Out With My Inner Child

So, the first time I heard the term “inner child”, I believe, was in therapy. By this time, I was about a year in and we were starting Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. EMDR is a psychotherapy technique used to treat the distress associated with past experienced trauma. 

During this treatment, either while watching your therapist’s fingers move back and forth, or by holding two buzzers in each hand that buzz back to back, you recall a traumatic moment and are gradually guided back to more pleasant thoughts. Afterwards, you are asked to rate your feelings of distress toward the traumatic event, and the goal is to weaken the negative feelings towards it over time. 

When we started this process, we didn’t have a particular traumatic event in mind. My therapist had noticed how much of my childhood I didn’t seem to remember. For her, it was a pretty alarming amount. So, she wanted to do this and just guide me through some childhood memories and images that I did remember to see what would come up. The first couple of sessions got a little intense for me, and we decided to come back to it another time. We haven’t yet, but it did start the inner child conversation. 

From what we did gather, I became aware of some of the things that I felt in need of as a child. I started to see how that shaped some of my patterns and habits and kept it in mind as I noticed them show up in certain situations. It helped me to gain a sense of gentleness and grace with myself. I started adopting the habit of communicating with myself as I would my child, and I still do this. 

However! As I just came to notice, there is so much more to inner child work. The other day, I woke up and the sun was beaming through all of my apartment windows. I checked the weather and found that it was going to be an amazingly pleasant day in Chicago. The first in a long while. I got in the shower and took note that I didn’t feel like washing my hair, and it was past the point of sprucing up my fro. So, I decided I’d put it in a high poof. 

As I stood at the bathroom mirror in my towel, with a wet brush, gel, and a whole bunch of ponytail holders on the sink, a very vivid memory came to me. I remembered that when I was in junior high, one of my best friends and I would plan to wear our hair the same. The high poof. We’d use beeswax on our edges and tie a ribbon in our poof to match whatever we had on. This was one of my favorite looks. 

I Loved how brushing my hair up tight made my eyes slant a bit and look pretty. I Loved how it lifted my cheekbones. This is the face I’m looking at now, at 29, in my own apartment’s bathroom mirror. I remembered on those days in 7th grade, I’d have my hair in its perfect poof, and I always chose the jeans that showed my ass off just right. I liked to be looked at. I like to be looked at now too. So, this day, I also found pants that made me feel like I ought to be seen. 

It felt so good. It was such a pleasing moment of being back in that place. As cringey as it is to think about, it was so cute to relive those moments, and be that girl now. I realized, this too is inner child work. Allowing myself to think how I thought then, and be that version of me. Letting myself laugh at the things that used to tickle me then. It’s actually kind of silly to think about how serious I was about connecting to my inner child. It’s literally in the name, it’s okay to be childish, to play. 

I was approaching it with such seriousness. Treating myself like I’m my own child instead of just being the child that I still am in a lot of ways. All that stuff still gets me going, it still makes me smile and laugh, and feel those good feelings. This is just as valuable as the gentle grace that I give to myself as I would my real child.

Good things happen when you’re as free as a child. I want to live in that good space.