When we’re doing the inner work to heal ourselves and recover from our addictions and mental health issues, one of the most important elements of our healing is working with our wounded inner child. We often don’t realize consciously how our inner child became wounded in the first place. We know we have unresolved issues and unhealed pain from our childhoods, but we might not realize that our inner child stays with us into adulthood, driving our thinking, fueling our emotions, and informing our behaviors and choices. Our inner child can essentially form the mental, emotional and behavioral patterns we’re struggling with as adults, such as our addictive patterns, because the pain it represents from our childhoods is still within us waiting for us to address it. How does our inner child incur this woundedness?
For many of us, our trauma was explicit and easy to define. We were harmed, mistreated or abused, and the origins of our wounds are clear. For others of us, the source of our woundedness might be harder to pinpoint. We might have been emotionally or mentally abused, and since we associate abuse with physical harm, we might not realize that we were in fact being abused. We might have been neglected or abandoned, and the pain that can come from these wounds, such as the wounds of being separated from our homes and the people who were important to us, for example, can be just as severe as the more overt forms of hurt we more commonly associate with trauma such as experiencing violence or the death of a loved one. We might have incurred woundedness from being bullied, belittled or demeaned, overly criticized and judged. We might have had a caregiver or teacher constantly tell us we weren’t good enough and that we would never amount to anything.
The scars of these wounds might not be visible to the outside world, or even to us, but they can program our subconscious minds to form damaging limiting beliefs about who we are and what we have to offer other people and the world. Our sense of self-worth suffers, and we lose our connection to our inner selves. All of these forms of pain are wounds that our inner child might have sustained without our even being consciously aware of them. We might know we’re in pain but not know why. Over time we might start to believe that we deserve to be hurt, or that we’re undeserving of being loved and treated well. We might come to believe that our wounds are evidence of our unworthiness and inadequacy. We might hold onto our inner child woundedness for much of our lives, never knowing why we’re feeling so at odds with ourselves, so self-hating, so depressed, and so down on ourselves.
At The Guest House Ocala, you will be treated with dignity, respect and compassion. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.