Psychology Reading Series 1 — Reclaiming & championing your inner child
Recently I became more interested in reading psychology books, specifically self help books. In this article I’ll share some parts of the book called Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw. John Bradshaw is the international bestselling author of famous self help books and hosted a PBS series in US for years. I’ve read two more of this books pretty recently which are the ‘Healing the Shame that Binds You‘ and ‘Bradshaw on the Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem’. I am planning to write my thoughts and reflections on these two books as well, but let’s start with this one which I am recently started currently reading .
Problems of the Wounded Inner Child
The knowledge illuminated forgotted chambers in the dark house of infacy. I knew now why I could feel homesick at home. G.K Chesterton
The first section of the book introduces the Problem of the Wounded Inner Child. The main problem of having a wounded inner child inside ourselves is because our feelings were repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt. A person grows up to be an adult with an angry and hurt child inside of him. At first this seem irrational that some events or repressed feelings can affect your current life that much and I was one of those people. I didn’t know that was possible, I was skeptical about the possibility of this despite hearing talks or reading social media posts about that. However, after delving into the relevant literature and changing my perspective, I began to understand the validity of the concept.
There are multiple ways that your inner wounded self contaminates your life. Author lists some of the ways using the word contaminate.
- Co-dependence
- Offender Behaviours
- Narsistic Disorders
- Trust Issues
- Acting out/Acting In Behaviours
- Magical Beliefs
- Intimacy Dysfunctions
- Nondisciplined Behaviours
- Addictive/Compulsive Behaviours
- Thought Distortions
- Emptiness (Apathy, Depression)
Co-dependence
Have you ever heard this term before? I believe many people have this problem but don’t know about this. It is described as loss of identity in the book and author describes it is a stated where a person is out of touch with their feelings, desires and needs. You are basically unaware of what you need or what you desire. You can’t prioritise yourself because you can’t be yourself. You depend on someone else to exist.
Children need security and healthy modeling to understand their inner signals and able to distinguish their thoughts from their feelings. When the family environment has some type of violence, the children focus on outside to survive. The violence can be in different forms like physical (beating), emotional (abundance) , sexual (rape, incest).
One example scenario is believing your self esteem depends on the outer image like owning a car, going into expensive clubs. Another example is believing other peoples problems are yours, like if your wife is overweight you are ashamed of her, you don’t want your friends to see her. You don’t know where you end and your wife or others begin.
Let’s jump to the next topic!
Offender Behaviours
The second way that you are contaminated by your childhood is behaving offensive. Contrary to popular belief, not all the people who carry their wounded inner child inside is nice and quiet. Most of the cruelty and savagery in the world in done by the same people. A very classic example used in psychology books is Hitler. He had a really toxid childhood where he was beaten and ashamed by his sadistic father many times. That childhood resulted in one of the worst tragedies that our world has ever faced.
In most of the cases, the childhood violence and suffering results in offender adult. The once powerless child becomes the offender adult. A dramatic example in the book was that, one of the clients of the author, who was a child of a mother who spend time in Nazi concentration camps. Her mother was treating her the way the Nazi guards was threating her during that concentration camp period. Her mother was calling her the jewish pig. The story shocked me that how our childhood affects our behaviours years later and you can hurt your most loved ones without noticing. It is clear that if you don’t resolve these childhood traumas, they will keep hurting you and the people around you.
Let’s keep this article short and continue the other behaviours and ways that wounded inner child affects us.
Let me know what you think about this series and follow me for more content!
#psychology #self-help #self-esteem #co-dependence
