The Adult Inner Child
Many of us live primarily from our inner child psychology. As you go about your adult life, some of your life activities might have a childlike undertone. Inner child emotionality can so easily "take over" adult states, especially when you feel frightened or insecure.
Dr David Hawkins describes the inner (adult) child:
"The inner child we hear so much about is not actually inner at all; it is actually quite "outer." As people grow up, they take on various identifications and copy what they conceive of as adult behaviours and styles; however, it is not the adult who is doing this but the child. Therefore, what we see in daily life are people acting out the programs and scenarios that they identify with as a child.
The young child already exhibits curiosity, self-pity, jealousy, envy, competitiveness, temper tantrums, emotional outbursts, resentments, hatreds, rivalry, seeking limelight and admiration, petulance, blaming others, disclaiming responsibility, making others wrong, looking for favour, collecting 'things', showing off and more. These are all attributes of a child."
Centering to Feel Calm
Inner child survival programming will activate whenever you feel fear. When your emotional energies are fearful, inner child aspects of self seek external support and outside validation. Maturing yourself involves "growing up" your inner child by loving the places within that feel afraid - from the inside.
When you fear that your emotional needs for safety, support and love will not be met, it will be hard to focus and function in adult life. Gathering scattered emotional energies into the center of your body, through concentrative techniques profoundly calms your witnessing mind so that you can think more clearly, and regulate your inner child's emotions.
Gathering Energy to Heal
You can heal your fearful inner child through "dual consciousness." The calm, witnessing part of your mind can see, hear and support the fear, sadness, anger that arises from the younger "keepers of your fear."
We all have our own unique ways of creating calm. When we center ourselves, we bring calm to our emotions. When we’re not centered, we feel out of touch with ourselves.
Getting centered involves concentrating your attention in the middle of your body, and caring for all of your emotionally activated younger parts of self with calm, unconditional love.
Loving Your Inner Child
Many of us have remained tense, uncentered, and dysregulated since childhood. If you are stuck in fear (fight/flight), it will be difficult, if not impossible, to heal your inner child. For example, you might be blocking your vital connection to your inner child self through cringing, defiance, hypervigilance, and muscular contractions.
Psychotherapist Judith Blackstone author of "The Enlightenment Process," offers a way of releasing your body's fearful resistance to feeling and healing your inner child's pain:
"Let your body move into the bound attitude. Really experience yourself in this attitude. You may find that parts of your body that you did not know were involved in the attitude move into the pattern of tension.
Because the whole body is connected through the fascia, our bound patterns often involve a line of tension throughout our whole body.
When you feel the whole pattern of tension, try to attune to the consciousness that is holding that tension. Originally all of our binding was volitional, even though unconscious.
The same part of your childhood mind that organized the contraction in your body is still preserved in the contraction. Try to experience the childhood mind that is holding the attitude that you experience in your body. You may experience the age that you were when you first formed this pattern. You may also experience the emotional content of the pattern.
As that childhood consciousness, you will be able to feel and discharge the bound emotion. The emotional release may occur as tears, or as the movement of energy through and out of your body. The emotion has the quality of your age when it was bound in your body.
For example, the rage of a two-year-old will have a different quality than the rage of the six-year-old, or the rage of an adult. You will also be able as the childhood consciousness, to let go of the physical tension, as simply as you relax your hand after making a fist.
This is not a method of regression in the usual sense of experiencing oneself entirely as a child. Our present-day consciousness remains alert and witnesses the fragmented part of our consciousness, energy and body that is bound in the childhood memory."
Calming Your Survival Fears
A profound way to calm the survival fears of your inner child is to identify what you most wanted to be told by your parents when you were growing up - such as "I love you," and then affirm this to yourself many times a day. If you consistently repeat this loving statement to yourself, you will heal your emotional pain.
"Simply by repeating the phrase, "I love you," you become the source of your own fulfillment while rewriting your subconscious mind with consistency, patience and ease.
Every time you send love to your heart, it gets subconsciously recorded as a vote of familiarity. Even just one "I love you" acts as a precedence-setting moment once you are able to honor yourself unlike any time in the past."
~ Matt Kahn
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