How can inner child work help me cope with emotional abuse?

There's something I've been avoiding writing about in my blog, and something else I've been avoiding in my life. The something in my life is the practice of being present to my inner child (or children). The something in my blog is my experience of being the 'victim' of emotional abuse.

Something else tells me that the two are connected.

I've written about the inner child - specifically the Wounded Child (0-6 or 7 years of age) and the Adaptive Child (6 or 7 upwards). But while I'm happy to write about it and to support my clients doing inner child work, I seem never to get around to doing the work for myself.

Getting started on inner child work

Last week however this all changed. I was so ill on Wednesday that I could barely get out of bed. And Thursday was a write-off as well. This time of rest and recuperation acted like a circuit breaker. It made me reflect on what I had been doing for the last few weeks and review my plans for the next couple of months.

This was when I realised that I had been ignoring my inner child. Just like my beloved Mum ignored me when I was three years old and needed to pee. After much sleeve-tugging and trying to get her attention, I finally wet myself. And poor Mum realised she'd barely noticed me because she was so caught up in conversation with our neighbour.

You could almost see the illness last week (which really was no more than an exhausted collapse) as equivalent to my younger self weeing on the kitchen floor.

Over the weekend I realised that I would like a process which I could use myself and which I could teach to my clients to make the inner child work become more of a practice rather than a once-off intervention. And I tried it on myself this morning. It worked. Yay!

When a trigger leads to emotional abuse

So what has this got to do with emotional abuse? I had an experience of emotional abuse earlier this month. It was someone who I've known for 20 years and who I've supported through all kinds of troubles including listening when they were revisiting unresolved trauma.

But the relationship had become more difficult for me in recent months because of their tendency to complain about some people I am rather fond of. So I decided that I'd like a boundary around that particular topic.

We were chatting on the phone, all quite light-hearted. We talked about what they'd been doing recently and their plans for the coming months.

And then the conversation slid seamlessly into the trauma stories and onto the subject for which I had decided I wanted a boundary. For the first time ever, I asked them not to talk about it. My words were ill-chosen "could you not bang on about them." I should have known better. But I was off-duty and off-guard, and I allowed myself to be triggered.

The reaction was fast and furious The phone call was followed by voice and text messages, which were pretty abusive. I won't repeat what they said, but suffice to say they managed to nail all the things I would find most painful. Interesting. And when I revisited the messages, I realised it was pretty abusive.

In a pattern I now recognise, I tried to learn as much as I could from the experience. I recognised that I could have chosen my words more carefully. No one wants to be accused of banging on about something. In fact if I had been paying more attention to my own inner child, I might have adopted a more considered approach.

I can see now how we were both triggered and how we both dropped into Adaptive Child. It’s so fast you can’t even see it happening. Because there’s that moment when your Wounded Child gets triggered. But it’s a moment and is followed by the reinforcements turning up in the shape of the Adaptive Child, who uses their usual go-to approach. In my case it was my rather passive-aggressive ‘could you not bang on about...’ and in their case it was verbal abuse, or 'unbridled self-expression.'

Weirdly the last time I suffered abuse like that was at the hands of my ex. And that would probably explain why I was so upset by the messages I received.

What's inner child work got to do with coping with emotional abuse?

Eventually I noticed how quick I am to analyse a situation, and how effective that is at taking me away from the pain I experience. That amounts to ignoring my inner child - until she has to wee on the floor!

The emotional abuse stopped years ago. But I suspect that the reason that the pain is still there is that I've not shown my younger self that I've got this and that I'm big and strong and can protect her no matter what life throws at us.

This is the beauty of doing the inner child work. By offering safety and protection to the Wounded Child while putting boundaries on the Adaptive Child (who may have been sabotaging our relationships in its attempt to protect the Wounded Child), we can create a new way of being which comes from our Wise Adult most of the time!

This new process for doing inner child work is now available as an online mini-course. It's designed to be completed in less than one hour, but will set you up for an on-going practice of connecting with your inner child. And it's available for only £7.90. You can sign up for the course here.