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Love Your Inner Child
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Many people struggle with self-love and acceptance. Loving and forgiving ourselves for past mistakes or failures can be a challenge, especially if you grew up in a dysfunctional home where you felt the need to be perfect in order to keep things together at home. Perfection is impossible: we are all human and make mistakes. Many of us still demand flawlessness from ourselves and berate ourselves constantly when we don’t live up to our high standards. We may have grown up with a critical, unloving or impossible to please parent and have perpetuated that pattern into our adulthood.
John Bradshaw, author of Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child, says that we have around 25,000 hours of parent tapes running through our brain at any given time. Those tapes can be full of messages of criticism, unattainable demands and thoughts of never being good enough. The good news is that these tapes can be erased and re-recorded at any time. No matter what kind of parent you had, you can become a nurturing and loving parent to yourself and interrupt the negative messages you’ve been playing in the tape-recorder of your mind. You don’t have to continue the harmful patterns of a painful past.
One of the most empowering things you can do to heal yourself as an adult is to love and nurture your inner child. We all have an inner child who may have been wounded or damaged in the past. You can practice what John Pollard, author of Self-Parenting: the Complete Guide to Your Inner Conversations calls self-parenting. You don’t have to continue the abuse and disapproval you may have experienced as a child. You can make adult choices now to love, praise and encourage yourself positively. You are in control and can choose joy rather than pain.
Treat your inner child as you would have loved to have been treated growing up. Don’t wallow in blame for your parents or bitterness from your childhood either and use those as an excuse for your current unhappiness. If you continue to blame others then you remain in victim status and are using your past as a justification for not creating the life you desire. Recognize old patterns you may be perpetuating and make the conscious choice to care for yourself in a more loving and positive manner. Choose affirmative and encouraging inner dialog today.
Become the parent you wish you had had! Try mirror work where you repeat positive affirmations to yourself like, “I love you and am proud of everything you have accomplished in your life.” Visualize your parents differently and give yourself what you desired as a child. What is the one thing you always wanted to hear as a child but never did? Say that to yourself repeatedly. Welcome your inner child and rewrite your childhood!
One of my favorite exercises at Unleash the Power Within with Tony Robbins was imagining the process of burning bad childhood memory tapes in a bonfire and then re-recording them the way we wanted them to be. It was very powerful and healing. Picture yourself as a child, or find a childhood picture of yourself, and send affirming and loving messages to yourself. Wake up every morning and repeat encouraging, rather than discouraging, messages. You want to wake up excited about the day ahead, not scared to get out of bed. Remember that it is impossible to love and accept others if you don’t love and accept yourself. Self-love begins with remembering, loving and nurturing your inner child.
