Our abandoned Inner Child is literally screaming to be acknowledged, cared for and comforted.
So why do we persistently IGNORE him or her?!
I suspect this post is gonna have some intricate layers to it, so I ask you to bear with me as I try and tie ‘em all together in a cohesive way, so that you can feel glad ya read this piece. If you’ve been tracking with my writings for awhile, you’ll see the same themes coming up time and time again, though they may be delivered in a slightly different fashion. The purpose for doing this, is to help you intellectually integrate my materials, so they can become familiar enough to spawn emotional knowing.
Think of Emotional Knowing, as being akin to expecting the sun to rise every morning. No doubt in us exists about this fact. Every fiber in our body simply knows we can count on seeing a sunrise every day, because of that repetitive outcome. When we KNOW something emotionally, we cannot un-know it or forget it. It becomes an integral part of our cellular structure.
This is how I want to help you learn about life and love~ so if ya didn’t catch it the first time around, here it comes again! Repetition is what helps intellectual understanding become emotional knowing, and given how rife our world is with misinformation, I can’t help but feel compelled to try and correct that situation.
Some years ago, I briefly worked with a male client who was a very successful life coach (or so he said). Unbeknownst to me, he’d previously sent his young BPD girlfriend to me for repair, but she dropped out of treatment, explaining she couldn’t keep affording it. Typical for Borderlines incidentally, is when their immediate crisis starts to abate, they lose interest in continuing to receive care, in the form of growth and healing.
In truth, growth and healing cannot take place, if we’re always doing damage control. It’s only the sessions that are relatively free of having to slay dragons or put out fires, that can effectively catalyze real and lasting change within an individual. Borderlines are chaos and crisis oriented, because they thrive on intense emotions, whether pleasurable or painful, so you can see where this is going, can’t ya?
Anyhow, about eight weeks after this young Borderline left my care, I heard from her Ex, the life coach. He wanted to elicit my assistance, and helped me learn about the connection between him and my former female client. Birds of a feather flock together, and like attracts like~ so I instantly began to wonder about the degree to which this male was emotionally sound.
One comment he made to me fairly often during the brief time we were in contact, was that he felt “worthless.” Worthless is not an emotion, incidentally. There is no direct association to a genuine feeling state, that this word carries. When we assign “worthlessness” to ourselves, we are harshly judging numerous other emotions we’re experiencing in our body as being “wrong, bad, unacceptable, evil, weak, despicable,” etc., because this is how we were programmed to feel about them (by our parental units) as toddlers and throughout our childhood.
For many, when they feel a bit scared, fragile, vulnerable or even just tired, they chastise themselves for being a “worthless piece of shit.” This is so wrong, on so many levels.
God forbid, we were caught crying when we were little~ did we hear from Dad or Mom, “stop that, or I’ll give ya something to CRY about!” How many of us today, immediately apologize to a nearby other whenever we feel emotional, and our tears well up?! FYI, tears and crying actively help us purge long-standing, embedded archaic trauma from our body cells. So does raging, incidentally.
But I’ve digressed (told ya this might happen). So, this “Life Coach” revealed to me he felt “worthless,” on numerous occasions during his brief sojourn into this healing modality of treatment. When I offered a tried and true power tool to help him begin to heal, he scoffed: “That’s so pedestrian,” he remarked. “I’ve been thru every type of therapy that’s ever been invented, and I’m absolutely NOT gonna use that silly, utterly unsophisticated, ridiculous tool!!!”
I instantly understood this was his adult-self speaking to me. His Child-Self however, had perpetually felt worthless, over the course of his entire lifetime~ despite myriad methods he’d already tried, to find inner peace, restoration and genuine healing. I can’t help but wonder how many tens of thousands of dollars were flushed down the toilet during that pursuit.
I know this may be hard to accept, but precious few humans are open to actually healing, and attaining happiness. Oh, they talk the talk and rattle on about how committed they are to getting there, while reading a plethora of self-help books or spending sizable sums of money on this guru or that… but when you give ‘em a way to reprogram and actually repair themselves, they may reject it as being too simplistic or “silly.”
I had a gal pal with BPD traits for many years. She’d reject anything (love, success, contentment, inner-peace) that came easy to her, and believed that if her life experiences weren’t hard-won, they had no value. She’d often remark, “I have to do everything the hard way!” To each his own, I always reflected.
I find it utterly tragic, how all our childhood programming and resultant adult patterns, always die hard. And if you think it’s a simple task to help people reverse all those years or decades of bad, self-defeating programming, you have another thing coming! Within this context, you’d probably be amazed to learn how many believe that God means for them to suffer during their life’s journey.
To a small child, their parent is a GOD. If our earliest experiences with that parent can’t foster our ability to receive nurturance, warmth, affection and real-time concern, how are we to ever build a foundation for trusting them? Furthermore, if we cannot construct a nourishing, loving baseline of experience with a parent for any reason, how can we ever grow up trusting God?!
Nobody can decide to trust someone. It’s never a mental decision, and there’s no such thing as instant trust. If trust can be established, it develops over a considerable passage of time, and it must be earned. I have believed for many years, that Divine Intervention has brought people to my website, or given ‘em enough courage to phone me for the first time~ even if it’s just to ask a question and chat for a few minutes.
I am delighted I’ve been entrusted to help damaged souls heal~ because it matters not how financially successful you become, or whether you’ve managed to establish a healthy relationship bond. What matters, is being wholly dedicated to finding real joy and contentment during this life’s journey, and realizing that if you continue to neglect and abandon the little girl or boy inside who’s still battered and bleeding, your adult self is never gonna quite get to that “Happiness” you keep thinking is just ahead, on the road you’re traveling.
I have this on very good authority.
Early childhood years are so important. When reading your article today I was reminded of the "tabula rasa" (blank slate ) hypothesis that was suggested by English philosopher John Locke.
"John Locke's tabula rasa theory posits that at birth, the human mind is a "blank slate" without pre-programmed ideas or knowledge. All knowledge and understanding, according to Locke, are acquired through sensory experiences and reflections on those experiences. This "blank slate" is then filled with "ideas" derived from the external world and from internal reflection. "
I was once skeptical about Locke's theory but that changed when I was in a lift (foreign country -
different language from my own) with a mother holding her two year old baby in her arms.
The baby said " Sa wa dee kap". I looked puzzled. Then the mother translated the baby talk. "He
said "Good day to you". Now there is an example of how quickly young minds can learn things
off by heart (not insight - that comes later), that baby was learning a language quicker than me
so much so the mother had to do a translation for me. That was my first acknowledgement of
the "tabula rasa".
There is another process in play for every baby worldwide. It was identified by by Konrad Lorenz
a psychologist. After a baby is born there is an immediate bond with the mother. One can see
examples in many animal species such as chicks with hens or cubs with bears. Later psychologists
were able to show that imprinting denied in humans causes mature adults to be more violent.
That might explain why violence may have become more prevalent in the modern era; a lack of
early parental bonding being at the root cause.
As you are aware Shari, there is much more to this topic.