Inner Child - 1

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Growing up in a really healthy family -

here's real luck.

Robin Skinner

Where there is no childhood, there is no maturity.

Françoise Dolto

In psychotherapy, one can quite often meet with the "virtuality" of a person's mental reality, its insubordination to material physical laws. One of these most striking phenomena is the phenomenon of psychological time and psychological age.

The possible discrepancy between physical (physiological, passport) and psychological age is a fairly well-known phenomenon. We often encounter in real life the facts of such a discrepancy, both physical and psychological: a person may look older / younger than his age, behave inappropriately for his passport age. In psychology, there are even terms for these phenomena - infantilism and acceleration.

In the works of Eric Berne, it was shown that in the structure of the personality of each person, three components can be distinguished - Parent, Adult, Child, which he called Ego-states. The aforementioned Ego states can alternately be actualized - either the Adult, the Parent, or the Child can successively appear on the psychic scene. A psychologically healthy person is characterized by mobility, dynamism of the selected Ego-states, the possibility of their change. Psychological problems arise in the case of a rigid fixation on any one ego state.

The therapist in his work often encounters this kind of fixation, which is often the cause of many of the client's psychological problems.

In this article I want to focus on only one Ego state - the Child.

Every person was once a child, and at any age he retains this childhood experience - his inner child.

What is this inner child like?

In a therapy situation, one often encounters the phenomenon of the actualized state of the "Child". This phenomenon can be noticed both by observing a client who regresses greatly in therapy - crying, looks helpless, disorganized, so referring to his inner experiences. In this case, to the therapist's question: "How old are you now?", "How old do you feel?" an adult client can answer: 3, 5, 7 …

In the experience of therapy, there are two types of inner children that are more often encountered. I will call them conditionally - Happy Child and Traumatized Child.

Happy child - a source of creativity, energy, spontaneity, life.

A Happy Child is one who had a Childhood - carefree, happy. The happy child had "good enough", loving, accepting, adults (not infantile), psychologically healthy parents. Such parents did not involve the child in their adult games, did not burden him with parental functions, did not use him as their narcissistic extension … In general, they did not deprive him of his childhood. This list of "sins" of parents goes on and on. How many of these parents do you know?

The inner “Happy Child” is a resource state for an adult. Good contact with your Happy inner child is a source of positive human experience. A happy inner child knows well what he wants … Adults, as a rule, find it difficult to answer this simple question, or, in the worst case, do not want anything. Many psychological problems - life crises, depression - are the result of a bad connection with the inner Happy child, which a person forgets about in the maelstrom of adult problems. In this case, the task of psychotherapy will be to restore connection with your inner child for the emergence of energy for life. You can read more about this in our article with Natalia Olifirovich "The Little Prince: Meeting with the Inner Child"

A much more complicated situation in therapy arises in the absence of a Happy Child in a person's psychic reality. It can be a rejected, used, appropriated, sacrificing, abandoned, forgotten, lonely child. I will call him in one word - traumatized.

Traumatized child - "frozen", anxious, squeezed.

This is a child who was deprived of Childhood. His parents, if any, were too busy with their adult problems, often ignoring him or overly incorporating him into their adult life. These are either "bad parents" - insensitive, distant, reluctant, rejecting, egocentric, or "ideal parents" - overly sensitive, anxious, over-caring, "suffocating" with their care and love. And no one knows what is better. There is a well-known expression in psychotherapy - all mental problems arise from lack or excess …

The traumatized child appears on the "mental stage" in a difficult situation for a person - stress, overexertion, mental trauma … crash.

In the situation of psychotherapy, in the case of actualization of the Traumatized Child, two work strategies are possible:

1st strategy - support

Traumatized Child - a child who lacked love, acceptance and care from those close to him.

The therapist's task is to become such a parent for the client for a while - attentive, caring, sensitive, etc. As a result of such an attitude on the part of the therapist, the client should have a feeling of reliability, stability, confidence. For more details see my article "The Therapist as a Parent"

2nd strategy - frustration

In the case of using the second strategy in therapy, the therapist turns to the adult part of the client. In a psychotherapy situation, it might look like this:

- How old are you really?

- Tell us about yourself as an adult …

- Remember the situations when you were strong, confident, adult …

- What / what kind of adult / adult man / woman you are …

The client's speaking of the answers to these questions brings back and strengthens him in the identity of an adult, mature person who can cope with life's difficulties.

The second strategy is only possible if the first is well developed. Before frustrating the client, the therapist must provide him with a sufficient amount of support so that the frustration is not destructive for him. This is possible in a situation of creating a trusting relationship between the client and the psychotherapist. Here, as in a real family, a child can accept and assimilate a certain amount of frustration (criticism, instruction, punishment) only if he has a strong feeling that his parents love him.

In any case, psychotherapy will be a client's maturing project. Growing up through experiencing and reconstructing childhood experiences.