Happiness is...

...learning to nurture your inner

child

What is your inner child?

Childhood needs are insatiable – they are irrationally high, and that is why
no matter how good a parent you are, it’s so difficult to cater for all your
child’s emotional needs successful that you never can. The trick is to be
compassionate and forgiving and allow them to work through their
disappointments and challenges to grow up and leave their scars behind,
healed.

In childhood, the final authority was the other person (the older adult),
and so we were guided and controlled by our relationships with these
others. Either we did what they said, or we disobeyed. If we obeyed and
were not being true to ourselves, we felt resentful for not doing things our
way and play the victim, thinking that life is unfair. Or, we can disobey
and play the martyr, knowing that life is unfair but that there is another
way, but not trying to or knowing how to get to that other way – hence,
we built our Helpless Child persona. If we disobey, we then feel guilty
about rebelling because we do not know what the consequences will be,
or do not want to be responsible for the consequences of our actions –
hence, we build our Rebellious Child persona.

“Other-controlled”:
Response as a child: to think - “I should”
Even when our guts tell us otherwise
↙ ↘
/ \
/ \
/ \
Obey Disobey
| |
| |
| |
↓ ↓
Resentment Guilt
\ /
 \ /
\ /
↘ ↙
Blame
↓
Insecure

In each of these situations, we’re facing the hard end of the stick, with a
no-win situation. The relationship between the child and the authority
figure is damaged for the child. However, what we come to realise as we
foster our Adult selves’ persona, is that even though the situation seems
unfair, sulking and thinking that the world is a horrible place does not get
us very far. Stepping up and being able to realise when we are right and
when others are right is an important part of growing up. So is learning to
be accountable to our word, learning that behaviours speak louder than
what we think our intentions are, and that we need to be responsible for
our actions, even the undesired or unintentional consequences of them.

The child thinking, “I should” is really thinking, “I don’t want to, but
it’s not okay for me to do what I want or need in this situation, so
I’ll act to protect myself and do it anyway.”

The link between healing our inner child and feeling fulfilled and
happy with our lives and ourselves

These childhood and adult personas stay with us, shifting to gain more
power in more situations, and less power in other situations. In particular,
they help us work through the Grief cycle, which has five stages:

1. Denial – Helpless Child persona

2. Bargaining – Rebellious Child persona

3. Anger – Rebellious Child persona

4. Depression – Helpless Child persona

5. Acceptance – Adult persona

For example, if you’re having a really bad day and then it rains before
you can get the washing in, and then you receive a phone-call to say your
dog’s died, then you find you’ve failed a course at uni. In this situation,
your Helpless Child might come forward and take over for a while, telling
you that the world is unfair and that it has time to sit down and feel sorry
for yourself.

At this stage, most people will either indulge their helpless child, feeling
that nothing is ever right and they are not good enough, and perhaps take
on the help of their Rebellious Child by trying to escape the situation,
through distracting themselves with movies or books or music, or legal
and illegal drugs. This is working our way through Bargaining and Anger
and Depression, and they don’t necessarily occur in order. One thing to
remember, though, is that it’s healthy to allow ourselves to work through
the grief cycle – if we don’t consciously let ourselves work through it, we’ll
just end up repressing emotions, leading to futher hurt for our inner child
personas.

If we can reach a stage of realising that we’re not getting anywhere with
the situation by going around in circles feeling sorry for ourselves, we are
starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is our ‘Wise Mind’,
our Adult persona starting to be heard over the din of our Helpless Child
and Rebellious Child. The Adult persona, who can also be called the Adult
Child, is the voice of reason, the linking of what the head wants and what
the heart wants. It allows us to see what we need and what we want in
situations, what is rational and what is irrational, what is realistic and
what’s not realistic, and helps us lovingly, compassionately and forgivingly
to be accountable for our actions and responsible for our choices.

It’s not multiple personalities, just the recognition that we all hold scars
from our past emotional, physical, mental and spiritual experiences, and
that we need to consciously work through those in order to let them go.
When we are able to work through our feelings, truly feel them, we are
able to realise what they’re trying to tell us, and let them go peacefully,
releasing negative emotions and the baggage they create. This is the
integration of our personas, and the pathway to living authentically,
true to our consciously chosen values, and without irrational core beliefs
ruling our lives.

Many people, even when they grow well into their adult lives, still haven’t
worked through integrating their persona’s very well. They are still “other-
controlled” in many parts of their life. How can you tell how much you are
“other-controlled” right now? A simple exercise can tell you– for the next
day, think about how often you feel guilty or resentful. Be careful to be
honest with yourself; otherwise you are just in denial about the
existence of your childhood persona’s. If this is the case, it is likely you
haven’t even reached the first stage of grieving your childhood
irrationalities to reach the point of acceptance of your childhood
experience for what it was, and moving forward to an adult state of strong
and compassionate personal empowerment over your life, how you live it
and where it takes you.

A healthy adult perspective on life is that it’s yours to make of it what you
will, and nobody else can tell you what to do – they can only give their
experiences for you to ponder upon, and advice to aid your decision-
making, but they have no right to expect you to live by their expectations
of you. The only person you need to meet the expectations of are
yourself, although this does not excuse you from being accountable for
your actions and responsible for your choices.

The problem with not being able to hone in on your Adult persona clearly,
i.e. if you haven’t integrated your inner personas that effectively, is that
you are often unhappy, angry, resentful and unsatisfied, and
you’re never really sure why. You try so hard, but still life is unfair, and
everybody else keeps treating you badly and never changing to make
things right. This is, I believe, what Buddhists call ‘suffering’ – a state of
being unaware of the subconscious reasons for your actions and the
patterns in your life, hence perpetually being stuck in a ‘victim’ or ‘martyr’
complex, which you’re often not consciously aware that you have!

I bring this up because of the question, ‘What is Happiness?’ Henri

Bergeson writes, in Mathieu Ricard’s book ‘Happiness: A guide to
developing Life’s most important skill’ (pp17-18):

“Happiness is commonly used to designate something intricate and

ambiguous, one of those ideas which humanity has intentionally left
vague, so that each individual might interpret it in his own way.”
The chapter goes on to say, “Sociologists define happiness as “the
degree to which a person evaluates the overall quality of his
present life-as-a-whole positively, in other words, how much a
person likes the life that he or she leads... For some, happiness is
just a momentary, fleeting impression, whose intensity and duration
vary according to the availability of resources that make it
possible...”

Aside from the gender-binary pronouns, I think that this is still a pretty
ambiguous definition, as it’s still entirely subjective and still dripping with
big fat drops of ‘vague’.

“For the philosopher Robert Misrahi, on the other hand, happiness is

‘the radiation of joy over one’s active past, one’s actual present and
one’s conceivable future.’ According to Andre Comte-Sponville, ‘By
 ‘happiness’ we mean any span of time in which joy would seem
immediately possible.”

Seems like a bit of a tall order for us everyday folk. But this might just be
because of our inner confusion and tension caused by the conflicts our
inner persona’s have. This is the subconscious war we wage on ourselves,
which seeps us of energy and motivation, belief in ourselves and belief
that life can be good. This war is constantly draining us and leaving us
devoid of passion, of interest, of zest for life, ourselves and our
relationships.

If, even as adults, we are not able to get past the state of being where we
believe that others are responsible for our needs being met, then we will
continue to live in a world of subconsciously thinking “I should” all the
time, and feeling disempowered. Our inner persona’s have control over
us, instead of our adult persona’s being able to parent our inner children
and keep our inner-family happy. All of this, of-course, a metaphor – ‘inner
child’, ‘inner persona’s’, they all mean our emotional selves, and whether
it’s happy or unhappy.

Co-dependency occurs when you are unwilling or unable to look after your
own inner child, expecting others to meet your needs for you. Often if you
are codependent, you will be in denial about this, and instead of being
able to meet your own needs, you’ll rely on others to meet them for you,
but at the same time, you’ll emotionally rescue other people, thinking
mistakenly that if you fulfil their needs, they’ll be obligated to fulfil your
needs for you in return. This is irrational thinking, and is not a reflection of
how the world really is. It is just wishful thinking, as hard as it is to be able
to admit that to yourself. It is only by becoming aware of these patterns
that you can move past them, and be happy within yourself. Happy with
yourself, the way you are. Resentment and guilt are the price we pay for
keeping the approval of others, and it’s only by realising that we don’t
need the approval of others, we need the approval of ourselves, that we
can give ourselves permission to stop rescuing others and start taking
responsibility for getting our own needs met.

Co-dependency

Co-dependency occurs when you are unwilling or unable to look after your
own inner child, expecting others to meet your needs for you. Often if you
are codependent, you will be in denial about this, and instead of being
able to meet your own needs, you’ll rely on others to meet them for you,
but at the same time, you’ll emotionally rescue other people, thinking
mistakenly that if you fulfil their needs, they’ll be obligated to fulfil your
needs for you in return. This is irrational thinking, and is not a reflection of
how the world really is. It is just wishful thinking, as hard as it is to be able
to admit that to yourself. It is only by becoming aware of these patterns
that you can move past them, and be happy within yourself. Happy with
yourself, the way you are. Resentment and guilt are the price we pay for
keeping the approval of others, and it’s only by realising that we don’t
need the approval of others, we need the approval of ourselves, that we
can give ourselves permission to stop rescuing others and start taking
responsibility for getting our own needs met.

Blame

Emotional rescuing is a sign of wanting to be emotionally rescued

yourself, and blame is the precursor to feeling like you need to be
emotionally rescued. Think of it this way – you start of as a child who’s
told that they should do something that they don’t want to do. They can
either obey or disobey, either way they’ll end up feeling either resentment
or guilt, and this is internalised to become a subconscious blaming of
someone else when things don’t go the way we want. This subconscious
blaming saturates society – almost everyone blames something or
someone at least once a day without being aware that they’re doing it.
Stopping and examining your thoughts regularly, taking stock of the
things that you say and whether you really mean them or not, and asking
trusted friends and family about your behaviour and what they think of it,
whether they can see any patterns, etc, can be helpful in learning to not
blame and taking responsibility for yourself and your actions and choices.

Getting in touch with your inner child – what does this mean?
How do you do it?

Learning to recognise the presence of our inner persona’s can be difficult.

We all have them, it’s not that we need to create them, but rather we
have to become aware of them, and this is not always easy depending on
how many mental defences you’ve got up. Our inner child is a permanent
part of everyone, and in order to be truly happy and feel that we’re living
an authentic life, we need to embrace and nurture our inner child
personas as well as our adult child personas, whoever and however they
may be. Learning to love ourselves unconditionally and forgivingly like
this is, perhaps, the most important lesson in life.
Our emotional natures are the sides of us that concern our dreams, fears,
creativity, vulnerabilities, aspirations, what we think is possible or likely,
and our dependent sides. Our feelings come from our inner child, while
our rationally thinking side, which is able to forgive and accept and move
through situations, comes from our adult personas. If these are too
separate, you’ll probably feel out of control of your feelings. That one
minute you’re fine, you can achieve your goals, then next you feel like you
can’t do anything right, you’ll never be able to do anything, there’s no
point in trying, it’s too hard to battle with what everybody else wants you
to do and you don’t have any time left for you. See how tiring this
constant switching in how we think can be? The rest of your mind, and
your body, can’t keep up. Often, neither can our work or our relationships,
and our quality of life keeps going downhill.

It is an important part of being in-touch with your feelings is to recognise

that the reason we are so often run by “I should’s” is that in our
childhood, living by these “I should’s” dictated our survival – or at the very
least, determined our perceived ability to get our needs met, and the
ability to get our needs met dictated our ability to survive. It had nothing
to do with happiness, and everything to do with getting our intrinsic
needs met. These needs are:

- physical (warmth, shelter, touch, food, water, access to medical

care, etc),

- emotional (affection, approval, acceptance, encouragement,

validation, ability to follow our interests and develop our passions,
ability to express ourselves creatively and feel fulfilled by our
everyday lives and our perceived short- and long-term futures, etc),

- mental (intellectual stimulation, ability to understand the world

around us and how things work, ability to develop our problem-
solving abilities, etc), and

- spiritual (ability to connect with other people, other beings, the

world around us, to feel that our life has meaning and that there is a
purpose in being alive, finding out what our values are and living
authentically by them, working through our core beliefs to aid the
integration of our child and adult personas, ability to have fun, etc).

If we can’t get these needs met when we’re children, we repress them –
this means, we operate by “I should’s” instead of following what we want
to do or what we feel, and over time we internalise the feelings of
resentment, guilt, blame, anger, frustration, and disempowerment, fooling
ourselves into believing that we’ve put the issue behind us. This is where
the helplessness of the Helpless Child and the rebelliousness of the
Rebellious Child come from – these repressed internalised destructive
emotions. The more we internalise, the more out of touch we get with our
inner child, and usually the less happy we are.

In order to get back in touch with our feelings, respect them and ourselves
and live authentically – stop this inner self-waged war – we need to
rediscover our inner child. Think about what ‘fun’ means – not to your
adult self, but rather what are the things you always wanted to do as a
child but never could? It doesn’t matter why you couldn’t do them to start
off with, but we get to that later, because if you think of that at this stage
you get caught up in hiding from the pain of your inner child instead of
being able to emotionally connect with that part of yourself that
remembers what fun feels like. It could be going out into the bush and
exploring, building a tent cubby-house in the backyard, making fairy
bread and chocolate milk for dessert, dressing up in non-co-ordinates
clothes and trashy make-up and dancing to the pop-songs you grew up
with with your door closed, painting or drawing, icing a cake with colours,
playing in the sprinkler on a summer’s day, making mud pies in the
backyard, watching a Disney movie from your childhood, etc. It can be
anything you want – all that matters is, by doing it, you give yourself
permission to have fun, to be happy, and to stop living in
‘should’s’. Although you don’t have to, doing it by yourself is advisable
so that you actually allow yourself to connect with yourself and don’t feel
stupid or that you’ll be judged by other people, no matter how well you
know them.

That may not work for some people, and if you’re one of those, try this
method: Pause from reading, from thinking about your life’s troubles or
what groceries you need to buy on your way home, and clear your mind.
Take some deep breaths, breathing in a sense of calm and lightness as
you breathe in, and letting go of tension, anxiety and worry as you
breathe out, letting your body and mind relax. It can help to have a
physical object that you hold as you’re doing this – often a cushion or a
teddy bear can work well. In your mind, go back to somewhere you
enjoyed being as a child, somewhere you felt safe. Picture yourself as a
child, and gently allow yourself to say “Hello” to yourself. Watch for the
way your inner child reacts – they might be wary, not trusting you, and so
not responding at all for a while. They might anxiously say ‘hi’ in a high-
pitched voice back. They might hide behind a piece of furniture. Whatever
happens, just focus on sending patient unconditional feelings of love,
forgiveness and acceptance towards your inner child, letting them know
that you’re sorry for the hurt, pain and sorrow that they’ve gone through,
but that you’re here to hold their hand, protect them and guide them
lovingly. Just focus on letting them know this, don’t expect anything in
return.

It will probably take some time for them to trust you. You may be
surprised by what you feel when they let you in – you might feel like
you’re two people at once, that it’s all a bit surreal and you wonder if
you’ll remember this after it happens. If you can, and you might have to
work through a number of meditation sessions to get to this stage, allow
your Little Self to talk to your Adult Self – what does your Little Self have
to say? How do they feel about the current problems in your life, be they
your job, your relationships or friendships, your body image, your
confidence, anything. Let them tell you how they feel, and when you know
they’re done, talk to them as your Adult Self. Allow your Adult Self to
reassure them that things will be okay, point out the irrational or illogical
reasons in their thinking kindly, and help them reframe situations so they
can understand them more lucidly.

Sometimes it can help to talk to the cushion or teddy bear as though it’s
your inner child, so it’s easier for you mentally to grasp that you’re having
a conversation with different aspects of yourself. Sometimes it can help to
use a book, and use your non-dominant hand to write as your inner child,
and your dominant hand to write as your adult self. Don’t feel bound to
play by any rules or feel that you ‘should’ do this a particular way – do
what feels right to you, allow yourself to be creative with how you
converse with your inner personas.

Summary points:

These three points are appropriated from Barbara and Terry Tebo’s Book
‘Free to be me’ (p 49), and are a useful summary of key points of learning
to get in touch with your inner child:

1. My happiness, success and wellbeing has a lot to do with my needs

being met – the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs of
my inner child.

2. Some of these emotional needs are conscious, but many of these

are subconscious. Nonetheless, they are still alive and active within
me; they are valid and worthy of attention and being met.

3. In childhood, I was totally dependent on others to meet my needs,

and meeting my needs was an issue of survival. I was bound by
“Other-approval” and in fact had to give my personal power away in
order to get these needs met, i.e. do what others wanted me to do,
in order to get my needs met and survive. These experiences have
left scars of anger, guilt, blame, frustration and pain, and it is only
by allowing my Adult persona to integrate with my Inner Child
personas that I can reclaim my personal power and feel in control of
my life and happy within myself.