Have you ever had a reaction that surprised you?
A moment where something small happened and a wave of emotion rose up,
Much bigger than the situation seemed to call for?
You feel tightness in your chest when someone raises their voice.
A rush of shame moves through you when you make a mistake.
An urgent need to fix everything.
Comes the moment someone seems disappointed.
These are not random responses,
They are signals,
And they almost always trace back much further than today.
Every one of us.
Carries an inner child.
That's not a metaphor for fragility.
It's a description of how the brain works.
The experiences we had early in life,
Especially the repeated ones,
The ones that happened before we had words to make sense of them,
Get encoded not as stories we can choose to revisit but as patterns.
The nervous system forms its best prediction about how the world works,
How safe it is,
And what to expect from the people in it.
Those patterns don't stay in the past,
They travel forward with us.
They run in the background of nearly every interaction.
So when something in the present activates an old pattern,
The response comes fast.
It arrives before thought and before choice.
A younger version of you steps forward,
Not because anything is wrong with you,
But because the brain is doing exactly what it was taught to do.
This is why two people can experience the exact same situation and feel completely different things about it.
One person hears a critical tone and feels nothing unusual.
Another hears the same tone and feels devastated.
The difference lives not in the present moment but in the past that each person carries into it.
The inner child is not something to manage or overcome.
It's something to meet with.
When you notice a disproportionate reaction,
Try asking,
How old does this feeling feel?
That one question creates a gap between the feeling and the moment.
And in that gap,
You have a choice.
One that was not available to you as a child.
Here is a short practice to try together today.
Think of a recent moment when you reacted more strongly than you expected to.
And hold it gently in your awareness.
Now notice where the feeling lives in your body.
And do not analyze it,
Just feel it.
Now ask yourself.
How old does this feeling feel?
Now place one hand on your chest.
And breathe slowly.
And speak to that younger part of you silently from where you are right now.
You might say,
I see you.
You make sense.
You are safe here.
You don't need to resolve anything today.
You are simply making contact.
And that contact.
Return to again and again.
What begins here.
To shift the pattern.
For more support with this kind of inner work.
Explore among my tracks here on Inside Timer.
Dr.
Hugh Lenz.
Inner Child Ho'oponopono Meditation.
Much Love!
And light to you.
To your inner child.
