Heal Your Inner Child, Heal Your Relationships
“In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.”
The first time I ever heard of the inner child was when I first met with my now therapist, about 10 years ago. I sought him during a time when I finally accepted I was still deeply traumatized from my troubled past and recent domestic abuse, and my relationships were clearly reflecting back to me something was not right within me.
I was unable to maintain fulfilling or healthy relationships in my adulthood. So when the relationship I was in at that time began to crumble yet again like so many of the ones before it, despite being with a loving partner, I knew that the common denominator was me. I needed help.
I was growing hopeless that I’d ever find love, and years of failed relationships and heartbreak made me feel hopeless that I’d actually ever find it. In fact I questioned whether or not true love even existed, and my heart began to feel sad and embittered.
My heart grew cold and closed off and I began falling in to a deep depression and at times, dark thoughts about my existence. It was during this time I realized just how important relationships are to the overall satisfaction of our lives. Truly no person is an island. We need healthy relationships to thrive as human beings.
During that darker period I grew increasingly frustrated and thought to myself:
Why is love such great source of pain, is it actually supposed to be like this?
Are love relationships really so tumultuous, volatile, and fragile?
No, this can’t be normal. I am the problem.
How is it that, despite my best efforts, I am continuing to see the same toxic relationship patterns manifest either from me or from my partners?
I was following all the advice of the most popular dating/relationship coaches, journaling all the time, reading all the self-help books, and practicing my positive affirmations so what am I doing wrong?
What the hell is wrong with me?
I must be unlovable.
I felt doomed to live a loveless existence for the rest of my life- that is until I began to heal my relationship with my inner child.
When I was first began to “meet” my inner child through hypnotherapy and guided visualization, to be honest it was very challenging at first. In the beginning, trying to connect with her felt so intimidating and at times I was alarmed at the state of her condition.
She would appear before me a shadowy and dark looking kind of creature, with an undefined black aura that almost looked like tv static (imagine the ghost chick from the The Ring, creepy right?).
She was encased in sadness and despair and being in her energy made me feel unbelievably sorrowful. At first she refused to even speak to me. It was hard not to blame myself for letting her get to this point.
Those first few years of meeting with my wounded inner child were hard, and it took a lot of bravery to see just how hurt she was. Having been estranged from this part of myself for so long, I began to see the source of my chronic loneliness I’ve felt throughout the years that made me constantly seek romantic affection from, in unfortunately many cases, toxic partners.
That kind of self neglect and self sabotage I was engaging in back then was a mere reflection of my relationship with the most love-needing part of myself, my inner child.
Through inner child work I began to discover the source of my codependency in adulthood and why I was behaving the way I was in my romantic relationships. Working with her also showed me why I was attracting certain types of toxic partners or toxic behaviors from them.
As I built trust with her, over time she rewarded me with invaluable information about our traumas and began revealing to me the deeply repressed memories that were the cause of our relationship wounds.
However as she is just a child she needed an adult, me, to care for her and love her in the way I needed to be when I was young.
By repairing the first and most foundational relationship of my life, the one between my childhood self and my caregivers, I was able to heal the future of all of my relationships for the better.
Turns out the relationship I needed the most was the one with my inner child.
As I reflected back to my inner child the healthy and secure love I needed from my parents, I was essentially reflecting back to myself the love I needed to give myself now. And by giving myself now the love that I need (and thus meeting my own needs), I am literally manifesting the love I desire and deserve in all of my other relationships.
Inner child work has taught me that the most knowledgeable source for improving my relationships lies with my inner child. The inner child is more than just a concept, they are are very real part of you. They are the gatekeepers to the subconscious realm of our minds that hold all of our beliefs about love and relationships, because they were the first ones to receive the downloads about love and relationships first from our caregivers during our earliest cognitively formative years.
Learning about healthy relationship skills are indeed important and useful, but this does not actually resolve the root of our relationship issues which are our limiting beliefs around love and relationships. However your inner child holds the key to those beliefs, and by working consistently with them you will be able to rebuild not only the most important relationship you will ever have in your life, the relationship you have with yourself, but the ones you have with others.
What are your relationships reflecting back to you? If what you’re seeing from them now is undesirable, this may be the perfect time to seek the company and counsel of your inner child. They are waiting for you.
Sending both you and your inner child my love,
Song
