Caring for your inner child.
Quote by Martha Beck.
Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result.
Do it and the child heals.
Meditation.
When we are listening to our anxious and distraught feelings and see them as feelings of our inner child,
We can get in touch with those younger parts of ourselves that have often experienced a lack of love.
And as we discover those hurting,
Younger parts of us,
We can develop compassion for ourselves.
We can learn to grieve for our inner child who yearned for love,
But experienced abuse,
Neglect or abandonment.
Often those memories of our childhood injuries not only show up in our particular ways of coping in life,
But they are also stored in our bodies.
Sometimes our body shows us where our past injuries still pain us.
As we seek healing for those childhood injuries,
We begin to care for our inner child.
The first step of caring is to distinguish between the adult voice and the child voice inside of us.
After we learn to distinguish who it is that is feeling and talking,
Our inner child or our adult,
We become intentional about having our adult self to care for our distraught inner child.
This care can be physical in nature,
But by us providing extra safety and nurture to ourselves in a loving and caring way.
And doing so is an exercise of compassion.
We learn to have our caring adult talk gently to those younger parts of us that easily get anxious.
We in some ways learn to re-parent ourselves.
As we learn to care for our inner child,
We at the same time refuse to let our inner child be the dominating and leading force in our life.
We consciously put our adult in charge.
That caring adult part of us will want to listen to our inner child's emotion and voice.
However,
We will not abdicate our adult role and responsibility.
As we accept the responsibility of caring for our inner child,
We indeed begin to heal.
When we put our caring adult in charge,
Our inner child will calm down and feel less afraid.
We stop over-functioning out of fear.
We stop neglecting ourselves.
We stop following our negative predictions.
Learning to care for our inner child is the door to freedom and healing.
The Bible verse for today is from 1 Peter chapter 5 verse 10.
And after you have suffered a little while,
The God of all grace,
Who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ,
Will himself restore,
Confirm,
Strengthen,
And establish you.
I'm saying a prayer.
God,
For all of us who still need healing for our inner child,
Be our guide and our role model of how to love ourselves unconditionally.
Restore our inner child's trust.
Strengthen our caring adult parts so we learn patiently and abundantly how to care for our younger,
Wounded self.
With your grace reaching out to us and unconditionally loving us,
We will be able to heal our inner suffering child.
Amen.
