Theory
Through my counseling services, blog, and other offerings I hope to convey the extraordinary and very real phenomenon of the Inner Child and discuss its pivotal role in healing the suffering of our human condition. To get the most out of this website it would be useful to read my book, Another Way: A Guide to Understanding the Inner Child and Path to Reclaiming Our Divinity. In it I describe the origin of the Inner Child and its manifestation within human consciousness, as well as explain the process of developing a secure attachment with our Inner Child to heal past trauma and maladaptive patterns of behavior.
I use the word “God” frequently throughout this material, and will occasionally use other terms, such as “Source”, the “Divine”, “Spirit”, etc. My view of God is expansive and non-specific, and while the word is rooted in Judeo-Christian religion, I use it merely to refer to the well of spirituality that is inherent in all of us and all around us. The “image”, or idea, of God given by our families, society, or religion has caused many people great harm and can lead us to reject the notion of God outright. The consequence however, is that in banishing the word and idea of “God”, we also distance ourselves from the invaluable and healing resource that this relationship can offer.
Therefore, I ask that you keep an open mind and heart. If there are any questions you have, please reach out and I will be happy to explore them with you. For now, I will offer a brief outline of this material so you may benefit from the discussions that follow.
The Beginning
“In the beginning” there was only God and God’s Child, created to share in God’s love. Yet born in perfect love—in the oneness of God—the Child could not experience their own reality. Without contrast they could not feel God’s love, and so believed that God had abandoned them.
The creation of the universe, while initially the Child’s strategy to escape feeling separate from God’s love was repurposed to help them experience it. Our embodiment as human beings and the birth of the Inner Child in us makes this possible.
Parent−Child Attachment and the Inner Child
Our embodiment as human beings is the Child’s manifestation within the universe. Our Core Child represents this divine state of consciousness—open, vulnerable, ready to receive and experience the unconditional Love that is God. As children, we look to our parents to embody God’s love through meeting our primary needs.
In the diagram the large circle represents the child’s parent and the smaller circle represents their Core Child. This psychic relationship is experienced within the consciousness of the child.
Core Child
When the child’s primary needs are not met—when unconditional love is not given—the child experiences trauma. As a result, they feel themselves to be separate from their parent, much like the Child’s feeling of being separate from God. The human child, who was once the manifestation of their unwounded soul, becomes a Wounded Child.
Attachment trauma disrupts the child’s sense of connectedness with their parent. Consequently, the consciousness of the Wounded Child now surrounds that of the Core Child.
Wounded Child
In reaction to the distress caused by attachment trauma the child’s psyche develops a Wounded Self—an aspect of the Inner Child that uses maladaptive strategies to meet our core needs. The primary strategies seek to elicit love and avoid rejection (i.e., dyadic regulation), create an internal sense of security (i.e., autoregulation), and numb or change the way we feel (i.e., dissociation).
In the diagram the consciousness of the Wounded Self manifests as a layer surrounding the Wounded Child to help “protect” them from further harm.
Wounded Self
Wounded Self Strategies
The strategies that we adopt as children become habitual patterns of behavior as adults in the form of codependency, addiction, the repression of our authentic self, and others. Although such strategies seek to experience God’s love they ultimately keep us separate from it, for they disconnect us from our Inner Child—from the relationship where God’s love is most intimately felt.
Below are three slides that portray the Wounded Self strategies of dyadic regulation (slide one), autoregulation (slide two), and dissociation (slide three). The behaviors themselves may not have necessarily been unhealthy—it was how we used them, and our intention for using them, that was.
Connection with God, the Source of Unconditional Love
What enables us to be a Loving Parent to our Inner Child is God (or whatever we choose to call this Source). If we feel resistant towards relationship with God, it may not really be God that we are resisting but our idea of God, given to us by our families, society, or religion.
We can rewrite our understanding of God so it no longer carries the connotations we grew up with. We can choose to believe that God’s love is unconditional, that God exists in every moment of our lives, and that God’s support and guidance is always present. We can start there and let this idea of God become a reality.
By coming into deeper connection with God our consciousness becomes more influenced by love. God’s love becomes our own love that we learn to offer unconditionally to our Inner Child.
Becoming a Loving Parent to our Inner Child
Reclaiming our divinity and experiencing freedom from suffering occurs from having a conscious relationship with our Inner Child; it mirrors the parent-child attachment relationship for it is our actions that determine the nature of our Inner Child’s attachment to us. As we learn to respond to our Inner Child’s distress, support their authentic expression, and include them in our day-to-day lives we come to form a secure attachment, and thereby create the conditions to experience God’s love.
The terms “Wounded Child” and “Wounded Self” are borrowed from Paul (1999), “dyadic regulation” from Hill (2015), and “autoregulation” and “dissociation” from Schore (2002).