S2 EP244 – Inner Child Healing: A Deeper Dive

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding podcast. I’m somewhat dismayed about the relatively superficial articles that are coming out about inner child healing. 

Before I address this issue, I’m going to describe how Inner Bonding Therapy defines your inner child. In the Inner Bonding process, your inner child is your true soul self, your essential self which is who you are on a soul level when you came into life. It is your intrinsic qualities as a spark of the Divine and your individual gifts. It’s not actually a child – it’s the immortal part of you that came into your body to evolve in your ability to love, and it communicates with both feelings and words. It’s your inner guidance system, letting you know instantly with your feelings whether you are loving yourself or abandoning yourself, and whether a person is open or closed, honest or lying, or whether a situation is safe or dangerous. I hope you can see that this information is vital for your safety and well-being. 

We call this beautiful aspect of ourselves our inner child because we know we are responsible for a child. Many people don’t think in terms of taking responsibility for their feelings and needs, which is part of what healing really means, so for some people seeing their feelings and needs as their inner child can help them remember to learn how to take loving care of themselves.

We are all blessed with this inner guidance system but many of us have learned not to listen to our inner truth.  

It’s actually not our inner child that needs healing. As a spark of the Divine, our inner child is perfect, and it’s our job as a loving adult to discover and evolve our perfection – our ability to love and express our love in the world in our own individual ways. 

We do have a wounded child and adolescent inside, which in Inner Bonding, we call the wounded self. The reason we call it the wounded self is because our wounds are not limited to being a child. Our wounds, which show up as our false beliefs and resulting fears and unloving actions, could have started prebirth if we were not wanted, and can continue through young adulthood – depending on when we developed our false beliefs that came from various forms of abuse – physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse. Our fears and false beliefs can also occur later in life from traumatic experiences.

It is our wounded self who need healing, and our wounded self can be many ages from prebirth to early adulthood, depending on when we concluded a false belief, and when we experienced trauma.

There are numerous articles, many written by coaches who have little experience with deeper levels of healing, or by free-lance authors who glean their information from various sources. Some of the articles talk about various exercises to heal the Inner Child, but again, it’s not the inner child, the perfect spark of the Divine that is our soul, that needs healing. What needs healing are the deep and subconscious false beliefs that fuel inner pain, and none of the exercises offered even begin to touch these false beliefs.

Various articles talk about reparenting and learning to nurture the wounded inner child, but what we speak about in Inner Bonding is learning to develop a strong, spiritually connected loving adult who learns how to reparent and nurture who you truly are – your beautiful soul who may not have been seen and loved and valued and nurtured by your parents or other caregivers. 

When we are not seen and cherished for our true soul self, and instead experience various forms of abuse – physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual – by being physically hurt, violated, abandoned, yelled at, criticized, neglected, and rejected in various ways, we suffer trauma, resulting in many beliefs that may still be currently running our life and causing anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness, addictions, and dysfunctional relationships.

None of the information offered in the many articles I’ve read about the inner child talks about the work it takes to develop a loving adult, and without developing your loving adult who is able to open to learning with your higher guidance to learn about what is true and what is loving, how do you know how to lovingly reparent yourself? Do you have role-models for loving yourself? A major aspect of loving yourself is to learn from and take responsibility for your feelings and needs, and taking loving action on your own behalf.

There is where so many of these articles break down. Without a process for developing your loving adult and connecting with your higher guidance for the information regarding how to love yourself, doing some exercises isn’t going to work. 

One article encourages you to acknowledge your inner child and let them know you love them and are looking out for them.

It’s fine to do this, but reminding your inner child that you are looking out for him or her and sending your love isn’t the same thing as being present for your feelings with an intent to learn and wanting responsibility for your feelings and needs. It’s not at all the same a taking actual loving actions on your own behalf.  This is what I mean by superficial. If you did this with an actual child, that child would not feel loved.

We are told to hug ourselves for a few minutes each day, and while this is good to do and it’s comforting, it’s not what heals trauma. Healing from trauma is a deep process that takes much time and therapeutic support. What disturbs me about recommendations like this is that if people do this and don’t experience healing, then they might feel like a failure. In Inner Bonding Therapy, we recommend learning to stay connected with your feelings all the time and holding your inner child by holding a doll or stuffed animal whenever you need comfort, which is likely much more than a few minutes a day.

Another recommendation is to think about a time in childhood when you felt happy and safe. Again, this is okay to do, but it doesn’t cancel out memories of painful times. In Inner Bonding Therapy, as you develop your loving adult self and your inner child starts to feel truly loved by you, he or she will feel safe enough to let you in on traumatic memories so that you can access the false beliefs that you are still operating from and that are still causing you pain. 

How often have you been told to look in the mirror and say positive things to yourself? Have you been told that false beliefs such as believing that you don’t matter and are not good enough can be healed by looking in a mirror and saying positive things to yourself? The problem with this is that if you are not also treating yourself like your feelings matter to you, these affirmations do nothing. Just affirming that you are a beautiful child of God but continuing to treat yourself as you were treated or as your parents or caregivers treated themselves will do nothing to heal false beliefs.

One recommendation that is often offered is one I totally agree with, which is to practice self-compassion. This is vital for healing. But if you subconsciously or unconsciously are judging and criticizing yourself, the deeper level of healing isn’t going to occur. Self-judgment is a major form of self-abandonment, and the wounded part of you that learned to judge yourself also needs self-compassion to heal.

Some articles recommend to notice your triggers – notice what activates your anger or fear, and then connecting these triggers with past childhood experiences. This is important, but some articles state that once you remember what triggers you, just reassure your inner child that that he or she is being seen and loved and is safe. 

As I said, identifying emotional triggers and tracing them back to painful events is important, but they don’t heal by reassuring your inner child that they are safe, loved, seen, and heard. Again, it’s fine to reassure your inner child, but it takes much more than reassurance to heal deeply painful events. Making something like childhood pain sound easy to heal makes me sad, because again people might feel like a failure when this doesn’t help or heal them.

Have you ever tried to reassure yourself about something that you are stressed over, but the stress didn’t go away? Have you practiced affirmations over and over, only to find yourself still feeling badly? Have you wondered why the affirmations and self-reassurance often don’t work?

In a session I had with Maryann, she told me about feeling stressed while walking into a bank, because she was thinking of the bad things that could happen to her in the bank – like being held up at gunpoint. As soon as she realized that she was stressing herself out, she told herself that everything would be fine, yet the stress didn’t go away.

“You’ve told me that I need to tell myself the truth rather than keep telling myself the lies that cause stress, yet when I told myself the truth it didn’t make any difference. Why isn’t it working?” she asked me.

“Maryann, did you tell yourself the truth from your mind, or from your guidance?”

“Oh, it was from my mind. I didn’t even think about opening to my guidance,” she said.

“Why would your inner child believe your mind?” I asked her. “Your mind is operating from what has been programmed into it and is intent only on controlling. Your mind created the stressful thought and then created another reassuring thought, but your inner child knows that both thoughts are just about controlling. So your inner child does not believe what comes from your wounded self. It only believes what comes through your loving adult from your guidance. It is only your loving adult who has the authority to tell the truth to your inner child, and we are a loving adult only when we are connected with our spiritual guidance.”

“So unless I’m connected with my spiritual guidance, my inner child will not be reassured by what I’m telling her?” she asked.

“Right,” I said. “Would you have the same response to an actual child or adolescent reassuring you as you would to a wise and knowing adult? If an adolescent tells you that everything is going to be okay, is that as reassuring as a loving adult telling you that everything is going to be okay?”

“I see what you mean,” she said. “So this is why it hasn’t been working when I try to reassure my inner child. I’m still stuck in my mind rather than accessing the truth from my guidance.”

“Yes. The programmed aspect of your mind wants to think it knows the truth, but it actually has no way of knowing what is true and what isn’t until you open to your guidance. This is what being “open-minded” is about. When we are truly open-minded and openhearted, the love and truth from spirit can flow through us. But when we are in the intent to control, rather than in the intent to learn, the mind is closed to guidance. We are then stuck with our programmed thinking, which often causes us much stress. The closed mind has no authority to tell the truth, so your inner child will not be reassured when your wounded self is in charge. And if there was actual danger, only your guidance would know this, not your wounded self.”

“Okay,” she said. “I can see the problem here. My mind doesn’t want to open to guidance. My mind likes to be in charge.”

“Right,” I said. “The wounded self doesn’t want to give up control. Opening to guidance is a surrender of control, and this is the last thing that the wounded self wants. Yet this is the only way of accessing truth.”

“Oh, I can feel the resistance as you say this! Letting go of control feels so scary!” she said.

“Of course it feels scary!” I said. “One of the major false beliefs of the wounded self is that letting go of control and surrendering to the guidance of spirit will cause us pain. Yet, once again, the programmed mind of the wounded self doesn’t know what it is talking about!”

Maryann was willing to try allowing her guidance to bring in truth rather than rely on her mind. She discovered that her inner child did indeed calm down and feel reassured when her loving adult was in charge, rather than her wounded self.

Can you see that just reassuring your inner child isn’t nearly enough and often won’t work?

Another common recommendation is to meditate. Meditation is great, but I’ve worked with people who meditated for many years and still had much pain because of never learning how to be a strong, spiritually connected loving adult who knows how to take responsibility for their own feelings and needs and is present for their feelings throughout the day. 

A major aspect of healing is learning to see your self-worth by seeing your true soul essence. Knowing and deeply valuing who you are is vital for wanting to be loving to yourself and do the healing work you need to do. 

I grew up with parents who had no idea they even had a soul. They believed they were their wounded selves, and that they were not good enough. Because they could not see their essence, they could not see mine, so I grew up also believing I was not good enough.

Everything changed for me when I finally saw my true essence. Since my wounded self was programmed to believe that I was not good enough, I could not see my essence through the eyes of my wounded self. In fact, my wounded self was so convinced that I was not good enough that she spent a lot of energy hiding my essence. I could not see my essence until I started to practice Inner Bonding and began developing my spiritual connection.

Through my consistent Inner Bonding practice, my connection with my spiritual guidance became stronger and stronger. By testing out, many times, what my guidance told me, I finally learned to trust her.

So when she showed me the magnificence and beauty of my true essence, I believed her. That’s when I stopped needing others’ approval. That’s when I started to be able to fully manifest my life.

My guidance not only showed me how incredible my essence is, she also showed me how incredible everyone’s essence is. She helped me develop the ability to see and relate to people as their essence rather than as their wounded self.

Now I know that the essence of all of us is love – an individualized expression of the love that is God. Not only are we love, but each of us has been given unique gifts and talents to enable us to express our love in unique and individual ways.

Inner Bonding is about healing your false beliefs and learning to love yourself – but you cannot fully love yourself until you know who you really are.

Right now, take a deep breath. Put your focus into your heart and move into an intent to learn with your older wiser self about who you are. Use your imagination to envision yourself about 500 years older than you are right now.

Now imagine that you can see your soul essence – your true self – through the eyes of your higher self. What do you see? You need to get beyond your wounded self to the child you were before you became afraid and learned to protect against pain. You might even need to go all the way back to before you were born, since if your mother didn’t want you, or there was a lot of conflict in your environment, you might have already been afraid – even before birth.

See if you can FEEL the love that you are, and all the other unique and wonderful qualities that you are as a soul. You might want to write down what you see.

One of the habits I’ve developed is the exact opposite of self-judgment, and very different than the recommended mirroring exercise. I acknowledge out loud to my inner child whenever I behave in a way that truly expresses my soul essence. I tell her how grateful I am that she is within me and that I get to take loving care of her. I marvel at her creativity, her kindness, the joy she receives from giving to others. I praise her for her love of learning, her joy and laughter, her connection with people and animals, her playfulness and her aliveness. I let her know how much I value her deep sense of integrity and honesty. I celebrate her.

In other words, I do what good parents consistently do – I mirror to her, throughout the day, who she really is.

Yet, as I previously said, even this isn’t enough. In order for her to believe me, I then need to treat her as a cherished being. I need to love her by taking loving action in her behalf. Seeing her is only the beginning. Taking consistent loving action in her behalf lets her know that I truly love and cherish her. This is what Inner Bonding Therapy is all about. And part of taking loving action is learning to speak up for your inner child.

What do you generally do when you are in an interaction with someone and you are feeling anxious, scared or lonely from the interaction?

Perhaps the other person is judging you, blaming you, or threatening you, or is being sarcastic or discounting of you. Or maybe the other person keeps interrupting you and bringing the conversation back to him or herself. Perhaps the other person is going on and on, not letting you get in a word edgewise. Or maybe the other person is just completely non-responsive to you, not listening to you or acting as if you are not there.

These interactions will often bring about an inner feeling of stress. How do you respond to your inner stress?

As I’ve often said, many people, in response to their inner stress, have learned to protect against their pain in a number of ways: arguing, defending, explaining, attacking, withdrawing or complying. These are just of few of the ways you might have learned to protect against inner pain and stress. Yet none of these actually deal with the painful and stressful feelings, so none of them are healing. In fact, the more you act from your wounded self, the more you are abandoning yourself and reinforcing that your inner child can’t trust you.

These painful and stressful feelings are your inner child telling you that something is wrong. The feeling is telling you that you are picking up a negative energy, an energy that is not in resonance with safety, peace, and love. If you respond to these stressful feelings with your own protective, controlling behavior, then you are also moving out of alignment with yourself, out of alignment with what feels safe, peaceful, and loving to your inner child. By protecting against your painful and stressful feelings with some form of controlling behavior, you have abandoned yourself, which results in even more pain and stress. Now, not only are you responding with stressful behavior to the negative energy that is being aimed at you, but you have also abandoned your inner child in the face of it. Not only is there nothing healing about this, but it reinforces your woundedness.

However, if you are consistently practicing Inner Bonding, you will begin to be more aware that the energy coming at you is negative. You will gradually become more aware of your feelings, of the stress that comes when negative energy is aimed at you. With consistent practice, you will be more and more able to stay in Step One of Inner Bonding – being mindful of your feelings. Learning to stay present in your body with your feelings is essential for your inner child to feel safe.

Then you can move on to Step Two, moving into compassion for your feelings with a deep desire to learn what is causing them, rather than just reacting to them. Once you are in a compassionate intention to learn, you can quickly discern that you are feeling stressed due to negative energy being aimed at you. Once you are aware of this, you have a much better chance of moving into loving action – speaking up for your feeling self – your inner child.

In an important relationship such as with a partner, a close friend, or a co-worker, speaking up for your feelings – for your inner child – can take different forms, depending on the situation. But a sort of standard response could be something like, “This isn’t feeling good. This is feeling stressful.” 

Once you have made this kind of statement, then you can decide what is the next loving action. There are really only two different loving actions you can take in important relationships when there is negative energy coming at you. One is to move into an intention to learn with the other person, which might look like this:

“This isn’t feeling good. This feels very stressful. I’d like to understand what’s happening for you right now. Are you willing to explore it with me?”

The other is to express your limit and take action on it, which might look like this:

“This isn’t feeling good. This negative energy is feeling stressful. I’m going to take a 30 minute time out (or whatever time you want), and then see if we can talk about it with openness and caring.” Then you would need to leave the interaction by going into another room, taking a walk, or getting off the phone. You can come back in 30 minutes or whatever length of time you stated and see if the other person is open.

If the other person is not open when you come back, then it is best not to discuss the issue until both of you are open.

You will find that your stress level goes down once you become adept at speaking up for yourself. Just imagine how loving this would be to your inner child!

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newesr book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.