As explained in my post, “Healing Your Inner Child - Healing Your Wounded Heart,” this process is very important to enabling you to experience peace and happiness, even when the deepest core of your suffering is touched. But I realized the other morning when meditating that there is a semantic error here.
When you go through the process of healing your inner child, what is really healed isn’t your inner child but your adult self. The reason is that your inner child is your past, even though it is alive and well in the present, influencing your actions every day. The past cannot be healed; what is done is done. The hurt cannot be removed nor can the anxiety you experienced be expunged from you.
But you can heal your adult self. At the start of the process, we don’t usually have much compassion for the inner child. We think it has failed us; we feel guilty or ashamed. We do not love our inner child unconditionally, if at all. Or we are in denial about what happened to us as children. All of this negative emotion pushes the inner child away from us, strengthening its feeling of rejection and inadequacy and its ultimate power over us.
But when we go through the process of healing, showing our wounded inner child unconditional love and asking it to speak and tell us how it feels, we are embracing our inner child. And by so doing, we end the struggle between our adult self and our wounded inner child.
We, as adults, become healed of the pain and emotions we felt since we were children. The hurt will always remain, but after the healing process our buttons will not be pushed, or at least not as strongly, and we will be able to react to situations that formerly agitated us with dispassion.
When you go through the process of healing your inner child, what is really healed isn’t your inner child but your adult self. The reason is that your inner child is your past, even though it is alive and well in the present, influencing your actions every day. The past cannot be healed; what is done is done. The hurt cannot be removed nor can the anxiety you experienced be expunged from you.
But you can heal your adult self. At the start of the process, we don’t usually have much compassion for the inner child. We think it has failed us; we feel guilty or ashamed. We do not love our inner child unconditionally, if at all. Or we are in denial about what happened to us as children. All of this negative emotion pushes the inner child away from us, strengthening its feeling of rejection and inadequacy and its ultimate power over us.
But when we go through the process of healing, showing our wounded inner child unconditional love and asking it to speak and tell us how it feels, we are embracing our inner child. And by so doing, we end the struggle between our adult self and our wounded inner child.
We, as adults, become healed of the pain and emotions we felt since we were children. The hurt will always remain, but after the healing process our buttons will not be pushed, or at least not as strongly, and we will be able to react to situations that formerly agitated us with dispassion.
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