Healing the Inner Child and the Abused Child

Healing the Inner Child and the Abused Child

Recently a great deal of attention has been focused on "healing the inner child. "John Bradshaw, among others, has helped popularize the technique of having a patient go back in time, in a relaxed and light hypnotic state, to discover the hurt, confused, and vulnerable child carried within as he or she grew up. This concept is one that evolved from psychoanalytic techniques. In the free associations made during traditional therapy, an intense emotional catharsis of traumatic childhood memories frequently occurs. As patients experience this process of remembering and emotional release, which clinicians call an abreaction, therapeutic changes and clinical improvement can occur.

Transactional analysis (TA) refined the psychoanalytic concept of recovering the repressed or forgotten painful memories from one's childhood. In I'm OK, You're OK, Dr. Eric Berne, the father of TA, stated that "every individual was once younger than he is now and that he carries within him fixated relics from earlier years which will be activated under certain circumstances. . . . Collo￾quially, everyone carries a little boy or girl around inside of him." When childhood pain has not been resolved and emerges in the adult, it can produce a whole host of symptoms, including guilt, shame, depression, low self-esteem, and self-destructive behaviors. When people exhibit childish behavior, such as pouting, temper tantrums, and seeking excessive attention, the inner child is being triggered. If these triggering mechanisms are not brought to awareness, the maladaptive behavior that the patient suffered as a child can be turned against himself or herself and/or turned around and inflicted on others. Especially vulnerable are the patient's own children. For example, it is often found that an abu￾sive parent was himself abused as a child. Freudian therapists label this "repetition compulsion." Bradshaw calls it "spontaneous age regression." 

In TA theory, every person's psychological makeup contains three parts: the Child (the little boy or girl carried inside), the Adult (the rational objective part of the person now), and the Parent (the internalization of the parent or parent figure's thoughts, feelings, and actions). In TA therapy, actual dialogues between the Child, the Adult, and the Parent take place. The Past life therapy fosters greater awareness of larger issues and more complex and expansive situations. When the shadows are there and memories aren't clear, there is nothing tangible to grieve about or to release. But when appropriate memories are recalled, an abusive victim has a place to "push off from" into future growth. 

When we understand reasons, patterns, and causes, we experience what many call grace. The grace of understanding allows us to transcend the traditional idea of karma, so that we do not have to reenact the same old dramas. We absolve ourselves of the need to repeat them, the need to experience pain. We enter a higher flow where the keynote of our lifetimes can become one of harmony and joy.

Finally, victims of abuse need to remember that even in these challenging circumstances, the soul is never harmed. The spirit is indestructible and immortal. patient acts out the different roles. 

A variation known as Psychodrama adds even more roles for tapping into our carried-over childhood fears and vulnerabilities during the therapeutic process. For example, an alter ego—a person observing words, behaviors, and body language—can com￾ment as the various roles of Child, Adult, and Parent are enacted by others. Multiple participants, playing simultaneously, can shift roles, act out dramatic encounters, and experience the intense emotional release that occurs when painful childhood memories are brought into conscious awareness. 

Bradshaw combined the concepts of TA with Erik Erikson's theory of personality development. In this way, he is able to pinpoint the problems and adapt his therapy to particular childhood stages. 

The common thread in all of these techniques, as well as other methods employing dialogue with our "child," is the remembering and emotional release of painful childhood memories. In the inner child techniques, which are often effective and which are frequently used with adults who have grown up in dysfunctional, abusive, and alcoholic or drug-abusing families, contact with the memories of childhood is made while the person is in a relaxed state. Sometimes key words or phrases are used to focus in on the particular points in childhood from which the most painful memories arise. Sometimes the traumas are everywhere, in the day-in and day-out pounding of negative, undermining abuse from one's parents or significant others. Unlearning such negative program￾ming is a vital part of therapy. 

For example, in the relaxed state, the adult is sent back to find the "child" carried within his or her psyche for all these years. A childhood house is remembered and visualized, the rooms within, the family, and then the little child. The adult, with the increased perspective and understanding maturity has brought, talks to the child, reasons with the child, hugs the child, promises to protect the child, and brings the child out of the traumatic environment into the present time. In a sense, the child is rescued. 

In theory, as the perspective of what happened to the child is broadened, the reactions to the childhood traumas are changed. This is called rescripting. It is as if the life-script is rewritten, the play altered. Hopefully, the inner child can now understand that he or she was not responsible for causing the parent's dysfunctional behavior and can now forgive the parent, or at least com￾prehend the reasons why the parent acted in such an irrational way. The adult becomes the loving parent of his or her own inner child.

Of course, the reality of past events has not changed at all. The only change occurs in the adult's internalized reactions to those events. He or she can let go of the pain, release the hurt, can heal the childhood wounds. The technique can be powerful. It can be the first step toward a cure. But sometimes even these emotional and moving childhood abreactions are not enough. Sometimes there is more than one Past life therapy fosters greater awareness of larger issues and more complex and expansive situations. When the shadows are there and memories aren't clear, there is nothing tangible to grieve about or to release. But when appropriate memories are recalled, an abusive victim has a place to "push off from" into future growth. 

When we understand reasons, patterns, and causes, we experience what many call grace. The grace of understanding allows us to transcend the traditional idea of karma, so that we do not have to reenact the same old dramas. We absolve ourselves of the need to repeat them, the need to experience pain. We enter a higher flow where the keynote of our lifetimes can become one of harmony and joy. 

Finally, victims of abuse need to remember that even in these challenging circumstances, the soul is never harmed. The spirit is indestructible and immortal. childhood involved. Sometimes the roots of the pain go even further back.

 Inner child work and the ensuing catharsis act as a doorway to healing that is best and most effectively accomplished through past life therapy. Traumas experienced in this lifetime's childhood are sometimes variations on traumas experienced in other lifetimes. These prior lifetimes may be the true source of this childhood's pain. Reexperiencing the source of the problem can heal the current lifetime's inner child.

The incidence of abuse against children in countries like USA is startlingly high. Approximately one in three girls is a childhood vic￾tim of sexual abuse, and one out of five boys is victimized sexually. Past life therapy can be important to the healing process because for many adult survivors it provides a rapid, safe way of unlocking and clearing the experience, and because it also offers a larger emotional and spiritual framework in which to process and inte￾grate the memories and feelings that are released during the heal￾ing process. Past life therapy gives victims new handles and hooks for approaching and grasping their experiences. 

In the hands of a trained therapist, past life therapy for sexual abuse is not dangerous. In the therapeutic situation, no victim needs to be afraid of reexperiencing painful, repressed memories.

In my experience with patients, reexperiencing memories in this context is characterized by a feeling of liberation. Therapy enables the victim to comfort this lifetime's inner child. Many aspects of adult life, particularly relationships, are improved. 

A blocked memory of sexual abuse presents a monumental challenge to our ability to find joy, satisfaction, and intimacy in adult relationships. The tendency is for adult survivors of abuse to shy away from intimacy in their relationships in a symbolic bid to protect themselves from reexperiencing the buried pain. This tendency is another manifestation of the same dynamic that ³prompts women to symbolically protect themselves from hurt with a sexual origin by becoming overweight to mask physical attractiveness.

Or. John Briere, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said that one of the most painful insights he has repeatedly heard from adult victims of childhood sexual abuse is "knowing Daddy hurt me for his benefit. Daddy was willing to sacrifice my needs for his needs." Dr. Briere also observed that a victim of child abuse ". . . loses that notion that you can depend on a warm, caring caretaker; a sense that you often never get back." Instead, that reality is replaced with one in which a child knows that a "seemingly 'good' person is quite capable of being 'bad.' " That sense of trust is shattered. 

Dr. David L. Corwin, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, has observed that a profound sense of deprivation and of seriously impaired self-esteem frequently results from childhood molestation by the father. The result is that "those affects and attitudes undermine a person's Past life therapy fosters greater awareness of larger issues and more complex and expansive situations. When the shadows are there and memories aren't clear, there is nothing tangible to grieve about or to release. But when appropriate memories are recalled, an abusive victim has a place to "push off from" into future growth. 

When we understand reasons, patterns, and causes, we expe￾rience what many call grace. The grace of understanding allows us to transcend the traditional idea of karma, so that we do not have to reenact the same old dramas. We absolve ourselves of the need to repeat them, the need to experience pain. We enter a higher flow where the keynote of our lifetimes can become one of harmony and joy. 

Finally, victims of abuse need to remember that even in these challenging circumstances, the soul is never harmed. The spirit is indestructible and immortal. ability to stand up and protect herself, to feel that she has the right as a person to expect and demand that she be treated in a respectful, caring, appropriate manner." The women "begin to think of themselves as bad to preserve the image of an idealized .. . fa￾ther." Therapy can then "help the childhood abuse victim 'un￾learn' negative self-concepts and become a survivor in the fujlest sense." 

The abuse need not occur in the present lifetime or in childhood in order to influence the present lifetime's relationships. Once the memories are accessed, the healing process begins. Some typical patterns of healing from sexual abuse are documented in the excellent book The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Linda Davis. The first step in that process is the decision to heal, to seek help. 

As we have seen, frequently the memory of abuse becomes more easily accessible during regression therapy. Victims can begin to become aware that the frightening elements of their dreams and daydreams and the tips of those elusive memory fragments are really all connected to the overriding childhood trauma. 

A subsequent stage in the healing process is the ability to accept that the memories of the abuse are real. Doing so is a vital part of the healing process. Hypnotic regression to this childhood and to other lifetimes is a technique that is ideally suited to accepting such memories. Patients see and feel their experiences vividly, yet they feel safe and are able to integrate their memories afterwards in the protected therapeutic situation. The patient knows that these are memories, not fantasies, due to the intensity of the memories and emotions accessed through regression, and the ex￾perience of this intensity counteracts the mental defense mechanism of denial. Dr. Wayne Dyer, author of Your Erroneous Zones, reminds us that mental acceptance often lags behind emotional when he says that "You'll see it when you believe it." 

But for many patients seeing is still believing. And seeing the past with hypnotic regression does allow some otherwise denial-prone patients to accept their pasts more effortlessly, thus speeding the healing process. Survivors of abuse often pass through another stage of healing—that of feeling shame about their experiences, shame for participating in an activity that is taboo. But patients who access these memories through hypnotic regression are able to integrate more easily the fact that as small children they were never responsible for the adult's behavior. Past life memory also helps dissipate shame as it helps explain why boundaries that should have been impermeable in these formative relationships with significant adults were broken.

This brings us to the highly charged subject of anger. Survivors are typically encouraged to experience their anger toward their abuser, to feel that this anger is healing. While anger is certainly a stage that must be traversed, 1 have found that when past life therapy is employed, anger is often rather quickly transmuted into understanding. In my practice, this stage is often comparatively short. 

I am not exactly sure why this happens, and more research certainly needs to be done. It may be that the greater perspective that is afforded by past life experience allows the victim to become more dispassionate more quickly. Or, perhaps, the spiritual com￾ponent of the therapy can, in some cases, provide a quicker growth and healing curve.

Ever since Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross delineated the stages of grief, it has often been assumed that one must go thoroughly and methodically through every stage of every process for complete healing to take place for a protracted period even though your therapist may think it is necessary. After reexperiencing the visual and empathic review in past life therapy, understanding sometimes quickly follows. This type of therapy does seem to have a special facility for short￾circuiting the anger phase. It encourages a patient to work at his or her own pace, whatever that pace may be. Why experience anger for months when you can rid yourself of it in an hour, a day, or a week?

The PLRT case experiences demonstrate, through the understanding that past life therapy provides, anger can be diminished and the trauma can be more quickly resolved. This is not a promise of a "quick fix," nor a "scolding" for patients and therapists who proceed at a slower and, in their cases, more appropriate rate. It simply highlights another choice a survivor can make.

Once you understand the roots of your anger, you can choose to release it whenever you want. You can keep it, if you feel more comfortable about that, but you can also let anger go at any time. The choice is yours. Everyone has his or her own unique and perfect pace of healing and growth. 

A patient who unlocks memories of abuse in this lifetime and perhaps other lifetimes through hypnotic regression does not forget the memory of the anger. But such a patient seems to be much quicker to forgive himself or herself and others. A deep level of forgiveness often seems to be the spiritual lesson of abuse experiences. 

People often bring up the idea of "karma": that as far as lifetime experiences and circumstances go, what we sow in one lifetime is what we reap in the next. This is not always strictly true. I believe that experiences like these are not necessarily punishments from the past, or even lessons or patterns carried forward from past lives. By choosing to come into a particular family or constellation of circumstances you have not agreed to submit to abuse. How￾ever, you have agreed to participate in a certain lesson or type of drama. You still have free will about how a particular lesson or teaching is carried out and so do the other individuals who have chosen to share the lifetime with you. Just because you have agreed to play a role in this family, abuse is not the invariable result. Part of the learning process is learning not to choose the more harmful or destructive paths. Growth can occur easily and joyfully as well as through struggle, and there are many gradations between the two.

The potential for abuse will exist, but it is not inevitable. In this sense, all families are like little interactive worlds or universes, small emotional and spiritual ecosystems that constantly interact, readjust, and interact yet again. This is one way to un￾derstand why abuse occurs between certain family members and not others. Past life therapy fosters greater awareness of larger issues and more complex and expansive situations. When the shadows are there and memories aren't clear, there is nothing tangible to grieve about or to release. But when appropriate memories are recalled, an abusive victim has a place to "push off from" into future growth. 

When we understand reasons, patterns, and causes, we experience what many call grace. The grace of understanding allows us to transcend the traditional idea of karma, so that we do not have to reenact the same old dramas. We absolve ourselves of the need to repeat them, the need to experience pain. We enter a higher flow where the keynote of our lifetimes can become one of harmony and joy. 

Finally, victims of abuse need to remember that even in these challenging circumstances, the soul is never harmed. The spirit is indestructible and immortal.