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.
