Healing the Inner Child - Willow Arlena
Our inner child contains all our positive and negative emotional patterns. He or she lives in our psyche as the little child we once were. He or she carries the wounds of past trauma. A clue that our inner child runs our lives emerges in the patterns of drama and trauma, which keep reappearing repeatedly in our adult lives. Another clue shows itself if we keep retelling the same story of suffering to others.
My inner child carries the wounds from growing up with an emotionally distant father addicted to alcohol. Yet, I am grateful for him allowing me, at the age of ten, to play for two summers with my younger brother. We played fantasy cowboy games amongst the groves of maple trees.
As a man, I never related to my inner child. In fact, I knew nothing about having an inner child. In addition, when I studied psychology at college no one mentioned the inner child at the time.
Therefore, my inner child remained invisible and unknown to me until my early forties. My partner at the time told me she had a therapist who worked with healing her inner child. This and most of all the pain of being unable to know and express my emotions or needs in relationships motivated me to contact this child. I started by reading John Bradshaw’s, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child.
A few years later, I began teaching energy healing and a method of healing the inner child. At this time, I realized the intensity of pain my inner child carried since childhood.
Over a decade later, my wife, Lyn, assisted me by refusing to accept being my emotional body. I will explain this more. Our inner child connects to our emotions. I numbed and avoided my emotions for two thirds of my life. Therefore, instead of feeling and expressing my emotions, I had my wife do this for me as all my previous female partners had done in the past. One day Lyn refused to do this. She explained I needed to be responsible for my own feelings. Therefore, I accepted and began to express my feelings a bit more. Over time I could identify my feelings more readily. How many men like me unconsciously have their women carry their emotions for them?
Today I understand the influence of my childhood. My father numbed his feelings and pain through alcohol. I am grateful I never succumbed to this addiction. I learned from my mother to sacrifice and caretake those close to me. I have since learned to nurture myself first although I find myself still challenged, as I tend to take on other people’s energies unaware in my desire to assist them.
I recognize a pattern from my father. I swore as a teenager never to drink, yet gradually over seven years I began drinking more and more. One day because a new meditation practice required I quit I did so for four years and after I no longer had a craving for alcohol. It takes great will power to break such an addictive pattern.
Over thirty years of becoming more aware of my inner pain and trauma, through various energy medicine methods and self-discovery I have come to terms with the pain and a large amount has healed.
Most of my life my wounded child wanted to stay angry and rant at the injustices of the world or sink into the powerlessness of the victim. I learned with the help of my wife Lyn, a gifted energy healer, how to hold the emotions of my inner child rather than drowning in them or being trapped in anger.
I learned to embrace my inner child. By staying present with the feelings, they began to transform on their own and a peace would fill me. I do this more and more now. I choose to take charge rather than allowing my inner child to sit in the driver’s seat of the emotional train. When our inner child heals, we heal.
If you choose to heal your inner child, Evelyn Lim, a life coach, writer, NLP practitioner and an Intuitive Consultant describes seven steps:
1.) Understand Your Childhood Programming.
2.) Recognize Repeated Life Patterns.
3.) Acknowledge Your Pain.
4.) Disengage in Self-Judgment.
5.) Embrace The Wounded Child.
6.) Practice Courage.
7.) Free Yourself Through Forgiveness.
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