A look into the inner child

Have you ever felt, as an adult, that you are not able to control your emotions or your thoughts in relation to some situation or some person? Have you rationalized what you should do but are unable to sustain that decision? Have your relatives told you that you were dramatizing what happened? I present to you, then, your inner child.

I always explain to my clients that we are made of parts. We have parts that help us to enjoy life, to organize ourselves, to calm down, not to stop, to judge situations... And there is even a phrase that shows that this idea of ​​the parts has permeated our collective unconscious: "There is a part of me that tells me ...". This phrase is relatively common not only in consultation but in everyday life.

There are parts of us, in the now, an adult self or an old self, but also there are parts that, although they have their origin in the past, continue to be with us; there is in us a child I and a teenage I too.

• Related article: "What is emotional intelligence?"

Understanding the infantile self

Children do not have sufficient emotional or cognitive resources to understand why they happen some situations or how they should respond emotionally to them for better management of the pain; we are the adults who guide these interpretations and emotions, we are their models. These children learn based on the messages and behaviors they refer to as adults. If an adult does not help that child to properly manage or look at that situation, the emotional wound will remain on him.

Imagine a person who, every time a friend cancels a plan or tells him that he cannot stay, feels abandoned and has a hard time calming that feeling. Now imagine that this person spent two years of his childhood living with her grandparents because her parents could not care for her for health reasons and were immersed in her illness. Would it make any sense to think that this child would have been sensitive to rejection or abandonment and that they develop as an adult being also sensitive to rejection or abandonment?

When we feel uncontrolled, overwhelmed, without resources, it is most likely this inner child who has taken control of the situation., and as a child, he does not have the ability to look at more than how he learned or what he was taught. We have as many inner children as wounds to heal.

But inner children don't just appear in negative situations, They also appear when we play or have a drink enjoying with friends, or practice an activity that we love since we were little.

• You may be interested in: "Self-concept: what is it and how is it formed?"

How, then, do you work with inner children?

Regarding the process, the idea is that the adult can see another way to interpret what happened. As adults we do have the necessary resources to understand better and in a more peaceful way what happened to us, or the ability to acquire those resources. We can have a more empathetic look with those around us, understand that, perhaps, what we experienced in the past was not only the way we evoke it in the present.

Human beings create our reality through our narrativeHow we tell ourselves what happens to us is what makes us see the world in a certain way. It is not the same to say "my son is a crybaby" than "my son is sensitive." The work with the inner child involves being able to give it another narrative, another way of telling what is happened, easier to understand and less painful, perhaps, understanding more fully what we have vivid.

Thus, the person you can take charge, as an adult, of what happens in your life, and take responsibility for his own process so that he can sustain those situations that previously mobilized him so much emotionally.

Finally, imagine that this person who feels rejected now looks at you from another perspective. He now introduces his grandparents as people of care and love and understands that the only way for his parents to be recovered was dedicating time to them and that allowed him to be with them years later and enjoy them and their family. Sending that boy or that girl was the best way those parents found to take care of their child.

Maybe this fictional example will help you understand a little about how inner work works.. I leave to you the task of estimating if this other perspective of how to look at what happened could help that person heal that wound, and I encourage you to work your own.