From: bob@reed.edu (Robert Ankeney)
Subject: Re: Inner Child
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 16:57:36 GMT

In article <1992Apr12.180217.25357@wpi.WPI.EDU> asar.315@wpi.wpi.edu   writes:
> Hello,
>
> I have a question for anyone who cares to answer it.  I have been
> reading "The Courage to Heal" and one of the chapters deals with
> the inner child.  I haven't been able to figure out what they are
> talking about.  Can anyone help me to understand?
> 
> Thanks,
> Kat
>


     The term "Inner Child" is difficult to describe as it has been used
rather broadly and generally.  And I suspect it has different meanings
to different people.  Some see the inner child as simply a metaphor, and
others as a real thing.  For me, it's a little of both.  Under hypnosis,
and sometimes when dissociating, I regress to an early age where I
function as a child.  The particular child I regress to is one who was
abused and ended up rather developmentally stuck.  The abuse was too
difficult to deal with, to reconcile with my view of the world, that I
split my memories of the abuse off.  I feel like I split the child that
I was at the time off from me.  Not only did I split the memories, I
split a lot of what that child was.
     I see my set of belief systems as something like a pyramid, built
on the foundation stones of my earliest beliefs.  These core beliefs I
developed as a child, using a child's primitive way of viewing the world.
As an abused child, my view of reality was severly distorted.  I came to
see myself as being bad, as having something inherently wrong with me
that brought about the abuse I received.  How else can a child, who is
completely dependent on his parents, comprehend it?  If my parents, who
are supposed to mirror me and my self worth, choose to abuse me, I must
assume I deserve it, because I trust my parents implicitly.
     Thus the foundations stones of my belief systems are based on lies,
and are built of pretty poor material.  From then on, each succesive
belief I develop is built on those foundation stones.  My reality is
filtered through these stones, so that what I perceive is pretty
distorted.  Going back and discovering the lies, rebuilding my belief
systems requires going back to my foundation stones.  For me to do that,
I needed to access my inner child, the one who created these stones.
If me as a young child can perceive the truth, I can rebuild my
foundation.  A lot of my foundation is based on what I believed about
myself, my self-esteem.
     A lot of accessing my inner child is building a trusting
relationship with him.  For me, it was like I split off a hurt child,
abandoned him and ignored him and his needs, his pain so that I could
survive.  And in part I blamed him for causing the pain.  So to him,
I became an abuser.  He didn't trust me because I refused to give him
voice.  So reclaiming "him", accepting "him" as a part of me,
rebuilding that trust has been difficult.  Going back and listening,
giving voice to that pain, accepting the pain as my pain, not "his"
pain, undoing that split is what healing is all about for me.  With
trust, I slowly regain that lost trust and begin to integrate that
lost child.  It's now hard for me to write about "him", because there
never really was a "him", just a part of me.  I didn't want to own
the pain of what happened.  Who wants to own having been sexually
abused?  It's often easier to pretend it never happened, or to lay
the blame elsewhere, like on "him".  That's a trap that kept me
from owning *my* abuse.
     But envisioning that hurt child within me has been useful.  Is
that child real?  Is that child simply a metaphor?  I'm not sure it
really matters.  Either way, it has helped me to look at it this
way.
     Hope that helps.  I'm sure many others have different ways of
defining "Inner Child".

     Robert

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Ankeney                 | "Yield and overcome.                |
...!tektronix!reed!bob         |  Bend and be straight.              |
...!tektronix!bob@reed.EDU     |  Empty and be full."    - Lao Tzu   |
Newsgroups: alt.sexual.abuse.recovery