Tag Archives: wounded child

A Day in a Life: Inner Child Work

I’ve been doing inner child work for years. I’ve learned so much from long encounters, from hours of what Jung termed active imagination, from weeks of inner focus, as I’ve attended to my spirit. I sometimes feel that it’s like driving a car; sometimes I’m aware that I’m doing it, alert and conscious of everything I pass along the way, at other times I arrive at my destination wondering just how I got there.

I do inner child work especially when confronted with a dilemma or when conflicts arise. I know that it’s imperative that I constantly check in with my inner child and see how she’s doing. Although my personal challenges are, for the most part, clearly defined now, I also know that sometimes they are not the issues that need attention but that something else is calling to me, some deeper more profound need is making itself known.

Self-reflection?

I have a dilemma. How do I solve it? I ask for guidance. I wait for an answer. Meanwhile I have my own agenda. For the time being my personal agenda rules. It takes over. It’s all I can think about: how to set it in motion, how to contrive to make it happen, how to make it meaningful. I can’t get away from it. As I allow it to assert itself, it begins to dominate not only my thinking but my actions as well. This feels like part of the process I must go through, but deep inside I feel restless. Something else is stirring in me, raising a protest, asking me if this is really what I intend to do. I push it away.

“No,” I say, “I want it to happen my way. I want to be in control. I want to set up my life in such a manner that I can determine not only the process but the outcome as well.”

“Sorry,” I hear. “You are not going to be granted that wish today. Today you are going to have to struggle and eventually you are going to have to let go.”

“No, I don’t want to. I want things to work out my way!”

As this tug-of-war goes on, I know, deep inside, that I must stop playing this game. From experience, I know that the sooner I acquiesce to a process that is already in progress, already laid out for me, the better things will unfold. This is how I resolve my dilemma: I acquiesce to the process, but it takes deep work to get to this place of acquiescence.

I know I must dissect my personal agenda and discover why I am so attached to it. I must face the fact that I may be trying to hold onto old ideas, old agendas, and old comforts that no longer serve me. I must face that even though I may want those things, they are not good for me; they no longer serve who I am becoming, who I have the potential to become, and whom I need to become to evolve.

Once I’ve studied my personal agenda, the next step is to turn inward. I must get quiet in order to do this. I must let myself have a few moments of meditation or simply sit quietly and comfortably. I must ask myself: What is really going on here? What am I missing? Am I just reluctant, avoidant, affronted? Am I being shown something I must embrace; or the opposite, that this is something I must refuse?

Sitting in calmness allows the voice of our inner child to be heard. If we listen carefully we will hear truths spoken that we may not have wanted to hear before, that we may not have been ready to hear until now. If we allow ourselves to become a frightened child again, knowing that we are facing changes that we don’t want to happen while we also remain our adult selves, we may reach a new level of understanding about how we tend to function on a normal basis.

We all have a needy, wounded child inside us. No matter how much inner work we do that child will always be present, suggesting deeper issues that need attention. Its needs are endless, ancient needs. Eventually we learn that they stretch far back, into eons, into past lives full of similar needs left unresolved.

Ready to get off the well worn path and enter the abyss?

As we do inner child work, our spirit will repeatedly guide us in how to sit alongside our child self, perhaps in discomfort at first, but later in full acceptance as we face the ancient knowing child self and ask it to tell us what comes next. What must I face this time? Where are you taking me?

We must be prepared to face our fears. We must accept that our inner child self of this lifetime is frightened of change. We must accept that our adult self of this lifetime is afraid of change too. Both parts of us must constantly face the truth that change is challenging us to face our fears and conquer them with awareness.

Whenever I sit in calmness with my adult self and my frightened child self, I know that there is something else beneath the fears that I must also face. I must go even deeper. I must reach down to that far more evolved ancient child self, the one who has already lived these life challenges before. This is the knowing self that constantly challenges me to go beyond my present self. This is the place where I will gain clarity on what to do to resolve my dilemma.

Clarity often comes in calmness, delivering a direct blow. Much like getting hit over the head, it strikes quickly and with utter clarity. When we are ready we are able to accept it and immediately act upon it. If we are not ready it will remain churning inside us until we are ready.

When our world is challenging us, even collapsing on us, our deepest dilemma is often in learning how to acquiesce, to let go, to not fight as we have been taught, but to let the process guide us. Often we may find the deeper meaning inside, rather than in constantly looking for reason and answer outside. Sometimes we just can’t have things our way.

There is so much more to doing inner child work. As we work with what our inner child presents, going deeper and deeper, we get to know just who that child is, and just who we are and why. Eventually, we all arrive at that place where the ancient child self speaks. Often the sound of that ancient child’s voice may be distant and difficult to decipher, but if we let our personal agenda go, for even a second, we may be able to accept the truth it brings us. Sometimes just a hint of something different, a deep inner knowing, may waft up and offer us just enough to help us along, to make a decision that will indeed set us on a new path.

What lies in the vastness of the inner world?

The inner world is vast, bigger than the outer world. Jung once noted that once we do inner work we will no longer be able to ready novels, because nothing can compare to what we have already encountered inside the vastness of the self. I have found this to be true. I personally can no longer read a novel. I am quickly bored, knowing that inside the self reside all the mysteries and horror stories that I once enjoyed reading, the adventures and relationships I loved to tap into, other people’s lives I’d turn to. All of those things, and more, reside inside us, in the vastness of our inner world, just waiting to be tapped into.

As we let ourselves be guided through the terrors inside us, we arrive at precipice after precipice. And each time we stand on the brink of change we know that we must take the leap into the abyss that yawns before us, if we are to keep evolving. That is where our riches lie, where our thrills await us, where our adversaries lurk, where our beauties hide, and where our spirits will greet us.

Going ever more deeply inward, we soon discover that our outer world is less threatening, less frightening, less terrifying, for we discover that it cannot present us with anything as frightening as we have already faced within. This is what Jung learned and this is what we also may learn as we continue our inner child work.

Thank you for reading, and may you all enjoy the adventure of a lifetime, inside the self.

Love,
Jan

A Day in a Life: Wounded Children

I believe we are all born wounded.

Find the wounded child within

Some of us are born with physical wounds, readily apparent. Some of us are born with deep psychological wounds. Some of us are born into wounding circumstances. Some of us encounter wounding situations at young ages and some of us do not encounter them until much later. Some of us don’t know we are wounded at all. But, overall, if we are born into human existence we carry wounds that we are challenged to heal.

If we are ready to evolve into beings of higher consciousness and spiritual enlightenment our first challenge is to discover what our wounds are, to acknowledge and accept them. Our next challenge is to do everything we can to face them, to work on ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in so that we can heal and grow.

If you believe, as I do, that we choose the life we are in, then it stands to reason that we also choose the wounds and the work it takes to deal with them. I was born to distant, unemotional parents who lived out their own wounds their entire lives. My siblings and I were forced to grow up under the dominating force of those wounded child parents who were deeply cut off from feelings, with the inability to express love. If you have read my book, you know that shortly after the age of two I entered the world of a sexual predator. To what end, you might ask, did I choose that life? What is the purpose of my life?

I have discovered that in acknowledging and freeing my wounded child self, I have freed myself of a burden that I carried through many lives, that of the sexually abused child. In recapitulating, I have freed myself of my wounded parents as well, and I have freed my own children of bearing this wounding into another generation. Of course they chose me as a parent so they will have their own issues to contend with as they take their journeys, but I feel confident that I am no longer burdening them with my own personal issues by hiding them from myself.

As we ponder our wounded child self we are faced with many possibilities. Is our wounded child self known? Does it dominate us? Is it a big baby, like the 1% demanding everything of us, stealing our energy? Or is it like the 99% begging for a place in our lives, asked to be fairly treated and accepted? Is it angrily pushed away, decidedly evil? Or is it tenderly acknowledged as an integral part of our journey?

Face the fears

We are further challenged to become the proper adult figure in the lives of our wounded child selves. We must treat them fairly, without judgment, but with compassion and a firm approach. We must become a parent, loving and accepting, yet release the wounded child from its captive role, allowing it to take its own rightful place. We must thank our child self for bearing the wounds that are our evolutionary task, and we must find the means of integration, so that we may become wholly adult, all aspects of self in symbiotic balance, kept well-attended and nurtured, yet fully known.

If we are ready to release ourselves from our own traumas and face new possibilities for life we are more compassionate and appreciative of the challenges that others must face as well. We find that we are detached in a new way, having discovered that, as we recapitulate and face our personal challenges, we energetically free so many others. In freeing myself from my past I not only free my children, but I remove my negative, depressed energy from the world as well.

I believe my purpose in life is the same purpose as all other humans: to become as spiritually evolved as possible by knowing myself in the deepest way, freeing myself from repeating many more miserable lifetimes with the same wounds festering. In facing my wounded self I faced eons of wounded selves.

I understand now what it means to be deeply wounded and to really heal. Healing is what life is all about, finding the means to heal so that the world around us can heal as well. In our present lifetime it may be difficult to assess just what healing the world will look like, for it presently looks quite dire out there. With so many issues arising and coming to a head, the festering wounds of humanity now pose perhaps the greatest danger ever.

Triage is called for on a mass scale, but I still believe that each one of us must do personal triage first. We must go innerly and face the wounded self, healing the wounded child within so we can be fully present as integrated adults. In so doing we may just discover that what the world needs now is not really that much. We may discover that we don’t really need this world to be the same anymore, in fact we don’t want it to be the same because, as we recapitulate, we discover that what we once found so comforting is sorely lacking in comfort. We discover that our earthy needs are really very simple.

We really just need the world as our mirror, to keep us focused on changing our outlook on ourselves and others, to keep us focused on turning inward. We need the world to reflect back to us the real reason for being born into the life we are born into.

Achieve healing and freedom

Find out why you are born so wounded and then find the means to heal. First heal the self and then heal the world by staying deeply, introspectively connected to a healing journey of constant course correction. By living a life of deep inner reflection, intent on healing, we take full responsibility for our wounded child self and we shift our energetic configuration from one of deep sadness, regret, and woundedness to one of power, grace, and freedom. Such inner work will change all of us: our selves, our families, our communities, our world.

In the Readers of Infinity blog on Monday I noted that Jeanne once again gave the same message: Learn to listen. I am struck by how often she speaks of training ourselves to pay attention to what is going on inside us. Listening is the key to doing inner work, to finding the reasons as well as the answers. In learning to listen to our wounded inner child we must be a good listener, but we must also be a good guide.

In recapitulating, or doing any kind of deep inner work, our adult self must be alert and aware, able to flow with what comes without judgment, fear, control, disgust, or dismissal. Each time we face our wounded child we must go deeper, beyond what we think, to what we feel and truly know is right. It is a process of constant readjustment, of learning to view ourselves and the world in a different way. We must all begin to envision ourselves as evolving spiritual beings, rather than human beings stuck in endless personal misery.

I challenge everyone to approach the wounded child self with compassion and love, listening to what the issues are and what the proper approach to resolving those issues might be. The answers for how to do this are available, but we must each decide that it is the journey we want to finally take. We must decide that in this lifetime we are choosing to free our wounded self to evolve in a new manner, both immediately now and in the lifetime to come.

Love to you all as you do your inner work,
Jan