In inner child work, the therapeutic subject visits and comforts earlier versions of themselves at unique and pivotal stress points. At each of these points, the subject gives to their earlier self the care and understanding they did not receive at the time, a process which gradually quells latent feelings such as anxiety, anger, confusion, and sadness. Through this process, the subject “integrates” their inner child into their adult self, becoming whole, stable, and self-accountable. The process is almost mystical in its benefits, yet simultaneously quiet and quotidian.
Even in the private domains of the inner children we might visit throughout this process, already there were other, earlier versions of ourselves in need of care. For instance, the three-year-old who—scared and confused—had just witnessed a fight between his parents might already have harbored the more elemental memory of himself as an infant, crying with cold; the ten-year-old who stewed over being forced to attend his grandmother’s funeral might remember his three-year-old self’s quagmire, and so on. In a sense, this recursion constitutes a system of Russian dolls harkening back either to our very genesis, or to preceding lives in which, too, we met against and struggled with hardship.
It recently dawned on me how, from the perspective of God, I myself am God’s inner child, the self God was before it remembered the totality of itself in infinite compassion. Even though in this life I am ostensibly an “adult,” and responsible for my decisions, in the scheme of things I am no more than an infant, newly awake and making decisions as messy and improbable as would befit this age. Just like my own kaleidoscope of earlier selves, frequently I find myself anxious, angry, confused, in mourning, and yet because I am older than those selves, I judge myself for these same dispositions, rarely receiving my present self’s comfort. From the perspective of God, I am no less deserving of this kind of gentle understanding than my earlier selves, and in those moments when I remember and can emanate from this fact, I approach the Godly. That is, through accepting myself now with the same fullness and nonjudgement as I would my own child—or the child of another being—I remember and evolve toward my deepest nature.
The universe has been set up as a hall of mirrors or looking glass through which we might hold ourselves with the softness of a child.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 