edunguy, this is good insight and the first steps of discovery can lead to improvement. At first your inner child will not know how to play or feel that he is allowed to due to the past parental involvement. At some point you may feel grief for the loss of the childhood but that grief process can lead to gradually allowing the child to have fun. Damaged does not mean forever. I'm going to give you a link to transactional analysis, this is something that help me to better understand the make up of my personality and thus helped me to help those wounded child parts... Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis parent adult child model, theory and history article