Healing the Inner Child

Mental Health –Inner Child  Healing - How to begin

"Recovery involves bringing to consciousness those beliefs and attitudes in our subconscious that are causing our dysfunctional reactions so that we can reprogram our ego defenses to allow us to live a healthy, fulfilling life instead of just surviving.  So that we can own our power to make choices for ourselves about our beliefs and values instead of unconsciously reacting to the old tapes.  Recovery is consciousness rising.  It is en-light-en-ment - bringing the dysfunctional attitudes and beliefs out of the darkness of our subconscious into the Light of consciousness.

On an emotional level the dance of Recovery is owning and honoring the emotional wounds so that we can release the grief energy - the pain, rage, terror, and shame that is driving us. 

That shame is toxic and is not ours - it never was!  We did nothing to be ashamed of - we were just little kids.  Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc.  This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.

There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds."

(Quotations in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

Inner child work is in one way detective work.  We have a mystery to solve.  Why have I have I been attracted to the type of people that I have been in relationship with in my life?  Why do I react in certain ways in certain situations?  Where did my behavior patterns come from?  Why do I sometimes feel so: helpless; lonely; desperate; scared; angry; suicidal; etc.

Just starting to ask these types of questions, is the first step in the healing process.  It is healthy to start wondering about the cause and effect dynamics in our life. 

In our codependence, we reacted to life out of a black and white, right and wrong, belief paradigm that taught us that is was shameful and bad to be wrong, to make mistakes, to be imperfect - to be human.  We formed our core relationship with our self and with life in early childhood based on the messages we got, the emotional trauma we suffered, and the role modeling of the adults around us.  As we grew up, we built our relationship with self, other people, and life on the foundation we formed in early childhood.

When we were 5, we were already reacting to life out of the emotional trauma of earlier ages.  We adapted defenses to try to protect ourselves and to get our survival needs met.  The defenses adapted at 5 due to the trauma suffered at earlier ages led to further trauma when we were 7 that then caused us to adjust our defenses that led to wounding at 9, etc., etc., etc.

Toxic shame is the belief that there is something inherently wrong with who we are, with our being.  Guilt is "I made a mistake, I did something wrong."  Toxic shame is:  "I am a mistake. There is something wrong with me."

It is very important to start “awakening to the Truth” (Basic Goodness) that there is nothing inherently wrong with our being - it is our relationship with our self and with life that is dysfunctional.  And that relationship was formed in early childhood.

The way that one begins inner child healing is simply to become aware. 

To become aware that the governing principle in life is cause and effect.

To become aware that our relationship with our self is dysfunctional.

To become aware that we have the power to change our relationship with our self.

To become aware that we were programmed with false beliefs about the purpose and nature of life in early childhood - and that we can change that programming.

To become aware that we have emotional wounds from childhood that it is possible to get in touch with and heal enough to stop them from dictating how we are living our life today. 

That is the purpose of inner child healing - to stop letting our experiences of the past dictate how we respond to life today.  It cannot be done without revisiting our childhood.

We need to become aware, to raise our consciousness.  To create a new level of consciousness for ourselves that allows us to observe ourselves. The Past Present Linkage. We have to Back to Go Forward

It is vitally important to start observing ourselves - our reactions, our feelings, our thoughts - from a detached witness place that is not shaming.

We all have an inner critic, (Super-Ego) a critical parent voice that beats us up with shame, judgment, and fear.  The critical parent voice developed to try to control our emotions and our behaviors because we got the message there was something wrong with us and that our survival would be threatened if we did, said, or felt the "wrong" things.

Self- Love – Self- Hate

It is vital to start learning how to not give power to that critical shaming voice.  We need to start observing ourselves with compassion.  This is almost impossible at the beginning of the inner child healing process - having compassion for our self, being loving to our self, is the hardest thing for us to do.  Love others as we love ourselves.

So, we need to start observing ourselves from at least a more neutral perspective.  Become a scientific observer, a detective - the Sherlock Holmes of your own inner process as it were. We need to go on ‘Dig’ – We have to make conscious the Unconscious

We need to start being that detective, observing ourselves and asking ourselves where that reaction / thought / feeling is coming from.  Why am I feeling this way?  What does this remind me of from my past?  How old do I feel right now?  How old did I act when that happened?

One of the amazing things about this process is that as one starts to become more aware of our own reactions, we also start to become more aware of others.  We start seeing when the people in our lives are reacting like a little kid, or adolescent, or teenager, or whatever.  The more we become aware of their reactions, the easier it becomes to stop taking their behavior personally - which then makes it easier to detach from our own reactions and observe ourselves. The Self- Observing Self

It is an amazing, miraculous process that can help us to change our relationship with our self, with other people, and with life.  Becoming more aware, becoming conscious of a new way of looking at ourselves and life is the beginning of a process of learning to forgive and Love our self. Through Self-Awareness

A detective always looks at cause and effect.  By becoming a detective, solving the mystery of why we have lived our lives as we have, we can start to free ourselves from our past.  By doing the inner child healing, we can start to learn how to really be alive instead of just surviving and enduring.

Inner Child Healing - Why do it?

"We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal.  We are taught to repress and distort our own emotional process.  We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.

This emotional repression and dishonesty causes society to be emotionally dysfunctional.  Additionally, urban based civilization has completely disregarded natural laws and natural cycles such as the human developmental process.  There is no integration into our culture of the natural human developmental process.

As just one blatant example of this, consider how most so called primitive or aboriginal societies react to the onset of puberty.  When a girl starts menstruating, ceremonies are held to celebrate her womanhood - to honor her coming into her power, to honor her miraculous gift of being able to conceive.  Boys go through training and initiation rites to help them make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Example Outward Bound. Look at what we have in our society: junior high school - a bunch of scared, insecure kids who torture each other out of their confusion and fear, and join gangs to try to find an identity.

This lack of integration of the natural human growth process causes trauma.  At each stage of the developmental process we were traumatized because of the emotionally repressive, spiritually hostile environment into which we were born.  We went into the next stage incomplete and then were retraumatized, were wounded again." We can return to the beginning through Infinite Regression

(Quotations in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

For all of the so called progress of our modern societies, we still are far behind most aboriginal cultures in terms of respect for individual rights and dignity in some kind of balance with the good of the whole.  (I am speaking here of tribal aboriginal societies - not urbanized ones.)  Nowhere is this more evident in terms of our relationship to our children.

Modern civilizations - both Eastern and Western - are no more than a generation or two removed from the belief that children were property.  This, of course, goes hand in hand with the belief that women were property.  The idea that children have rights, individuality, and dignity is relatively new in modern society.  The predominant and underlying belief, as it has been manifested in the treatment of children, has been that children are extensions of, and tools to be used by, their parents.

A very telling insight into the basic beliefs underlying Western attitudes towards children is shared by inner child pioneer Alice Miller in her book The Drama of The Gifted Child.  She shares how the 19th Century German Philosophers who laid the groundwork for modern psychology, emphasized the importance of stamping out a child's "exuberance."  In other words, a child's spirit must be crushed in order to control them.

Children are to be seen and not heard.  Spare the rod and spoil the child.

It is only in very recent history, that our society has even recognized child abuse as a crime instead of an inherent right of the parent.  The concept of healthy parenting as a skill to be learned is very new in society.

Any society that does not respect and honor individual human dignity is going to be a society that does not meet the essential needs of its members.  Patriarchal societies, that demean and degrade women and children, are dysfunctional in their essence.

We form our core relationship with our self and with life - and of course with other people - in early childhood in reaction to the messages we get from the way we are treated and the role modeling of the other people in our lives.  We then have no training or initiation ceremonies, no culturally approved grieving process, to help us let go of the old programming and learn a different relationship with our self and life.  So, we build upon the foundation laid in early childhood.

As adults, we react to the programming of our childhood. To contend that our childhood emotional wounds have not affected our adult lives is ridiculous.  To think that our early programming has not influenced the way we have lived is to be in denial to an extreme.

Because societies standards for what constitutes success are dysfunctional, many people can be pointed out who "have risen above" their past to be a success.  It is those people, who are supposedly successful, that are running the world.  How good a job do you think they are doing?

It is our world leaders, reacting out of the fear and insecurity of their inner children, and the dysfunctional belief systems underlying civilization, who give us war and poverty, billionaires and homelessness.

My book, Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, evolved out of a talk that I first did in 1991.  In the talk, I stated that I would like to one day make up a bumper sticker that said "Work for World Peace, Heal Your Inner Child."  I did have these bumper stickers printed when I published my book.  It is, I believe, an essential Truth.  We will never have world peace, or a civilized society which is based upon respect and dignity - to say nothing of Love - unless we can heal our relationships with ourselves enough to learn to Love and respect our self.

We cannot Love our neighbor as our self, as long as we are judging and comparing our self to them in order to feel good about our self.  We cannot have a society that meets the essential emotional and spiritual needs of its members as long as we are reacting to life in alignment with rules of interaction that we learned in junior high school.

We are all connected - not separate.  We all have worth and deserved to be treated with dignity and respect - instead of earning societies version of worth by stepping on and over our fellow humans, to say nothing of destroying the planet we live on.

It is through healing our inner child wounds that we can learn to respect and Love our self so that we can know how to treat others with respect and Love.  It is through healing our inner children that we can save our planet and evolve into a society that does meet the essential needs of its members.

Inner child healing is not some fad or pop psychology.  Inner child healing is the only way to empower ourselves to stop living life in reaction to the past. Reactive vs. Proactive. We have been ignoring history and repeating it for centuries.  If we are going to have a chance to reverse the self destructive patterns of human kind, it is going to come from individuals healing self.  By healing our inner child wounds, we can change the world.

Infinite Regression - "It is through having the courage and willingness to revisit the emotional "dark night of the soul" that was our childhood, that we can start to understand on a gut level why we have lived our lives as we have.

It is when we start understanding the cause and effect relationship between what happened to the child that we were, and the effect it had on the adult we became, that we can truly start to forgive ourselves. It is only when we start understanding on an emotional level, on a gut level, that we were powerless to do anything any differently than we did that we can truly start to Love ourselves. 

The hardest thing for any of us to do is to have compassion for ourselves.  As children we felt responsible for the things that happened to us.  We blamed ourselves for the things that were done to us and for the deprivations we suffered. There is nothing more powerful in this transformational process than being able to go back to that child who still exists within us and say, "It wasn't your fault.  You didn't do anything wrong, you were just a little kid.""  Healing of Guilt and Shame

"As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are giving power to the disease. We are feeding the monster that is devouring us
. 
We need to take responsibility without taking the blame. We need to own and honor the feelings without being a victim of them. 

We need to rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling our lives. STOP them from driving the bus!  Children are not supposed to drive; they are not supposed to be in control. 

The Child will become the Father of the Man

And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned. We have been doing it backwards. We abandoned and abused our inner children. Locked them in a dark place within us. And at the same time let the children drive the bus - let the children's wounds dictate our lives." 

Our parents were our higher powers.  We were not capable of understanding that they might have problems that had nothing to do with us.  So it felt like it was our fault. 

We formed our relationship with ourselves and life in early childhood.  We learned about love from people who were not capable of loving in a healthy way because of their unhealed childhood wounds.  Our core / earliest relationship with our self were formed from the feeling that something is wrong and it must be me.  At the core of our being is a little kid who believes that he/she is unworthy and unlovable.  That was the foundation that we built our concept of "self" on. 

Children are master manipulators. That is their job - to survive in whatever way works.  So we adapted defense systems to protect our broken hearts and wounded spirits.  The 4 year old learned to throw tantrums, or be real quiet, or help clean the house, or protect the younger siblings, or be cute and funny, etc.  Then we got to be 7 or 8 and started being able to understand cause and effect and use reason and logic - and we changed our defense systems to fit the circumstances.  Then we reach puberty and didn't have a clue what was happening to us, and no healthy adults to help us understand, so we adapted our defense systems to protect our vulnerability.  And then we were teenagers and our job was to start becoming independent and prepare ourselves to be adults so we changed our defense systems once again.

Robert choose “quietism to cope and survive.

It is not only dysfunctional; it is ridiculous to maintain that what happened in our childhood did not affect our adult life.  We have layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, buried trauma, unfulfilled needs, etc., etc.  Our hearts were broken, our spirit's wounded, our minds programmed dysfunctional.  The choices we have made as adults were made in reaction to our childhood wounds / programming - our lives have been dictated by our wounded inner children. 

(History, politics, "success" or lack of "success," in our dysfunctional society/civilizations can always be made clearer by looking at the childhoods of the individuals involved.  History has been, and is being, made by immature, scared, angry, hurt individuals who were/are reacting to their childhood wounds and programming - reacting to the little child inside who feels unworthy and unlovable.) 

It is very important to realize that we are not an integrated whole being - to ourselves.  Our self concept is fractured into a multitude of pieces.  In some instances we feel powerful and strong, in others weak and helpless - that is because different parts of us are reacting to different stimuli (different "buttons" are being pushed.)  The parts of us that feel weak, helpless, needy, etc. are not bad or wrong - what is being felt is perfect for the reality that was experienced by the part of our self that is reacting (perfect for then - but it has very little to do with what is happening in the now).  It is very important to start having compassion for that wounded part of ourselves.

It is by owning our wounds that we can start taking the power away from the wounded part of us.  When we suppress the feelings, feel ashamed about our reactions, do not own that part of our being, then we give it power.  It is the feelings that we are hiding from that dictate our behavior, that fuel obsession and compulsion. 

Codependence is a disease of extremes. 

Those of us who were horrified and deeply wounded by a perpetrator in childhood - and were never going to be like that parent - adapted a more passive defense system to avoid confrontation and "hurting others."  The more passive type of codependent defense system leads to a dominant pattern of being the victim.

Those of us who were disgusted by, and ashamed of, the victim parent in childhood and vowed never to be like that role model, adapted a more aggressive defense system.  So we go charging through life being the bull in the china shop - being the perpetrator who blames other people for not allowing us to be in control.   The perpetrator that feels like a victim of other people not doing things "right" - which is what forces us to bulldoze our way through life. 

And, of course, some of us go first one way and then the other.  (We all have our own personal spectrum of extremes that we swing between - sometimes being the victim, sometimes being the perpetrator.  Being a passive victim is perpetrating on those around us.)

The only way we can be whole is to own all of the parts of ourselves.  By owning all the parts we can then have choices about how we respond to life.  By denying, hiding, and suppressing parts of ourselves we doom ourselves to live life in reaction. 

A technique I have found very valuable in this healing process is to relate to the different wounded parts of our self as different ages of the inner child.  These different ages of the child may be literally tied to an event that happened at that age - i.e. when I was 7 I tried to commit suicide. Or the age of the child might be a symbolic designator for a pattern of abuse/deprivation that occurred throughout our childhood - i.e. the 9 year old within me feels completely emotionally isolated and desperately needy/lonely, a condition which was true for most of my childhood and not tied to any specific incident (that I know of) that happened when I was 9.

By searching out, getting acquainted with, owning the feelings of, and building a relationship with, these different emotional wounds/ages of the inner child, we can start being a loving parent to ourselves instead of an abusive one.  We can have boundaries with ourselves that allow us to:  take responsibility for being a co-creator of our life (grow up); protect our inner children from the perpetrator within/critical parent (be loving to ourselves); stop letting our childhood wounds control our life (take loving action for ourselves); and own the Truth of who we really are (Spiritual Beings) so that we can open up to receive the Love and Joy we deserve.

It is impossible to truly love the adult that we are without owning the child that we were.  In order to do that we need to detach from our inner process (and stop the disease from abusing us) so that we can have some objectivity and discernment that will allow us to have compassion for our own childhood wounds.  Then we need to grieve those wounds and own our right to be angry about what happened to us in childhood - so that we can truly know in our gut that it wasn't our fault - we were just innocent little kids.

Feeling the Feelings

"Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work.  Emotions are energy:  E-motion = energy in motion.  It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow. 

Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be - even those emotions that feel uncomfortable.  Fear is a warning; anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing.  These are not negative emotional responses!  We were taught to react negatively to them.  It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion."

"The way to stop reacting out of our inner children is to release the stored emotional energy from our childhoods by doing the grief work that will heal our wounds.  The only effective, long term way to clear our emotional process - to clear the inner channel to Truth which exists in all of us - is to grieve the wounds which we suffered as children.  The most important single tool, the tool which is vital to changing behavior patterns and attitudes in this healing transformation, is the grief process.  The process of grieving.

We are all carrying around repressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods, whether it was twenty years ago or fifty years ago.  We have this grief energy within us even if we came from a relatively healthy family, because this society is emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional."

Emotions are energy that is manifested in our bodies.  They exist below the neck.  They are not thoughts (although attitudes set up our emotional reactions.)  In order to do the emotional healing it is vital to start paying attention to where energy is manifesting in our bodies.  Where is there tension, tightness?  Could that "indigestion" really be some feelings?  Are those "butterflies" in my stomach telling me something emotionally?

When I am working with someone and they start having some feelings coming up, the first thing I have to tell them is to keep breathing.  Most of us have learned a variety of ways to control our emotions and one of them is to stop breathing and close our throats.  That is because grief in the form of sadness accumulates in our upper chest and breathing into it helps some of it to escape - so we learned to stop breathing at those moments when we start getting emotional, when our voice starts breaking.

Western civilization has for many years been way out of balance towards the left brain way of thinking - concrete, rational, what you see is all there is (this was in reaction to earlier times of being out of balance the other way, towards superstition and ignorance.)  Because emotional energy can not be seen or measured or weighed ("The x-ray shows you've got 5 pounds of grief in there.") emotions were discounted and devalued.  This has started to change somewhat in recent years but most of us grew up in a society that taught us that being too emotional was a bad thing that we should avoid.  (Certain cultures / subcultures give more permission for emotions but those are usually out of balance to the other extreme of allowing the emotions to rule - the goal is balance: between mental and emotional, between intuitive and rational.)

Emotions are a vital part of our being for several reasons. 

1. Because it is energy and energy cannot just disappear.  The emotional energy generated by the circumstances of our childhood and early life does not go away just because we were forced to deny it.  It is still trapped in our body - in a pressurized, explosive state, as a result of being suppressed.  If we don't learn how to release it in a healthy way it will explode outward or implode back in on us.  Eventually it will transform into some other form - such as cancer. 

2.  As long as we have pockets of pressurized emotional energy that we have to avoid dealing with - those emotional wounds will run our lives.  We use food, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, work, religion, exercise, meditation, television, etc., to help us keep suppressing that energy.  To help us keep ourselves focused on something else, anything else, besides the emotional wounds that terrify us.  The emotional wounds are what because obsession and compulsion are what the "critical parent" voice works so hard to keep us from dealing with.

3.  Our emotions tell us who we are - our Soul communicates with us through emotional energy vibrations.  Truth is an emotional energy vibrational communication from our Soul on the Spiritual Plane to our being/spirit/soul on this physical plane - it is something that we feel in our heart/our gut, something that resonates within us. 

Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes from our childhood wounds.  When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid, etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 - not to what is happening now.  Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways when we were kids.)

 4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level - which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids.  At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the message that I wasn't good enough, that I was unlovable.  Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror - the emotional grief energy - from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.

I became willing to do the emotional healing in the summer of 1987 when I set myself up to be abandoned on my birthday one more time.  I called a counselor that I had been told was good with the emotional work.  It turned our that he was in the middle of moving to Hawaii and wasn't doing counseling anymore.  But he said I could come over and talk to him as he packed.

I don't remember anything that he said to me that day - what I do remember is that as I sat in his house watching him pack I had a feeling, and a visual image, that I had just opened Pandora's Box - the monsters were loose now and I would never be able shut that box again.

Doing the grief work is absolutely terrifying.  The word I came up with to describe how I felt was terrify***ingfying.  It felt like if I ever really owned the pain, I would end up crying in a rubber room for the rest of my life.  That if I ever really owned the rage, I would just go up and down the street shooting people.  That is not what happened.  The Spirit guided me through the process and gave me the resources I needed to release great quantities of that pent up, pressurized emotional energy.  To release enough to start learning who I really am, to start seeing my path more clearly, and to start forgiving myself and learning about love. 

I still need to do the grieving/energy release work from time to time.  There is still a hole in my soul - a seemingly bottomless abyss of wish-to-die-pain, shame, and unbearable suffering.   But it is a much smaller hole and I don't have to visit it very often. 

The wounds don't go away.  They have less power to dictate my life as I heal.  I needed to own that wounded part of me in order to start getting to know, and have compassion for, me.  I also needed to learn to have a balance because we can't live in those feelings.  We need to own them and honor them in order to own and honor ourselves - but then we need to learn to have internal boundaries that will allow us to find some balance in our life, allow us to trust the process and our Higher Power. 

We are on a Spiritual journey - and the Force is with us.  It will help and guide us as we face the terror of owning how painful our human experience has been.  The more we are able to feel and release the feelings / emotional energy, the more clearly we can tune into the emotional energy that is Truth - and Love, Light, Joy, Beauty - coming from The Source Energy.

Learning to Love our self

"Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child.  Because we had no tools for reprogramming our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met - our emotional, mental, Spiritual, or physical needs.  Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside.  Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves."

"We need to take the shame and judgment out of the process on a personal level.  It is vitally important to stop listening and giving power to that critical place within us that tells us that we are bad and wrong and shameful.

That "critical parent" voice in our head is the disease lying to us. . . .Again the Critical Super-Ego This healing is a long gradual process - the goal is progress, not perfection.  What we are learning about is unconditional Love.  Unconditional Love means no judgment, no shame."

"We need to start observing ourselves and stop judging ourselves.  Any time we judge and shame ourselves, we are feeding back into the disease; we are jumping back into the squirrel cage."

(Quotations in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

Codependence is a dysfunctional defense system that was built in reaction to feeling unlovable and unworthy - because our parents were wounded codependents who didn't know how to love themselves.  We grew up in environments that were emotionally dishonest, spiritually hostile, and shame based.  Our relationship with ourselves (and all the different parts of our self: emotions, gender, spirit, etc.) got twisted and distorted in order to survive in our particular dysfunctional environment.

We got to an age where we were supposed to be an adult and we started acting like we knew what we were doing.  We went around pretending to be adult at the same time we were reacting to the programming that we got growing up.  We tried to do everything "right" or rebelled and went against what we had been taught was "right."  Either way we weren't living our life through choice, we were living it in reaction. Illness is Reactive – Health is proactive

In order to start being loving to ourselves we need to change our relationship with our self - and with all the wounded parts of our self.   The way which I have found works the best in starting to love ourselves is through having internal boundaries.

Learning to have internal boundaries is a dynamic process that involves three distinctly different, but intimately interconnected spheres of work.  The purpose of the work is to change our ego-programming - to change our relationship with ourselves by changing our emotional/behavioral defense system into something that works to open us up to receive love, instead of sabotaging ourselves because of our deep belief that we don't deserve love. 

(I need to make the point here that Codependence and recovery are both multi-leveled, multi-dimensional phenomena. What we are trying to achieve is integration and balance on different levels. In regard to our relationship with us this involves two major dimensions: the horizontal and the vertical. In this context the horizontal is about being human and relating to other humans and our environment. The vertical is Spiritual, about our relationship to a Higher Power, to the Universal Source. If we cannot conceive of a God/Goddess Force that loves us then it makes it virtually impossible to love to ourselves. So a Spiritual Awakening is absolutely vital to the process in my opinion. Changing our relationship with ourselves on the horizontal level is both a necessary element in and possible because we are working on, integrating Spiritual Truth into our inner process.)

These three spheres are:

1.  Detachment

2.  Inner Child Healing

3.  Grieving

Because Codependence is a reactive phenomena it is vital to start being able to detach from our own process in order to have some choice in changing our reactions.  We need to start observing our selves from the witness perspective instead of from the perspective of the judge. 

We all observe ourselves - have a place of watching ourselves as if from outside, or perched somewhere inside, observing our own behavior.  Because of our childhoods we learned to judge ourselves from that witness perspective, the "critical parent" voice. 

The emotionally dishonest environments we were raised in taught us that it was not ok to feel our emotions or those only certain emotions were ok.  So we had to learn ways to control our emotions in order to survive.  We adapted the same tools that were used on us - guilt, shame, and fear (and saw in the role modeling of our parents how they reacted to life from shame and fear.)  This is where the critical parent gets born.  Its purpose is to try to keep our emotions and behavior under some sort of control so that we can get our survival needs met.

So the first boundary that we need to start setting internally is with the wounded / dysfunctional programmed part of our own mind.  We need to start saying no to the inner voices that are shaming and judgmental.  The disease comes from a black and white, right and wrong, perspective.  It speaks in absolutes: "You always screw up!"  "You will never be a success!" - These are lies. We don't always screw up. We may never be a success according to our parents or societies dysfunctional definition of success - but that is because our heart and soul do not resonate with those definitions, so that kind of success would be a betrayal of ourselves. We need to consciously change our definitions so that we can stop judging ourselves against someone else's screwed up value system.

We learned to relate to ourselves (and all the parts of our self - emotions, sexuality, etc.) and life from a critical place of believing that something was wrong with us - and in fear that we would be punished if we didn't do life "right."  Whatever we are doing or not doing the disease can always finds something to beat us up with.  I have 10 things on my "to do list" today, I get 9 of them done, the disease does not want me to give myself credit for what I have done but instead beats me up for the one I didn't get done.  Whenever life gets too good we get uncomfortable and the disease jumps right in with fear and shame messages.  The critical parent voice keeps us from relaxing and enjoying life, and from loving our self.  Dammed if you do, and dammed if you don’t

We need to own that we have the power to choose where to focus our mind. We can consciously start viewing ourselves from the "witness" perspective.   It is time to fire the judge - our critical parent - and choose to replace that judge with our Higher Self, who is a loving parent. We can then intervene in our own process to protect ourselves from the perpetrator within - the critical parent/disease voice.

(It is almost impossible to go from critical parent to compassionate loving parent in one step - so the first step often is to try to observe ourselves from a neutral position or a "scientific observer" perspective.) 

This is what enlightenment and consciousness raising are all about.  Owning our power to be a co-creator of our lives by changing our relationship with ourselves.  We can change the way we think.  We can change the way we respond to our own emotions. We need to detach from our wounded self in order to allow our Spiritual Self to guide us.  We are Unconditionally Loved.  The Spirit does not speak to us from judgment and shame. 

One of the visualizations that have helped me over the years is an image of a small control room in my brain.  This control room is full of dials and gauges and lights and sirens. In this control room are a bunch of Keebler-like elves whose job it is to make sure that I don't get too emotional for my own good.  Whenever I feel anything too strongly (including Joy, happiness, and self-love) the lights start flashing and the sirens start wailing and the elves go crazy running around trying to get things under control.  They start pushing some of the old survival buttons:  feeling too happy - drink; feeling too sad- eat sugar; feeling scared - get laid; or whatever.

To me, the process of recovery is about teaching those elves to chill out.  Reprogramming my ego-defenses to knowing that it is ok to feel the feelings.  That feeling and releasing the emotions is not only ok it is what will work best in allowing me to have my needs fulfilled. 

We need to change our relationship with ourselves and our own emotions in order to stop being at war with ourselves.  The first step to doing that is to detach from ourselves enough to start protecting ourselves from the perpetrator that lives within us.