I’M WAITING, WHERE ARE YOU?
My Inner Children need me to talk to them!
Previous: Healthy Adult & Loving Parent, (Part 1)
REMINDER: Use ACRONYM page for abbrev.
♥ INNER DIALOGUES – Intro (Examples in Part 3)
❀ Everyone’s INNER CHILD is made up of the combined emotions, memories & thoughts from childhood. It’s a composite of -
• every age & developmental stage we’re lived thru
• our interactions with family, school, friends, religion…
• our version (conscious interpretation/ ‘understanding’) of all the people who were important to us, good or bad
• what we picked up from them subliminally. Kids are very intuitive!
Depending on the content of a voice, we’re either hearing from:
❧ a good parent, ❧ a bad parent, ❧ a healthy child,
❧ a wounded child, ❧ a sane adult, ❧ a fake adult
Some of those voices are louder, carry more weight, cause us more pain…
OR they can be soothing, informative helpful, humorous, even spiritual
NEW UNIT (HA + LP) needs to interact with both the NC & the WC
To learn how:
• Get IC dialogue-writing books, & practice until it becomes natural
• Watch kind, loving real-life or TV parents talking to their children (especially when the kids mess up!)
• Visualize holding your WIC & NC – what do they need & want to hear? (what would you have liked your parents to say to you?)
✶ Make sure to leave time for the kid to answer, comment, feel, react… It’s not a dialogue if you do all the talking!
Some helpful PREREQUISITES (but not imperative for getting started):
• Less Self-Hate & less attachment to the Bad Voice (PP)
• Be willing to make the time & effort to learn this new language
• Done enough inventory writing to know your WIC’s issues
• Know quite a bit about you real self – all your good qualities
• Less anxiety – to be able to sit quietly & communicate
• Maybe having done ‘morning pages’, meditation…
• Lot & lots of patience – the kid may not respond right away
➼ REASONS why you may have trouble ‘hearing’ the kid, because:
1. Being ‘kid whipped’!
a. you’re ALL kid. Without the ‘UNIT’ present there IS no dialogue. That can be changed. We need to identify the child E.S. as a separate entity, otherwise it continues to be in charge. A therapist once said: “You have a child, you are not a child!”
• Visualize the IC sitting outside of yourself – in your lap, on the bed or floor, hiding behind a chair or curtain… but always there, waiting
b. the IC is too young to talk. Depending on what IC age is being triggered in you by a current situation, you may be in contact with a pre-verbal infant part – with lots of emotions but no words
c. doesn’t trust you. If you’ve been inconsistent, only talking AT the kid, sounding like the bad parent…. the kid isn’t going to respond!
Expl: “Hi little one, how do you feel?” >> “What do you care?”
d. the IC is old enough to talk but doesn’t know how to express what’s going on with it yet – doesn’t have the right words for things it’s feeling, isn’t developed enough to think abstractly, isn’t allowed to say what it feels or needs…. Expl: “ Hi, what’s bothering you?” >> “I don’t know”
(Bill Cosby always said that’s how his kids responded when asked why they’d done something)
2. OR – some people mainly hear the Bad Parent voice – in the form of ‘shoulds’ & judgments, about themselves and others (you know who you are). They’re the one who know it all, are controlling, bossy, demanding, pushy… they’re channeling the PP!
• In this case, when you start a conversation, you’ll be talking to the IT. Expl:
✶✶ When Mike asked: “Hi, how are you doing?” He got back: “None of your business!” and when Sara talked about wanting to write a book, she heard “ Who do you think you are?”
• We CAN do dialogues with the PP to find out more about it’s point of view, what it’s telling the kid all the time, what it wants… so we can counter it with truth & logic!
❦ WE (the UNIT) need to PROVE to the kid that we are SAFE, KIND, COMPETENT, SMART & DEPENDABLE! in order for the kid to trust us enough to turn over it’s power.
This is done by taking the right ACTIONS. That takes time & dedication. Our ONLY job is to take care of our Kid. If we do – everything else falls into place.
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Q: What are your experiences with the Inner Dialogue?
