How Wounded Inner Child Undermines Adult
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-03-21

There is always a discrepancy between one’s chronological and emotional or mental ages. When the gap is inordinately big, regressive infantilization sets it (Puer Aeternus or Peter Pan Syndrome).

This happens when the child is not allowed to separate from the parent, establish personal boundaries, and become an individual. The primary objects (caregivers) objectify, idolize, instrumentalize, or parentify their offspring or violate the boundaries via more classical forms of abuse (sexual, psychological, verbal, or physical).

The Ego or Self constellate and integrate via repeated exposure to bruising reality and via external object relations with people. Absent these, one feels estranged from one’s life and cannot own it (“whose life is it anyhow).

Unable to inhabit his own life, alienated and confused, the adult retreats into familiar modes of infancy and remains fixated there.

History of the Inner Child Concept

Developmental needs meeting strategy (DNMS)

Working with the Inner Child

Procedural memory

Transference to people on whom we depend: intensity of reactions disproportional

Children seek to influence a grownup to solve problems magically

View of adulthood: all work and no play, I am a fraud (pretending to be an adult)

Dysfunction is coming from an inner child

Carl Rogers corrective emotional experience

Affect Avoidance Model 

Adult reactions more self-efficacious

Values militate against childlike (shame, anger, self-punishment, and repression)

Intrusive

Adult reshaping child content, growth and integration

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