i don't understand or know what to think or believe... there seems to be as many ideas about this as ther are people to think them.

It would seem some people believe they have an inner child... a nearly distinct version of themselves as a child... but how old? How does that get determined? is it 5 or is it 10? does it depend on trauma...and what if there was none? i do not understand.

some people talk about their inner child in terms of the age at which they focus their therapy work, and not as a distinct "thing." i can understand describing or thinking about themselves in those terms... but is that true? is it true or real to have a child-self to talk to directly? is it a tool or a fact?

i have heard someone talk about frozen age states... a small bit of oneself frozen in time... so a variation on the first example i suppose... except that there maybe more than one and it is both distinct and dependent on events at that age.

what happens in dissociation? what does that really mean in terms of experience?

what happens when an inner child, assuming one is there, tries to speak? can such a thing happen? do people actually experience "being young" at significant moments in therapy? Can questions bring forth a memory so tangible it forces the adult self aside?

i am trying to understand my experiences.. trying to dissect what i feel when i am there.

[confused4ever]

Hi Gerber,
I just started the inner child work. I use the dominant hand vs. non dominant hand approach. So this is how my T and I have approached it, yes I do believe there is a inner child in all of us. Frozen at different parts of our childhood, mine happens to be at the age of 7, when I started disassoiating to protect myself and gave all those emotions and feelings to my inner child then.

This is how I can best describe what is happening working with this approach.

I understand that the inner child is me, my emotions my feelings and my memories. But to have a inner child to work with and through this process it is like a second person to buffer my feelings and emotions. I write my questions with my dominant hand, and my inner child "Mickey" writes her response with my non-dominant hand. We have drawn, and talked to each other this way, I have gotten alot of feelings out and emotions, and some areas I of course do not want to enter yet.

I do believe we all have a inner child that controls our emotions, mad, happy, spontaneous. When we are abused or trama effects us, we lose the ability to do these things like others can without even giving it a thought. To make our inner child happy again, gives us the ability back to live again.

Not sure this helps, but it is kind of hard to put into words the work I have been doing.

Let me know if I can help in any other way?

I don't understand the inner child thing myself.....I do know that I revert back to the way I was as a child whenever i'm around my mother. Maybe that's what they mean by inner child.

As far as dissociation goes. I sometimes go into a trance like state as if I were a ghost in the room. Also depending on if i wear my glasses or not my personality changes. The person with glasses is extremely confident, business like, assertive, etc. ....the person without glasses is extremely submissive, timid, shy. But if the submissive person puts on the glasses it doesn't mean that the confident personality will come out. The switch happens depending on the situation.

I find dissociation completely frustrating.

[MissCharlotte]

gerber,

I can only share my personal experience. I am keenly aware of my inner child at times and at other times, have no clue where she is. I see her at different ages. Mostly she's between 5 and 7 years of age. Once I heard her talking and it frightened me,but now I realize I didn't need to be frightened because she is part of me.

When I am with T I am not actively aware in the moment of when my child is talking and when my adult is talking. I try not to analyze the moment when I am in it, but rather to feel what I am feeling.

I dissociate quite a bit, but less now when I am with T. It is a feeling of being there but not really being there, spacing out if you will (to a greater degree). Sometimes I just "go somewhere" and T and I have actually laughed about it. He said I remind him of a book, The Time Traveler's Wife. It grows out of childhood trauma and then becomes habit. I am working on staying present in the moment.

Yes, I believe that the adult self can be forced inside when tackling difficult issues.

I hope this was helpful.

[sunrise]

I conceptualize this sort of thing using the ego state model rather than a sole inner child.

Here's a blurb on ego states:
http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/overview.html
</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
(Paul) Federn believed that the personality was not simply a collections of perceptions, cognitions, and affects, but that these organized into clusters or patterns, which he called ego states. An ego state may be defined as an organized system of behavior and experience whose elements are bound together by some common principle.

When one of these states is invested with ego energy, it becomes “the self” in the here and now. We say it is “executive,” and it experiences the other states (if it is aware of them at all) as “he,” “she,” or “it,” because they are then currently invested with object energy.

Ego states may be large and include all the various behaviors and experiences activated in one’s occupation. They may be small, like the behaviors and feelings elicited in school at the age of 6. They may represent current modes of behavior and experiences or, as with hypnotic regression, include many memories, postures, feelings, etc. that were apparently learned at an earlier age. They may be organized into different dimensions. For example, an ego state may be built around the age of 10. Another one may represent patterns of behavior toward father and authority figures and thus overlap on experiences with father at the age of 10. Behaviors to accomplish a similar goal may be uniquely different from one ego state to another, especially in true multiple personalities.”

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

I have a lot of different ego states. We have worked with one in therapy that is about 4 years old and experienced abuse. This ego state is organized around both age and the abuse. I recovered memories of this abuse early in therapy and with it, I found this ego state. But I certainly had other memories of this age that were not abuse related and that I didn't "forget" for 30 years. So I could have more than one 4 year old ego state, one organized around abuse, one organized around something else, etc. Interestingly, the ego state we worked with also had some other recovered memories of that era that had nothing to do with abuse but that I had repressed. They somehow just got bundled into that ego state. I also have a lot of other ego states. Some are more integrated into me, more "shadowy." Others are more differentiated from me and seem more like "other" than "self", like the 4 year old. However, she is more integrated now than when I first discovered her, due to our efforts in therapy. My mature ego state learned how to go back and nurture her and rescue her.

I never used the writing with non-dominant hand technique, although my therapist told me about it. In therapy, my therapist would lead me into conversation with her. He would have me bring her into the room (if she was willing) and then I would ask her questions (silently) and she would answer me (silently), then I would report back her answer to T. And he would ask something else, and I would then ask her, etc. So we would hold conversations like this. Pretty wild! For a time, this ego state was really in the forefront for me. Sometimes when I was going about my everyday business, I would see her out of the corner of my eye, or hiding just around a corner or behind something, and I would whip around, and try to look at her head on, but she always disappeared. She was a companion for a while. She's not so overt now, is more integrated, and is part of me. She was lost for so long. I love having found her.

I'm not sure that answers your questions, gerber, but that is my experience.

I think working with an inner child or younger ego states is different for everyone and probably there are different ways to go about this in therapy. What approach does your therapist use?

studies show that 'inner children' (or 'child alters') don't behave as children (with respect to cognitive ability and the like), rather, they behave as adults think children would behave. inner children aren't real in the sense of someone physically having a child inside them (like how you do with pregnancy, for example) but the FEELINGS can be ones that were experienced intensely since childhood. that can be very real indeed.

some theorists think that everybody has an inner child. here, inner child just means the child-like feelings and desires and thoughts that we typically try and shut off with comments to ourself like 'thats silly!' and 'how old am i?' and so on. the thought is that it is those really vulnerable feelings... that arose during our actual childhood, yeah. but... the only sense in which they are parts of us that have been frozen in time is the sense in which those vulnerable feelings haven't undergone an evolution into their adult forms because we have ignored them and not been able to deal with them for so long.

> how old? How does that get determined? is it 5 or is it 10? does it depend on trauma...and what if there was none? i do not understand.

vulnerable feelings... everyone has them. it can be good to put them away sometimes so that one can function as an adult doing the things that adults need to do. i guess the age is supposed to be related to trauma. trauma doesn't have to be of 'objectively sickening severity', however, relational trauma (which could be due to misattunement) can be traumatic.

> is it true or real to have a child-self to talk to directly? is it a tool or a fact?

depends on what you take a child-self to be. personally... i think it is a tool because i think the way most people think of inner children is (strictly speaking) false. but i'll admit i wonder at the utility of the tool sometimes. i do think people have a tendency to be overly concrete... there is a literature on the notion of a 'self' and the consensus in psychology is that the self is a narrative construct (or similar). so... is a self a real entity or a useful fiction? the majority of psychologists come down on the latter side. it doesn't make much sense to ask about reality simplicitor. it helps to ask whether something is as real as something else. e.g., are alters more like selves or more like fictional characters? but of course this doesn't make much sense if we think that selves (quite generally speaking) ARE fictional characters... tricky huh...

> what happens in dissociation? what does that really mean in terms of experience?

dissociation is when aspects aren't consciously experienced. for example... some people can dissociate from (distract from) pain. so they don't consciously experience the pain, or they only intermittently become consciously aware of it and then they 'numb out' to it again. you can dissociate from things going on around you too. not be aware of something in your environment... not be aware of certain thoughts or feelings. of course there are moments of awareness but one just kinda numbs out from them. focuses on other things to their exclusion. pushes them away.

> what happens when an inner child, assuming one is there, tries to speak?

a thought pops into your head and you go 'wasn't my thought!!!'. so... whos thought was it then? 'must be... inner childs thought'. then you can ask yourself 'who is my inner child?' and then a name might occur to you. before you know it you have constructed yourself an inner child. but... er... why would you want to? it is a way of making sense of ones experience to be sure. espeically aspects of experience (thoughts, emotions etc) that are too painful. i guess the reconstruction goes that you hear a voice/thought. but that you just KNOW it isn't your voice/thought. it just seems alien or 'not me' or foreign somehow. one way this can go is to be reconstructed into 'thought insertion' (e.g., aliens are inserting thoughts in my head). another way it can go is that one is possessed by... an inner child (internal not me rather than external) that is putting voices/thoughts in your head.

> Can questions bring forth a memory so tangible it forces the adult self aside?

sure. they just have to focus on something that is too overwhelming for the person. when they can't cope they will employ their coping strategy of 'not me', whoever they have constructed their 'not me' to be...

of course this is just one other opinion to add to the mix... but it is the view i've come to in trying to make sense of my experience.

this is interesting... all perspectives, and as i said, each one is different. It's disappointing that we cannot make the 'true" way the minds works known to us... like religion we seem to have to choose and have faith (an analogy only).

i don't personally think i have an inner child.. but i have no issues with people who do believe so, it's about our own experiences...about what makes sense and feels "right" to us i guess. With no real fool proof way to quantify human experience, everything is open to interpretation.

what i experience is an odd sensation... i know that whenever i have looked at pictures of myself from certain ages i seem more engaged with the image and i have gotten flooded with emotion. Often i have had no real idea why. Part of me felt really bad for the kid in the picture, even as i recognize that kid as me. What i think is that feelings associated with that age are triggered but without the coinciding memory attached to it... so for *myself* it feels like pressure emotionally... flooded with feeling that needs to be voiced or understood but has no reference without the memories which caused them.

right now, i feel "shown" images and flashes of memory. My memories, and all of which i do recall once my attention is turned their way... what interests me is the turning of my attention. i think it's all me, but i find it curious how it all happens without awareness of the "happening."

thanks everyone for responding, it's not easy to answer when what you say or think may be questioned. It's a difficult idea.