The Inner Child & the Outer Grown-up

The psychological wounds we all suffered in childhood and our formative years form part of our inner shadow. In recent times those psychologies came to be known as the inner child . We were all abandoned and scared and often hurt by our caregivers. It’s the task of the authentic grown-up to go back inside those wounds to discover himself or herself. For, if the inner child is not understood and handled properly it can become the inner brat that destroys you in the end.

It creates such a storm of anger and unreasonableness that others start to shun you, and they become uncooperative, and eventually life falters all around you. You burn out those that love you and those that would support you. I am a great believer in inner child therapy and I attended a therapist diligently for about nine months on and off, some years ago. She was very kind. She showed me how my parents, having survived terrible experiences during the Second World War, passed that unresolved terror into me.

I came to see how much of my early fear in life was nothing much to do with my circumstances but that it was a deep shadow process that I knew nothing about. In my twenties, I reacted to my terror by drinking; my mum and dad had always reacted the same way. Both were dedicated, steady drinkers. My dad had a beer at ten o’clock on the dot, every day of his life. Later in life I understood the reason for the fear and I didn’t react to it, and so I didn’t need to go binge drinking anymore.

Our spiritual journey is very much the process of becoming authentic. We learn to clean up and stop lying. We stop pretending, we become better communicators and more real. Strangely, the journey to the authentic grown up is through the egocentric, frightened child. It’s the journey through the phony you to the spiritually mature being. There is a beauty in that.

Where I have seen problems is when people get so caught up in the inner child process that that becomes the only thing they do. Life falls apart surrounded by the story of their pain. Your life no matter how sad it is, is just a story; you should never make that story too important—it’s irrelevant for the most part. You may have suffered injustice, but it was part of your karma to evolve in a dimension where injustice is everywhere. Werner Erhart said, “Life’s a rip off, then you die.” You liberate yourself from your anger and your shadow’s reaction once you accept that. You realize you can be happy and live a full life even when surrounded by injustice.

The mysteries of the inner child aren’t so mysterious. You can study them in books but most of it is fairly obvious. When you get angry with people for little or no reason that is the inner brat, demanding attention. When you get scared it is often the child suffering abandonment, or suffering the fear of not being able to cope at a young age to situations in the family it knew nothing about (like shouting between parents) that the child takes on emotionally, with no way of fixing the problem. So fear of losing control is often an inner child reaction.

The inner child in romance is often seen as co-dependency. He makes the girl into his missing mother, and/or she creates him as the father figure, each enables the dysfunction of the other. Greed is sometimes an inner child reaction to money fears that were handed down from the parents. I know a man who was raised in an orphanage. He is very, very rich and a miser. He won’t part with a dime. His childhood fear of not having security or proper emotional support, plagues him to this day. Yet when you meet him, he is a really nice man, very sociable.

I am sure he learned as a child the need to butter people up to survive and stay safe. But he is not authentic because he often doesn’t really mean it, and inwardly he treats lesser mortals that are not as rich as him with disdain. I like him but he is very strange. He’s so mean he won’t tip the waitress or the bell cap at a hotel. That always embarrasses me; I go back and tip them for him when he’s not watching.

The new dimension is threading itself through this one, so the shadow will no longer remain hidden and some people may go nuts. That’s not a bad thing long-term as in processing your shadow you become real, and when the dark you is integrated into the white you, you acquire a new power. It is vast. The missing you is joined to the current, waking you, and the sense of being lost falls from you.

I went on a three-year journey through my shadow. Some of it was with the Celts in the greenwood, and part of it was in the Morph, where I got to watch the global shadow as well as my own. Once you see the global shadow and you understand it better, then resentments fall away and you see humans, even evil ones, as unresolved children that are learning to understand. That evokes a compassion for people and life. Things become less black and white and more grey-looking. No one is perfect and then again no one is completely evil either.

The Inner Child & the Outer Grown-up – Repost