I’ve been doing a lot of inner-work lately.
Like… a lot.
Compared to before, however, where doing inner-work meant reading or thinking (about thinking), I have dropped into my body.
Why the body? You may ask.
I am looking for clues of inner child trauma I may be carrying that my mind is not consciously aware of.
And yet, despite not being aware of the wounding, I am perfectly aware that my inner-child’s wound is influencing the way I perceive the world — this is what it means to say that we create our own reality.
How is my inner child wounding influencing my world-view?
- By second-guessing my abilities (hello inner critic and impostor syndrome)
- By sabotaging any efforts to take action in the direction of my dreams (hello cat videos on Youtube)
- By feeling paralyzed by perfectionism (what’s the point in trying if it’s not perfect and I already know I am going to fail anyways)
But why look within the body when I have a perfectly beautiful mind to get the job done?
The body keeps the score
Before I left for Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) back in February earlier this year, I had the uncanny sensation that working with my body during the training would help me achieve a whole new different level of healing than any of the Psychological healing I had ever experienced before.
My intuition was right.
During the training I let go and released a lot of unprocessed grief that I had been carrying with me since my mom and dog both died of cancer last year.
As with inner-child trauma, I had been carrying this grief in my body without my conscious awareness of it.
I knew that not only I wanted to learn more, but I needed to learn more.
To satisfy this need I made my way through The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kol (the book had been in my never-ending, ever-growing list of books to read for quite a while at that point) in a couple of weeks and consequently moved onto learning about Polyvagal theory.
I was obsessed.
That is when I turned my attention to my body and my body’s daily state.
I started asking questions like…
- What does it feel like to feel safe in my body?
- How do I identify and release the trauma I am carrying in my body?
- Where is this state of being that I am embodying coming from — this state of anxiety and fear of the unknown?
That last question in specific led me to start asking whether states of anxiety and tension were learned behaviors from my direct environment — especially as a child.
I knew in that moment that, just like having had to take responsibility for my thoughts had been part of my Psychological healing journey, the “burden” of healing rested on my shoulders.
No one was coming to save me.
So I did the only natural thing I could think of.
I hired a coach.
Working with a Coach
I decided to hire a coach because after nearly two decades on my spiritual path, I knew that reading books and doing courses and answering journal prompts, were only going to be able to get me so far. Something I had confirmed during Yoga Teacher Training.
More importantly, I already knew that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That no matter how many generic journal prompts I answered, I was not going to be able to get to the core of the trauma without the leading hand of an expert who knew just how to help me navigate my way there.
I was lucky to have worked with Josephine Hardman, who helped me see what I couldn’t see — to bring into focus that which hid in the darkness outside of my awareness so that I could have the gift of 20/20 vision.
Through our work together we focused a lot on childhood wounds that were affecting my ability to confidently move in the direction of the goals and aspirations I had set for myself.
The work became as much about identifying the source of the wounding, as it did about releasing the wounding and creating a container to holding space for my inner child to feel safe.
The Silent Implications of Inner Child Trauma
One of the most important realizations I had while doing this inner-work was how seemingly small moments in my past were influencing how I perceive and interact with my reality in very limiting ways today.
These limiting stories looping through my mind became mantras that I would say with no conscious awareness as to their root source.
Had it not been for my coach asking me the right questions I might not have seen these mantras for what they were.
The hard part in identifying these mantras or scripts is that they are not so obvious. It would be fine and dandy if they came neatly packaged as “I am most likely going to fail if I try to do this.”
Instead, these mantras come wrapped up under layers of long-forgotten memories of our past.
For example. During our work together, I shared with my coach that I was “afraid to drop the ball” when it came to growing my business. This fear, I thought, was rooted in my fear that I would abandon showing up for my business the moment things got rough.
The story, as it turned out, came from the shame and embarrassment of being constantly picked last during physical education class in elementary school.
Growing up I was a skinny and scrawny kid who struggled to keep up with the more athletic kids. It was no surprise that I’d be picked last when I kept, literally, “dropping the ball,” thus causing my teammates to lose in competitive sports.
This mantra, running the show behind the scenes, was thus wrapped up in my feelings of wanting to belong, feeling left out and feeling unwanted.
The story was not so much about “dropping the ball” in my business, but about my feelings of unworthiness around my ability to show up powerfully in my business.
Like that story, we uncovered a host of other old limiting stories affecting my current worldview.
Releasing Old Stories
What I later came to realize, once the story came into full awareness, was that now that I recognized the story and released it from my body, I was free to explore other more empowering stories.
Above all, releasing the old story freed up my imagination. It opened up portals that allowed me to freely dream up more empowering stories, to broaden more freely the interpretation of new empowering stories that up until that moment I had not been able to dream up.
But unlike that little girl, feeling left out and unwanted, I now possess the self-awareness to know that 1) it’s not personal, 2) I know this is not a strength of mine, and 3) that I should not measure my worth according to the standards of my weaknesses.
Your Inner Child Trauma is Limiting your Worldview
If I had to choose, the largest implication of going through life and going through the motions operating out of the wounds of your inner child, it is that you are limited by the worldview of that wound.
You are limited by a level of consciousness that
- Has not fully matured yet and is limited by its Psychological and emotional developmental stage
- Even if that story helped protect you from Psychological damage in that moment, it is also limiting you from becoming all of who you are meant to be, all of who you want to become.
The important thing to recognize is that the trauma imprints in our body don’t have to be caused by big traumatic events like a car accident, sexual assault or abuse and neglect.
“Trauma with a small t” as it is called by professionals, is just as insidious and comes in the shape of that small comment a parent made about the way you look, feeling abandoned by an absent parent who has to spend a lot of time working away from home, or, as in my case, interactions with peers from school.
If you are experiencing difficulties, setbacks, or simply feel stuck when it comes to reaching for what you want out of your life, your inner child trauma might be the culprit.
Your inner child trauma is that voice inside your head that keeps replaying a story looping in your mind about an event from your past that is currently influencing your worldview.
This might look like an inner voice that is critical, doubts your abilities, and is constantly making you second-guess yourself about being good enough.
- Good enough to reach your goals
- Good enough to have happy and fulfilling relationships
- Good enough to create a fulfilling life of purpose.
While that story might have protected your sense of identity in the past, it is now keeping you bound to circumstances that are no longer true. Above all, you now possess the psychological and emotional maturity to see your experiences from a different perspective.
The work is in creating self-awareness, identifying and releasing the stories keeping you stuck, creating new empowering stories, and choosing the new story anytime you are triggered to go act out the old story.
If you’re a spiritual high achiever who has been feeling the urge to break through the patterns that are keeping you stuck, and you are looking for individualized guidance in creating a new and empowering story for yourself, shoot me an email and let’s connect about how I can help you move through your self-imposed limitations.
