Treat your pain as a hurt child you are trying to comfort, not as a stepchild — always demanding and begging it to speak to you and tell you what it wants and why it’s misbehaving. Have you tried that on a kid? Or had it tried on you?
You were hurting and confused and needed someone to hold you and comfort you, someone to tether to while you figured out life. Instead you got scolded. Like, how dare you have feelings?!
You’re the parent now.
It’s your job to reach back and take the hand of the frightened child inside of you, to let them know that you’ve got them and won’t let anything bad happen to them.
Go first so your Inner Child can feel safe to follow you. Don’t push. Rather, allow love to penetrate into the fear so that there is more love and less fear. Always more love and less fear.
Safety is the absence of fear. Your absence of fear will create a feeling of safety for your Inner Child to hit some developmental milestones and come into the present. You call back the fragmented pieces of your Inner Child, the parts of you that are stuck in the past and all its scary feelings by holding that child’s hand and helping them forward.
