Our inner child in the real world

Is there any reason to dwell so much on the “inner child”? On the wounds inflicted in specific passing or repeated moments in our earliest years? Even if it’s true that the unhealed child in us is prepotent, the law underlying our life, it’s obviously not where we live. It is not our present thoughts and plans, the activities we do every day, our ideas of meaning, the energy or inertness of our relationships. It is not our intelligence and competence.

Does that historical self actually manifest now, or is it comatose in the deep and dark bilge of our ship? Just as significant, if our simple, younger, brighter words and feelings are somehow diffused throughout our aged chemistry, does it matter?

The answer is, I believe: It depends on how delusional we want to be and have to be. We can imagine that every thought and feeling and behavior is on the plateau of adultness or is the more or less successful evolution of our child self. We can be psychologically laden: remembering and feeling abuse, abandonments and other injuries, and even allowing them to enervate our present energies. There are those who remain predominately stunted and don’t know it. The weaker their delusion of adulthood, the most incapacitated they’ll be in the world.

Our inner child may inevitably make us fail, but if we’re delusional, we won’t see failure.

This speaks to the paradox that the most real person who comes from dysfunction is the ungrown child who can’t handle life with any competence: the psychotic inpatient, the man or woman in chronic crisis, self-medication and projection. The unreal person is an organism of defenses and delusions that, cobbled together, enable dictionary-definition success.

The most troubling ramification of the inner child, possibly, is that awareness of it can make us feel that time has never passed, we have never moved on. We still need a sick substance for comfort; we still have only primitive likes and dislikes; we still follow our parents or lie in their hands; we don’t feel like an adult. Individuals in regressive therapy may grasp some strand of that (“ha ha, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up”) but don’t let themselves fall into the deep end of its implications. I have never heard a client name full existential desperation.

Emotionally winning versus logically winning

I have a fair number of male softies on my client list. This is not merely a matter of the success of women’s liberation’s evolution, nor is it just a matter of men’s depression. It appears to be a problem generated when either (a) men are attracted to overpowering women or (b) men have a kind of personality that brings out the dormant abusive and narcissistic power of their wives.

Examples are two men in their thirties who are the sole breadwinners and hard workers in their families. One husband referred to the “negative cycle I get into with my wife. I’ll identify an inequality and get worked up, but I’ll sulk because I’m conflict-averse. It festers. I analyze it. I don’t want to confront an issue if I can think of what she might say.” The other husband was cowed by his wife regarding the household chores, which he alone did. He vacuumed the carpet but missed some corners where pet fur had collected. His wife was over-the-top abusively angry at him over this.

The point here is that these men feel in advance that their wives’ arguments or criticisms are superior de facto and de jure and would by that fact defeat anything they might say. So they remain mute. This intrinsic defeatist “knowledge” – “what she might say” – is probably related to Dr. Thomas Gordon’s concept of “psychological size.” Gordon, Nobel Peace Prize nominee (thrice) author of Parent Effectiveness Training (1970) observed that to a child, the parent always has greater “psychological size.” The parent looms large – powerful, omniscient, awesome – before the child’s diminutive self-possession. These men turned to awed, intimidated mush in the presence of their wives’ negativity which was, I’d wager, C-PTSD or personality-disordered.

To them, I suggested a lite theory (made up on the spot) and its intervention. The theory is called “emotionally winning versus logically winning an argument.” Both men could see they mentally equated their wives’ angry arguments with factual soundness. This mentality is a feature of the inner child, which Pessimistic Depth Therapy conceives unconventionally: “We don’t have an inner child. We are our inner child. The adult is just the window dressing.” My clients were asked to see that their wives’ emotionality was not right: It was their feeling felt as fact. This was named “emotionally winning.” The clients were asked to see that their own feeling-fact – now called “logically winning” to accentuate their right not to be vanquished by injurious disrespect – had every reason to be in the ascendancy. It would be perfectly valid for the man to vacuum the house, after a grueling workday, and bypass carpet corners that would require the placement of a cumbersome attachment and unnecessary time spent. He was asked to consider responding to his wife’s emotional attempt at winning: “You’re not right. I’m not giving in this time.” With possibly this supplement: "You can pick dust out of the corners, as this is obviously important to you."

We all know that self-esteem and an emotional backbone can’t be conjured by rightness or willpower. But sometimes noble anger can be summoned from the deeps to support right and to inhabit willpower. Inner child work can wait for another day.

The hollow man

Recent actions perpetrated by the present administration brought this biblical quotation to mind: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Trump’s taking over Venezuela. Enabling and justifying the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Threatening Denmark and Greenland. Removing leaders from ethics, oversight and accountability offices. Strong-arming universities to do his bidding. Attempting to subvert an election. Personalizing the justice system. Living and breathing for personal revenge. Pardoning sixteen-hundred criminals. Emasculating Congress. Planning to punish Iran for doing what he is doing to U.S. citizens but on a smaller scale.

The quotation came to mind because of its falsity regarding the president and his henchmen, and possibly its falsity universally. This person who is striving to “gain the whole world” is not losing his soul. He died by soul murder (Shengold; Schatzman) or something intimately close to it in his childhood. It was already lost. That was the vacuum that filled with hate and enabled the switch to a material ego. I picture this president on his deathbed counting his buildings and his millions, counting the people he has made his subjects, counting the countries and allies he has commandeered, threatened, cowed and alienated. Hate will remain but he'll be tired and there will be no more fake smiles for family and henchmen and the gimps that bend over to him. On his deathbed can he, could anyone, feel good and at peace to be made only of objects and poison? That’s all his world is, he has shrunk it by trashing everyone’s heart so there’s only room on his planet for buildings, skeletons, dollars not yet spent and a suffocated inner child.

Do these last days or minutes count? Could they be the most important days and minutes in his life?