Therefore, whenever the opportunity arises to have these things, our inner kid goes overboard.

Kids from dysfunctional families cannot possibly seal their identity, because they have no sense of I AMness when they begin adolescence. My family was severely enmeshed as a result of my dad’s alcoholism and his physically abandoning us. Our enmeshment looked like this. As you can see, none of us had a whole distinct self. Most of each of us was part of the others. When one of us felt something, the others felt it too. If mom was sad, we all felt sad. If she was angry, we all felt it and tried to stop her from being angry. There was very little foundation for me to create my identity.

The feeling of aloneness is the hardest feeling for all of us to feel. It causes such deep pain that we all work hard to protect ourselves from feeling it. When parents and other adults reject, shame, abandon, and abuse us as children, the pain of their abandonment is so unbearable that the Inner Adult disconnects from the Inner Child so as not to experience these feelings. Then the Inner Child not only feels alone and lonely in the world, but feels alone and empty inside as well, with no one inside to protect it from being hurt by others. As we grow up, the abandoned Inner Child learns to project onto others the internal experience of abandonment.

These authors posit that a value is not a value unless it has seven elements. They are: 1. It must be chosen. 2. There must be alternatives. 3. You must know the consequences of your choice. 4. Once chosen you prize and cherish it. 5. You are willing to publicly proclaim it. 6. You act on this value. 7. You act on it consistently and repeatedly.

It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather…I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.

To a child, abandonment is death. In order to meet my two most basic survival needs (my parents are okay and I matter), I became Mom’s emotional husband and my younger brother’s parent. To help her and others made me feel that I was okay. I was told and believed that Dad loved me but was too sick to show it and that Mom was a saint. All of this covered up my sense of being worth-less than my parents’ time (toxic shame). My core material was composed of selected perceptions, repressed feelings, and false beliefs. This became the filter through which I interpreted all new experiences in my life.

It will take patience and empathy and real self-love to heal the wounds in your life. As Thich Nhat Hanh has written: After recognizing and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to soothe and relieve our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see the roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.

The wounded inner child carries all of these compulsions into adulthood. We carry this powerlessness, hoping that others will change our circumstances and make us happy, externalizing quick fixes and daydreaming of alternate realities. We seek approval from others so that we will feel good about ourselves. We choose the quick fix—drugs, alcohol, sex—to feel pleasure in the moment that will dull our pain. Our real long-term goal is to find that security inside ourselves. Our work is to internalize the feeling of being good enough—a state of okayness that is not reliant on others. How can we begin to get to that place? This is the question at the heart of our inner child work.

We feel Divine Love entering us firstly through gentle, soft, humbling, kind and loving feelings, independent of any other person. This can be experienced as gently overwhelming as it increases, dependent on the depth of our desire for It. As we heal further, and more of our negative, repressed emotions and causal soul wounds are removed, the entering of Divine Love into our souls becomes stronger and stronger, bringing deep tears, powerful sensations and expansions in the heart and soul in immense gratitude, humility and feelings of great love and even more yearning for God. There may also be whole body tingling and sensations, crown chakra and heart explosions, feelings of being fully bathed in love and light, great feelings of humility, awe and wonder at the indescribable nature of God’s Love, and at how much He loves you. Receiving Divine Love can feel like being immersed in a bath of love all over, in every part of you, every cell. Deep peace, joy and waves of ecstasy, rapture and bliss arise and flow all over, and great humility washes over the soul. Immense love for God as the most wondrous, awe inspiring Soul that He Is is felt. A deepening into the essence of your pure soul occurs, along with the deep desire to give more of your soul to God. You feel deeply nurtured and embraced in God’s Arms. There is nothing better than resting and dropping into This. You feel the purity of His Love that is the most pleasurable feeling your soul will ever experience. Heat, pressure, inner and outer movements, pulsing, physical shifts and alignments can occur as you open and embody more Divine Love and the feeling of Blessedness this brings. This Blessedness also arises in felt feelings of forgiveness and mercy. Divine Love is Perfect in its trust and tenderness. We become more and more like a child; innocent, joyful, playful and beautiful as we were created to Be. This play is a pure and glorious sensation, wishing to share itself freely and touching all others. Receiving Divine Love can also become so powerful that we are brought to our knees in immense gratitude, rapture, pain and bliss, sometimes all at once. Receiving Divine Love in its fullness is overwhelming, and can even be physically painful in the heart as it inflows to such a degree that the heart actually stretches to accommodate It all. It is both rapturous and ecstatic, as the body may rock, sway and stretch as it receives more and more Divine Love.8 There is no better feeling in all universes than to receive this Greatest Love of all loves, the most pleasurable feelings a soul can experience as it has actually been designed this way, yet our physical bodies cannot take too much of it at one time! When I receive Divine Love in a rapturous way, it is blissful to the soul yet sometimes painful to the physical. Sometimes I have to stop praying as the body becomes too tired.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem. Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.) You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not. Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

Obedience, coercion, severity, and lack of feeling are no longer recognized as absolute values. But the road to the realization of the new ideals is frequently blocked by the need to repress the sufferings of one's childhood, and this leads to a lack of empathy. It is precisely little Katies and Konrads who as adults close their ears to the subject of child abuse (or else minimize its harmfulness), because they themselves claim to have had a "happy childhood". Yet their very lack of empathy reveals the opposite: they had to keep a stiff upper lip at a very early age. Those who actually had the privilege of growing up in an emphatic environment (which is extremely rare, for until recently it was not generally known how much a child can suffer), or who later create an inner emphatic object, are more likely to be open to the suffering of others, or at least will not deny its existence. This is a necessary precondition if old wounds are to heal instead of merely being covered up with the help of the next generation.

Many people don’t realize that they have a lost inner child who makes a lot of decisions in their adult life that the responsible adult self later has to clean up. They go about their lives on auto-pilot, impulsively reacting, yelling at the top of their lungs, withdrawing and sulking, or keeping others at arm’s length because they are scared of emotional connection. They feel hurt, confused, abused, shamed, or neglected, just like they did as a child, but now they look and sound like an adult. They are unaware that a part of them is lost and emotionally stuck in place. Many people are scared to look within because they know at some level that something powerful is lurking in the shadows, carrying all of those feelings they want to avoid. The lost inner child is a part of you that is emotionally frozen in time. It is “lost” in the sense that you may be oblivious to what will later be obvious signs of communication from this part. Even though this is a part of you, it is lost because it didn’t mature emotionally with the rest of you.

Drawing and other forms of visual art can be an amazingly powerful tool for inner child healing. Drawing, painting, and playing with clay are things that children do spontaneously, happily, and naturally. We only lose our artistic inclinations as adults, when we are made to feel ashamed of something that we've created. Drawing is so ingrained in our natural human development that it comes well before writing. Art therapy is often used with children who refuse to speak or who feel they cannot verbalize their feelings. Inviting your inner child to color and draw can give you the freedom to finally say thins you were never able to put into words. If you are artistically inclined as an adults, you know that the process of creating visual art breaks you out of rational, analytical mental states. If you suffered with very restrictive parents or an education that prioritized verbal logic, drawing can help you reconnect with your natural, childlike creative impulses. Everyone is capable of making art. It's a natural, necessary part of our development. The stifling of creativity through shame or criticism leaves very real wounds on the inner child. Drawing through our self-doubts, self-criticisms allows us to speak with the child in its own language.

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

When emotional energy blocks the resolution of trauma, the mind itself becomes diminished in its ability to function.

The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present.

When we are not allowed to grieve, the energy is frozen. One of the rules of dysfunctional families is the no feel rule. This rule prohibited your inner child from even knowing what he was feeling. Another dysfunctional family rule is the no talk rule, which states that the expression of emotions is prohibited.

Children from dysfunctional families often have no allies, no one to whom they can express their emotions. So they express them in the only way they know—by “acting them out” or “acting them in.” The earlier the repression takes place, the more destructive the repressed emotions are. These unresolved and unexpressed emotions are what I refer to as “original pain.” Original pain work involves reexperiencing these earliest traumas and expressing the repressed emotions.

Children growing up in dysfunctional families are taught to inhibit the expression of emotion in three ways: first, by not being responded to or mirrored, literally not being seen; second, by having no healthy models for naming and expressing emotion; and third, by actually being shamed and/or punished for expressing emotion. Children from dysfunctional families commonly hear things like: “I’ll give you something to cry about,” “Don’t you ever raise your voice to me again or I’ll knock your head off.” They are often actually spanked for being afraid, mad, or sad.

For example, a chronically depressed man who becomes a superachieving executive through his work addiction can feel only when he is working. An alcoholic or drug addict feels high with mood-altering drugs. A food addict feels a sense of fullness and well-being when his stomach is full. Each addiction allows the person to feel good feelings or to avoid painful ones.

they dictate how each person is to behave and what he can and cannot feel. The most common role distortions of the preschool years are: Superresponsible One, Overachiever, Rebel, Underachiever, People Pleaser (nice guy/sweetheart), Caretaker, and Offender. This lack of individual identity is why dysfunctional families are dominated by toxic guilt. Healthy guilt is the guardian of conscience. It develops out of a healthy sense of shame; it is the moral dimension of healthy shame. The toddler’s shame is premoral and mostly preverbal.

Adults who have a wounded inner child who failed to learn this lesson tend to be rigid and absolutist. They think in all-or-nothing extremes.

Whenever a shame-based person feels his real feelings, he feels ashamed. So, to avoid that pain he numbs out.

Most gays carry an excessive amount of shame, as there is particularly strong and widespread shaming of boys who don’t display the traditional masculine traits and behaviors. If you are a gay man or woman, your wounded inner preschooler needs to hear that it is perfectly okay to be who you are.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family’s precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

The most important skills he has to learn are those of socialization: cooperation, interdependence, and a healthy sense of competition. The preparation of one’s life work requires academic skills as well: reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, these skills should not have been more important than knowing, loving, and valuing oneself. In fact, a healthy sense of self-worth is essential for good learning.

Sometimes it can seem like your inner child part isn’t receptive to your care. It’s as if this part of you isn’t used to receiving such goodness from others, or even from you, and they might not trust it. If that happens, know that this is common and will change over time. Sometimes we need to make amends with our parts for how things have been until now. Sometimes we just need to gently continue wishing them well regardless of their reaction.

Depression, sexual troubles, anxiety, loneliness, and guilt are the main problems that drive consumers into the recovery movement. Explaining such adult troubles as being caused by victimization during childhood does not accomplish much. Compare “wounded child” as an explanation to some of the other ways you might explain your problems: “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” or “sexually dysfunctional.” “Wounded child” is a more permanent explanation; “depressive” is less permanent. As we saw in the first section of this book, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction—unlike being a wounded child—are all eminently treatable. “Wounded child” is also more pervasive in its destructive effects: “Toxic” is the colorful word used to describe its pervasiveness. “Depression,” “anxiety,” and “sexually dysfunctional” are all narrower, less damning labels, and this, in fact, is part of the reason why treatment works. So “wounded child” (unless you believe in catharsis cures) leads to more helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity than the alternatives. But it is less personal—your parents did it to you—than “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” and “sexually dysfunctional.” Impersonal explanations of bad events raise self-esteem more than personal ones. Therefore “wounded child” is better for raising your self-esteem and for lowering your guilt. Self-esteem has become very important to Americans in the last two decades. Our public schools are supposed to nurture the self-esteem of our children, our churches are supposed to minister to the self-esteem of their congregants, and the recovery movement is supposed to restore the self-esteem of victims. Attaining self-esteem, while undeniably important, is a goal that I have reservations about. I think it is an overinflated idea, and my opinion was formed by my work with depressed people. Depressed people, you will recall, have four kinds of problems: behavioral—they are passive, indecisive, and helpless; emotional—they are sad; bodily—their sleeping, eating, and sex are disrupted; cognitive—they think life is hopeless and that they are worthless. Only the second half of this last symptom amounts to low self-esteem. I have come to believe that lack of self-esteem is the least important of these woes. Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness or passivity, however, accomplishes nothing. To put it exactly, I believe that low self-esteem is an epiphenomenon, a mere reflection that your commerce with the world is going badly. It has no power in itself. What needs improving is not self-esteem but your commerce with the world. So the one advantage of labeling yourself a victim—raised self-esteem—is minimal, particularly since victimhood raises self-esteem at the cost of greater hopelessness and passivity, and therefore worsens commerce with the world. This is indeed my main worry about the recovery movement. Young Americans right now are in an epidemic of depression. I have speculated on the causes in the last chapter of my book Learned Optimism, and I will not repeat my conjectures here. Young people are easy pickings for anything that makes them feel better—even temporarily. The recovery movement capitalizes on this epidemic. When it works, it raises self-esteem and lowers guilt, but at the expense of our blaming others for our troubles. Never mind the fact that those we blame did not in fact cause our troubles. Never mind the fact that thinking of ourselves as victims induces helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity. Never mind that there are more effective treatments available elsewhere.

give your anger, your despair, your fear, a bath of mindfulness every day.

First, redesign your relational field. Psychically add green to it if you are dealing with a physical illness or trauma; add pink if your core issues are relational in nature, such as social phobias or abuse issues. Add gold if the most striking symptoms are chronic, repetitive, or addictive in nature; if your issues are spiritual (linked with entities or attachments); or if you are lacking in boundaries altogether. You can also combine these colors. Now ask the Divine to link your inner child with a healing stream of grace and to then plug the same stream of grace into your relational field. Request that the Divine fill this field (and surround the child) with the appropriate hue, intensity, and amount of the heart colors just described. Know that this incoming energy will push out all undesirable energies. Allow this healing stream and the incoming energy to continue flowing as long as necessary.

We will then dive a bit deeper into our mind and meet our inner child. We will learn about the ego stories that protect us and keep us repeating relationship patterns we began experiencing in childhood.

The inner child is a petrified part of our psyche that formed when we were limited in our emotional coping abilities. This is why many of us act like children when we are threatened or upset. The reality is that many of us are stuck in this childlike state. We are emotionally illiterate because we are little children in adult bodies.

Accepting that you have an inner child with wounds will help you remove your shame about and disappointment in your inability to change, the “stuckness” that we’ve discussed. Your inability to move forward or make changes isn’t about you, it’s an extension of the conditioned patterns and core beliefs you developed in your childhood.

The greater your presence and awareness grow, the greater your ability to distinguish between your inner child reactions and your authentic Self will be.

Our ego’s defensiveness and vulnerability are similar to those of our inner child: Both need to be seen and heard without judgment. Our ego needs space to settle. It needs room to relax and soften.

Their past traumas and experiences have crafted them into a person with such anxiety that the line between nervousness and abandonment has morphed and blurred into an individualistic focus. In that context, the admiration they are constantly seeking is due to Their inner mental conflicts rooted in a possible lonely and unloved childhood.

This journey of growth and healing is cutting through dense jungle of personal history, navigating with bare hearts and feet that desire to follow the whispered hints of possibility. Some days, the feet that guide your way and the hands that do the cutting, are those of the sage, withered and knowing. Other days they are the feet and hands of the wondrous inner child. No matter, our feet and hands have been ours, even before we were born, through every experience of holding on, and letting go, as we dare to make your way.

West Coast inner child meditation

The shame that our Inner Child internalizes—she writes about it as if it’s all about your individual experiences and interpersonal interactions. All based on what our parents did or didn’t do to us, with no real accounting for the systemic problems entrenched in society—no real accounting of anti-Blackness or anti-queerness—and not enough concern for community healing. It feels like a very individualistic kind of self-help.” What I didn’t say was that I still feared therapy in general might have the same limitations.

The rational and dispassionate virtue of an impartial Judge Imposter can become irrational and cold, which is the shadow side of the Judge archetype. You might even have a tendency to be a bit holier-than-thou, even though under all that hubris there’s usually an insecure inner child whose judgmental nature is hiding a lot of self-doubt

our subconscious makes predictions within our relationships, we can easily apply past trauma to our present interactions and make decisions based on old inner child wounds.

Acceptance is the act of fully realizing what has happened to you and knowing that you cannot change it.