Come Out, Come Out... Wherever You Are

Part 3 Inner Child Healing

No matter what type of childhood you experienced, there's bound to be some traumatic incidents lodged in your sub-conscious. Why not leave them alone? After all it happened a long time ago, it's over. The problem with unresolved issues staying unresolved, is they become stuck in the body and cause  dis-ease. They also  crop up in a myriad of places like dysfunctional relationships, ineffective parenting, addictions, etc. Therefore it is important to make peace with the past and heal it.

In previous weeks the blog "When Your Inner Child Calls…Answer" explored how situations from the past, although not major for an adult, have a profound effect on a child and carry forth into adulthood. The experiences were filtered through a young person's psyche and  tinted by the  limited understanding they had of the world at the time. Seemingly insignificant events can have long lasting implications when viewed through the eyes of a child.

With "Exploring Your ChildhoodStories" we looked at photographs of our life while growing up. Studying the environment, age of our parents and other circumstances of our childhood helped us understand the problems inherent in our family. Looking at our parents' past and what they brought to the table in terms of dysfunction and their own unresolved childhood issues provided another layer of clues as to what influenced our development.

A powerful exercise is to meet your child, if you can find them. It's not unusual  to have to search  for your inner child, because the experiences caused them to be scared and hide. The process involves visualizing your home where you grew up and introducing yourself to the child. The following prompts will help you to notice the details to make the experience stronger and more realistic.

Exercise: Take several deep breaths and ask your angels, guides, God or higher power to put you in touch with your inner child to facilitate a merging and healing. Imagine yourself on the street where you grew up. Notice as you walk down the sidewalk or road, what does the ground look like? Do you see a gravel or dirt road or a paved street with sidewalks and well tended lawns? Continue walking until you get to your house. Stop and look at the structure. Notice the color and material it is made from. Is it wood, bricks or stone? Is there a front porch? Are there flowers by the walkway or just dusty brown dirt? As you move towards the door, notice the material it is made from. Is it metal  or wood? Is it a screen door or solid panels? Open the door and step inside. Notice the smells as you enter. Glance into the house to see if you see toys scattered around. Begin to call your child's name to see if they will come and greet you. If you are met with silence, begin thinking of the hiding places in the house you might have found when that age. Secret hideaways  like the front hall closet, under the beds, beneath the stairs, in the bedroom closets or in the attic. Did you check their  room or outdoors in the backyard? As you search, continue to call their name and begin talking, assuring them that you are there just to say hello.

When you find your child, and yes you will eventually, ask if you may hug them. As you hold your child, begin talking in a soothing manner. Saying something such as, "I am here for you, I love you. I am here to protect and love you. You are safe now. I am you when you're grown up and look at me, I turned out ok. Please trust me to love you and take care of you." Eventually the child will begin to warm to you and in some cases may talk back. The purpose of this exercise is to reunite with your child and merge the two parts of yourself. With practice and some repeated visits, the child will trust you and come right away, without coaxing.

In time there will no longer be a need for these connections, for the two of you will become one, totally integrated. The goal in your going back and finding your child was to retrieve the part of yourself that had been hurt and left behind. Our reconnecting with ourselves allows the inner part of us to feel safe  because the adult self is the strong protector. Everybody wins and in the process, significant healing occurs.

The final installment of  "Inner Child Healing" explores other integrative techniques. And in the meantime, be gentle with yourself. This is intense work, so allow yourself lots of time for processing.

Becky Arrington guides individuals and businesses to discover their purpose and live authentically. Whether you’re a company looking for innovative ways to lead and engage employees or an individual trying to prioritize, reduce stress or decide what you want to be when you grow up, learning to accept and thrive in change is key.

Exploring Childhood Stories Part 2 Inner Child Healing

Every lifetime has a theme. It is usually an emotion that seems to infiltrate every relationship and experience. It is like a lens that shades your world and everything in it. Mine is abandonment.

When I was a child I had experiences where I wasn't  listened to and my parents seemed to escape every chance they got. Even breaking my foot at the age of ten I now see was a cry for attention. A  painful one.


 As an adult I can understand the stresses my parents were dealing with and why they  ignored me. After being a parent myself, I can certainly appreciate the need to escape.


 But through the eyes of a child, I felt unwanted and unloved…truly abandoned. 

This theme carried into adulthood as I chose partners who were unavailable to me emotionally and eventually left. After I spent the time and healed my inner child(we'll explore those techniques in upcoming blogs),  I no longer needed to repeat that pattern and invited emotionally vested people into my life.

My blog "When Your Inner Child Calls…Answer" introduced the possibility that we choose our parents and create the story of our life, much like being a director. An important part of my inner child healing was to understand the relationships and the stories that made up the play. I spent time looking through old photographs, trying to better understand what formed my parents. 


As I relived our early life through the photos, I saw how terribly young they were. When you're a child your parents seem so old and wise, but when you do the math as an adult you realize they were barely of legal age. Remembering yourself at their age and putting yourself in their role of parent, provider, etc  provides you better insight into what their frame of mind was.

I even looked at photos of my parent's childhood to determine how they grew up, which helped me further understand what formed their behaviors and beliefs. When I understood their lives growing up, it made more sense as to why they were unable to be engaged and present in my life. My father had practically raised himself as his father was a busy veterinarian consumed with showing cattle, civic events and talking politics. His mother escaped through bridge and other social clubs, leaving little time or attention for my father and his brother who ran the streets and hung out in pool halls.

My mother's parents were salt- of- the- earth people who loved her very much. However her older sister was ill from polio and required many out of town hospital stays which took both her mother and father away. Although she was well cared for by relatives, this separation scarred my mother deeply and left her with feelings of abandonment and jealousy.

After learning  the respective background stories of both my parents I understood why my father buried himself in work and avoided emotional connections and why my mother sought so desperately the attention she didn't get as a child. They were so caught up in their own needs and pain, there was little time or attention leftover to nurture children. That is why I chose them as parents, they were the perfect actors to star in my theme of abandonment for this lifetime.

Awareness is one of the first steps to healing. Understanding family relationships and the underlying issues that shaped them is an important part of the journey. By taking a 10,000 foot  overview of the painful background  of these parent/child relationships as an adult, prepares you for the next step; finding and reconnecting with your child. 


Becky Arrington guides individuals and businesses to discover their purpose and live authentically. Whether you’re a company looking for innovative ways to lead and engage employees or an individual trying to prioritize, reduce stress or decide what you want to be when you grow up, learning to accept and thrive in change is key.

When Your Inner Child Calls...Answer! Part I of Inner Child Healing

We choose our parents before we are born. Hard to believe, but we are responsible as souls before we incarnate, to select people who will give us certain experiences for our learning.  It's like being a director in our own play casting all the parts, with us as the star.

Even if on the surface you did not have a traumatic childhood, there are still parts that get stuck in our subconscious and fester,waiting for us to get tired of the pain they cause and heal. These missing pieces manifest in disease, discontent and discord.

 As our awareness and consciousness expands and opens during this mass awakening on the planet, these old issues come up for review and have to be cleared. 

A lot of us spend our whole lives trying to push away the things that nag at us. Yet the problems never vanish. Long term avoiding eventually causes the nudges to become stronger until they become impossible to ignore.  Challenges develop in our daily life played out through relationships, health or work and cause havoc.  After living amongst the chaos caused by buried emotions, eventually the pain becomes too much to maintain because the concerns infiltrate every facet of your life.

Finally there is nothing left to do but face your fears and deal with them. Unfortunately there are no shortcuts and the only way to healing is through exploring the past.

Most of the things causing challenges in your life can be traced to an event from childhood. Yes, the fact that your daddy didn't pay enough attention to you as a child could be one of the reasons you are needing extra pats on the head in relationships or at work and are labeled needy.  Or as detailed in Louise Hay's "You Can Heal Your Life," many diseases are rooted in infancy through adolescent events.

As an adult the childhood incident may seem inconsequential, but remember you were a child at the time, therefore your cognitive skills were not very sophisticated. When I mentioned earlier that you didn't have to experience a horrendous childhood for things to become lodged in your subconscious, just think about how a child interprets the world  and you can begin to see how certain events may have become skewed. Determining what the event or emotion is can be difficult to discover and might require some sleuthing techniques and extensive digging.

What is interesting about the new expansive energy the world is experiencing during this time of awakening is it hastens healing. What might have taken years in therapy to work through in the past, can be erased in a much shorter amount of time.

Even if you have engaged in inner child work before, you may find some old patterns returning for a final look. This is part of the process and it's a way the universe has in giving you one last chance to make sure you're truly finished with those thoughts and behaviors.

Understanding how childhood wounds develop is next up as we explore the relationships we brought in to our lives and how we chose to interact. Being a director in our own play is a hard concept to imagine, especially if we created a Nightmare on Elm Street. But taking a 10,000 foot view of the situation will help explain why you created  the scenes for your growth and make healing easier.

Becky Arrington guides individuals and businesses to discover their purpose and live authentically. Whether you’re a company looking for innovative ways to lead and engage employees or an individual trying to prioritize, reduce stress or decide what you want to be when you grow up, learning to accept and thrive in change is key.