Dear mind, I mind.

When we talk about healing we mostly talk about healing from trauma that we remember. We believe we have become a different person and the traumatic event changed our personalities. But are we certain that the person we were before, was free from all the trauma and was not a product of their previous environments?

We often forget that the biggest contributors to our personalities and patterns are our life experiences. We talk a lot about subconscious growth but tend to overlook the fact that most of our subconscious beliefs and habits stem out of an emotion associated with a life experience or the experience of a younger self or the inner child. It has been found that many of our behavior patterns and thinking are due to our conditioning.

Now, what is conditioning? It is a form of learning or associating responses to particular stimuli. It is also a million other subtle things like the acknowledgement that our emotions received, the responses our questions got, the attention an achievement got us, and many more. One can say that conditioning is a collection of associations of reactions and responses we got with the stimuli given from our end.

The inner child can build habits as a coping mechanism, a defense mechanism or just based on the conditioning. But these inner child habits or wounds inevitably bleed into adulthood. It’s not very obvious which behavior is which wound bleeding, but with enough introspection and retrospection, patterns can be recognized and associated with a particular inner child wound.

The reason these wounds act out in adulthood is simply because the underlying feeling of the inner child has not been addressed.
Just an example, when an infant wants something, they cry until they gets it. But when a toddler wants something, they ask, but if denied, they go back to their inner child habit of crying till they get what they want, the want or the underlying feeling in this case has not been addressed.

In adulthood, when the adult’s needs or wants aren’t met, or their feels are left unresolved, that’s when they involuntarily go back to the habits that used to get them what they wanted. Most of time the adult will not even be aware that they have such a habit.

When you see someone being unreasonable when they are upset over something, or acting out, look beyond their actions, at the person who is acting. It is mostly the inner child that faced a similar situation or felt a similar feeling. It’s frightening how many of our responses, habits and behaviors are a result of such inner child wounds.

When we analyze these detrimental patterns, that may have protected us when we were kids, but no longer serve us, it can be seen that to a threatening cue, our response is involuntary. We probably would have responded the same way to many such similar cues that now that response has become a habit. There is a subconscious association formed between a group of cues that are similar to the ones that caused the inner child’s wounds, and the corresponding response that is supposed to save you. The key to breaking the pattern is to weaken the association of the cues, and the habit formed as a response to it.

I recently started inner child therapy and the journey has been spectacular. I never knew how wounded my inner child was until I started recognizing patterns in my behavior. Once I recognized the patterns and the associated environment and the feelings, it became easier for me to break those patterns. Once I recognize a pattern, all I have to do is address the underlying feeling. For me, most of the time the underlying feeling is fear or loneliness and I just have to console the inner child, tell her that the situations are different and that there is nothing to worry about. Once I calm my inner child down, I don’t feel the need to act out of habit. Now the response to the cue can be different.

This is what works for me. I found out what works best for me through trial and error. Each individual is different, hence their underlying feelings and the way of addressing those feelings also differ.

So, fellow survivors, I hope you find what works the best for you, end this vicious feedback loop and break free. Much love.