I hate my inner child (TW)

[Quiet]

I've touched on inner child work with my therapist, before I stopped going.  It didn't go well.

I discovered that when I tried to connect with my inner child, I hate her more than I hate the adult me.  I had nothing but vitriol for her, and I wanted to tell her all the reasons why everything that happened was her fault and call her names.  If anything, I think I had worse things to say to her than my dad did during one of his screaming rants.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can learn to have some compassion for the kid I used to be, even if I'm not ready to actually get in touch with her?

[Three Roses]

When I'm having difficulty showing my IC love and compassion, I try to imagine how I'd feel if I saw another child, someone I didn't know, going through that same experience.

Here's a quote from http://joy2meu.com/loveself.html

That "critical parent" voice in our head is the disease lying to us. . . .  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."

[Blueberry]

Photos of yourself as a little one? Or doing things little children like, like hugging a teddy bear?

I used to hate my inner child too. I learned compassion for her by sensing other people's hurt inner children. I also needed people (like therapists and other patients) to show me in my adult form compassion. It was a long journey... Also I got in touch with inner children who were less damaged - the playful ones, the ones who were pretty independent, even though very young. They were happy to let me watch them play, but didn't want to come with me anywhere or for me to do any 'parenting'. "They" - I have more than one!

[woodsgnome]

I hated myself in general, so this carried over to any notion of an inner child making any difference now. Just going there created an EF-like reaction and seemed to make things worse, not help.

I also regarded myself as a realist, and saw an inner child projection as a silly sidebar. This was totally weird, considering my having been in real life an actor playing all kinds of silly, 'unreal' fictional characters that on stage were quite realistic in tone. Audiences got into the character, and so did I.

Something I always recalled from my youth was being blamed for kid-like choices...i.e. for just being myself; I was shown all kinds of ways that I was unwanted and abandoned and seemed to have internalized them so well that as an adult even conjuring an inner child seemed so stupid and so I continued to hate him (me).

But a few years ago, I was desperate and decided to suspend my fierce belief in reality (except for the 'real' acting lol). Always good with visualizations, I found a picture (one of only a few I ever kept) of the desolate 16 year-old I'd been, forlorn and bedraggled, friendless and beyond hope. What if I didn't identify that person in the pic as me? What if I didn't help him, given the chance?

I tried visualizing what I might do to help. At first all I came up was visiting the person in the pic in his environment. But I always left, in turn leaving the boy in his prison of fear and loathing. Somehow this changed one time and I took the fellow with me, to a more peaceful place--a home in the woods (my only place of sanity as a kid was a grandparents home in the woods and as an adult a cabin in the woods became my home).

Now I don't visualize so much about 'him' as incorporate the sense that he finally did achieve more peace than he thought possible. Not perfect, but more open to the possibility of finding himself as a partner with me, an adult he never had.

Opening up to the existence of one's inner child isn't a sure way to come to terms with any of what happened. But it helped me put another perspective on what happened and most important, that the boy in those times did survive, because I gave in and risked helping him.

I hope this makes sense. All I know is that the self-hatred was soothed, too. I needed that; still do.

[Quiet]

Thank you, woodsgnome.  That sounds like something I might, someday, be able to manage.