HEALING INNER CHILD WOUNDS
Travel with me back in time and imagine yourself as a child. Imagine how you looked like in your favorite space, glowy eyes and radiant smile full of hope.
Now imagine yourself playing with your favorite toy or playing hide or seek with your sibling or friend.
Whatever you are doing, you are innocent, pure and simply whole. Now imagine you hear a loud voice coming from your parents. Your main two caregivers are screaming at each other and maybe one of them is uttering words that you were told that only evil people say! Your heart beat is getting faster and faster and you feel helpless, maybe even scared for your life. Your entire existence is in danger! To make things worse, you approach your parents thinking maybe you can do something and you find them glaring at you with so much anger. You feel a sting in your heart and for the first ever you experience guilt and shame. Maybe you are the reason they are fighting, maybe you did something wrong! And while all of this is happening, your mind, heart and body are processing your first trauma, creating your first defense mechanism in order to survive!
Fast forward years later, and you are weighted down by your childhood wounds ... Abandonment, guilt, trust and neglect. Maybe you have experienced them all or one but without a doubt they shape your thoughts, emotions, behavior and patterns. Your subconscious is re-playing you childhood wounds over and over again in all aspects of your life. So how can we stop this vicious cycle and re-write your life story without the heaviness of your childhood wounds?
The first step is simply to create awareness! Children are self-centered, they don’t have the cognitive ability to process events happening in a rational way.
They view the world from one perspective! This is why it’s important to go back in time as an adult and create this awareness for your inner child. But first you need to acknowledge and validate the emotions and thoughts that were present back then. Any repressed emotions need to be released safely and with unconditional love and acceptance.
One of the most powerful tools to unpack such memories is writing!
As a therapeutic writing group facilitator, the participants always express their doubts that they will be able to write … Three hours later pages and pages of repressed thoughts and emotions come to life and a new level of awareness is born. You can simply start by writing, “I don’t know what to write” and as magical as it may sound, words flood enjoying their release from the subconscious prison they were placed in. As you get lighter and lighter, your wise mind has more clarity, compassion and understanding of what happened. You are not operating out of survival but rather love and compassion. Now you are ready for another journey of changing the patterns that carefully kept protecting you all of those years and creating a different narrative. It will take time, energy and many errors, but just like you cannot undo what happened to you, you cannot undo the awareness of what happened to you!