How to take care of your inner child when your care takers did not take care of you:

It is hard embracing play in an adult life when your childhood did not have it. A healthy type of fun encouraged and supported every step of the way by your care takers. Without it you might feel as I do now, that it is not safe to play even in my adult life. An irrational fear at a root level of my existence going back exactly to those childhood years deprived of healthy fun. And I say healthy because what we often call fun in child's life is not a joyous feeling of being alive but a coping kind of fun where kids play to escape from their realities as there is no adult around to support them, to be sensitive to their needs and who they are. But still kids like me played without an adult around and we wanted to play because life was pretty dark and that's good - it did help us. However it’s not this type of fun that allows us to develop healthy foundations for living life. You need an adult in your life, one is merely enough, who is there for you, with you every step of the way, giving you time to express your curious child mind and listening, really listening with their whole heart while giving you space, supported by their warm embrace, so that you can feel safe trying new things - with no limited attempts. Only then we can feel loved and love allow us to function better. It is without it that we feel less safe in trying new things and more prompt to be hard with ourselves for making mistakes. A child like me could never feel safe in trying new things for there was no support, no one to run to if I fail, no one to embrace me and tell me it’s all ok, no one to make me feel like a child that is allowed to be careless in the first place. Without it, I developed a hyper active brain, one that is afraid of fun, afraid of not working at its best, afraid to relax and afraid to fail. Making processing of information as a developing human very difficult though these are the exact strategies we unconsciously develop as kids to help ourselves. But it is love that we need in the first place to be able to start digesting life in a healthy, effortless way. A kid who is stroked lovingly as it reads a book aloud for an upcoming class, will feel much more calmer and prepared than a kid who isn’t stroked because love makes us relax and makes information those written and unwritten more digestible and easy to understand. Relaxed kids, aka loved kids, can learn better from experiences and grow in a way that allows them to embrace play continuously throughout their entire life which translates as a capacity to enjoy life. Because play allows exactly that - being able to enjoy life's ride. It is truly our super power and we simply need more of that to grow in our capacity for joy as it is our birth right.

So onto the inner child bit, who didn’t play as much and wasn’t supported in being a child, it still needs a parent after all this time, because it simply couldn’t grow with no love around. And the good news is that we all know how to have fun, we weren’t deprived of that, we were deprived of love that allows us to express that what we want and test it out, but we weren’t deprived of that little spark inside of us. We are always here, always will be, waiting for a space to come out. Now our job is to give us this space, the attention and love that we didn’t receive as a child. Our job is to love our inner child like a parent that we wished we had. The bad news is that we have to acknowledge that this is what life was like for us, unloving and sad and that can be very painful to feel. All the feelings of loneliness and neglect are there to come up and we need to feel them for this is how we connect with our inner child. This is our inner child, unloved and left behind by its care takers who didn’t give us time to get to know us. Instead they asked us to grow up very fast in a way that was comfortable for them as they didn’t see our spark, did not hear it, did not have the capacity to take care of us. So this is how we heal: we feel all that, one emotion at a time and we get to know ourselves, for we are always there, no matter the neglect from our past. Our spark doesn't die. We split and we dissociate and we put up walls and barriers to shade ourselves. But our light remains bright under all that. It just needs some clearing-healing done to regain its full brightness - one emotion at a time . Giving our inner child a space to feel, to breathe, to be seen and to be heard is how we do that. It needs that so it can learn to trust us and slowly unveil its wonderful self with all its ideas and journeys in life it wants to take. And remember, your inner child is still a child and needs plenty of playtime among the healing through feeling to develop right. It needs your gentle support in doing things that are childish - for a child - before it feels in any way resourceful in creating its dream life. So take care of your inner child, buy it a childhood snack, go for a walk with childlike eyes, note the little daisy, touch the grass, cuddle under a blanket, be its best friend following up on its curiosities and likes - it's a gentle and slow process but it means the world to show up for ourselves like that, in a kind and compassionate way, respectful of the wounds, patiently taking our time to be here for our inner child in any way that feels right.

With love,

Blossom