The inner child and misconceptions that cause us to become stagnated and fragmented.
Oh, hi there. In this article, I want to talk about the inner child and some of the misconceptions people have about this idea, particularly the tendency to take it literally. Often, the inner child can be a useful construct or metaphor that helps unblock energy and enable us to move forward in life. It reconnects us to parts of ourselves that we have become disconnected from or have disowned, which can help us develop a healthy, authentic relationship with life.
However, when we take the concept of the inner child literally, it can cause us to become frozen in time, ultimately blocking the healing process, which is fundamentally about becoming whole. If we believe that we literally have an inner child responsible for our poor choices and behavior, we end up stuck in the same cycle of thoughts, ideas, and assumptions that keep us where we don’t want to be.
This article isn’t just about the inner child; it’s about any therapeutic constructs or metaphors. Taking these constructs literally can be detrimental. If you see them as tools for growth and expansion, you’ll likely be fine. But remember, you’re one system. Anytime you create separation or fragmentation within your experience of yourself, you’re going to have a bad time.
I find it particularly interesting, and I’ve observed many times, that the inner child is just a metaphor. Despite this, some people, for various reasons we will explore in this article, treat it as literal. They act as though there is a literal child inside them that occasionally takes control of their mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties, causing them to feel out of control. They believe this child has needs that must be fed, and when it takes over, they feel justified in behaving however they like.
Maybe I’m creating a straw man argument for the sake of demonstration, but ultimately, if you take any of these constructs literally, you’re taking yourself out of reality. In reality, we are one fluid process that goes from birth, ripens, starts to decay, and then dies without any breaks in continuity. Believing in separate parts of ourselves causes us to step out of that process and become frozen in time.
The inner child is a popular example because it frequently comes up in discussions. This phenomenon can happen with many concepts, such as the shadow self or chakras. People sometimes become overly attached to these constructs, which can lead to problems in their spiritual journey. For instance, chakras, which are just energy centers where the body’s energy channels meet, are often depicted with fancy colors and superpowers. This can lead people to take them literally, which disrupts their natural flow.
This article is about recognizing that while these constructs can raise awareness and open your eyes, becoming attached to them can cause significant problems. I’ll use the inner child as an example to illustrate this point. Over-attachment to these constructs can take us out of reality. If you want to heal, feel good, and flow with life, you need to stay grounded in reality. Many constructs serve as convenient ways to avoid or resist reality. The inner child is particularly insidious because it appears to offer healing, but treating it unrealistically elevates fragments of ourselves over the whole, pulling us away from the truth. If you base your life on such misconceptions, you invite friction, frustration, and misery due to the gap between your perception and reality.
There are three main reasons we might attach to the inner child in an unrealistic way:
- Distraction: Focusing on the inner child and its needs can distract us from addressing real-life issues. It allows us to avoid facing emotions and self-image challenges that come with personal growth.
- Excuse for Behavior: The inner child can serve as a convenient excuse for bad behavior. For instance, in a relationship argument, blaming the inner child for a tantrum might earn sympathy and forgiveness, allowing people to avoid taking responsibility for their actions.
- Relationship with the Past: This is more serious, as it involves shame, guilt, and trauma. Attaching to the inner child helps keep these negative emotions at bay. People fear that facing their trauma will be overwhelming and disrupt the identity they’ve built as a reaction to it. Thus, they use the inner child to freeze themselves and their emotions in time, forgetting that emotions are energy in motion.
In summary, while constructs like the inner child can provide insight, over-attachment can lead to avoidance of reality and personal growth. It’s essential to see these constructs as tools rather than literal truths to stay grounded and move forward in life.
And so, you need to feel these emotions and let them move through you so that you can progress to the next level and start facing reality. Looking at it this way, there are three reasons why the construct of the inner child might seem like it’s leading you toward facing and coming to terms with your past. This involves integrating the things you’ve been avoiding or need to reclaim, and releasing the things that no longer serve you.
Becoming frozen in time can give you a false sense of control over life, but that control isn’t real. The only way to have a genuine relationship with life is to let go, surrender, and start moving down the authentic path. The main problem with becoming overly attached to the inner child or any similar constructs is that they cause fragmentation of the self. Anytime you fragment yourself, you take yourself out of life and create problems. This distorts your relationship with life and prevents you from having a real connection with the truth.
The solution is to view these different parts of yourself as part of a unified whole, without putting any one of them on a pedestal or giving it more attention than it deserves. Treating a fragment as the whole makes you unreal. The most authentic relationship you can have with yourself and life is at the experiential level, not the conceptual level. These constructs are ultimately just concepts. If you use them as a filter or lens for your relationship with yourself and life, and become attached to that lens instead of what the lens is looking at—life—you remove yourself from the flow.
We are a unified whole. From birth to decay and death, it’s all one process. As we go through it, we can become more connected to life by accepting what is true, which leads us toward wholeness. Attaching to things that cause fragmentation makes their intended healing effect redundant, taking us off the necessary path and leading to more problems.
There is a real and an unreal way to approach this. The real way involves becoming more open—to life, to ourselves, and to the truth. The unreal way involves closing off, shutting down, and becoming blocked. This blockage always results from treating a fragment as the whole or viewing everything through a concept instead of experiencing it directly.
In the case of the inner child, there’s a real way to approach it. Use this construct as a tool to shape and guide your actions, helping you move forward.
Childish or childlike?
Instead of using the inner child as an excuse to hold back, shut down, and become frozen in time, it’s important to differentiate between being childlike and childish. Being childlike means bringing back valuable qualities that can help us have a genuine relationship with life—qualities that may have been metaphorically beaten out of us by life and sent into the shadow. These qualities include innocence, curiosity, joy, and spontaneity. Embracing these childlike qualities allows us to stay open, keep growing, evolving, and moving with life, filled with joy and wonder associated with childhood.
On the other hand, being childish means not being in control of your emotions, being frozen in time, having temper tantrums, and acting out. Childish behaviour often stems from a desire to protect the ego. As reality keeps evolving, it calls us to evolve with it. When we resist this call due to emotional resistance, we respond with childish temper tantrums. These tantrums are attempts to protect the image we’ve created to avoid reality, thus perpetuating avoidance, resistance, and distraction. Childish behaviour is a sign that you’re not healing; you’re trying to protect the things causing problems in your life and closing yourself off from life instead of being open to it.
As with all constructs, in the case of the inner child, you can choose to be real or unreal. Being real means moving, flowing, and evolving. Being unreal means trying to protect and preserve things that make you miserable. Acting childishly is a coping mechanism to keep reality and unresolved emotions at bay. In the short term, this might work, even attracting attention and sympathy, which some use as a substitute for the love they felt they didn’t receive in childhood and don’t know how to give themselves now. However, this is only a short-term strategy. In the long term, resisting reality will lead to more friction, frustration, and misery.
There are two main reasons people tend to choose childish behaviour. The first is simply missing childhood, longing for life to be like it was when we were children. The second is wanting to blame our childhood for the current state of our lives. Let’s explore these reasons in more detail.
One reason we want to remain in a childish state is because we miss childhood. In childhood, our relationship with cause and effect is completely different.
As adults, we constantly navigate cause and effect to achieve the results we want from life. When we’re kids, however, we experience safety, ease, and a sense of magic almost effortlessly. This is largely due to our relationship with life being intertwined with our relationship with our parents. Assuming a healthy relationship, our needs are generally met without much effort. We don’t have to work to put food on the table; babies cry and are fed. Many people miss this simplicity because navigating the law of cause and effect in adulthood can be challenging. It requires facing ourselves, facing life, and putting in effort. As a result, some adults yearn for that effortless state of childhood, whether they realize it or not. They adopt a childish mindset and lash out when reality reminds them that cause and effect dictate their lives.
The second reason people cling to childhood and act childishly is the need to blame their childhood for the current state of their lives. Bad things can happen during childhood—personally, I experienced some crazy stuff. However, once we reach adulthood, we have the capacity to accept, process, deal with, learn from, and move on from these experiences. This can be particularly difficult for those with significant trauma, but clinging to the past and blaming childhood for everything keeps us stuck. It provides a convenient excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our lives as adults. It may feel unfair if you had a tough childhood and then find yourself responsible for your life as an adult, but blaming the past only keeps you frozen in time.
If you want to move forward, you must let go of the past. This doesn’t happen instantly; it involves a process of facing emotions and coming to terms with why those who caused you harm did what they did. Ultimately, your healing is your responsibility. Clinging to the inner child in an unreal, childish way is a means of avoiding this responsibility. The inner child construct allows us to play the victim, justify temper tantrums, and cling to the past instead of moving forward. These behaviours are ways of avoiding ourselves and the reality that our lives—regardless of what we’ve been through—are ours to manage now.
Even the emotional stuff we’re holding onto is part of us. In my own life, when I think about some of the things I went through, the people who caused those events likely don’t ever think about them. They don’t care. The only reason I would hold onto it is because I’m not ready to face it. But by facing it, those issues dissolve, and you can put yourself on a real path. Childish behaviour is a way of avoiding what you need to face to take control of your own life. Ultimately, this is just a roundabout way of saying that the healthiest relationship you can have with your inner child is to realize that childhood is done; it’s gone. We are a unified whole. From birth to death, it’s all one continuous process.
If you’re attached to the concept of the inner child in an unreal way, that child isn’t a separate entity. It’s you. The seed of who you are today is that kid you used to be. Detaching from it or keeping it at arm’s length by conceptualizing and boxing it up only freezes you and takes you out of life. It’s a way of resisting instead of accepting the truth about who you are and what life is. When you see and accept the truth, you realize you have much more power than you may have been conditioned to believe. That power lies in your ability to learn, grow, evolve, and move forward no matter what.
So that was the article. I feel a bit high from writing so much, and I did drink a fair amount of coffee while going through it, so I’m a little dehydrated now. You don’t need to know that; I’m just wasting your time.
Ultimately, we talked about how these metaphors and constructs can be useful if you use them to raise awareness of some things you may have neglected within yourself. However, like with anything, if you treat the fragment as a whole and become overly attached to it as a coping mechanism, you end up screwing up your life. You take yourself out of the flow of life, stop yourself from moving in the way you want, and cause more fragmentation of the self, which takes you out of reality. This is counterproductive because reality is the only thing that can give you the healing you think you want from these constructs in the first place.
In general, I hope you got some value from this article and that it helped you think about whatever you are going through in your life. If anyone wants to talk about any of this stuff, there’s a link on my website, olianderson.co.uk/talk, where we can explore ideas and see what’s what. Ultimately, you can move forward, which of course you can. I also have a free course on my website, The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock For Realness & Life Purpose. Check that out if you want to grow more real. Either way, I hope this article helped you.
Peace to you. Thanks a lot.
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