Healing and Transformation: Parenting Your Inner Child

Our deepest desire—and our birthright—is to be happy: to be in touch with an inner peace, joy, and contentment that remains unaffected by the ups-and-downs of daily life.

Yet so often the recipes for happiness handed down to us from our parents or given to us by teachers and through cultural media, are faulty. So instead of a magnificent chocolate soufflé—tender and sweet—what comes out of the oven is a burnt and bitter mud-colored brick. Instead of happiness, suffering.

The good news is that healing and transformation are possible. Learning genuinely effective recipes for happiness, and letting go of the ones that don’t work, is possible.

This life is a beautiful classroom, and from its hardships can emerge great beauty, if we’re brave enough to face the challenges, and to embrace the wounding. A very good starting-point on this journey of healing and transformation is to get to know your inner child.

MEETING YOUR INNER CHILD

To grow properly and bear delicious fruit, a tree requires rich soil, sunshine, and rain. Just so, children have specific needs—both physical and psychological—that must be met if they are to develop properly.

When childhood needs go unfulfilled, this can set the stage for mental-emotional disharmonies later in life. Taken collectively, the emotional and behavioral patterns related to childhood trauma and/or unmet needs are sometimes referred to as “the inner child.”

A CHILD’S BASIC DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS

A child’s basic physical needs include clean water and nutritious food, adequate shelter, rejuvenating sleep, opportunities for exercise, and access to healthcare.

Equally important are psychological needs. Children thrive in environments rich with unconditional love, kindness, affection, encouragement, appreciation, and support. Safe and secure surroundings, appropriate guidance and discipline, and the opportunity to play with other children are other basic psychological needs. In such a milieu, feelings of self-worth and confidence can easily take root.

Encouraging a child’s natural curiosity and creativity, the exploration of new things, and the willingness to take risks and to try again if it doesn’t work out the first time—all support vibrant growth: from infant to toddler to adolescent and into adulthood.

BECOMING A WELL-BALANCED ADULT

Becoming a healthy and well-adjusted adult—like a tree growing to healthy maturity—requires that our childhood needs are met, either by our parents when we were a child, or by ourselves now that we are an adult.

This process includes learning how to metabolize challenging events. While children often possess great resilience, they can also be deeply impacted by traumatic events such as the death of a parent; the divorce of their parents; physical or emotional violence in their home; or even having to move away from their friends and familiar surroundings, when the family relocates.

Sometimes a child can digest such events, but if not, then the old trauma may become lodged in the body-mind as subconscious tensions or a vague sense of dis-ease. It’s our responsibility, as adults, to explore and unwind these old undigested traumas and their attendant physical or emotional tensions—thereby freeing the inner child.

HEALTHY PARENTING: CLARITY, JOY AND PRESENCE

What’s the purpose of investing time and energy to do this sort of emotional processing, to meet and liberate the inner child?

The answer is quite clear and simple: Because wounds that are not resolved tend to be transmitted from one generation to the next. The ability to parent our own children well depends upon this willingness to relate skillfully to our own mental-emotional challenges.

We must learn to love and parent our inner child: to acknowledge, accept, and take responsibility for the old wounds. Only then can we parent our own children with genuine authenticity and clarity—rather than transmitting our unresolved wounding to them.

Every childhood has its challenges: none is perfect, and there’s no shame in acknowledging the imperfections. And the good news is that any wound can, with time and skillful attention, heal. When we scrape a knee, the skin almost miraculously regenerates. Similar healing and transformation is possible for psychological wounds.

As our own childhood wounding is resolved, our capacity to parent with clarity, joy, and presence comes forth naturally.

SPIRITUAL MATURITY AND THE CHILDLIKE SAGE

When developmental needs are met, this also provides the groundwork for spiritual unfolding.

Sometimes spiritual maturity requires leaving behind or at least going beyond certain social norms—particularly if the society isn’t particularly enlightened. But this can only happen, in a healthy way, when the inner child’s needs have been fully met.

A spiritually awakened being—a sage—very often exhibits a childlike innocence, playfulness, and freedom. Yet there’s an important difference between being childish—an expression of the inner child’s unmet needs—and the childlike wisdom of the sage.

When the inner child’s unmet needs are resolved, this creates the space for the emergence of genuine spiritual wisdom. The sage’s wisdom is naturally infused with joyful spontaneity, innocence, wonder, awe, sensitivity, playfulness, and curiosity.

EMBRACING OUR INNER LIGHT

To heal is to transform deeply by embracing our innate inner light: the light of presence, of spiritual awake-ness; the light of awareness that’s shining through your eyes right now.

To embrace our inner light as a mother means to raise children from a place that is wholesome, authentic, and real. It’s to live a life where love, pleasure, comfort, and joy (not pain!) are the norm. And this is the surest way to bring about a more enlightened society.

SHARE WITH FRIENDS