Tag: inner child
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Cultivating Self-love in times of crisis
The last few weeks… they have felt very familiar. I’d like to think I’ve grown wiser since 2016, and 2020. My former therapist often said that in times of crisis, people tend to either overfunction or underfunction. She correctly observed that I am an overfunctioner. For much of my life I had used achievement, workaholism, and over-attending to relationships as…
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Is healing possible?
Healing can be a loaded word, and lately it seems trauma has become one too— the subject of numerous think pieces about whether the wider understanding of what constitutes trauma has gone too far. As a person who has experienced both “big T” and “little T” trauma, I feel it’s a great disservice to compare…
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A Constellation of Selves
Developing a “cohesive sense of self” is a goal in many perspectives of therapy and personal development. In this view, the self that is not cohesive is in conflict, opposing parts fighting for primacy in the personality and in relationships. We could refer back to concepts illuminated in the Adult Attachment Interview, that this lack of cohesion…
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Connecting to your core self, from a time before memory
Over the many years that I’ve facilitated inner child work, I’ve found that most people (at least initially) find it very difficult to connect with their younger selves in a positive way. Often they carry guilt, shame, annoyance, indifference, or even animosity towards their various child selves. This frequently stands in contrast with intellectual work…
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Heart Opening and Boundaries
Any time energy centers develop blocks, it’s always for a good reason. The arrangement and flow of the energy body is ideally suited to meet one’s environmental conditions and is adaptive in nature, but sometimes we retain certain patterns of movement even as our conditions change. The energetic blueprint of the body works just like…
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Past and future selves
“The past is a much a mystery as the future.” Season 3 of Umbrella Academy So often we think of healing or growing as resolving the wounds of the past, and maybe the present. The ways we hold on to experiences, are haunted by them, or see indications of their repetition all around us (whether…
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Redefining being “stuck”
A theme I’ve been working with since last summer is the idea that our ability to ground, to root down, must be in proportion with any focus on expansion or growth. Just like a tree can only grow as tall as its roots can support, or risk being highly vulnerable to the elements, we cannot…
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Reclaiming self-worth, integrating your inner child(ren)
Trigger warning: discussion of abuse culture, and brief reference to the documentary Allan vs Farrow Culturally we are reckoning with abuse culture in a way that has never been so sustained and is moving across demographics that were not previously engaged with anti-violence activism. The push for accountability is needed and long overdue, and yet…
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What does it mean to be an “artist?”
I made a personal decision earlier in December 2020 to take an indefinite hiatus from social media in order to free up more time, mental energy, and emotional space for practices that nourish me. There’s a lot of amazing creative work that happens on SM, so this isn’t a dig at the medium or anyone’s…
Inward Vision 