Healing Developmental Trauma - inner child work.

Little Ahisha, then Vanessa around 1981, beneath that cool fringe lies a very shy sensitive complex sweet child

Ultimately, we have left ourselves a roadmap to self healing by looking at our past, in our family of origin, understanding how our beliefs and conception of reality was created. By being willing to take the journey into the past, to feel the unfelt, to cry, to rage, to liberate all parts of ourselves that've been abandoned and trapped in the dark, so we can once more become whole.

Everything that we experience contributes to who we are so naturally a lot of our stuff, beliefs, programs, patterns, etc. can be energetically traced back to our developmental years, our childhood. We can follow the threads of our recurring patterns to find the root, delete and re-program.

Once a belief, let’s call a ‘program’ is installed it continues to manifest in our reality through our relationships and experiences. You could say, energetic echoes of past wounds, recurring in new manifest ways. For example; A person with an emotionally absent parent might keep dating or go on to marry an emotionally unavailable partner. Re-living the energetic pattern looking for resolution by unconsciously recreating the situation and blindly hoping for a new outcome.

Echoes, often referred to as shadows are experiences created as a result of the unconscious mind, the shadow self and its beliefs. In a way is the world showing us our Karma that needs to be resolved.

As we know trauma is not what happens, i.e. the parent leaving or dying, but how the child is able to respond to that emotional experience and process it. How coping patterns are formed and how one learns to regulate, to make meaning of the experience, and program gets created.

What is normal? Often there is a tendency to be seated from an opinion that the world should be perfect, trauma shouldn't exist, trauma is bad, a deficiency, a brokenness. This is not balanced; we need to seat ourselves in equilibrium, in neutrality. Seeing our life as a dance through many emotional landscapes, like a great story, an odyssey.

To do this work without descending into blame and shame we need to understand and accept we live in very chaotic, confusing times. Parents are generally doing the best they can with the knowledge they have and what we are uncovering about wellness and child development was not available when we were children.We have to surrender the idea ‘it shouldn’t have happened’. And let it go because this is what they call in psychology's,  'Drama triangle’, 'Victim mentality' and this helps no one and will only trap us in suffering for life. It’s time to step out and embrace;

‘What happened, happened. Now let it be my tool for liberation”.

HOW PROGRAMS GET INSTALLED

What often happens when a child’s emotional needs can not be met, for what ever reason, the child develops a program to manage that emotional need itself. During the childhood phase of development, this program may very well protect the child when there’s not an alternative, for example; a child cannot just get up and leave when somebody verbally or physically abuses them so they develop a program to protect their psychology. Because the child is not able to rationalise the caregiver as wrong, this would threaten their very existence, they might created the program/belief that they instead see themselves as the wrong.

When emotional states are not allowed to be expressed and processed in the external world, the child will have to find an inner way to deal with their emotions and a program for suppression will be created.

Eventually when the time comes the child, now an adult can make choice, can be in control of their lives, yet the protective programs are so deeply ingrained they keep running, causing the adult to make decisions and choices from this old operating system. We need to update and change the system,  this is what inner child work is all about.

The repercussions of developmental programs are the root of most outward manifestations of neurotic conditions such as, dissociation, depression, alienation, addiction along with physical aliments. It didn’t start with our parents, our culture has a massive impact on who we are as people. There is so much embedded in our cultural narratives on how we are meant to do life. What is right and wrong, what we are meant to believe, how the world works. Sometimes trauma programs are simply created  from the trauma of living in this modern day world of chaos, but we don’t have to keep running them. We can rewrite the programs today.

Check out my website for meditations and journaling exercises and more discussion on how to heal developmental trauma and the chaos these programs can reek on our lives