Beyond Your Confines by Chris Warren-Dickins

Author:Chris Warren-Dickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Labels LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

What was the worst moment?

What was the best moment?

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How to parent your inner child and the children you care for

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. What we might need to learn about parenting our actual children can also apply to parenting our wounded inner child. Your inner child might have felt scared at times, particularly when you were physically smaller, or vulnerable, or hurt. If a situation in the present makes you feel like moments from your past—or in other words, if you are triggered—you can end up acting or speaking from that inner child. For example, you might lash out because you feel smaller than you really are. Or you might leave the house because you feel trapped, believing you have no other options. We are more likely to get triggered when we are parenting young children because there are frequent situations that can leave us stressed or exhausted, with or without a pandemic, and so we can end up feeling as vulnerable or overwhelmed as we once did as a child.

How would you respond to your own child if they showed that they were scared or hurt? Might you stop what you are doing and acknowledge the fear or pain that they are communicating? You wouldn’t tell them that they did not feel that way, or they should not feel that way. You would respond in a way that validates their emotions, and you would show them—because you are the bigger, more experienced adult—that you are here to support and contain their fears or pain. Sometimes this can be healing in itself. We can parent by listening to and comforting our wounded inner child as much as we need to listen to and comfort our actual children. Doing this can create a sense of safety, and we know from Polyvagal Theory that when we neurocept (sense) safety, we are more likely to move up the ladder of our autonomic nervous system out of the shutdown of the dorsal vagal pathway, or the fight-or-flight of our sympathetic nervous system, and into the social engagement system of our ventral vagal system. If we can do this, we can regulate ourselves and co-regulate by connecting with others, particularly our children. If we can get to a ventral vagal state, we are less likely to lash out at imagined demons that hide in the shadows of our memories and haunt our wounded inner child.

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