Do you know where your Child(ren) are?

The other night the 1980’s TV public service announcement came to mind: “Its 10pm, do you know where your children are?”. Along the same line, it is important for us as a Loving Parent to know the whereabouts of our Inner Child. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of the Inner Child such a statement may sound absurd. Yet the Inner Child is not some intangible concept, separate from our own experience; it is in our own experience. Every moment can tell us the whereabouts of our Inner Child, and whether or not we are in connection with them.

In the “About” section of this website I mention that before becoming aware of my Inner Child I felt very confused about my day-to-day emotional experiences. On a theoretical level I guessed that my behavior was connected to my feelings, but that didn’t always explain the depression, anxiety, and emptiness that I felt on a regular basis. In the first few years of my recovery I learned the importance of nurturing my spiritual health—of seeking connection with God as I understood God—and yet there was something missing. I was reaching towards the source that could empower me to love myself, yet I didn’t then choose to connect with my experience and offer myself that love. It is what is often referred to as “spiritual bypassing”.

It was only when I began to explore ways of actually bringing curiosity and compassion to my experience that some shifts began to take place. I made space for the possibility that my experience was more than just things that felt uncomfortable in my body (e.g. constriction in my chest, uneasiness in my stomach) and that my thoughts were more than just stuff that happened in my mind. When I was introduced to the concept of the Inner Child I tried on the possibility that much of my experience and thoughts were my Inner Child. The anxiety I felt was their anxiety, telling me that whatever I was doing in that moment was causing them to feel anxious. The worrying I experienced in my mind was their worry that something in my life was not going to work out the way they wanted. While the step from having this awareness to taking loving action in response to it has been a slow, ongoing process, it was nonetheless a critical moment in my recovery. The solution was that instead of writing off my feelings and thoughts as arbitrary or “fixable” through some external medium, they were the communications of my Inner Child asking me to pay attention to them.

So in response to the question, “Do you know where your Child(ren) are?”, the wonderful news is that they are not lost or in some place unknown, but right here in our experience. Their whereabouts can be discovered at any moment if we pay attention, and from there the journey opens.