Pay Attention to Your Inner Child
Your inner child wants something from you and like a child, it wants it right now! In choosing this card you are struggling to see your situation from an adult perspective. You may be feeling unsafe, a lack of independence or control and your inner child is trying to protect you. Your inner child is asking you the adult to help it resolve powerful old emotions. The time to act is now; resolve and release old wounds of the past so that you can embrace being fully present, being completely as you want to be and truly yourself.
When the inner child is triggered it is like a switch being turned on. One minute you are an adult, the next minute you feel like a child. When the child switch turns on you feel like you are being reprimanded, or criticised; the ‘others’ have ganged up on you; you have been excluded from the group or they are having a great time without you; you feel you have been blamed when it’s not your fault; or you just don’t want to do ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. You know your child switch is activated when you hear yourself using the cry of all children: ‘It’s not fair!’.
Alternatively, you may be dealing with adults who are really children inside. They become difficult by shouting, throwing tantrums and being rude; or they become moody and sullen. You don’t know how to deal with their constant crying out for sympathy or how they play manipulative games with you when trying to get what they want. These and other situations trigger childhood memories that re-engage your childhood emotions, such as feeling overwhelmed, isolated, abandoned, confused, frightened, burdened or fearful, and so on.
These feelings link directly back to the inner child for several reasons but the main reason is that your inner child is a raw powerful emotional system designed to protect you. This emotional system of protection contains the rules and the limitations set in place at a certain point in time in your developing years. In choosing this card you are being asked to pay attention to a situation that has triggered the protective system within you. You are now looking at a situation or a person through the eyes of your inner child. When you see the world from the inner child perspective you have returned to the point in your childhood where you felt the same as you do now. The situation you are experiencing is not the same as your childhood circumstances. However, what is the same are the elements of healing that you require. Consider what the common elements are that have spanned time. These elements are presenting a doorway that is showing you what you need to learn right now to keep you safe, elements that the child within has not been able to cope with and has been holding onto as a form of protection.
The most common reason the child switch turns on is that you are going back to the parts of your inner self that couldn’t work out how to deal with a particular situation (or recurring situation) in your childhood. Until now you as the adult didn’t know what to do. You have waited for this moment in time when you are ready to understand the experience fully and learn the skills required to keep your inner self safe. This could be setting boundaries, learning relationship skills or resolving a deeply wounding experience in your past. In your current situation you may feel as if you have been sucked into a vortex re-enacting (once again) past circumstances in which you play the same role and experience the same feelings. However, the purpose in replaying an event is not to cause more pain but to change the ending of the event. The old ending created the identity you carry now, which is made up of what you feel about your life and yourself. This perception of yourself is what you now wish to change. What you are trying to heal is a feeling about yourself that is part of your core identity. The child within wants you the adult to stand up for them and feel strong using the skills that you have developed as an adult. The child needs the adult to learn the new skills that will set your boundaries and keep it safe.
Another reason you may need to connect to the child within is that you need the raw emotional power of your inner child to motivate you to act on a situation you have been presented with. In many ways children feel more deeply because they don’t rationalise or temper their feelings to make way for common sense or compassion for the other person; they retain the emo-tional connection and capacity to just feel. If you need to act – as opposed to remaining in your head through intellectual rationalisation – you may need to call on the emotions of the inner child to help you access and act upon a depth of feeling that your adult self may have lost contact with or does not use on a regular basis.
Another possibility is that your mindset and the rules that you live by may be predominantly based on your child self; one who has never learned to take control of their life and is waiting for others to rescue and take care of life for them. This mindset may be playful, fun-loving, creative and sponta-neous, or irresponsible, unfocused, easily distracted and unable to complete tasks, etc. Your adult self may wish to restore and integrate qualities such as playfulness and innocence, or it may be ready to look at areas that have never fully formed as you grew into an adult. These qualities may be a lack of commitment, a fear of the unknown or an unwillingness to try something new, and so on.
The key difference between an adult and a child is the ability to see beyond a self-centred perspective. When the inner child is triggered it can only see through the perspective of its particular age, stage and level of development. More importantly it can only see through the eyes of its wounds and the rules it has established around its pain. This mindset includes the meaning it gave to the situation, the meaning it gave itself, combined with the rules and abilities that governed its life at that stage. In order to live to your full potential beyond the child’s perspective you need to know all the hidden rules that you live by. The only way to do this is to go back to the child within.
It is a common belief that the inner child is tucked away and hidden. However, when the child is wounded it plays a part of your everyday world as an adult, constantly making sure that you are safe. There are some automatic everyday behaviours that demonstrate the child’s presence such as taking events personally, responding automatically to situations with deep feelings of guilt and shame or frustration – even anxiety – if you are not acknowledged in some form. These feelings and responses protect and reinforce the inner child’s sense of self.
The situation that triggered your child within is a gift. Your inner child is full of useful information that you need in order to be the person you want to be. Contacting your inner child is like being your own detective; you are finding out the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of your core self. In other words, being triggered is going to lead you to your true self, and that’s what your inner child wants. It wants action. It wants you to act on what you feel right now.
At the core of this card is a desire to acknowledge and heal the child within and in doing so it will let go of its duties of being on-guard to pro-tect you. The child can then go back to normal childhood activities such as being curious about life, playing, growing and having fun. When you are ready to integrate your inner child, you are ready to acknowledge and respect yourself as the powerful and creative adult that you are. Get ready to release the people, situations, circumstances that make you feel like a child. It’s time.
