By Blake D. Bauer //

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

The term ‘wounded inner child’ typically refers to the emotional pain experienced during childhood that currently remains unhealed within us. The reason it’s optimal to address this topic is because our psychological and emotional wounds from childhood are directly connected to the situations and relationships that are currently full of victimhood and blame. In order to love and heal ourselves fully, we subconsciously create experiences in the present that mirror experiences from our past, often from childhood, so we can (1) transform the associated pain that is still stored within us and (2) learn the important lessons necessary to fulfill our life’s purpose and awaken spiritually. If we have not fully healed a past experience or period that was painful or confusing, then we will instinctually create situations in the present that reflect back to us the unresolved emotions from the original incident(s), ultimately so we can make peace with our past, care for ourselves more deeply, and enjoy our life now.

The feelings of hurt and powerlessness that always co-arise with our patterns of blame and victimhood actually exist so that we can bring unconditional love and awareness to the child within us and heal these deeply rooted wounds from the past. Through giving ourselves the unconditional love that most of us did not receive as children, we can, in a sense, become the enlightened parents we never had, parent our own soul, and thus transform any limitations created during childhood. By using our innate intelligence to revisit past memories and experiences that were painful, scary, traumatic or love-deprived, we can fill these dark inner spaces with the love, compassion and belief in ourselves we’ve always needed to be happy and well.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
— Sigmund Freud

Another way of looking at the process of healing our wounded inner child focuses primarily on the subtle relationship between our body and what we term our soul. Although our physical body and our soul are not actually separate in any way, from this particular perspective, when we encounter painful, scary or traumatic experiences as children, parts of us, or fragments of our soul, actually disassociate and leave our body until we feel it’s safe to return. In these instances, the psychological and emotional pain is often too overwhelming for us to feel and process, so we repress both the emotion and the memory into some part of our physical body. This process literally pushes fragments of our soul out into the space surrounding our physical body (typically called our energy body). The overwhelming emotional pain often felt during childhood becomes bottled up in a way where it fills both the open spaces and the cells that make up our physical body, thereby forcing parts of our non-physical self outside our body until we’re ready to heal these emotional wounds and embody these parts of our true self fully once again.

Each of us can heal our early emotional pain through creating a loving and safe environment within ourselves and our lives now. More specifically, we can go back both in time and in memory to invite all of ourselves, or all of our soul, back into our body by bringing the wisdom of our lived experience to our inner child.

Our lives can be viewed simply as the journey from healing our wounded inner child to embodying an enlightened form of our inner child, because as we heal our repressed emotional pain and master the lessons we came here to learn, we not only rediscover the innocence, purity, openness and vulnerability of a child, but we also exemplify true wisdom, love, intelligence and self-awareness. Even if our childhood was extremely traumatic or painful, through giving ourselves the love we’ve always deserved, we can still liberate ourselves from our suffering and learn how to be happy now. The more loving attention we direct inwards towards healing our inner child, the sooner we welcome home the parts of ourselves that we’ve lost touch with and the more joyful, authentic and simple our lives become.

Excepted from international bestselling book You Were Not Born To Suffer

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