Who Are These Children and Why Are They in My Head?

One of the things I love about discussing ED's and recovery with people is that it makes me think in different ways about things it would not ever have occurred to me to look at more closely.  For example, the inner child.  It didn't occur to me how casually I approached this topic.  Me of a few weeks ago was bopping along and if there was much thought in my head about the inner child it went about like this: Child, inside. Be nice to it. Check!

And then Mars said, "Lets discuss this whole inner child thing." And my mind was blown!

OK, my mind wasn't exactly BLOWN blown.  But it turns out I was being incredibly cavalier about a topic that is actually pretty nebulous and very open to interpretation.  It also turns out that a lot of my ideas about the inner child seem to have come right out of my... well, it turns out very few of my resources talk about the inner child at all.  I got all the ideas I had about it from Louise Hay and a big dollop of my own randomness.  And since concrete resources on the inner child on the web are hard to track down, what's coming up next is mostly just the result of more focused speculation on my part. 

Now, the way I had been thinking of the inner child was basically another name for the past self.  The way I see it, there's three selves in my head.  There's me of the present, who has the power to act, think choose, speak and so on.  There's the future me, whose needs and comfort I need to plan for and who has near infinite potential.  And then there's the past me, from whom I can learn who I am and what made me this way, and whose unresolved needs and concerns I need to meet.

But since we all tend to have problems treating ourselves well whether they be past present or future selves, it helps to think of the past self as a child.  Self as a child is different from how I see myself now. That perceived disconnect makes it easier to be kind because one of the things most ED sufferers have in common is the inclination to treat others with way more consideration than we treat ourselves..  But now I am thinking that while calling the past self the inner child can help start the process of healing, this also does it a bit of a disservice.  It might be easier to care for something that is not-me, but the goal is to be able to take care of me.

You might be asking yourself how one can resolve needs that weren't met in the past.  After all, the past is PAST and we can't change it.  And you're right...rightish, anyway.  The past self needs you to understand it and to really take its part.  For example, I have a pretty big fear of abandonment.  Having done a lot of introspection about my behavior when I feel abandoned and the types of situations that bring that feeling up for me, I've been able to locate a few main reasons why I feel this way.  The biggest one is that as a child, my father was emotionally and physically absent and my mother, while present, trusted me to speak up about my needs.  I wasn't able to advocate for myself (oooh, that's a good post topic, too!).  As a result, I learned to believe that I was not important to others.  And that led me to think that as soon as I was out of sight, I was out of the minds and hearts of the people whose love I need. 
   
My goodness what a huge paragraph!  I'm going to break it in half here. 

Understanding that, I've already met my past self halfway.  The past self needs to know it is being  heard.  Once you've heard it, you can tell it, "I can see how things were and how that hurt you/me.  Now THIS is how it should have gone." And in your head, you can build an alternate reality where the best things happened and your past self got all the things it needed.  You can't live in that reality, of course.  You're here in the present, where your power is, but you can use that power to soothe the past you.  And then, finally you tell your past self that you're not going to let that stuff happen ever again.  The past self will be able to fully put aside its hurt when it trusts you are going to keep the same thing from happening to your present and future selves.  So now I am working on advocating for myself emotionally, making sure people I need know that I need them, and learning to trust that my relationships are reliable even at a distance.  As a result of this work I am in much less distress when people I rely on aren't around.

Women, Food and God (the book I brought home from Barnes and Noble) has what seems to be a similar view.  The author says there is no one inner child, but there are frozen places.  Times and situations that your mind gets stuck in and tends to recreate again and again.  So if you were very frightened and got frozen in that fear, you might have a hard time losing that fear, and find more and more things to fear in your present without realizing that what you're experiencing is not a healthy reaction to real threats, but an unhealthy construction imposed on your reality because you can't let go of the fear of the past. 

I also like to think of the inner child as the echo of the baby you used to be.  As a baby, you had no shame, were not self conscious, and acted as one with your physical self.  To a baby, there's no disconnect between the mind and the body.  She is her body, her body is her and she knows she's the perfect expression of herself.  I'm not sure it's possible for an adult with a fully formed ego to regain this oneness, but it's an ideal to strive for. 

I'm sure Freud had lots to say on the inner child, and it probably had a lot to do with penises, too...but I made a choice not to even ask Freud about it before I wrote this post.  Freud is good for cigar jokes and good insults, but I don't want him coming near my recovery.

Here's a link to Louise Hay's official site.  http://www.louisehay.com/  She's a great teacher of self love and a good source of uplifting affirmations.  Just don't believe her when she tells you you can heal disease with self love.  I'll be the first one to tell you that self love can improve every aspect of your life.  But for some things, like physical illness, your self love should take a supporting role while science and medicine take center stage.