Cry Baby: Inner Child trauma, from the beast to the beauty.

What better to talk about on Monday morning then trauma. For most people living in the world today Monday is a day that’s pretty freaking traumatic. If you don’t work on the weekends, you most definitely work on Monday. Hence the Thank God it’s Friday references and can’t wait for the weekend memes. So I figured I would talk about something worse than Monday. Now, what could possibly be worse than Inner child trauma? If you ask me, not a whole lot. Right here and now, I’m going to do my best to deliver and report on the logistics of this heinous bogeyman. Break it down a little bit, and share my experience of using therapy paired with meditation, and a hell of a lot of interpersonal work. Hopefully, convey how this helped me use the beast to my advantage, and learn something. Maybe even realize it isn’t such a beast at all. So sit down, fasten your seatbelts kids, because this could be a bumpy ride.

I consider myself an adult, For the most part. However,I don’t really think I Had a freaking clue what being an adult was until I started to help parent my partner‘s daughter, a.k.a. my little girl. I don’t know if I ever would’ve fully grown up, that I am, or even achieve that status really.. Nevertheless, I realized one day that I had someone watching me. Serendipitously soon after, I ran a crossed a meme. It was a lion and its cub, across the picture of the two lions it read in huge letters, all capital, white bold face font. “ I thought about quitting, then I realized who was watching.” I had already been doing work with my therapist about healing my inner child. It began very organically. We started with a timeline exercise, but after the presence of some thing, well someone that I knew I affected, it made me want to dig in deep and do the real work. I’m not sure who’s reading this, or if you know anything about the 12 steps. When I do step work there is a period where I take inventory.( I speak in terms of first person because I’m not here to tell anybody how to do anything. This is how I do things, how I specifically did it in order to get me where I am today.) In the beginning the work was daunting exercise after exercise. I began to recognize why I reacted to certain things so negatively. I started to understand why I was such an ass-hat in certain situations. It was very eye-opening and refreshing, here I was 40 years old and having a come to universe moment. I could really take some time to pull back the layers and process trauma that I never healed from early on in life.

I really don’t think it matters what kind of trauma you have experienced. I personally feel that everyone experiences and perceives life differently. If I had not been through something that someone else has, or vice versa. I would say there is not really much that people can compare it to at all. Which is why I think it is a really bad practice to compare trauma. I think it is a negative source of affirmation, and can lead down a rabbit hole of just all-around bad energy. Whether we want to or not, we experience trauma. Just the other day I was listening to someone, they mentioned getting stung by a bee in their eyebrow. I’d like to say that’s pretty freaking traumatic, but if you talked to another friend of mine, that lost their son in a car accident a few weeks ago, they probably would disagree. So it’s all relative, and the more therapy I’ve done and time I’ve taken to process my wounds the better my relations with others have become. I am not as afraid to be myself, and I’m learning to define my worth inside my existence , not others.

Shortly after I started doing Inner child trauma work with my therapist, I got the courage up to ask my mother if she loved me. This was a big step, I have always held a tumultuous relationship with her, and I am grateful that with time, patience and a lot of program, I am able to have a very compassionate, and amicable relationship. It’s not perfect, and it is definitely not what I expected ever, like ever. At one point in my life I figured I would die without speaking to her, and the really sad part about it all is that in my research and education on inner child trauma, we inherit it. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Reconciliation, Healing the inner child, “When you grow up, you might believe that you and your mother are two different people. But it’s not really so. We’re extensions of our mother. We mistakenly believe that we’re a different person than our mother. We are a continuation of our mother and father, and our ancestors as well. If we look into one cell of our body or one cell of our consciousness, we recognize the presence of all the generations of ancestors in us. .”

I understand that means, if my mothers parents were clueless and didn’t know they were hurting their children, in turn my mother passed on hers and their trauma to us as children. If my mother‘s wounds were still open, how could she have avoided passing on her trauma to me. Which in turn made me never want to be anything like her but exactly like her at the same time. The trauma from childhood can be something as small as stubbing your toe and nobody being there to help you. Trauma can look like burning your fingers on a hot cookie sheet, or breaking your arm riding your bike. Stress is parents worst nightmare, I know hat it is extremely traumatic for me. That stress then passes on to said infant, five-year-old, 16 year-old, 25-year-old and he goes on and on.

I feel as if the work I have done inviting my inner child into the living room of my mind. Then, to sit on a crazy comfy couch, surrounded by blankets has helped me achieve certain mental health goals I never thought possible. The work is not fun, at all. Exhausting, really. I have relived certain aspects of my childhood that I never ever wanted to go back to, but when I did this time my five-year-old self , or my younger self that almost died when my liver burst. My now present tense 40 years old self is experiencing it with that inner child. Sometimes I have to hold the child because she is so small. I’ve even let my 14-year-old self cry on my shoulder in my minds eye. I still stand by the fact that I would never want to be a teenager again. That was some really painful, and emotionally draining work, but in the end it’s been worth it every single bit.

I will say that timeline work has been pretty important to help me organize the events that hurt me the most, and I was even able to understand that some of the things weren’t traumatic at all. Our mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and fantasy it just remembers it happened. As children we withdraw and hold it in, we push it down and force ourselves to swallow pain. When I began to really allow myself to let go and choose to heal, I had to learn how to process. Process brought me to being able to build boundaries, boundaries for myself with myself, others and the world. I didn’t realize until I was 39 years old that I had absolutely no idea what the hell a boundary was, nor realized I needed them which today I think is ludicrous. I also have chosen to set boundaries to protect people in my life without boundaries. I don’t think that we were raised to have good boundaries, especially if we come from unhealthy, faulty past programming. That programming as I’ve said before usually trickles down from the very top.

The person I wanted to be able to have a relationship with more than anybody in the beginning was the kiddo. I can report it is going well. I swore she deserved everything, and I didn’t even know why I believed that coming into this relationship. Yet I have realized recently that I want for her what my inner child needed most. It may not even be what she really needs, and it’s not my job to deliver safety and happiness 100% of the time, because I don’t have control over anything, besides my thoughts, actions, and reactions. I have witnessed myself reenacting my childhood within my own family, and presently am attempting to build a relationship with me, one that is much needed. Another thing that I never did before I was 35, develop a relationship with myself. Actually take the time to know who the hell I am, what I stand for what my values are? Talk about a midlife crisis, when you realize that you’ve been interpolating falsity Into reality. Pouring it on really thick too, So much as you actually believe the lie. It can be pretty devastating to realize that you’ve been living your life to appease the thoughts of others as if you have control over their thoughts by what you do, say, or think, talk about a God complex. Geesh.

It’s kind of haunting to realize that I’ve been merely a ghost of my authentic self for such a long time. But this story is not over. I heard someone say that in a meeting, “No matter what has happened in your past, your story doesn’t have to be over”. Only you can pick up the pieces, peel back the layers and decide how you want to live your life. No one is holding a gun to my head telling me to do anything, I’ve just been lost in my self-absorbed mentality, for far too long. Wanting to be the source of whoever’s happiness I could be. I have learned that this is my greatest affliction, to worry about pleasing others and making people smile when I may not have the smile to give. We all have needs, and when those needs are not met it can be traumatic. Living within your trauma can hinder growth, development and forgiveness. Without a foundation of honesty and healing ourselves first how can we grow? Today I am continuing to do this 10 seconds at a time. I mean, I have to ..because my inner child’s attention span is far too short.