In the hustle and bustle of the day to day adult life it’s not uncommon to feel the need to nurture your inner child.
While not to be confused with feeling the attraction of nostalgia, empathy and awareness of deep childhood-related emotions can play a huge part in the daily lives of adults.
Jonathan Bernick is a late-diagnosed autistic student covering neuroscience and methods of neuromodulation.
“I have had a long process over the last several years of coming to terms with the challenges of the behaviours that were laid down in my childhood that allowed me to function maladaptive coping mechanisms that I now have to gradually unlearn. And, for me, the inner child is a very, very literal concept. For several years, I would convey in therapy in treatment, that I had always had this kind of voice in my stomach that kept getting more and more uncomfortable, kept screaming louder and louder if I did things that it didn’t want to do, and that it would keep escalating the discomfort, the anxiety until I put things in their proper place. I had compulsions as a child, I had fixations as an adult on anxious ruminative thoughts. And what I came to realize is that this is essentially the crystallized state of a childhood self that was so afraid of instability of the world being unpredictable and out of control, especially as an autistic child whose needs and feelings were not being recognized or heard.”
Bernick faced years of fighting conflicts within himself in his childhood that has taken time in his adulthood to explore and piece together reasonings
“The combination of being on the spectrum and being somewhat of a neurotic child to begin with, and being male socialized, the tools one is equipped with for emotional intelligence interoception and recognizing one’s feelings and processing them healthily, they’re simply not up to par. And because I lacked that equipment, my need for stability, had no way of communicating with me. Other than escalating the discomfort until I listened, it became a very antagonistic relationship that persisted much later into my life.” shares Bernick.
Through therapy, Bernick was able to properly find the equipment to self-reflect the needs of his inner child and listen.
“I needed to realize that this voice inside me, essentially did not have the emotional intelligence or the self awareness to realize that there was a better way of going about things and that I needed to step up, be the bigger person and extend to extend an olive branch, to my younger self in there. And it’s not necessarily an identity in there so much as it is a set of feeling states that it is essentially a parallel series of responses to the environment around me, I feel a certain way. And this crystallized version of myself responds a certain way. And when those emotional states conflict, you know, adult me is okay with the situation but child me is not, then child me throws a tantrum, and starts escalating anxiety until it gets what it needs. Because child me has no other way of communicating their needs.”
Emilie Van Gent faced trauma and difficulties in her childhood that has since been reclaimed. By taking part in activities she was not able to as a child, “permission” has been granted to herself to heal.
“With money and everything, I didn’t get a lot of the things I wanted as a kid. With realizing I have adult money and adult freedom, I started collecting stuffed animals. Who can say no now?”
Provided by Emilie Van Gent
Van Gent notes that part of their fascination with stuffed animal collecting as an adult is due to her trauma and mental illness.
“I feel like I didn’t get to enjoy my childhood then, but I’m doing it now. I didn’t get to collect these things and enjoy them. I was not allowed to play in a way that made noise, because if my mom heard me making noise, I’d get screamed at. That takes away the fun. This is something I’ve gotten to collect as an adult and no one’s taking away my fun. I can display them how I want, do whatever I want with them. If I want to take one on a trip with me I can.”
While a reversion is not in the psychological sense, the balance of power and resources available in the brain may not be equipped for ‘emergency protocols’ of difficult situations in daily adult life.
Under the duality of childhood and adulthood under stress, Bernick stresses the equipment and resources are important to consider when reflecting. “You are an adult most of the time, and then under stress, you only have the equipment you had essentially as a child because those adult faculties cannot reach the areas that are given veto power during stress situations.”
In discovering the intersection of rehabilitating one’s inner child and relationships, it can heal the intersection of the inner child and the agency of adulthood.
“The capacity for oneself and or one’s partner, to act as one’s own parent. If you’ve experienced trauma, especially as a child, as an adult, you have an understanding of that suffering, and can show yourself the compassion and the understanding that whether originating from a malicious place or not, was not shown to you. And part of that involves rehabilitating or defining experiences that were touchstones of your inner child’s fears and, and sources of stress, sources of sense of instability, or unsafety, in the world around them.”
Healing your inner child can be a long process, but the support and resources available in adulthood will help to make peace and growth.
