This was a "for popular consumption" comment, lacking in some essential detail. * For childhood pain and injury to be "mitigated," it must be expressed holistically (words, feelings and gestures in sync) and held by someone else at the same time. This is historical pain that still lives in the child who still lives in the adult, and children need a savior, a believer, a parent. * When pain is "internalized," it becomes a lens not immediately but through time, the time of caregivers' neglect when scar tissue grows over it to protect the child. The scar tissue is the double-sided lens that warps feeling and perception.
David Calof, in his published interview, "Multiple Personality and Dissociation," noted that the so-called "inner child" is not the cute tyke described by John Bradshaw and other writers of the time. It may be full of rage. A worthy question is: What makes one lion with an impaled paw rageful, destructive and delusional, a different one hurt, wise and amenable to help? Why have so many Republicans, forcibly adult owing to their age, opted for anger after their childhood injury? Why do they clench their body, their throat, their fists as a form of self-protective power rather than exhale, release the tension, collapse in the truth of their hurt? Almost anyone (barring birth psychopathology) would be capable of this. I know it's not necessary to become hardened. In my late teens, I was that angry Libertarian with contempt for many, fear of the rest, alienated, ego-syntonically insular (the "self-made man"). I could find my buried, burning self. I could cry. I could read good psychology. Why can't they?
Why, even with the gift of therapy, even with a loving spouse, can they not finally lean on someone, relent to the deeper person within them?
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.