Comforting my child part

I think discussing with your T your want for them to comfort you and not wanting to do it yourself would be a very productive discussion. My experience of this was I learnt I didn't trust myself and so wanted someone else to comfort me because i didn't think my adult self was capable. Which considering I had spent most of my adult life using destructive behaviours and essentially abusing my child self was more then reasonable. I had also broken a lot of promisises to myself so I couldn't trust what I had to say. Equally my adult self was completely overwhelmed with the pain of my inner child.

I think it is natrual to want someone to comfort you and take care of you and healthy we do that for one another, but know we should be able to do that for our selves as well. I am still trying to navigate those lines and I think they are different for different people. I just know my current lines mean I don't have a strong sense of self and the trust is growing but i still need to work on it.


Parts work has been a really useful tool to understand what is going on inside me and how often i am flooded with child parts, or anger parts of what my psyche is doing in that moment. It has been useful to capture how i talk to myself as well and look at the intentions of those parts. My self destructive behaviour was essentially an attempt to release pain or at least function. Equally it allowed me to understand what i thought i could get from other people that i couldn't get from myself. I also learnt why i am scared of being around people and fear of loosing myself and ignoring myself. Basically my inner child just needs lots of attention and to be listened to and that is how i comfort them.



@QuietMind I really like your idea of reading fostering and adoption blogs! Do you have any you particularly recommend?

None I particularly recommend (since people are so individual), but I periodically searched around on WordPress as it has topic tags. I focused on blogs which I felt were authentic about both the joys and the struggles while also using pseudonyms for the kids/youth.

I don't know if this is in the same neighborhood as what you're experiencing, but my longing among my child parts to be rescued from what happened, taken care of and comforted has been very profound. So profound at times that it has felt like a drive as strong as hunger. I didn't think I could do it myself but I have allowed my adult self to be cared for by my T rather than pushing him away. I have found various self care things helpful, but what really helped was really simple. I just listened, allowed her to speak. And that felt empowering.

I can totally relate. When I was doing DID work nothing made me feel more abandoned than to be told I had to comfort myself. I had to be alone with the abuse the first time through. It felt cruel to make me be alone in the memory. I told my therapist the part doesn't want ME to comfort her, she wants an adult who cares about her to comfort her. It generated a long discussion. I got my therapist to understand that she had told my part that she wasn't worth my therapist's comfort. My therapist got it and changed tactics. Timing is everything when you are teaching self-soothing. A traumatized part revealing herself is not the time to teach self-soothing. Instead. My therapist gave my part a stuffed animal. It became a substitute for her until the part trusted me. We still have the stuffed animal but I do the soothing now. It's all about timing.

Thank you, everyone. It helps me so much to know that so many people understand how I feel and have felt it themselves. I’m still debating how to handle it. Like I said, it feels complicated by the fact that my T does comfort me and had even comforted me earlier this same session. I don’t want to make this a big thing and lose that or put that at risk. Also, we have just recently been through a bunch of very bad ruptures, and I don’t want to cause another one by raising this issue. That said, it feels very painful to be told this by my T, and I know it’s important to be able to tell my T that. At the moment, it feels like my two options are either to tell her and take the risks, or not to and just not to ever mention the child part again. That’s honestly how much being told to comfort myself hurts. I’m kind of thinking that maybe I have to take the latter option, but it doesn’t feel right obviously. It feels awful.

In my experience in therapy, as has been true in life, making a decision to just tell the truth has worked out. It is the simplest and easiest solution, with a caveat or two. I think it helps to be a gentler truth-teller and to focus on oneself, "I think" and "I feel" and the like. I haven't found much wrong with "nonviolent communication" (Marshall Rosenberg) in this way, although I can follow it better sometimes than other times. So maybe it's not what to say so much as it is how to say it. I.e. Labeling, or calling someone a B----- may arguably be the truth, but it rarely allows the other person space to understand you.

If you're interested: The Basics of Nonviolent Communication – Developed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg