raising your inner child

Each of us has multiple selves within. Rather than being the different personalities that are sometimes reflected in Multiple Personality Disorder, these selves are part of our experiences in childhood, young adulthood, and mid-adulthood. We become fully integrated as a whole personality when we are able to recognize each of these sometimes conflicting voices, allowing the fully adult self to wisely nurture the less experienced voices in a loving way. The adult parent self can only gain the wisdom of its full maturity by acknowledging and accepting the experiences of these younger manifestations of the self.

Many of us never develop our fully adult selves, remaining for one or more reasons under the predominant influence of a younger selves. Others develop the fully adult self much later in life and only after considerable self-examination. Some of us, by contrast, have a relatively smooth progression through the stages of personality development represented by these selves.

I was one of the second group. My childish voice held a somewhat controlling role in early adult expression, with stormy outbursts of emotion, especially at times of stress. The young adult self acted with immature wisdom in those moments, impatiently scolding and criticizing the child self after the fact out of selfishness. Needless to say, this young adult, would be heroic, “I’ll pay the rent” ended up with quite a load of guilt to handle.

This young adult self was filled with a sense of inadequacy and therefore refused to accept help from anyone around him. More significantly, he refused to acknowledge the inner child at all. This me knew that his childhood had been painful and he didn’t want to go back there. Insecurity and inadequacy meant that recognizing the voice of the inner child could cause the young adult self to lose its emancipation and become trapped once more in the morass of childhood experience. The young adult self would attempt an outward demonstration that all was well, even appearing wise to many people, as long as it could avoid being found out. Secretly, he always feared detection, not because he was trying to deceive, but because he didn’t want his shortcomings to be discovered. In short, he was, and still is, your typical bright and assertive teenager.

My visits home, once I had escaped from that nest of confinement, outwardly reflected this inner dilemma, though I could not understand it at the time. I would feel fully grown up in my college, early professional setting, and later marriage setting, only to feel completely swept back into my childhood set of emotions and behaviors once I was back in the home setting for just a day or two. In fact, the struggle between newly found adulthood and the reimposed emotional restrictions of childhood began almost as soon as I got home. Little by little I was able to put off the change as I got older, but it took me quite a while to achieve the change from an almost immediate feeling of claustrophobia from being back in the home environment to a more developed state where I could put off this suffocating feeling for at least a few days.

I only realized a few years ago that I wasn’t operating from a fully adult perspective. I was well into my fifties by then. Counseling sessions with someone who encouraged me to listen compassionately to myself and to recognize the younger selves within me that needed expression and understanding, along with readings by Robert Bly, Robert Moore, and Douglas Gillette, among others, gradually allowed me to become aware of these inner voices and their influence on my current behavior, even when I didn’t recognize them. At first, I could barely detect the voice of the inner child, but it gradually became more individual as I paid more attention to it. The boy had lacked secure love during my growing up years. What the child needed now was the safe love and guidance of my adult self as a parent, the safe love and guidance that he had not received consistently today.

The result was the development of the true adult personality within me. The difference may not be apparent on the surface to anyone who has known me over the years of my life, but the difference is apparent to me. The child’s appearance in the current experience is often a fear-based reaction to uncertainty or outbursts of exasperation or outright anger when faced with obstacles or complications, especially when tired and less able to cope with detachment. The child can then take control as if he were finally able to assert himself in a way that was impossible for him during the previous years, or perhaps more accurately in the only way that he was able to express himself during that time.

Everything in my body and mind feels like behaving like a child in these cases. I can allow these emotions to take over or call a timeout so that the adult voice can have a chance to reflect and speak. You then need to acknowledge the child’s concerns and express understanding for her behavior without approving of it. Your job is to show the child that there is a better way and to convince him that together we can work things out without resorting to temper.

Needless to say, this is not simply a one-time accomplishment after which I’ll never have to go through this process again. Instead, as I’m sure you know, it’s an ongoing process that unfolds through successive experiences. The vital element is that the younger selves, who were discouraged in their chronological lives by inconsistent or totally lacking love and support, now receive encouragement from an adult selves who constantly loves and supports them as parents. This is what Moore and Gillette call the manifestation of the King (archetype) as opposed to the manifestation of the Hero, which finds its beginning in the adolescent or young adult male, or the Magician or Lover, which finds its beginning in the energy of the child.

All these manifestations ideally mature into the adult personality, losing their childish qualities as the male grows older, but the King is the person who unites them in balance, ruling over them like a wise and loving father. Interestingly, before developing my adult self, I preferred to see myself as the hero or the lover, if not puer aeternus (the eternal child), seeing the king as heavy and unimaginative. Now I see the person of the king quite differently.

Clraisa Pinkola Estes, in her book, Women Who Run With Wolves, exposes the feminine side of these archetypes while adding significant insight into masculine attributes.

What I am learning to do is listen to who is speaking when I find myself reacting to a situation in a certain way, particularly when I feel uncomfortable with my reaction. I am learning for sure that when I start to feel irritable and impatient with other people, my adult self is not there. An irritable king becomes a tyrant, the negative side of this form and anything but desirable. Stepping back enough to realize my irritability, I have to remain silent long enough for the adult self to collect itself and resolve a situation that may be spiraling out of control more quickly than I might have realized.

When they arise in the relationship, significant difficulties can arise to ask each other: “Who exactly is speaking at this moment?” – and also, “Do you think these feelings you just had are related to some past experience?” If a past experience is being evoked by present events, then we can be almost certain that the child’s voice is involved in some way and needs immediate attention and reassurance. One of the main obstacles to good relationships occurs when our reactions to present difficulties are hijacked by past associations without our realizing it. Then we can find ourselves hitting each other with emotional reactions to past events, instead of treating each other fairly with respect to present circumstances.

Dedicated self-exploration through contemplation and self-observation as we face challenging circumstances and interact with others each day can help each of us become more aware of voices from our past that indicate unfulfilled elements of our personality. Perhaps none of us is without an inner child who needs to calm down or an adolescent who can grow in awareness of the needs of others while expressing her own power. The desired goal is that we are in good relationship with ourselves and with others, especially those closest to us. While committed partnerships can present the greatest challenge to our ability to face the events of each day with equanimity, committed partnerships can also provide another compassionate yet firm voice to help us achieve greater personal development.

(c) Copyright. douglas boyd robinson