Personal Pitfalls of Inner Child Work

Why knocking on my childhood door goes wrong…

               Searching to find and comfort your inner child as a form of understanding, relating to and healing from immature responses due to childhood experiences can be a very useful and insightful tool, for some. I mostly have a very resistant, skeptical and even combative reaction to this method. But why? There must be something there.

               Let’s start with the approach. I have done this exercise many times by now, and each time I have had a similar reaction. The mental imagery used to conjure up this imagined meeting is steeped in traumatic experiences that make me want to turn back every time. Imagine your front door… This is a hard situation for me. I had many front doors before the age of 6. The house I lived the most of my life in, also had more than one front door. The front door, for me, evokes a symbol of instability. This automatically makes me not want to approach the exercise. In all honesty, I can’t really remember the front door all that well, but I can say that it was a sign of poverty, distress, anxiety and hiding.

               The front door, for me, brings up the separation between me and the outside world. This is a big deal as it was probably supposed to be a boundary between safety and danger. But that would assume that the there was no danger on the other side of the door. As a child, the outside world was aggressive and competitive, belittling and unkind. My first memory of being outside the house that I spent the vast majority of my childhood in was getting jumped by two neighborhood boys. Coming home, I got yelled at for not fighting back. I was terrified of my mother; I think we all were. Which means... there was danger on both sides.

               Let’s move past the front door… “Who’s in the house with you?” Everybody… Too many people… There were the unstable personalities of my mother that would be extremes of either sad, angry or goofy; mostly, that of a submitted person later in life, but overall, she was unhappy. That’s how it seemed to young me. I can tell you now as an adult, she was mostly just lost, scared and trying her best to keep it together. My dad was there, but not there. He was consumed by his own perceptions of the world and how it worked (or should work). So, you didn’t have your own life, you had his perception of your life insisted upon you, which obviously negatively interacted with my mother’s view. So, it was fair to say that from a parent-child relationship, I didn’t know who I was half of the time. I now know as an adult that my dad just lacked perspective taking and emotional granularity. He wasn’t taught to discern, for himself, right from wrong, good from bad, etc. These were ideas that were shoved down his throat, as they are with most Americans, so that you are properly trained to agree with your place in society. My sister was there, but we fought like two little bastards. That’s what I remember hearing about us. My sister was and still is a drama queen (though much toned down now and aimed more at self-abnegation… probably due to a latent sense of guilt). Regardless, I remember always arguing, her always crying and my mom hitting herself because she couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve worked through this, and I now know that she was just so overwhelmed and lost and with no psychological support or healthy moral support that she experienced psychological breaks. I’m not mad at her anymore for this, and I have forgiven her, but that doesn't mean that it isn’t still unpleasant to visit it.

My aunt and 3 cousins lived with us for a while. That was before our house caught on fire. There was even a subtext of a theory thrown around that she set it on fire and tried to rob us (or did rob us), I don't know… no one talks to a 5 year old, but they also don’t stop talking around him either. Like somehow my ears aren’t formed at 5 years or something. My uncle also lived with us once because he and my aunt were fighting. There was a lot of fighting.

Where am I? Well to be honest, I’m not there. I don’t know where I am, but I’m not there. Would you want to be? If you worked to heal your inner child, why in the world would you leave him or her there?

Then the next step in the inner child healing process comes along , “Where’s your room?” Well, that’s an oddly triggering question. The simple answer is right next to the bathroom and the attic stairs. But that was only until I was about 11. I can’t remember exactly the age when it got switched or the reason. I was hit by a car when I was 11 and almost died. But I do remember my room being moved to my parents’ room and my parents taking my old room, which by the way was ridiculous. My room was small, and blue and cold, and they sandwiched their king size bed in between the walls because, and the excuse was “…he can’t keep his room neat because it’s too small? Fine! He can take ours, and we’ll see…” Nothing like spitefully and passive-aggressively giving something to a kid so you can make him feel like shit later. I’m not going to get into debating whether or not a kid should be allowed to be messy or whether there are better, calmer parenting methods for raising a kid, but… asking me to imagine my child "self" in my childhood room in my childhood home is not going to help me connect to the inner kid in me.

So, let’s say that I play along with all of this, all the while suppressing triggers that haven’t been fully treated yet, and I agree to say that I see myself in my room. What is little you doing? Honestly, I’m too triggered to give you a real answer at this point… “playing…” Does he see you? "I don’t know." I don’t know what he sees because he’s not there; I’m not there and I’m just trying to go along with this inane exercise.

You see, not everything has been processed.  A lot, and I mean a lot, has been discussed, analyzed, treated and forgiven; but not everything. Now let’s add in another layer, and this is the main reason why this exercise is so hard for me… I feel guilty about having such pent-up feelings about my parents because they are gone. I can’t talk to them about it. I can’t share my feelings with them. I can’t revisit it yet in this way because the last time I was in that house, it was to empty it and get rid of it. And that wasn’t an easy moment. That was 3 long excruciating months of very bad and very sad events. And the time before that, my mom died, and my brother and sister said some very hurtful things to me (and I didn’t hold back either). Because none of us had a proper model for emotional expression, and they were very upset. I haven’t moved past this yet. Those words, that night, they are still with me. The rage from that moment is still with me. The pain and hurt of swallowing my pride to stay and try to repair our collective broken hearts is still with me. The time before that, my mom almost died and needed to be rushed to the hospital. And my brother, God bless his soul, had so much pent-up rage against me for a variety of reasons coupled with an inability to express grief and sadness from his own life, screamed and cursed at me, threw things at me and wanted to fight. I didn’t fight him.

The fact of the matter is this: If these exercises are not carefully done, they might assume that all of this stuff has some sense of stability and security, to some degree, that we can visit our childhood homes and find ourselves in our rooms. There might be an assumption that the degree of separation between us and our inner-child-selves is wide enough that we won't be retriggered just by working through the exercise. This doesn’t apply to me. There are a lot of compiled past traumas and subtext triggers that can be woven throughout these types of exercises. But if no one asks or doesn’t know how to circumvent these issues in guided imagery, then the exercise is lost, inaccessible, and unsuccessful. It’s not due to an unwillingness to give in to the exercise, it is that in every instance of my experience with the exercise, it has reopened old wounds that aren’t completely healed yet. My inner child isn’t in some old memory, in an old bedroom in a house that wasn’t stable or safe. He’s actively here, in me, where I can keep him safe. Sure, sometimes he comes out to talk when he gets triggered, but I let him do it because it’s ok for him to have a voice. He didn’t always have that opportunity. He’s not completely healed, nor am I, but he is being taken care of. So the best advice for doing inner child work is to not assume that the inner child is unacknowledged or pushed aside or disconnected or forgotten. Instead, connect to the person as a whole and find out first if there is a disconnection with the inner child or if they are sitting right there with you. Knowing how our inner child is being treated and kept changes how we approach this exercise and whether we validate or invalidate, soothe or trigger, the person in front of us.