As humans, we all have a tendency to want to grow up and be adults. We work hard to become independent, make our own decisions, and take control of our lives. However, despite all our efforts, there is a concept that psychology forces us to consider - the idea of an "inner child." It can be confronting and embarrassing to acknowledge that there might still be a part of us that is childlike, confused, and vulnerable.
The truth is that we contain within ourselves a version of all the people that we have ever been. Somewhere within the folds of our nature, there is a confused teenager, a sad child, a jealous or hungry infant - no version of us ever entirely disappears. They are merely added to and buttressed, like an oak tree that still contains in its rings the marks of all its former circumferences.
Furthermore, if we follow the psychological thesis, some of our inner children are likely not to be especially well. They might be dealing with a hurt that they have no idea how to cope with. They might have suffered a loss without any chance to understand who and what is to blame. They might be lonely, distressed, or ashamed. Despite their pain, their cries are not in any danger of breaking through into the public realm. That is precisely the problem.
Inner children cause psychic distress, not because they are too present, but because they are not present enough. They have been too effectively locked away, and their cries have been seamlessly forgotten and ignored. They've been pushed into a soundproof chamber from which no murmur emerges. And yet, they still exist. We are dealing with unwanted restless ghosts who have not been appeased or understood, but whose ongoing ignored unhappiness threatens the course of our lives.
The task ahead requires a perhaps even more grating and obtuse word - "re-parenting." The inner child needs to be identified, their distinctive troubles understood, and their pains soothed and becalmed. In a perfect world, it would be parents themselves who would carry out this work at the time that difficulties arose. But in the real world, some of the work gets left behind and lingers, which requires a bizarre-sounding maneuver to correct.
We, the adults, need to become parents to the children we once were. We need to gather together our adult capacities for kindness, reassurance, empathy, and warmth and direct these towards the three or five or fifteen-year-olds who still exist in our minds. We need to take stock of these young people's sorrows and help them in a way they were not helped at the time, in the name of helping ourselves right now. Because we are standing on their shoulders, and we can only be as stable as they are.
It is when we can directly imagine what a good and kind person might have said to us, and yet when we are simultaneously aware of how little anyone did actually say, that we might be overcome with compassionate tears for our former selves. We may register a trapped sadness that, at last, has an opportunity to be seen, worked through, and expunged. We might feel a lot lighter afterward, and we might then regularly, perhaps late at night, repeat the exercise, revisiting our inner child and bringing them an extra dose of comfort and tenderness so that they, and we - for we rest as a collective - might sleep more easily.
We probably all know well enough how to treat real children around us. True liberation awaits us when we finally learn to treat the children inside us with as much tolerance, patience, warmth, and encouragement.
