One of the most consistently confronting and at times embarrassing concepts that psychology forces us to consider is that of an inner child. All of us have along the years made such efforts to become adults, it can be at once grating and dispiriting to be told that there might nevertheless still be an inner child lodged somewhere within us.
Truth is, we contain within ourselves a version of all the people that we have ever been; there is in recessive form somewhere in the folds of our natures a confused teenager, a sad child, a jealous or hungry infant. No version of us ever entirely disappears, it’s merely added to and buttressed, just like an oak tree that still contains in its rings the marks of all its former circumferences.
Furthermore, if we follow the psychological thesis, some of our inner children are likely not to be especially well. They might be dealing with a hurt that they have no idea how to cope with; they might have suffered a loss without any chance to understand who and what is to blame. They might be lonely, distressed or ashamed.
Despite their pain, it isn’t that the inner child’s cries are in any danger of breaking through into the public realm, and that is precisely the problem. Inner children cause psychic distress not because they are too present, but because they are not present enough. They have been too effectively locked away; their cries have been seamlessly forgotten and ignored. They’ve been pushed into a soundproof chamber from which no murmur emerges, and yet still they exist. We are dealing with unwanted, restless ghosts who have not been appeased or understood, but whose ongoing, ignored unhappiness threatens the course of our lives.
The task ahead requires a perhaps even more grating and obtuse word: re-parenting. The inner child needs to be identified; their distinctive troubles understood and their pains soothed and calmed. In a perfect world, it would be parents themselves who would carry out this work at the time that difficulties arose, but in the real world, some of the work gets left behind and lingers, which requires a bizarre sounding maneuver to correct. We, the adults, need to become parents to the children we once were.
We need to gather together our adult capacities for kindness, reassurance, empathy and warmth, and direct these towards the three or five or fifteen-year-olds who still exist in our minds. We need to take stock of these young people’s sorrows and help them in a way they were not helped at the time, in the name of helping ourselves right now, because we are standing on their shoulders and can only be as stable as they are.
It is when we can directly imagine what a good and kind person might have said to us and yet when we are simultaneously aware of how little anyone did actually say, that we might be overcome with compassionate tears for our former selves. We may register a trapped sadness that at last has an opportunity to be seen, worked through and expunged. We might feel a lot lighter afterwards, and we might then regularly, perhaps late at night, repeat the exercise, revisiting our inner child and bringing them an extra dose of comfort and tenderness so that they and we, for we rest as a collective, might sleep more easily.
We probably all know well enough how to treat real children around us; true liberation awaits us when we finally learn to treat the children inside us with as much tolerance, patience, warmth and encouragement.