It’s a casual day in the week and your friend has really pissed you off. It’s probably something they said or did that made you feel like you wanted to throw hands. I want you to think back to how you handled that situation. You probably had an entire meltdown and said some things that you can’t take back. Ulichoma tu yaani. Your crazy just went off and you can’t explain it. If you’re like me and confrontations scare you, you probably walked away but you now have this feeling of bitterness weighing you down. Because you’re a ‘chicken’ you spent that entire day thinking about all the good comebacks that you could have used.
In our lives, we are faced with endless instances that require a reaction from us. We have to make decisions based on how the situation makes us feel. What we do not realize is that how we react in such instances is usually connected to our inner child.
The inner child is that part of your mind that stores all of our emotional experiences from childhood. It’s the core part of your mind affected mostly between the ages of 6-9 years old. We store an event or a series of events that triggered extremely strong emotions in us as children.
These triggered emotions cause a lock in your brain because they are so immense and this prevents your inner child from maturing. These ‘big’ emotions needed a parent/guardian to guide us through them because as children we did not have the emotional maturity to process them.
What happened naturally is that you created coping mechanisms at such a young age hence the emotional side of your mind matured faster than your logical side. As a result, throughout your life, as you become older, your emotional side is on a constant race to catch up with the logical side of your brain. So how does this influence how we react to situations in our lives?
The inner child that was stuck and unable to mature now became the lens through which you view your current experiences as an adult. For instance, if you felt unrecognized as a child for small wins such as doing well in school, winning a contest, being good at a new hobby you picked up… What you felt as a child was that you were not good enough, or that your parents did not love you enough. That is how you processed these emotions as a child. In your adult life now, you might notice that you talk yourself out of new experiences because you’re afraid that you won’t be good enough to succeed. Your inner child shields you from feeling how you felt when you were 6 years old; when you brought that report card home and no one acknowledged that win at the time.
You might also notice that as an adult, situations that can easily be sorted out turn into such a big deal. For instance, people who don’t switch off lights when they leave a room really piss you off and it can turn into a whole argument. ( I am people) Or people who leave dirty dishes in the sink and don’t know how to clean up after themselves. It could also be slow replies from your partner that gets on your last nerve. I’m guilty of overreacting when people squeeze out MY toothpaste from the middle instead of the bottom. Where is your brain, please???
As an adult, your inner child has this great job of shielding you from emotions it doesn’t want to feel ever again because it didn’t know how to process them at the time. Sometimes instead of being rational, we throw a tantrum like the childlike version of ourselves. Most importantly, however, that’s how most of us developed the unhealthy coping mechanisms we have now. We hide from our problems, we are scared of confrontation, we have anger issues, a bad temper, self-isolating tendencies, numbing our emotions and so many more.
The experiences we went through don’t necessarily have to be traumatic. As long as the event triggered strong emotions in you as a child, then the inner child was wounded and that block in your mind was created which prevented the maturity of your inner child. As adults, we may dismiss these events because we are viewing them from an adult lens now. We are grown, probably more emotionally mature. However, at the time when you were a child, that event was a huge deal for you and it created an emotional wound.
In our journey towards emotional maturity as adults, healing can feel like one step forward and 20 steps back, right? And it sucks because you’re trying so hard. You’re listening to affirmations and saying them to yourself, reading books, you’ve picked up meditation, you’re creating time to be grateful every day, and you’re taking care of your mental well-being… But why does all this go to shit on certain days?
The reason is that you’re probably unable to handle your triggers. All these issues from your childhood that you’ve been pushing down and trying so hard to lock away in a little box are resurfacing. The negative intense emotions are seeping out. Trying to move forward is also hard because your inner child is scared of this new reality and wants you to remain in that comfort zone that’s familiar with all these coping mechanisms you’ve been having over the years.
Maybe it’s time to address this inner child within you as you take your steps towards emotional maturity as a young adult.