One of the more consistently confronting and at times embarrassing concepts that
psychology forces us to consider is that of an ‘inner child.’ All
of us have along the years made such efforts to become adults,
it can be at once grating and dispiriting to be told that there might, nevertheless, be an ‘inner
child’ still lodged somewhere within us. But in truth, we contain within ourselves
a version of all the people we have ever been. There is, in recessive form,
somewhere in the folds of our natures, a confused teenager, a sad child, a jealous or hungry infant.
No version of us entirely disappears, it is merely added to and buttressed,
just like an oak tree that still contains, in its rings, the marks of all its former circumferences.
Furthermore, if we follow the psychological thesis, some of our inner children are likely not
to be especially well. They might be dealing with a hurt that they have no idea how to cope with,
they might have suffered a loss without any chance to understand who and what is to blame,
they might be lonely, distressed or ashamed. No one might have taken proper care of them
during a crisis or bothered to sympathise with their unusual difficulties at school.
Despite their pain, it isn’t that the inner child’s cries are in any danger of breaking
through into the public realm. That is precisely the problem. Inner children cause psychic distress
not because they are too present, but because they are not present enough. They have been too
effectively locked away. Their cries have been seamlessly forgotten and ignored. They have been
pushed into a sound-proof chamber from which no murmur emerges. And yet still they exist.
We are dealing with unwanted restless ghosts who have not been appeased or understood - but
whose ongoing ignored unhappiness threatens the course of our lives.
The task ahead requires a perhaps even more grating and obtuse word: reparenting.
The inner child needs to be identified, their distinctive troubles understood and their pains
soothed and becalmed. In a perfect world, it is parents themselves who would carry out this work
at the time the difficulties arose. But in the real world, some of the work gets left behind
and lingers, which requires a bizarre-sounding manoeuvre to correct. We - as adults - need to
become parents to the children we once were. We need to gather together our adult capacities
for kindness, reassurance, empathy, generosity and warmth and direct these towards the three
or five or fifteen year olds who still exist in our minds. We need to take stock of these
young people’s sorrows and help them in a way they were not helped at the time in the name of helping
ourselves right now; for we are standing on their shoulders - and can only be as stable as they are.
It’s when we can directly imagine what a good and kind person might have said to us,
and yet when we are simultaneously aware of how little anyone did actually say, that we
might be suffused with compassionate tears for our former selves; we may register a trapped sadness
that at last has an opportunity to be seen, worked through and expunged. We might feel a lot lighter
afterwards and we might then regularly - perhaps late at night - repeat the exercise: revisiting
the inner child and bringing them an extra dose of comfort and tenderness so that they (and we, for
we rest as a collective) might sleep more easily. We probably know well enough how to treat real
children around us: true liberation awaits us when we finally learn to
treat the children inside us with as much tolerance, patience and warm encouragement.