Inner child healing: Recognizing and Calming Painful Feelings
“When our mind is carried away by strong pain, it helps to go back to our relaxed and peaceful in-breath and out-breath. Eventually, when our painful feeling comes back, we accept it as it is instead of letting it carry us away and make us more agitated. We don’t fight the painful feeling because we know it is part of us, and we don’t want to fight ourselves. Pain, irritation, and jealousy are all part of us. As they arise, we can calm them by going back to our in-breath and out-breath. Our peaceful breathing will calm those strong emotions.
When an emotion becomes calmer, we can see the roots of our suffering and see that those who cause us pain are also suffering. Usually when we suffer we think we’re the only person who suffers, and that the other person is very happy.
But in fact, it’s likely that the person who hurts us also has a lot of pain and doesn’t know how to handle his strong emotions. Breathing with awareness, we generate our energy of mindfulness, and we can have insight into how to handle our suffering and that of the other with compassion. When we’re hurt, there are two ways to think. We can think in a way that makes us angrier and want to retaliate. Or we can try to calm ourselves, touch our compassion and understanding, and give ourselves a peaceful mind. This way helps us see that the other person also suffers, and then our anger will dissipate.
~Thich Nhat Hanh from the book Reconciliation healing the inner child.
Our Inner Child speaks most clearly and noticably in our instinctive reactions. We cannot fake or force them as they are usually strong defensive reactions or even spontaneous positive reactions. However, pain that our inner child is hold in our psyche can hold us back in many ways. We can have strong reactions to people we are in relationships with, people we work with, even our family members. These reactions and feelings often fly under the radar of awareness and can feel righteous because they are so strong and non-negotiable.
We, ourselves, can in turn perpetuate suffering by reacting from our inner child place of hurt. Practicing awareness and becoming conscious of our reactions, we can get to know them and feel more empowered to consciously choose another response.
We can practice patience with ourselves and others as well as extend a generosity of compassion in our interactions. Our instinctive reactions and defences tend to have a mental or mindset aspect to them where we can sometimes empower ourselves by understanding the underlying belief (eg nobody loves me). The extension of compassion towards ourselves initially activates our heart space. As we understand our inner child reaction, we can begin to offer what it really needs.