Inner Child: A Pandora’s Box of Addictions! Rachel Devine
The inner child might sound like a far-fetched notion of a Freudian error from the past. It might conjure up pictures of your childhood—the good, the bad, and the ugly. However, the inner child is alive and well and dwells within each one of us. The inner child is in charge of steering our lives in one direction or another, depending on the emotions and experiences it was fed throughout your childhood. This revelation is enough to get anyone’s attention, as it is vital information on why your life is where it is today. The really crucial part of inner child dilemma is with addiction. If you tried to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, or working long hours, and you can’t do it, it’s time to look at the inner child. Reparenting your inner child is key. Inner child healing is possible in order to curb addictions. Let’s explore this a little deeper.
Inner child definition
The inner child is our feelings, energies, needs, vulnerabilities, experiences, and neurological imprint. Simply put, the inner child is part of your personality that still feels and acts like a child.
The inner child that develops in each of our individual childhoods is what navigates our subconscious mind and drives our decisions in life without our realizing it. The subconscious holds all your experiences, traumas, and family interactions. The subconscious mind is the navigator of most of your life and is very powerful. In fact, the subconscious mind is in charge of 95% of your life, which includes your actions, decisions, and pretty much all that you do in a day.
When we struggle to move forward in life, to get out of a bad relationship, to start a love relationship, or to break an addiction, all of these decisions are coming from the subconscious mind of the inner child. That imprint that was embedded in our mind at different developmental stages is ingrained in our subconscious, and our adult intellect tries to reason with certain decisions we make but usually loses out to the fear or insecurity of the inner child. And most people are oblivious to this conflict that is going on within them and have no clue as to why they make certain decisions that are unhealthy for them. Make no mistake about it, when I say “subconscious mind,” it means we are totally oblivious to what is happening in that part of our psyches.
The wounded inner child
The dilemma ensues when our childhood was dysfunctional with things like alcoholism, drug addiction, abusive parents, etc. All of us have some degree of dysfunction from childhood; it is a matter of degrees. The inner child develops during the infant to 7-year-old stage. If you didn’t get your fundamental needs met at that stage, you would grow up to be a needy adult and perhaps fill that inner void with addictions such as alcohol, food, people, work, drugs, shopping, etc. This addictive behavior is to offset the void and also keep one in a numb state of having to feel our feelings. The wounded inner child wants to heal from the past. Inner child work is necessary to curb addictions.
Struggles with addiction
Most people struggle with addiction because, at the root of the problem, there is this feeling of emptiness within. I truly believe that if we fill that void with something healthy, it will help release the addiction. For instance, one can fill that void with exercise. Exercise induces endorphins, which make one feel good. When I tried to stop smoking, it was much easier when I exercised. Or you can fill the void with your own self-love. Loving yourself and parenting yourself can turn your whole world around for the better. Or you can fill that void with your Higher Power. The reason 12 step programs are so successful is because it reconnects one to their Higher Power. Being the parent of your inner child is key to releasing some of the hurt from the past. Parenting yourself is crucial to healing.
When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
Healing for the inner child
Once you can start to heal your inner child, the addictions will be more manageable. So, how do you heal the inner child? The first step would be to impress positive feelings into the subconscious mind. Remember, the subconscious mind drives your life 95% of the time. It makes sense to feed it positive feelings to offset the negativity from the past. The time to do that is just before you fall asleep at night. As you go from a subconscious to an unconscious state of sleeping, that is the most powerful time to feed the subconscious positive thoughts.
Make no mistake about it. Some of us are addicted to food, especially carbs and sugar. So, let’s say you want to lose weight. You will think about one image of yourself as slim, as if you already lost the weight, and fall asleep with that image in your head and with the feelings of how it would feel to be slim. You would feel healthy, happy, secure, etc. Those feelings will get into your subconscious mind and drive your life in the direction of losing weight.
Your story
In order to tame any addiction, your story has to align with the direction you want to go.
Here is an example of a negative story:
I have done everything, and I can’t lose weight.
What if we changed this story to a positive one?
I am willing to do anything to lose weight!
Your story must align with a positive light in the direction you want your life to go. Whether that is in business, healing, or anything you want to achieve in life.
Affirmations
Affirmations are phrases that are positive. Saying them out loud on a daily basis, consistently, will penetrate the subconscious mind. Whatever you say after the words “I am” is crucial to your inner child.
Some positive “I am” affirmations are:
I am loved.
I am beautiful.
I am successful.
I am happy.
I am a child of God.
Visualization
If you recall a time in your life when you were alone with some pain from childhood, you can change the feelings around. We all have them. Even being left out of a party can be traumatic for a little child. Just visualize that time in your life as a child and put yourself in that time frame in your visualization as an adult. Now you have a chance to comfort your inner child with words of kindness, love, and assurance. You can even give your inner child a hug. Going back to the hard times of your childhood and being a parent can heal one layer of many that would need healing. The more you do it, the more healing you will have.
In closing, it is crucial to connect with your inner child and start the healing process. You don’t want to live life in an oblivious state of not understanding the inner child factor. We all have hidden negative experiences from our childhood that cause havoc in our present world. Reparenting your inner child, with love, comfort and security is the most loving form of self-care. It will foster inner child healing and peace in your adult life. You have a choice, will you take this awareness to heart, or walk away to the same routine as yesterday.
Rachel Devine is the author of The Third Road and Lessons from the Needle in a Haystack, both on Amazon. My new book on the inner child and the subconscious mind will be out very soon.
Devine Intervention: Inner Healing Center website