When you were a child, you were very absorbent. You could sense everything that was happening around you. Every remark from your parents or anyone whom you were looking up to, was very important to you. Especially, you were subjected to feel and store negative comments (level of negativity that you needed in order to feel it depends on your personality) and traumas, those were deeply engraved in you. Probably even to this day. Child does not express its feelings so easily, and being in the environment that is judgmental and dismissive, it will completely shut down and it won’t show which feelings are being actually bottling inside that fragile soul.

Hello, my name is Selena, and welcome to my blog Alive and awake. I am so happy that you are here! 😊 I am a scientist, with a PhD in biochemistry, that is interested in how human brain functions at the biochemical level and how our brain’s wiring expands towards total awaking. Why do we become spiritual creatures? Why do we believe in God? And how that helps us ease brain health issues?

So, you grow up and you think that your life is going into the right direction. You can achieve great things. You can reach your middle age years before you start feeling that something is just not right. Some emotional trigger happens and you are 10 years old again, hiding in the corner of your room, feeling your pain alone. Suddenly, you lose your self-esteem, you are losing trust in people, you are filled with fear. Your inner child is awake and is telling you- hey, I am still here, and I am still hurt and you are going to feel the same pain that I am feeling for so long because no one help me get over this problem. When that is activated, you will behave as that kid that you were back then, every time when the same trigger appears.

How can you recognize if you are having an inner child that is wounded inside of you? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have big feelings about small things?
• Do you experience self-sabotage of your dreams becoming true?
• Do you have a difficult relationship with your family?
• Do you have lots of self-criticism and low self-esteem?
• Do you have problem to maintain a healthy relationship?
• Do you have mental, physical and emotional issues?

If these issues are familiar to you, then you can be sure that one part of you, that child that you were once upon a time, never healed from traumas and mistreatments that it had experienced. You can point fingers and choose to blame people in your life who did you wrong, but that will not solve anything. It can build resentment, anger, and negative emotions could transfer to the physical, making you ill. It is on you to take you life in your hands, to take your younger self and treat it as it should have been treated while growing up.

As would psychotherapist Robert Jackman say, ‘We have to learn to give to ourselves as adults what we did not receive in childhood.’

Our mental/brain health depends on how we heal wounds that we collected while growing up. Both scientists, doctors, psychotherapists, and spiritual leaders and healers, life coaches, recognize that we all have a part of ourselves that never grows up, that is our remainder of our hurts and our joys. Robert Jackman defines inner child as ‘a concept a person envisions that holds the emotional imprinted memory from a childhood.’ If our inner child is wounded it can be called – wounded inner child or lost inner child, and it is detrimental for many of our adult decisions and reactions.

While we are adulting and collecting imprints from the outer world, our inner self soaks all the experiences and compartmentalizes them into positive and negative ones. Negative experiences do not have to develop into traumas; however, some do. Developing our personalities from the birth until the age of twenty, we are not aware how important it is what surrounds us, how crucial is who are the people that we are interacting with. Unfortunately, many parents are not aware of this too, since they themselves often have their inner child wounded and not healed, so we cannot always count on them to be our guides and help us. Sometimes they are the actual source of child’s trauma, and other times they just cannot recognize that something is going on outside of the home that has been traumatic and painful to their child.  

Neurologically, when something traumatic happens, it is remembered very well, it is a very clear memory in our brain, stored so that flashes of it come through and help us asses the situation that we are in. Then the brain will decide if we are in danger or not. This is a primitive survival response and is deep in our brain, in the amygdala and in the hippocampus. During the traumatic event, the amygdala decides what is the next best thing to do. As the general of the body, it gives commands to either fight, flee or freeze. At the same time hippocampus cannot function as it should, and divide the event into its development phases. The opposite happens. Hippocampus is suppressed and the memory gets stored as a remainder, our flashback, where the trauma never ends. As long as we do not heal our traumas, our inner child, that so innocently wanted to be happy and care-free, will never allow us to become adults that can empathise with other adults or help our own children or even live life knowing that we can be safe and secured.

Today’s quote:

The privilege of a lifetime is to be who we are. Joseph Campbell

And in order to do that, we need to heal past self so that we can present to the world our true self.

I wish you a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I wish you to decide to heal and to get healed. It will not be easy; it will take time. It will trigger changes in your life. But it will help you to breathe deep, feel free and love being in your own skin. Until next time.

• Jackman, Robert. (2020) Healing your lost inner child: how to stop impulsive reactions, set healthy boundaries and embrace an authentic life.