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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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!

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?

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.

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

Transform your future by healing your past.

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.

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?…

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can ignore the pain. We can say it's not there. We can say it doesn't hurt. It doesn't exist. Until it will go out in tears, like an inner lava. Find the cure. Embrace your inner child with love. Supreme love. And heal it. And move on...

Feel the wretchedness for your inner child’s pain and sorrow.

Pinned shoulder to shoulder, t-shirts extended in lines, The power of expression, is what "THE CLOTHESLINE" defines. Although each color symbolic, the threads weave the same, Each shirt a picture of violence, each shirt a witness to pain. The color white a memorial, for a victim who died, Simply, because of her gender, precious life was denied. Yellow signifies a victim, embraced by batter and assault, When intimacy turned into violence, as if loving was a fault. Shades of pink, red, and orange - when passion turned into rape, Denied the right to say "NO", by either stranger, or date. The blue and green bear nightmares, when a child of incest and misuse Was forced not to tell the "SECRETS", endured from physical and sexual abuse. See the beautiful shades of lavender, to the one not afraid to voice, A different sexual orientation, condemned, when in public made the choice. In the beginning they first choose the color, then allowing pain to flow from inside, Using buttons, bows, paints, and prose, self-expression no longer denied. As you walk through the line of color, emotional pain may fill your heart, But to the victim this personal creation, permits an inner healing to start. Pinned shoulder to shoulder, t-shirts extended in lines, The power of expression, is what "THE CLOTHESLINE" defines.

Wounding moments happen when others project their own perceptions onto us and we take those projections to heart. When you were young, for example, a parent or friend might have asked, “Are you going to wear that?”, or your parents might have asked you why you wanted to play volleyball or disapprovingly questioned why you were

Until the wounding is acknowledged, it does not heal and emotionally mature.

interested in a subject like ornithology. Such scenarios sound innocent enough, but when we hear these comments over and over, the messages go in. This is where negative self-talk, such as I’m a bad person, I’m so stupid, Why can’t I do this better? Why are they mean to me? and What did I do wrong? comes from. We began to replay other people’s words in our heads and started believing them. This can create a lifetime habit of thought and feeling, of doubting oneself, questioning things, and being fearful of what others may say. People who struggle with such self-doubt are still attuned with themselves, but they have lost the connection to their sense of who they really are, their authenticity. They close down to their authentic self because they have given so much power to other people. They have come to believe this cloudy and incorrect perception of themselves. There is dissonance between the illusion of themselves they adopted along the way and their authentic self.

Once you get past the fearsome exterior, all inner monsters are weak, frightened, and alone. You long ago rejected this part of yourself, therefore it appears to you as a child of your own making that wants to be back with you. Now ask yourself, why did it turn into a monster?

The greatest barriers to your success are not outside of you, but your internal wounds that are waiting to be healed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the cost was too great. I was energetically drained, unfulfilled, and resentful. I decided to set the ultimate boundary: a complete separation. It was a decision for my inner child, showing her that, yes, I could take time and space away and could make choices that were good for me, even at the “expense” of others. For the first time ever, I authentically showed up for myself, while learning how to show up authentically for others, too. That boundary—one born of extremely painful deliberation—completely reoriented my life.

No matter your circumstances, your inner child needs your attention. You can empower

As you work through these practices, remember that your inner child is part of your story. Welcome them, engage with them. Do not silence them. Let them help you grow in your power. Their voice is your voice.

awareness can help you navigate your trauma response and provide you with insight into why you do certain things.

In simple terms, Alice was never safe to speak her mind as a child; therefore, she won’t be safe to speak her mind as an adult. Although this isn’t logical, it can be very hard to break this mindset or cycle, especially if Alice does not become aware of it. If she does not work on breaking this response, Alice will struggle in her intimate relationships and will be unable to communicate with authority figures in her life.

You will constantly be dancing around the things that you are fearful of or that make you uncomfortable and will miss out on many opportunities and chances for happiness.

Your original upbringing has caused wounding, so to heal you must re-parent yourself. Re-parenting yourself means reaching your inner child, embracing it and then teaching it love instead of fear. We are afraid we are not good enough. We are afraid we are not talented, attractive or successful enough. We are afraid we are not lovable. These fears stemmed from the treatment we received as children and the roles we took in our father’s hierarchy of importance and worthiness. What can help is visualizing yourself as a child, seeing your fears, tears you have cried and how you felt. Once you can do that, the next step is treating yourself as you always wanted to be treated by your father and your family.

By not rejecting yourself and supporting your inner child and nurturing your vulnerabilities instead of discarding them, you are ultimately taking responsibility for yourself. You could not choose your childhood, but now you can choose yourself and you can become your own person of trust, someone you always needed and who was never there. Please remember that you already have what it takes to re-parent yourself, as otherwise you wouldn’t be hoping or looking for healing and you are absolutely not alone. Re-parenting includes an immense amount of self-care and self-nurturing. It also includes getting in touch with your inner child and recognizing it’s needs and understanding how it wants to express itself, which goes hand in hand with choosing yourself. Choose you, because you deserve all those beautiful things you were made to believe you are undeserving of.

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

Every healthy couple has been faced with the temptation to quit on each other But rather than surrendering the relationship, they chose to surrender their egos instead.

Listening When we speak of listening with compassion, we usually think of listening to someone else. But we must also listen to the wounded child inside of us. Sometimes the wounded child in us needs all our attention. That little child might emerge from the depths of your consciousness and ask for your attention. If you are mindful, you will hear his or her voice calling for help. At that moment, instead of paying attention to whatever is in front of you, go back and tenderly embrace the wounded child. You can talk directly to the child with the language of love, saying, “In the past, I left you alone. I went away from you. Now, I am very sorry. I am going to embrace you.” You can say, “Darling, I am here for you. I will take good care of you. I know that you suffer so much. I have been so busy. I have neglected you, and now I have learned a way to come back to you.” If necessary, you have to cry together with that child. Whenever you need to, you can sit and breathe with the child. “Breathing in, I go back to my wounded child; breathing out, I take good care of my wounded child.” You have to talk to your child several times a day. Only then can healing take place. Embracing your child tenderly, you reassure him that you will never let him down again or leave him unattended. The little child has been left alone for so long. That is why you need to begin this practice right away. If you don’t do it now, when will you do it? If you know how to go back to her and listen carefully every day for five or ten minutes, healing will take

You deserve to heal from your trauma. It’s not fair for you to allow your inner child to dictate how you view your life now.

we find people who are dependent on something outside of themselves in order to have an identity. These are examples of the dis-ease of co-dependence.

Control madness causes severe relationship problems. There is no way to be intimate with a partner who distrusts you. Intimacy demands that each partner accept the other just the way he or she is.

many adults see play as idleness, and idleness as the proverbial “devil’s workshop.

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that.… I know it doesn’t make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen.