What exactly is our inner child? Is it the little child you once where who needed to be nurtured and loved, a free spirit you have tamed and controlled? Is it your emotions, sensitivity, creativity, the artistic you that you have controlled, silenced, organized and structured? Or is it the frustrated, confused, anxious, ignored, abused you hidden from view and denied existence so that it causes you to be worried and fearful of mistreatment? Maybe you have replaced the happy, loving, humorous and joyful you with maturity, seriousness and a sophisticated demeanor!
Your inner child is all of those things and more. It is also the childhood you have lost and forgotten yet it still resides within you in your subconscious. It is a person who knows how to have fun and play for play’s sake, who can help you prevent burnout and manage stress in your life. Your inner child is a person within you who needs healing, support, and reinforcement through a variety of coping tools.
Our parents didn’t know that they really helped to create this inner child. Most of us deny that there even exist such a part of us. When our inner child is not allowed to be heard, or acknowledged as real, a false self emerges and we begin to live as victims. Situations begin to arise that keep us with unresolved emotional trauma that can lead to chronic anxiety, fear, emptiness, unhappiness and confusion.
There are ways that you can connect with your inner child to bring about healing, happiness and the feeling of being loved.
It is through healing our inner child, by grieving the wounds that we suffered, that we can change our behavior patterns and clear our emotional process. We can release the grief with its pent up rage, shame, terror and pain from those feeling places which exist within us.
We need to nurture, love and rescue our inner child. It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to love the person we are. We do this by owning and honoring the child’s experiences and feelings and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around.
Let your inner child come out to play often. When you feel that urge to do something silly, allow it. It’s your inner child trying to show you how to have fun and enjoy life in the moment and not to take life so serious.
QUOTES:
The following are inspirational quotes related to releasing your inner child.
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. ~G.K. Chesterton
The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart. ~Mencius, Book IV
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within
us. ~Gaston Bachelard
When I grow up I want to be a little boy. ~Joseph Heller, Something Happened, 1974
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. ~Pablo Picasso
One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. ~Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius. ~Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon; a happiness weapon; a beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the Fulghum
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. ~Sigmund Freud
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. ~Rachel Carson
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. ~J. Robert Oppenheimer
Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. ~Jean de la Bruyere.
