As I mentioned in the previous article, the first step in the process of healing the wounds of your childhood is to RECOGNIZE your inner child. You can see this process as a process of self-discover. There are clients who imagine their inner child as a person. If that doesn’t work for you, you can try to remember anything from your childhood. It’s important to check if you’re still caring emotional baggage with those memories. They are emotions that are generated in the situations that cause strong emotions, discomfort and old wounds. If you follow the path back to specific events in your childhood, you can find the connection to similar situations in your adult life that provokes the same reaction.
If you can imagine your inner child, try to notice how it looks and how it feels. You can start a conversation in which is very important to:
– Not criticize it
– Not compare it
– Not judge it
If it’s difficult for you to imagine and start a dialogue with your inner child, you can try writing a JOURNAL from your perspective as a child. From this work you can detect your belief system that you formed in your childhood and that still has influence in your decisions and actions. To connect more easily with your inner child, it can help to see your PHOTOS of the age that you want to remember or make a brief visualization to remind yourself how you felt at the specific age you want to explore.
MEDITATION is another method of connecting with your inner child. With meditation you become more aware of your emotions and you can notice easier when a specific situation chains your useless reaction. In the prelinguistic stage, children do not know how to express emotion through words, or many times they learn that they should not express some emotions (“negative ones”), because their parents are going to punish them. So, they learn to repress some emotions. With meditation, the specific emotion is recognized and give permission to your inner child to feel it. During the meditation you stay with the emotion, you accept it and in the and you let it go.
If you realize that your life is full of responsibilities and you can’t find time to relax, it means that you have lost your balance. Connecting with your inner child can sometimes help you to detect that very early in your childhood you became the “adapted child”, the responsible and concerned child. The lack of spontaneous and joyful experiences (games and activities) can be “recovered” now in your adult life. Planning time to resume activities that you like can fill you with energy and can help you to return your happiness, the harmony in your life, the ability to ENJOY FULLY IN THE PRESENT MOMENT (just like the children do). Make a list of everything you like to do, and plan at least 15 minutes a day to resume any of these activities (eat your favorite ice cream, listen, sing or dance to the song you like, play the social game you like … .)
It’s necessary to test which method works for you, and you can work it alone or together with your therapist, the sure thing is that the benefits of resuming this connection with your inner child are great and are definitely worth it:
- Self-knowledge;
- Self-acceptance;
- Better communication with the others;
- Release of your repressed emotions that actually release the whole energy that was kept, so you can use it for actions in the present moment;
- Being able to enjoy the present moment and much more.
Anita Chukaleska,
psychologist, gestalt psychotherapist 02.06.2021