The Monster in You: Your Wounded Inner Child

The Monster in You: Your Wounded Inner Child

What? “My darling neglected, wounded inner child a monster?”  Yes. In the extreme, every abuser, pedophile, sadist, emotional abuser has themselves been abused, but more importantly, is unhealed.  The damages from their own past remained unexamined, usually still live in the unconsciousness, and therefore unhealed. The wounded child will run your life, will control your emotional reactions and flavor all of your life situations and choices. Your magical, spiritual, loving, hopeful, optimistic, healed or never wounded inner child does the same: runs your life, controls your heart chakra therefore your emotional reactions, and makes healthy choices that support you as an adult. Simply “knowing” about your inner child, or making blithe comments about your inner child does not imply a healing. Simply saying that you have learned some information is a bit like “monkey see, monkey do”.  It is a start. Information is not knowledge. Information applied, worked with, integrated into you and your learning styles, and into your life experiences becomes knowledge. Knowing you love someone is different than loving them. People who regularly beat their spouse will fall on their knees proclaiming their love even as a person lays there waiting for the ambulance. And in their great sorrow, they mean what they say. And yet they will do it again, and again, and again.  The information is in their head, they did a bad thing, they love their spouse, however because there is no knowledge, there is no healing, yet the behavior will, WILL, continue until perhaps imprisonment or some other extreme circumstance occurs.  

I do hope I am scaring you because in the majority of cases the wounded inner child continues undetected and therefore unstoppable because the majority of cases are not so extreme as to be identified and “stopped” by the law enforcement system. Or you will see people playing out the unhealed dramas of their inner child for an entire lifetime and passing the behaviors, energy and karma onto their children and their children’s children. If you take on this healing you will break this chain of karma. Just like being the first one in your family to stop drinking and get help healing the “why’s” of family drinking, the person who takes this on heals the entire family, past and into the future. Everyone will be impacted by your heroic journey of healing.

Healing is a process, a Journey, and cannot be addressed in an article or book. Reading is information, application is knowledge. To use too little information too soon will corrupt you.  If for example someone abuses you and then says “well, I am an alcoholic” that is information. It is generic and addresses nothing. That comment adds nothing to the conversation, nor does it address the specific situation or conversation in any manner and in fact is like throwing dust into a fan. It becomes a deterrent.  A statement like that can be used as a defensive mechanism, to allow yourself to feel better in the moment rather than facing your uncomfortable feelings full on or to get the other person “off your back” rather than being able to set a boundary. It is a manipulative response rather than an honest attempt to participate in what just happened and a discussion about what just happened, or setting a boundary.   If you are actually in the PROCESS of healing (not just talking about what you are learning or just learned), you will APPLY what you have learned about your wounded self to each specific situation. Apply it, not announce it as information. “I am going to kiss you” or “I want to kiss you” is different than kissing the person. Better that you lose the quick use of your labels, or articulate some new information you recently learned as those facile statements have no depth and no specificity, and will shut down a conversation rather than opening the conversation up to some deeper levels.  It will only function to “get you off the hook” but not in an authentic or honest fashion.

People talk about the wounded inner child with great compassion, sorrow, and love and in healing work this is appropriate. What is not often discussed are the behaviors of the walking wounded, the adults living with their wounds like an undetected cancer. The wounded inner child IS a child and like a child will lash out, except it is in the body of an adult, with the cunning, manipulative tactics and even viciousness of an adult mind fueling the unconscious wounded impulses with actions.  This is what you see in the extreme in criminal explosions. In everyday life the viciousness of the wounded inner child will show up in cutting comments, physical violence, narcissistic or sociopathic behaviors that will include seductive actions used to “win” your love and/or approval, behind the scenes competition to “bring someone down”, ghosting, perpetual lying about….well, everything, especially everything that feels the slightest bit uncomfortable or threatening (to a child’s mind) physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This is because these are all the tactics of a raging child in an adult body.  When the wounded inner child is in control, the adult in the person is not. The results of being the person on the receiving end of someone’s wounded inner child can range from painful, to confusing, to actual physical harm (even from non-criminal people).

Waking up, coming out of denial, to the fact that you indeed have a wounded inner child, and realizing that persona has been making decisions and taking actions for you as an adult can be excruciatingly painful. Along with healing work that must be done with another human, you will at some point need to do personal inventory work and then make amends. Only then are you truly on the road to recovery. Before that, it is all discovery, not recovery. Recovery is when your actions in daily life become different, applied information is now becoming knowledge. Discovery is when you are learning about yourself, your behaviors, reactions, your triggers, feelings, old programming, and even looking at all the harm you have caused others and yourself while unconscious about your wounded inner child. If you are a person who has not had to recover from childhood wounds you may not recognize the signs of a wounded inner child and you may end up shocked on the receiving end of some emotional brutality or inconsistencies.  If you are someone who has worked through to the recovery stage of wounded inner child work, you will recognize the signs and be better able to both predict and protect yourself from the walking wounded, and there are plenty of them out there.  Wounded people are drawn to "spirituality" as their wounded inner child has learned to not trust people (they will trust children and often therefore become pedophiles or move into bestiality). Sadly many of the walking wounded go to “spirituality” as a way to feel better but not do better and do not end up taking on recovery work. Therefore healers and Teachers are on the receiving end of the “monster” inside of you.  Some are equipped to both see and treat this, many are not as many “spiritual” folks are self-proclaimed experts “chosen” by their (self-proclaimed) “guides”, angels, even God or Jesus.

In any case it is up to each individual to take on this work if you ever wake up to the discovery of what is going on inside of you. You may have to work with one person or a series of people or even a group but you cannot do this work in secret on your own or with your invisible spirit or astral or ghost friends. Sorry.  And until you take accountability through very specific inventory and amends work both for damage you have done to yourself as well as harm you have done to others, ( all too complex to describe here…. plus reading about it will do nothing for you) consider yourself to still be part of the walking wounded, just awakened, but not yet healed.

Journey On