By Susan Vaughn, Compiled By Katie Vaughn-Kelso

Introduction
Review Of Literature
The Psychological Perspective
The Metaphysical Inner Child & Adolescent
Healing
Healing The Inner Child
Healing The Inner Adolescent
Tools For Healing
Bibliography

Introduction

The inner child is a concept that has been thoroughly explored by psychologists, psychotherapists, spiritual, and religious healers throughout time. Carl Jung called it the "Divine Child," Sandor Ferenczi the "Wise Child," Emmet Fox the "Wonder Child," and Charles Whitefield the "Child Within." Each discipline of thought has its own specific explanation for this aspect of the self. The inner child and adolescent is the part of our personality that represents those phases in our life, and are a part of the whole, integrated self, which also includes the real or "True" self, higher self and soul. Your True Self is that part of you that's "real," or truly an adult. The True or Real Self has integrated all of its parts into a working whole. Jacquis Bishop, M.S. and Mary Grunte, R.N. in How To Love Yourself When You Don't Know How: Healing All Your Inner Children (1992) explain the "Inner Family:" "'Inner' refers to what exists in the person's internal awareness, as opposed to what exists outside the body and can be seen by others. 'Family' refers to patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that resemble a family structure of personalities and interactions... When we listen carefully to [the] words and phrases [that run through our brains and tell us how we are or should be thinking, feeling, and acting], they begin to sound as if they are coming from particular personalities with distinctive characters. As we continue to observe, it becomes clear that some of these characters sound adult while others sound childlike... their patterns of internal communication... recall our own upbringing."

Our concern here is not so much the philosophy behind the Inner Child, but rather how to heal it so that we may be more whole and centered. In his book The New Millennium With Lazaris (1999), Lazaris says, "Your spirituality calls you to the challenge. You are at a crossroads. Your future is waiting with so much abundance and bounty, happiness and success. In so many ways, we would suggest, seeking your Truer Self is the next step in your quest for love. With new ways of changing and new ways of growing, you must have known that there would be new ways of loving." This course is meant to help you discover, heal, love, and play with your inner children. This journey will not be embarked on alone, for the higher self within each of us is always there to guide, heal, and love us. Lazaris (1999) explains the Higher Self: "There is something that breathes that breath of aliveness into you, that turns that technique of living into the art of being alive. That something is your Higher Conscious or your Higher Self."

Inner Child: Index > >

Review Of Literature

Home Coming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child (1990) by John Bradshaw. John Bradshaw is a professional counselor and author of numerous best-selling self-help books as well as the creator a nationally broadcast PBS television series and a syndicated TV show, The Bradshaw Difference. Home Coming is divided into four sections: The Problem of the Wounded Child; Reclaiming Your Wounded Inner Child; Championing Your Wounded Inner Child; and Regeneration.

Journey To The Beloved (1996) by Susan Vaughn M.A. Susan Vaughn is a published author, public speaker, teacher, and therapist. She has been teaching courses in Reality Creation for over fifteen years. She has a Masters Degree in Marriage and Family therapy. She is a trained hypnotherapist, and spent numerous years working with A Course In Miracles and the channeled being Lazaris, both of which are at the core of her work. Her own book, Journey To The Beloved, is a spiritual guide to healing with the assistance of our Higher Self.

How To Love Yourself When You Don't Know How: Healing All Your Inner Children (1992) by Jacquis Bishop, M.S. and Mary Grunte, R.N. Jacquis Bishop has carried on a private psychotherapy practice since 1982 in White Plains, NY. A graduate of the Foundation for Religion & Mental Health program in Transactional Analysis and Gestalt, Jacquis has also worked with Dan Casriel, M.D., at the Casriel Institute in the New Identity Process and has done extensive work in a wide variety of other healing disciplines, including rebirthing, massage, Alexander, and other bodywork techniques. Mary Grunte is a therapist and a psychiatric nurse. They are both authors of numerous other titles. How To Love Yourself is aimed to help the reader re-educate the inner grown-up to love unconditionally, opening the way for profound healing of psychic wounds.

Lazaris is a spiritual being channeled through Jack Pursel. Lazaris has conducted workshops on spiritual healing, growth, and reality creation through his channel since 1974. For this course we focus on The New Millennium With Lazaris (1999) and Healing The Child Within (1991). From the publishers, "Since 1974, Lazaris has channeled through Jach Pursel, his only channel, offering his friendship and love, and generating a remarkable body of tools, techniques, processes and pathways for our Spiritual Journey Home to God/Goddess/All That Is. He has touched thousands in his extraordinary workshops, and tens of thousands more with the books, video tapes and audio tapes that many have said are the finest tools of metaphysics and spirituality available. We invite you to explore the Love, the Light, the Joy, and the Wonder which is the Spark of Love known as Lazaris." He offers taped lectures and has also dictated numerous books including The Sacred Journey: You And Your Higher Self. This love and wisdom is profound and touching.

The Inner Child by Hal and Sidra Stone. From their biography, "Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D., are the creators of "Voice Dialogue" and the authors of the trailblazing books Partnering, Embracing Our Selves, Embracing Each Other, and Embracing Your Inner Critic. Their books have been translated into eight different languages. For the past eighteen years Hal and Sidra have taught together, both nationally and internationally, on the subjects of Voice Dialogue, relationship and the selves, and the Psychology of the Aware Ego. They have taught in Australia, England, Holland, France, Germany, Norway, Israel, Hungary, and Switzerland."

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The Psychological Perspective

To understand the inner child, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of personality. How the human personality is created is explained in a variety of ways from a variety of viewpoints. As any parent of multiple children knows, that while their children get essentially the same love and care, they each are unique, sometimes drastically different. Although our environment plays a large part in the development of the personality of a child, so do our genetics. Reunited twins, or the discovery of long lost parents often reveal amazing similarities in personality that can't be accounted environmentally. The only other explanation is that our genes determine a great deal about our disposition. Our disposition could also be called our karma, for the way one approaches life has a great deal to do with the reality one creates in that life.

There are a variety of components to the personality, explained in a variety of ways within psychology and spirituality. According to Dr. George Boeree (1997), Carl Jung calls the personality the psyche and theorizes it has three components: the ego (the conscious mind), the personal unconscious (personal knowledge that is not currently conscious, but could be), and the collective unconscious (that which we are born knowing or the "psychic inheritance"). The universal archetypes, such as the Mother, Father, Anima and Animus, Hero, Maiden, Warrior, and so on, are in the collective unconscious. They also have an effect on the personal unconscious as we individually live the archetypes the way our culture defines them. The inner child and adolescent can be seen as one of these archetypes of the psyche.

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The Metaphysical Inner Child & Adolescent

The inner child and adolescent are the parts of our personality that represents the needs of those phases in our life. The child, knowing nothing but self, is completely self-centered, while the adolescent, who has figured out that other people have needs too, tends to be self-important. In other words, the adolescent believes that their needs are more important than anyone else's. Although self-centered, the child is generally happy to receive guidance and care from adults. The adolescent, on the other hand, thinks he or she "knows it all." Bishop and Grunte (1992), explain, "Inner Children [includes Inner Teens] are the one or more young personalities we all have inside us. In many ways, these Inner Children are just like outer children-loving, curious, full of feeling and emotion, intelligent, and complete. They differ from outer children in that: (1) they share a physical body with an adult being-that is, you; (2) they are caught in a time warp: that is, even though the body they inhabit is fully grown, they still think they're physically small and proportionately vulnerable, especially to people who resemble their original caretakers in some way; (3) when threatened, they revert to behaviors that are related to unhappy events early in their lives, and they recreate the sense of helplessness, pain, rage, and fear that those original events evoked in them."

These are healthy parts of our psyches and part of the whole but they are also immature. These parts of us do not die but must be evolved. We will never stop having the self-centered attributes of our inner child, nor lose the self-important and righteous attitude of our inner adolescent, because, as Bishop and Grunte (1992), explain, "These Inner Children are made up of our own memories and our own emotional, thinking, and behavioral patterns at various ages, and so they are part of what makes every one of us who we are... Inner Children aren't abnormal or alien, nor does their presence in any way prevent us from being whole, integrated adults. Quite the contrary: The quality of our lives expand and deepen as we get to know and learn to care for them properly." Everyone who incarnates has a shadow. Our shadows harbor the remnants of immature, self-centered and self-important behaviors not yet outgrown from childhood. It also contains the leftover limited beliefs garnered from childhood that lead to lives that are less than successful. We carry our childhood terrors, and the defenses designed to protect us from what we fear in our shadows as well. Because these things are part of the operating systems of the child and adolescent within us, they will continue to function in our lives in ways we don't recognize if our adult self doesn't recognize these behavior patterns and transcend them by choosing to transform this mentality and see things differently. As Lazaris clearly states, "Becoming an adult is a conscious choice." The problem arises when childhood abuse, neglect, or trauma stunts our spiritual and emotional growth. John Bradshaw, in his book Home Coming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child (1990), uses the tool of a mnemonic formula to describe the contamination a wounded inner child has on our lives:

Co-Dependence
Offender Behaviors
Narcissistic Disorders
Trust Issues
Acting Out/Acting In Behaviors
Magical Beliefs
Intimacy Dysfunctions
Nondisciplined Behaviors
Addiction/Compulsive Behaviors
Thought Distortions
Emptiness (Apathy, Depression)

A responsible, healed adult recognizes when he or she behaves immaturely. Honest self-assessment, asking for forgiveness, making amends and changing behavior is the outcome. Before this can happen, however, the child and adolescent must be healed.

Most of us were born to parents who were immature in some way. Because our society doesn't teach us how to grow up, our parents, at least to some extent, probably stagnated in immature ways of being and behaving. Being poor role models, they could not teach us what we needed to know to become more mature, happier, and loving individuals. Being immature, our parents often treated us in unloving and irresponsible ways. Bishop and Grunte (1992) state, "When a person's Inner Grown-up fully loves and properly cares for every one of the Inner Children, the person experiences a sense of wholeness, health, and joy, as well as love for self and others, regardless of our outer circumstances... However, because no parent is perfect in all areas, and parents can't teach what they themselves don't know, most of us lack the information that can allow us to change, as well as the role models that can teach us how. Many are poorly equipped for the job of taking care of their Inner Children... When ill-equipped, we tend to resort to behaviors that aren't suited to adult life because, in some respect, we disregard the connection between action and consequences." This causes us to feel pain.

As children and adolescents, we were not yet mature enough to protect ourselves and also process this pain, so parts of our personality stagnated at those stages of development. Because most adolescents stop listening to authority figures (especially authority figures who are immature themselves), they become pioneering crusaders who are determined to make their own way in the world. Not seeing the bigger picture, their ways will fail just like their parents. Eventually, they too will learn the lessons evolution teaches everyone. Until the mature part of us processes the emotions from the painful childhood incidents, we will hold onto the grievances, reacting in the same way as adults that we did as children and adolescents. Our goal is to change these patterns, as Lazaris (1999) lovingly reminds us, "It's not about fixing. It's about changing. It's not about fixing others, it's about giving them space and allowing them to change. It's not about fixing the world, it's about having enough passion, love, and beauty to allow the world to evolve."

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Healing

Healing past traumatic events releases us from our blockages, allowing us to becoming whole and integrated individuals. Lazaris (1999) describes how these blockages color our perception: "Blockages are like steam on the bathroom mirror... they keep you from seeing yourself. Through the blurred image, your foggy shape becomes a scary monster and you run rather than clean the mirror. Do you hate yourself for a steamy mirror? Then, why do you hate yourself for your mental fog? You clean the mirror; you discover yourself." Healing past traumatic events is often a scary and daunting task, but Lazaris (1999) encourages that, "Everyone feels fear. Those with courage just act in spite of it... The greatest joy is the joy of healing... What was once the source of your pain can now be the resources of your success." Susan Vaughn, in her book, Journey To The Beloved (1996) illustrates the consequences of not taking the responsibility to heal, "Although shoving painful memories into your subconscious mind is a protective device that allows the child to survive traumatic events, if the memories aren't re-accessed and healed, the device that protected the child will kill the adult. Therefore, although you may not want to dredge up your childhood pain, it is imperative that you do so if you desire to cleanse your energy field of the toxic pain that creates disease." Bishop and Grunte (1992) define healing, "'Healing' means to restore to a healthy condition, to make sound, to reconcile. Inner Family Healing, then, means reconciling to one another the various Inner Children and the Grown-up that constitute the Inner Family in each of us, and restore a proper balance of roles in which the adult assumes responsibility for the Inner Children."

In order to fully heal, we must do two things:

1. The traumatic events of the past caused by poor parenting, sibling rivalry, other adults who were immature, and other children and adolescents who abused us, must be healed.
2. We must take responsibility for our own immaturity and the ways that we hurt others and learn to consciously re-parent ourselves.

To heal the child and adolescent, we must go to them in trance, let them talk about their fears and frustrations and honor all of their emotions without judgment, as Vaughn (1996) states, "In order to heal, you must go back to the time and space, when and where the pollution [painful experiences] was put into the steam of your consciousness and heal it there." Then, the true adult self must re-parent them wisely with accurate information about reality creation. They must do this by building rapport, never by shaming the child. You build rapport by understanding how and why the child was the way he/she was and not blaming them for their immaturity. Hating yourself is not going to heal the inner child. It will only antagonize it and cause it to act out more.

In child/adolescent rescue work, we must address survival issues, issues of value, and/or issues of adequacy in every traumatic incident of our past. We must also help them create principles and values that foster personal power. Once we give the child and adolescent within us permission to be what they are, without expecting or needing them to be different, they will feel accepted and loved. Vaughn (1996) explains, "After rescue work comes bonding and healing. Bonding is an experience of genuine, deep, unconditional love." Once they feel accepted and loved, they won't wreak havoc in our adult lives any more.

We come here to learn our life's lesson, live our purpose and become authentic adults. It is obvious by now why this doesn't happen. Very few children are adequately prepared for life by conscious, knowledgeable, mature, aware and wise adults. The unconsciousness of the parent is handed down to the child, who hands it down to their child. This is why no one is to blame for his or her problems, and also why we are all responsible for repairing the damage. Part of healing is recognizing that every experience (even the excruciatingly painful ones) serves to guide us on our life journey. As Lazaris says, "Everything in life is a reflection of something your Higher Self or Soul are trying to tell you about love." This is not to say that painful experiences were necessary; they were not, and as we learn to create our own realities as mature adults, we learn to grow through love instead of pain. In this way we can forgive the person who appears as the perpetrator of our past pain. We forgive not because it gives the perpetrator some sort of absolution, but because it lets us out of prison. Those who are stuck in the past, holding onto grievances, see their past experience through the eyes of the child they were when it happened, not the eyes of a true adult who sees a bigger picture. When we forgive, we move through the experience and on with our journey. Do not underestimate the power of forgiveness as Lazaris expresses, "Your scientists cannot measure nor imagine the immensity of its power... The force of forgiveness is no less. It can change you and your reality. And it will change the world." We do not have to forgive the act (as sometimes acts are unforgivable), but we can forgive the person as an immature soul struggling to find his or her own journey. Blame will not solve the problem but produces victims. In reality, we are each empowered to live the lives we choose, and with this empowerment comes the responsibility to create that life. Once we become conscious, and compassionately understand our history and that of our parents, we can stop judging ourselves. It is this that will allow us to heal. Bishop and Grunte (1992) explain that, "the key is educating the Grown-up to:

When the Grown-up performs all these tasks, a person becomes capable of empowered living-that is, living in the present-because one has forgiven others, the past, and all the Inner Children. Only then do we take full responsibility for ourselves and our actions." Once we have healed ourselves of our immaturity, we must break negative behavior patterns that we have been using since childhood and adolescence. Bishop and Grunte (1992) call this the Family Spell: "To a greater or lesser extent, all of us superimpose the experience of past relationships over present ones. We then activate the emotional reactions, assumptions, and behaviors that we believe helped us survive those early relationships."

In order to break the Family Spell three things are needed:

1. An understanding of the Family Spell and what keeps it in place.
2. A vision of what life could be like without the Spell.
3. A systematic way to implement that new vision.

Bishop and Grunte (1992) go on to state, "The Family Spell is a mental/emotional construction that replicates the structure and dynamics of power and love relationships as they evolved in our families." These patterns are neuronally programmed in our brains. However we are not imprisoned in our brain/bodies. We are spiritual beings with a will of our own who have the capacity to reprogram our minds consciously so that we can begin to see all things differently. Once we reprogram our mind, the very landscape of our brain changes accordingly for our neural pathways reconfigure themselves. Bishop and Grunte (1992) explain, "Developing a clear vision of what we want to become is the first step along the way to getting or becoming what we want..." Once we see things differently, we create a reality that heals us instead of one that destroys us. This may seem like an overwhelming and scary task, but we are not alone. We have a higher self, angels, and guides who can help us, and as Bishop and Grunte (1992) encourage us to do, "Trust your inner experience... Assume that what you hear or see or feel is valid, even if it doesn't seem to make sense or you think you're making it up."

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Healing The Inner Child

Healing begins with healing our belief system. When we heal our belief system, the True Self who communes with our higher self can figure out how to heal itself by evolving the child and adolescent. Lazaris (1999) states this simply: "Belief precedes reality. You create your own reality. There is no fine print... Nothing changes until you do." When the child and adolescent within us experience trauma, the unhealed emotions get stuck in the energy field. To get them out they must be expressed. To keep them out, the true adult, working in concert with the higher self, must do the work of figuring out how and why the trauma was created in the first place-life's lesson, limited beliefs, the shadow, or something else. We must figure out how and why we chose, at a soul level, those abusive parents, or the culture and religion that hurt us. When we understand this, we can truly forgive the past and let it go. It is time to think bigger than the lifetime itself and get to the soul level, the macrocosm.

Bishop and Grunte's The Three Stages of Inner Family Healing (1992) summarized is:

 1. Contacting the Inner Children and establishing an emotional bridge between them and the Grown-up...making physical contact [within the body] and begin speaking with and listening to the first Inner Child.
 2. Committing to the new vision in Inner Family terms...the Grown-up commits to assuming full responsibility for the Inner Children.
 3. Teaching the Grown-up how to respond to the Inner Children's needs... Two basic principles of parenting provide a framework for rectifying... early parenting errors.
    a. The Grown-up is always responsible for behavior. Regardless of how imperfect, inadequate, tired, angry, fearful, and ignorant the Grown-up may feel, there is no time off... When the Grown-up fails the Inner Child, there are no excuses. The only thing the Grown-up can do is ask forgiveness for letting the Inner Child down and commit to doing better next time.
    b. Inner Children's thoughts and feelings are always OK. When our inner children feel angry or think violent thoughts, they need permission to feel and express those feelings and thoughts in a safe way. Once expressed and acknowledged as coming from the Inner Child and not the Grown-up, the feelings begin to disappear.

"One's own Inner Children's needs take precedence over the needs and wants of outside adults... The general rule is, take care of yourself first, and then you will be able to help others as well."

In healing the inner children they must be reparented with a higher and wiser understanding of life. In particular, they must be helped to understand their own life. Figuring out why abuse happened is done through reflection and inner work with the higher self. Although the inner child is never responsible for the abusive behavior of others, at a higher level their soul allowed it. For what purpose can take intense inner work to understand. The more one knows about reality creation, life's lessons, and karma, the easier it is. Don't be surprised if it takes you weeks or even months to figure this part out. The answers are seldom obvious. This is what prayer is for. By placing our attention on how we are creating our reality and the reason behind it, in time information will come streaming in. We must use this information to re-parent the child and adolescent.

For example, perhaps being an abused child caused you to become a social worker who champions the rights of children. Without this earlier experience, you never would have found your life's purpose. When you reparent your inner children, you tell them that they did not cause the abuse, but that later on in life the experience gave them a sense of compassion and love that is well beyond the norm. Also, when you reparent your inner child you will tell him or her that not only are they lovable, but that there are many beings who do love them despite their flaws and errors, and that in time, their lovableness will manifest externally. Since everyone has numerous unseen friends, angels and guides, this statement is wholly true even if the child came from a highly dysfunctional or abusive family. The fact that loving people haven't yet manifested in form is irrelevant. This is the "bigger picture" that the child needs to be taught before he or she can believe in a positive future.

In the tape, The Child Within (1990), Hal and Sidra Stone state that the well being of the child within is of utmost importance in determining the quality of our lives because it carries the rhythm of our essential being. If the child within isn't getting its needs met, the adult self is not living a balanced life. The child within determines the level of intimacy we are able to give and receive. It is the doorway to the soul and to soul to soul relationships. The child within has several aspects, all of which must be addressed.

• The vulnerable child carries the pain of childhood. This aspect is totally defenseless against the world.
• The magical child is connected to our imagination and fantasy life.
• The playful child knows how to enjoy life in a childlike and innocent way.
• The shy child doesn't like to be looked at and is easily embarrassed.
• The needy child is dependent on others for gratification and safety.
• The inner brat wants its own way and doesn't care about the needs of others. It's the part of you that will throw a tantrum when you don't get what you want.

Hal and Sidra Stone further state that the inner child is incredibly sensitive and responsive to emotion. The child doesn't listen to words, but listens with the heart. The child's love is very personal and human. There is no intellectualism in it. The inner child often fears abandonment and will do anything to be loved. Each personality drive surfaces as a survival mechanism created by the child who knows of no other way to survive. Because the child was easily victimized, the primary self identifies with power and all the ways it can become more powerful. It screens out of its awareness all of the child's wants, needs and desires in its attempt to protect itself. We can't live life as children but we must develop an aware ego that can deal with their needs.

In the process of maturity and becoming powerful, the inner child gets buried, for it is a hindrance in this process. We deny its needs, refuse to believe we are vulnerable, forget how to truly play and have fun in our high tech, materialistic, competitive world, and reduce our imagination and creativity to almost nothing. We push ourselves to do more, be more, and become more visible even though the shy and vulnerable inner child just wants to be left alone to do life quietly. The improper care of the child results in a clingy, dependent child who becomes really desperate. When the child's needs aren't met, the tantrum throwing brat may run your life with hidden agendas, payoffs and negative scripts that may be abusive. Or else the shy child who is full of limited beliefs won't allow you to go after your dreams.

It is the job of an aware ego to be responsible and re-parent the inner child. If the inner child is not cared for by a conscious aware adult (which Bishop and Grunte (1992) call the Inner Parent) it will bond with someone who will take care of it in a co-dependent relationship. Lazaris reminds us, "There is no duty or obligation; only responsibility... your own." You can contact the child at different ages, even the preverbal stage. Very young children don't talk much. You must spend time with the child, honor its fears and see what it wants and needs to be safe. You must discover what the child enjoys doing. You must allow the child within to express its hurt at being ignored and victimized.

Hal and Sidra Stone believe that you must learn to meet the child's needs, which are very basic. The child needs to stay out of toxic situations where it can get further damaged. The child needs plenty of appropriate food and rest. It needs financial security. It likes a certain amount of predictability and schedules. It likes to be in an attractive, orderly environment. The child is also cared for when you develop a spiritual belief system that brings you a sense of comfort, safety and security.

Inner Child: Index > >

Healing The Inner Adolescent

In his tape on healing the adolescent, Lazaris says that healing the adolescent is more complex than healing the child because the adolescent is adept at hiding the pain. Whereas the child can't control their feelings, the adolescent can and does. Adolescents, however become rebellious in an attempt to deal with their pain. Through their rebellion, they camouflage it, making the issue into their behavior instead of the underlying pain that is causing the rebellion. The inner adolescent has very intense emotions they have learned to hide or numb out. Bishop and Grunte (1992) describes Teenage Inner Children as "concerned with what their peers think, are preoccupied with the challenges of learning social skills, are struggling to accommodate enormous sexual changes, and are working to establish themselves as separate from their parents." It can be frightening to work with them because of their intensity. The adolescent within is very rigid and has a thick "crust." They are resistant to anyone telling them what to do for they no longer trust authority figures. Consequently, your inner adolescent will resist even you. Part of your work in healing them will be to break down their distrust of you.

The adolescent years are unique. They must quell their fear of chaos and terror of responsibility. They do so by creating absolutes (the dark laws of: I will never be good enough. I will never be a success, etc.), and numbing out with drugs or alcohol, and/or by distracting themselves with sex, parties, video games, and more. The adolescent lacks identity. They don't know who they are. They have been taught by others what to believe for so long, they haven't figured out what they believe. The adult who is addicted to substances is acting from an inner adolescent point of view.

The adolescent is usually a performer. They have learned to play the game that authority figures demand. They will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. They are notorious for acting without thought of consequences, for thinking without feeling or feeling without thinking. This produces short-sighted conclusions.

During adolescence we were hurt, betrayed and abandoned at such an intensity that it wounded our soul. During the wounding we felt humiliated. This resulted in a demand of perfection for self and others that constantly led to condemnation and judgment. This led to self-rejection and the feeling of rejection from others. They feel that no one cares. They don't even care about themselves.

Inner Child: Index > >

Tools For Healing

Lazaris suggested how to heal the inner child and adolescent in meditation. In the tape Healing the Child Within (1991), he says to set aside time to work with each in meditation. You can work with the child at different ages for a month and than the adolescent.

Child:

• The first week of inner child work, go find the child where they used to go to be alone, safe, and private. I actually hid in my closet to get away from my mother. Some people may go to a tree house, or out back behind the garage. After you find the child, let it talk about the pain. As it talks simply love them. Young children need lots of holding, and rocking. They need to be given unconditional love and acceptance. Keep telling them that they are loved.
• During the second week go back to the same place with the child, but now tell it how you are going to meet its needs. Then talk about how life will be different once their needs are met. Explain to the child that you will still love it once it is healed.
• In the third week, go back to the same place with your child, but now bring in your higher self and any angels, guides or spiritual figures that you relate to heal the child. Let them touch and hold the child, send energy, laying-on of hands, and whatever else the guides feel moved to do.
• In the last week, go back to the same place with the child. Surround the child with light. Allow the child to play, run and have fun in the light.

Adolescent:

• Next find the adolescent in pain in a private place where it used to live. The two of you work together to create a safe place in nature. Ask what kinds of scenery it would like to have-rivers, mountains, fields, etc. What other magical things would the adolescent like to include? This information must come from the adolescent and be a safe place, no adults. It can be imaginative, including castles, magical ornaments, and so on.
• In the second week bring your higher self in to evaluate the safe place to discover the symbolic meaning of the scenery that you chose. Listen to the whispers from the higher self. Receive a box or treasure chest from the higher self and put it somewhere in your safe place. Visualize it clearly. Leave it there for later use.
• In the third week, go to the safe place to talk to the adolescent about its problems. Just listen. Don't tell them what to do. If they think, help them feel. If they feel, help them think. Don't be a parent or teacher, but a friend and confidant.
• In the last week go back to the safe place with your higher self to talk to your adolescent. Have the adolescent lie down by the treasure chest, visualizing it clearly. Open the chest. Out will come a mist, vapor or color of light which will fill the safe place. This mist will resolve the pain. As the thing is released from the box, instruct the adolescent that he or she will understand the real nature of the pain. Together, the two of you will know that you are loved by your higher self who will talk to you at this time about how much you are loved. Let your Higher Self fill both of you with love and light, and as Lazaris (1999) reminds us, "Give your Higher Self room to help you know the new you."

Beyond this, work to create communion with your child and adolescent, you must also rescue them from specific traumatic incidences from their past. In trance, go back to the time and space the trauma occurred. Let the child or adolescent express the pain and rage, fear or shame. Heal the child by loving it unconditionally and giving it evolved but age appropriate information about reality creation. In other words, reparent them with the truth, instead of the cultural lies most of us received. If the child is terrified of an abuser protect him or her in any way that makes sense to you. You can be as imaginative and creative as you like. When the intent is to heal, it is not inappropriate to imagine killing an abuser or putting him or her in jail if it helps the child or adolescent release negative emotions. Sending an abuser to jail and throwing away the key, or putting them in a space ship and sending them to another planet are also appropriate ways to deal with an abuser in meditation.

Inner child and adolescent work has four basic parts:

1. Relive: spend 1 or 2 minutes watching the traumatic event from start to finish as if it were happening now. Become a compassionate observer. Vaughn (1996) states, "Re-accessing the energy field is a simple matter of visualizing the events leading up to the traumatic incident and then getting in touch with the feelings the events have caused." Pretending that it is happening now is the key.
2. Re-feel the pain and let the inner child or adolescent express it. The true adult must evoke an emotional response if none is present. Usually, asking how the child feels is all that is necessary. As the adult, you might be required to help elaborate. At this point, the pain, fear, trauma, shame, or anger should actually be felt in your body. If the child felt fear then, if you are doing this meditation effectively, you will actually feel it again in your adult body. Don't be afraid to make it up and just pretend. "Fake it until you make it" is totally OK. In time, the real emotions will come.
3. Rescue the inner child and adolescent by becoming their authentic inner parent, advocate and protector. If abusers need to be told off, or hacked into bits, do it. If they need to be put into jail, put them into jail. If the children or adolescents simply need better social skills or to be more adequately prepared for life, tell them what they need to know. It is up to the adult self to do what needs to be done to defend and protect their child. This gives the child the message that he or she is not a victim. This is an important part of the healing process for you, the authentic parent, must learn to generate a resonance of self-protection. In other words, you must know right from wrong and do what needs to be done to protect the innocent.
4. Heal the inner children and adolescents by bonding with them, which usually includes physical touching like holding or rocking, and telling them that you love them and won't leave them. You can also do an imaginative healing ritual with angels and guides, cleansing baths and magic potions that make them feel comforted and cared for.

When we relive past events as though they are happening now, we re-access the energy field of who we were then. Expressing the emotions releases pain from the energy field. Rewriting the script in the way just described keeps it out. Talk therapy doesn't work because we don't re-access the energy field. All it can do is help us clarify the issues, which never go away. They just get analyzed to death. If we don't act on what we've learned by releasing the charge, we will never be healed. Past wounds will still haunt us.

In order to heal we must heal through love. Lazaris (1999) tells us, "Love's magic is the most powerful magic of all... You are loved more than you know." The child and adolescent must be unconditionally loved by the true adult self. They must also be creatively taught the truth to give them a motivation to evolve. When we do meditative work with child and adolescent, the emotions become easily accessible. Eventually, the emotions must be brought into the adult body where they can be felt, expressed and released.

Vaughn (1996) says: "If the child or adolescent is numbed out, not feeling anything, the adult can ask them questions to get them to talk about their feelings. Eventually, emotions will be felt. A single meditation may have to be done several times until this happens. If the child or adolescent isn't feeling what "should" be felt, some belief stands in the way that must be dealt with before healing can occur. For example, I once worked with a woman who had been date raped at age thirteen by two 18 year old teenage boys. Her feeling was one of shame and stupidity. She thought she should have known better. Out of trance, I had to help my client see that the boys needed to be held responsible for their behavior and that rage might be a more appropriate response. Your adult self may have to be creative in the way it helps the children or adolescents discover the truth, because all their feelings must be honored. The adult self must learn to move emotions when none come forth. I usually do this by asking probing questions that produce feelings."

Rescuing the child and adolescent may only take the form of re-education. Bonding is an important part of inner child and adolescent work. Bonding is an experience of genuine, deep, unconditional love that allows us to make mistakes without being humiliated by them. It may take time to develop, especially if you thought your child or adolescent was stupid, a failure, inadequate, or some other negative aspect.

If you do not like your child or adolescent, give the part of you who hates them a voice and let it talk: See what's in there. Talk to your higher self about how you feel. Think about what it would be like if you dumped that amount of hatred on an external child. Would they grow into happy adults? Every time you tell yourself how stupid you are, you are addressing your inner child.

If it is difficult to express negative emotions to an abuser who was both good and bad, do a split off technique in which the abuser splits into the good person and bad person. The good person can be acknowledged with an award or medal. The bad person must be told what the impact of their behavior was.

Identify what your complexes are. Complexes revolve around feelings of inadequacy, valuelessness, and survival. Address these issues in every child rescue session. It is important to heal all issues involving sexuality, for almost everyone has received many erroneous messages about sex. Sex is a driving force programmed into the body through the DNA. If this force is given to a negative ego, it becomes very destructive. The child and adolescent must be reprogrammed with a spiritually mature concept of sexuality. If you don't know what that is, research what some of your favorite spiritual teachers say about the subject.

As we heal the child and adolescent, our resonance begins to lift and change. Bradshaw (1990), affirms, "Three things are striking about inner child work. The speed with which people change when they do this work; the depth of that change; and the power and creativity that result when the wounds from the past are healed." When the child and adolescent have learned to love life, their love for life will create a resonance that's bound to heal us.

Inner Child: Index > >

Bibliography

Boeree, George C., Dr. 1997
Carl Jung, http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/jung.html

Vaughn, Susan M.A. 1996
Journey To The Beloved, New World Library; Novato, California

Lazaris 1999
The New Millennium With Lazaris, NPN Publishing, Inc.; Orlando, Florida

Lazaris 1991 (audio tape)
Healing The Child Within, Concept Synergy; Orlando Florida

Bishop, Jacquis M.S. And Grunte, Mary R.N. 1992
How To Love Yourself When You Don't Know How: Healing All Your Inner Children,
Station Hill Press, Inc.; Barrytown, New York

Bradshaw, John 1990
Home Coming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child.
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.; New York, NY

Stone, Hal & Sidra 1990 (audio tape)
The Inner Child, Delos Inc.; Collegeville, Pennsylvania