Connecting With Our Inner Child

Pete Walker’s work, particularly on arrested self-protection has been helpful with this.

How does your inner child feel about it? From one person, this can be an invitation into curiosity and to heal disconnection. From someone else, it can indicate contempt for being foolish enough to fall for that inner child nonsense. How does connecting with and befriending our inner child intersect with identification and nondual philosophy?

When we experience something that overwhelms us, we disconnect. This is especially true during childhood when we were stuck in our family with very little agency to make things better. We have limited brain development and do our best to survive, often in circumstances of neglect and abuse. We have naive (childish) ideas and hope we can fix our family. We take the blame because we can’t afford to see that it is our grown-ups who set up the conditions in our life, often due to their unresolved intergenerational trauma. We have experiences of feeling unloved and unworthy and these develop into core deficiency beliefs.

My experience is that our “self” at different ages exists in our nervous system and brain much like our “self” at this age. Consciousness is expressing itself through our human body and life. Our mammal body, nervous system and brain remember…