Inner Child Healing
Each one has within them a forgotten part called the inner child. This part orchestrates your entire life and yet remains unknown to you. All your thoughts, your behaviors, your responses to various situations, your deep inner feelings and your entire way of being are driven by this child. Between the ages of 4 to 7 most of your present standard operating behaviors are programmed by this child. This depends on how the child interprets the various experiences it encounters based on its limited understanding of the world around him. And while you age chronologically, the child in you continues to use the old operating system making you respond to situations pretty much in the same way that it did as a child of four years.
Who is this Inner Child?
In the early developmental years the difficult experiences that your inner child encountered, the interpretations it drew and ways of dealing with these situations that it discovered, became the operating software of your mind and these continue to play out right through your life even to this day. While your chronological age progressed and your body grew up along with the expanding scope of your intellectual abilities and range of experiences, the feeling – thinking part of you remained locked in the experience of that child that you were. This is the part of you that still resides and lives in your earliest and deepest memories and experiences. Chances are that it has long been forgotten and hence it is reclusive no longer emerging or making itself known to the adult you.
Why does the hurt inner child need to be healed?
In a child the critical factor of the mind is still not fully developed and hence its logical and reasoning skills are yet to mature. For this reason it tends to rely heavily on its feeling interpretation skills to understand and respond to situations. It is hurt and frightened more easily. A simple statement such as “not now Samira; mum’s busy and can’t answer your question right now” can be interpreted as “mommy doesn’t love me, maybe I have been bad.” This results in creating a filter in the child’s mind and each such successive lack of attention is viewed through this lens.
After several such small incidents the child may come to believe that it is not worthy of being loved and will continue to operate from this premise into its adult years. It may find itself repeatedly encountering lack of love in its intimate relationships because it still carries the filter within its mind that was placed in the early years. Therapeutic intervention is required to reach this inner child, remove the filter, heal its pain and replace it with a new appropriate adult filter that allows the personality to blossom and manifest its full potential.
What happens when the inner child is healed?
Once the childhood filters that colored your vision of life are removed, you suddenly experience a remarkable freedom to explore newer potentials and express newer ways of being. Its almost as though you had lived your life confined a single room and you suddenly discovered that you actually owned the whole mansion with sprawling lawns and orchards. You can now reinvent yourself, explore new talents and skills and train yourself to be anyone you wish to be. The filters caused your bondage to fixed ways of being but those having been removed, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for you and you can now choose who you really wish to be.
Along with new ways of thinking and being you also experience powerful new emotions of love, joy, confidence, freedom, self love and laughter. Things seem to become better and your life suddenly looks so much brighter. You find newer inspirations and happiness infuses your life with the colors of joy. You can now truly start living your life.