My inner child ?????

Hi . I have posted once before here. I have dissociative issues. My T has been talking alot about getting in touch w/ my inner child. I'm not sure what that means. She says I'll know when she shows up or she can help me find her. Sounds kinda weird to me. But sure enough she showed up I guess. In T I started crying because of what I was thinking. The T stopped mid sentence and said your little child is here and we need to talk to her. What in the world? I was able to tell her what was going on and causing issues at the time but inner child, I'm not so sure about that. Anyone here have any idea or way to explain this. I don't think it was in a multiple personality kind of way. I'm just not sure about what she was talking about. Anyone who can add insight or tell me where to put this if it is the wrong forum it would be greatly appreciated.

throwing an idea out here... maybe your therapist is talking about the inner child as in... everyone has times when they feel like a child....when they feel like they felt when they were a child, feel like needing someone to take or then feeling like you need your therapist to hold you almost like a parent would their son or daughter, .....

example this morning I felt so overwhelmed by not being in my own home that I felt like I just wanted to curl up on the sofa and cry. I wasnt switching into alters because my alters are integrated with me so switching into alters is no longer possible or an issue. but I sure felt like a child needing to cry, scream and holler "I want to go home!" and bury my face in the sofa pillows.

I got in touch with that feeling (other wise known as my inner child) by sitting down and telling my self ... "I know you miss your home and I know you want to go home and its not the ritz here but this is our temporary home. what do you need to feel more comfortable here until things get easier?"

by acknowledging my child like feelings and asking myself what I needed, that lead me to what I needed to see my pets, spend time with the dogs and cats and get away from the adult world of damage done by the storms.

when my wife got home from work we talked and we decided to take the weekend off and headed upstate to our friends and pets. right now I have a cat on the top of the chair, one next to me in the chair and one dog laying on my feet lol and I feel less homesick and happier.

I cant speak for your therapist but if this is what your therapist is talking about Im guessing she wants you to recognize what you are feeling, sit with those feelings (other words let your self feel what ever is going on) and then listen to those child like feelings to find out what you need from your self and from your therapist during that moment of child like feelings.

Ahha. Well now that makes alot more since. Some times we can't see the forest for the trees huh. Thank you for responding.

Has you cat met my cat. Like the picture.

i think we all have an inner child somewhere.
all of us

mentally ill or not

I'm a preschool teacher and when I think of inner child that is what I think of. I can play w/ I love to color w/ my daughter who is 5 and when my H ask me How old are we? I tell him only as old as you feel. So just how old are we?

I got really pissed when journaling one time and make deep marks w/ the pin in the note book I was writing in. The T saw it and said "Wow your inner child was here" OK I guess. I was not real sure what she was talking about. I still have lots to learn.

Here is a good definition of what is our inner child:

Many times, when we get in touch with our inner child, we start crying/sobbing very deeply. I believe we do this because for so long, we have either denied our inner child or have just not been in touch with the feelings of our inner child.

I remember my first time getting in touch with my inner child. My t was wonderful and extremely supportive through this journey. What I began to learn about my inner child is how often she felt unheard, uncared about or unloved. While those feelings began inside me when I was a child, they also continued through adulthood because I was not "in touch" with her for so long until I went to t. Many times inner children are very sad. But I can say that inner children are often able to be comforted and to help come out of the darkness and into the light of love and acceptance and healing.

I found that once I was able to help my inner child heal, it was easier for me, as the adult to begin healing as well. I think we are very connected to our inner children and many times don't even know it.

I hope you continue working with your inner child. I think you will find it very rewarding. I think you will also be able to feel as though a weight is lifted off you and you can find fun again in your life. Fun is so important in balancing out the daily struggles of adulthood.

Thanks for that definition. I am doing trauma work w/ my T right now. We are trying to find where to start.

I was raped many years ago. That that is an issue to work threw she seems to think we need to let the inner child show the way and the path to why I stayed w/ this man who raped me. Why I chose another abusive man to marry. So we have gone back a little further in my childhood to a time when my sister was born and I was unwanted and sent off to school. I was born out of wedlock and my sister was not. My sister was wanted and I was not. I am now 30 +years later but at the time I was a burden. Who know if we need to go further back then that. We touch on the subject every other month or so. I guess I need to sit w/ what has been learned and felt.

My H complains that I act like a child. I like to have fun. I love to sing and dance w/ my kids. Make jokes and go to fun kiddy events w/ my kids. My H ascts like a stick in the mud while I have a blast w/ my kids. My T says you may very well be stuck in a time frame of a 10 -12 yr old when you are w/ your kids. You are an adult sometimes and a kid sometimes. Weird. I am not sure about all that inner child stuff. But I'm not the professional my T is. They can't just go around making these things up, inner children, or they'd lose there creditability quickly.

they way I understand it, we choose to get into and stay in bad relationships because it is what we know. that is what our "normal" is. so we recreate it.

I know I have.

and hey, don't you ever stop playing and dancing and having fun like a kid. especialy with your own kids. your H should join you, not stand around disapproving.

I always tell my baby girl, "don't grow up too fast! leave that stuff for later, and be a kid. because you spend most of your life as an adult. you've got plenty of time to be a grown up, but only a little time to be a kid. don't waste it!"

this was the first positive thing I found about being DID. it preserves that spirit of childhood inside you.

and I can't help crying when we do inner child exersizes. and when doing partswork with my young ones.

I just started looking into healing the inner child. I find it hard to connect to her. I was trained at a very early age to be mature...had to handle alot of abuse and just take it...control my emotions, so Ive lost the childlike me, and find myself hating her vulnerability.

nessa1 - I was just reading your response. I had to look back over what I had written. This thread was started a year and a half ago. My how things have changed in that amount of time.

I still struggle with the inner child thing. But I have learned in hind sight a few things. I will share those with you in hopes that it will help you on your journey.

I think back to T (therapy) I still have the same T (Therapist) as I did a year and a half ago, actually going on 3 years now. I recall setting in T and biting my nails as my H would talk because me mind was off somewhere else. I recall tears running down my cheek as my H talked(H = Husband) Those were times that I was exhibiting childlike behaviors. The T would let my H finish what he was saying and ask me what was going on in my mind. I didn't even realize that I nail biting or in tears.

At times my T would ask me "mentally, how old do you feel?" In the beginning I told her I felt like my mind was operating as a 3 or 4 year old at the time. I wanted 0 responsibility. (3 years olds don't have responsibility) as time passed I felt like a 7 or 8 year old. ( I need more things, and could handle more information) I was stuck at 12ish years old for quite sometime. That to me was a time of feeling like I needed alot of help and support, (as a 12 year old would). I have 3 kids in real life. I wanted to play with them, be there friend, do kid stuff, but I also recognized the need to behave more adult like. But for so long I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.

Thinking of where I am now, I suppose if you asked me how old do I feel mentally. (meaning what do I enjoy, what do I like to do, what amount of responsibility do I feel like accepting) I'd say I feel like I am 15 or so. (Which is the age in which I was raped, I found out that when I was 3 or 4 I was sexually abused.) I say I feel like I am 15 or so because I still an quite content to do kid stuff, hang out at the mall, turn the radio up way to loud, skip doing laundry in order to go outside and pet the horse and do what I want to do. But I am also at a place where I know that some of life's responsibilities fall on me. I am angry more often because of my own actions. The actions of others still affect me deeply. I am after all a 15 years old teenage girl. (only in my thinking from time to time)

In all reality I am a 40 year old woman with a husband and 3 kids. My kids are 16, 14, and 7. So I feel much like one of my own kids. Having kids around the same age as I feel allows me to fully embrace the way that teens think. I know eventually I will move past this stage, and one day I will grow up to be a woman. Until then I have learned that 15 is not such a bad age, even though bad things happened to me at that age.

I hope that this helps give you clarity. I think if someone tried to explain all this to me at the beginning of this process I would think that they are the crazy one not me. But having experienced this first hand, ti is very difficult to explain because it makes no since. But it does exist. One of these days I will be 40, I think I like being 15 right now. But who knows 21 could be fun to. Guess we will have to wait and see.

Good luck to you.

Big Mama, I agree with all the posts above, but would like to add that "inner child" can also feel like another self separate from your main adult self. It depends on how dissociative you are. I've just recently admitted to T that my inner child has a transference with her, both negative and positive. I think inner child can be just a childlike place at times for all people, but a more separate dissociation problem for others. DID indicates that the child inside is more definite than a playful part of oneself.

If there was a lot of trauma in early childhood, and then a very strong need to survive, and have the defense of omnipotent denial, that inner child becomes deeply repressed, despised, and embarrassing. When there has been early emotional neglect and abuse, there is a lot that has been repressed, and it's exerting a lot of pressure on your present adult life.

The more I can discuss and recall of my inner child (alter) and the more transference I can trust with the therapist, the more integration and strength I gain. But I'm still very much in the scary suspenseful , stage of it all.
Maybe you could do a web search about DID and see about where you fit in. I'm so glad I finally started working on this and trusting it to be in therapy. I hope you keep on with yours, too.