Four and a half years of sobriety did not stop me from acting like a two-year-old.
Withdrawals of attention, blocking out unpleasant emotions, accusations, miscommunications, acting on assumptions, and a near-constant hyper-vigilance with the women in my life.
Romantic relationships proved to be a perpetual testing ground, giving me ample opportunities to perform what’s known as a spontaneous age regression.
It wasn’t until I sought counseling for my regressions that I was introduced to inner child work, and few books have affected me as greatly as Homecoming by John Bradshaw.
Since doing this work, I’ve come up with seven life-changing benefits that I’ve experienced myself. While I don’t do things perfectly by any means, connecting with my inner child and being “my own good parent” has yielded amazing awareness, self-control, and self-love.
1. You can stop throwing tantrums.
“There is an absolutist quality to rage. Being angry all the time and overreacting to little things may be a sign that there is a deeper rage that needs to be worked on.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
There’s something you may have heard about regarding emotional meltdowns, and that is the trigger. Triggers are subconsciously-stored memories, associations, and stories that act like tripwires. Someone says something, does something, or even dresses a certain way, and if it reminds you of a particularly painful memory, the primitive part of your brain sounds the alarms.
Your mind, emotions, and nervous system become hijacked, and you either shutdown completely or attack the offender. In relationships, these are sometimes known as protest behaviors, and while they’re often meant to increase closeness, provide reassurance, or get a need met, they end up doing the opposite.
Another type of outburst can be attributed to what I call paradoxical anger, which is the repressed anger toward our parents that we could not express fully as a child. How could we be angry at the people our life depended on, yet who violated our trust, safety, and boundaries?
By doing this inner child work, you can learn to not only prevent these outbursts, but reprogram your triggers and release that stored anger.
2. You can release your toxic shame.
“We heal our toxic shame when we grasp that our ‘adult child’ issues are about what happened to us, and not about who we really are!”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
After finishing Homecoming, I realized that all of my teenage years and adulthood were spent going back to my childhood and psychologically shaming myself. I wasn’t perfect, and I couldn’t please my parents over any length of time, even if I did things outside of my core values.
No amount of parent-pleasing worked, so I grew up feeling like a failure.
I did things that I looked back on with so much shame that I swore I’d take it to the grave. I wouldn’t tell a soul. Thankfully however, it was in doing just that — talking about the past I was ashamed of, that helped free me from it. It also allowed me to “go back in time” and love my child self.
It was I who was shaming myself for what I needed to do to feel safe back then, and in doing this work I was able to replace shame with compassion. It allowed me to have more compassion for others as well, once I realized that when people act out, it’s their wounded inner child that’s in control.
This work has allowed me to depersonalize so many things.
3. You can re-parent yourself.
“When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
Once you’ve become aware of the ways you didn’t get your developmental dependency needs met, you can begin meeting them yourself. This is what’s known as being your own good parent. As a conscious adult, you can recognize when an unmet dependency need arises, and meet it.
This can be talking to a friend to feel connected, journaling to allow your inner child to be heard, floating in a pool or in the ocean, and any way you can assure your child self that you’re safe.
Safety is a major concern for your inner child, especially if this was threatened growing up.
Sometimes my inner child wants to play with Matchbox cars in his room, alone. Sometimes he wants to do nothing. Often times, he wants to sprint across the sand at full speed, and jump in the water with his surfboard.
Meeting at least 50% of our needs ourselves is essential for creating healthy, sustainable relationships. We cannot depend on our partner for the majority of them.
4. You can stop recreating the past.
“Script messages tell us the way we are or what role we are supposed to play in life. They shame who we authentically are and create self-rupture.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
A common thread in dysfunctional, codependent relationships, is that two people subconsciously choose each other out of familiarity, and recreate destructive scenes from childhood.
See, when we’re young, helpless, and solely dependent on our parents, we had no choice but to idolize them. Therefore, any chaos, punishment, or unhappiness must be our fault. We internalized a set of beliefs about ourselves, and developed a set of tools to try and get what we needed from our parents.
When we take these strategies into adulthood and into relationships, we unconsciously fall back on those tools, recreating the same environment we grew up in. Like sheep, we follow the same scripts, playing out the same roles, and inviting the same behaviors that fit our mold.
By doing this inner child work, we can develop a sense about what’s a familiar script and what’s a conscious choice. In our re-parenting work, we can assure our inner child that he is safe without the need for these unhealthy strategies.
5. You can release your sexual shame and guilt.
“Sex is who we are, rather than something we have. The first thing we notice about a person is their sex.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
It is highly likely that your inner child suffers from sexual shame and sexual guilt. Whether this came in the form of ridicule, family repression, overt/physical incest, or covert incest/enmeshment, the chances are your inner child carries sexual wounds.
These wounds manifest themselves in adulthood as sexual addictions, sexual anorexia, compulsive masturbation, obsessive viewing of pornography, or any maladaptive sexual acting out (or in).
In the case of enmeshment or incest, the child will often hide or repress his sexuality in an attempt to ward off the offending parent. To further complicate matters, when he reaches adulthood, he may feel an overwhelming sense of guilt while having sex, leading to dysfunctional romantic relationships.
By reclaiming your inner child, you can assure your childhood self that it’s ok to be curious about sex; that your sexual drives and urges are not bad, and you do not need to hide your sexuality from an invasive parent any longer.
6. You can learn to value yourself.
“I could not heal my being with my doing. To be who I am is all that matters.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
In Healing the Shame That Binds You, another John Bradshaw classic, he calls himself a “HumanDoing” rather than a “HumanBeing.”
In other words, in the dysfunctional, role-based family system, we’re valued by what we do rather than for who we are. Our unique gifts, traits, talents, and identities, are set aside in favor of traits that benefit the parents.
If the parents had insufficient parental mirroring or were denied their own gifts, abilities, and identity, they often look to their child for their narcissistic supply.
The result is that one child will become the “Star” of the family. They overachieve — whether academically, athletically, or financially — and pretend like it’s of their own choosing. However, it is an incessant need to please their parents and balance the family equation, that propels this behavior.
By reclaiming and championing your inner child, you can release this false belief that value is found externally. You can remind your Wounded Child that he is valuable just as he is — unique, special, and with a purpose that can and should be fulfilled.
7. You can discover who you are.
“The very characteristics of childhood I am describing — wonder, dependency, curiosity, optimism — are crucial to the growth and flowering of human life.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
When we adopted the False Self of our family system role, we lost connection with who we are — what Carl Jung calls the “Wonder Child.” It is this Wonder Child that embodies the playfulness, spontaneity, curiosity, and healthy shamelessness that we had around five years old.
When I connect with that five year old though the meditations in Homecoming, I remember who I am. This child is not afraid to speak his mind, take risks, play hard, and enjoy the attention of women without guilt or addictive neediness.
My true self enjoys the ups and the downs of life, while knowing that falling down, picking myself up, and dusting myself off is what good stories are made of.
Conclusion
In Homecoming, Bradshaw strongly recommends doing inner child work with a qualified guide. Why? Because not only are there exercises that require at least one other person, but it is guaranteed to stir up powerful emotions — ones that have likely been repressed for a very long time.
As for my own continuation, I still do the meditations, and am constantly looking at the ways my inner child tries to protect me when triggered. I also embrace my Wonder Child, and have learned to play, relax in relationships, and take things one day at a time.
My counselor asked me what my favorite toy was at five, and I told him the original Star Wars lightsaber from the late 70s.
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: by Annie Spratt on Unsplash