From the series \"Closer to You\"<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes it takes very little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A simple question:\n\n\"Tell us a memory from your childhood.\"\n\nIt can be a happy one. It can be a painful one. Everyone is free to choose how much they say, what they say, and how far they want to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, when people are given this space, something surprising often happens.\n\nInstead of vacations, games, summer days, or the smell of a grandmother's kitchen, other memories show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A mother who wasn't there when the child needed her. A father he was afraid of. An argument overheard from the next room. A leaving. A punishment. A humiliation. A moment when no one came. Sometimes only one story comes. Other times, right after the first, another follows immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the adult telling it begins to cry.\n\nThe voice breaks. The breathing changes. The body trembles. The words stop coming.\n\nAnd then something becomes visible that, until that moment, may have only been an idea: childhood is over, but some of the child's experiences go on living inside us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The adult mind knows the time.\n\nIt knows we're 35, 45, or 60 years old. It knows those people have changed, grown old, or may not even be alive anymore. It knows the place where it all happened is far away. It knows that today we have other resources, other relationships, maybe a family of our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, a memory can bring, for a few moments, an intensity that seems to ignore the calendar.\n\nNot because we've literally traveled back in time, but because autobiographical memory isn't only an archive of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some memories are tied to emotions, bodily sensations, images, sounds, and physiological reactions. When they're reactivated, we don't just remember what happened. We can feel, again, something of how the experience was lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I've written, in an earlier article, about explicit memory<\/mark><\/a> \u2014 the kind we can put into a story \u2014 and about the implicit forms of memory, which can express themselves through reactions, sensations, and learned responses. In moments like this, the two worlds sometimes seem to meet: the story we can tell, and what the body seems to have learned from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There's an enormous difference between:\n\n\"I know my father used to yell a lot when I was little.\"\n\nand the moment you tell a specific evening, you remember the room, the spot where you stood, his voice \u2014 and you notice your hands are shaking.\n\nThe first is the adult's story about the past.\n\nThe second may touch the experience of the child who lived that past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This may be one of the keys to working with the inner child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The adult can say: \"Mom was depressed.\" The child didn't know that. The child could feel: \"Mom doesn't see me.\"\n\nThe adult can understand: \"Dad was overwhelmed by his own problems.\" The child could live: \"I'm doing something wrong.\"\n\nThe adult can say: \"My parents had a conflict in their marriage.\" The child heard raised voices from the other room and may have wondered whether his family would still exist by morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We reinterpret the past with the mind we have today. But part of what we felt back then may have stayed organized around the child's own conclusions.\n\nI'm not important. I have to be good to be loved. I have to take care of everyone else. If I make a mistake, I lose love. The people I love leave. I have to manage on my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, what we call the \"inner child's wound\" isn't only the memory of an event. It's also the way that child learned to adapt to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It's easy to treat \"the inner child\" as a self-help phrase that showed up recently.\n\nIts roots are, in fact, older and more varied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carl Jung wrote, at the start of the last century, about the \"child archetype.\" A psychic figure, he said, representing unfinished potential \u2014 the part of us that stays forever open to what it can become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hugh Missildine<\/a> used, in 1963, more direct language: every adult, he said, still carries \"the child of his past\" \u2014 the emotional patterns formed in the earliest years. Alice Miller<\/a> wrote about the suffering children bury in order to stay loved by parents who couldn't, themselves, hold it. John Bradshaw<\/a> carried the idea to the wider public. The language we use today, almost without knowing where it came from, is mostly his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It isn't the same concept. Jung's archetype, Missildine's adapted child, Miller's wounded child, Bradshaw's inner child \u2014 they come from different frameworks. Strictly speaking, they don't describe the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beneath the metaphor, a simpler fact remains: early experiences can shape emotional, relational, and regulatory patterns that go on influencing adult life.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It's interesting, what happens when someone is explicitly told they can also tell a happy memory.\n\nThe freedom is real.\n\nAnd yet, sometimes it's the painful story that comes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe because some experiences have been told many times, and others have waited years for a witness. Maybe because, once enough safety is created, something in us recognizes the chance to bring to the surface what has been held inside for a long time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But there's an important distinction here.\n\nThe fact that an emotion shows up with intensity doesn't mean it has to be pushed further.\n\nNot every cry needs to be amplified. Not every tremor needs to be encouraged into something stronger. Not every memory needs to be explored all the way, in that moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the deeper process is exactly the possibility of coming close to what hurts without getting completely lost in it.\n\nBeing able to feel, and at the same time, stay here.\n\nIn the present.\n\nIn the adult's body.\n\nIn a space where choices now exist that the child back then didn't have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There's a temptation, in many forms of emotional work, to treat intensity as proof of depth. The harder we cry, the more strongly the body reacts, the more it feels like we've \"gone deeper.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing, often starts from an observation in the animal world: an impala that escapes a predator trembles intensely for a few minutes. Then it gets up and goes back to grazing, as if nothing had happened.\n\nIn Levine's view, this kind of trembling can be understood as a defensive response that stayed active \u2014 from a moment when the body could neither fight nor flee. A small child, most of the time, can't do either one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this needs caution. The research doesn't let us say that every tremor, every intense cry, automatically means the \"completion\" of a trauma. It's a useful hypothesis of Levine's. Not a demonstrated mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we know with more certainty is something else: intensity and integration aren't the same thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I've written, in the article about the body that remembers,<\/mark><\/a> about the difference between catharsis \u2014 the release that brings relief \u2014 and reconsolidation, the rarer process through which an old learning actually changes. The same caution applies here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A strong emotional experience can bring clarity, movement, meaning. Or it can simply become overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That's why working with old wounds doesn't necessarily mean reliving the past at the same intensity we lived it the first time. It can mean coming close to it with something that was missing back then: a present adult.\n\nThe adult we are today. The one who can say: I see you. I understand why you were afraid. I understand why you thought it was your fault. I understand how alone you were. I'm here with you now.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this meeting between the child who lived the experience and the adult who can look at it today, another story begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of an exercise like this, a song can sound completely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201eCine m-a f\u0103cut om mare\u201d<\/mark><\/a> may have been heard dozens of times before. Maybe you've hummed it. Maybe you liked it. Maybe it moved you, a little. The title of the song itself seems, all at once, to ask the question at the center of the whole exercise: Who made me grow up?<\/em> \u0218i, uneori, And, sometimes, at what cost?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But after you've spent a few minutes beside your own inner child, the lyrics no longer land in the same place. Because now it isn't only the adult listening. The child you just spoke of is listening too. The child who maybe had to grow up too fast. The child who became \"grown\" before his time. The one who learned to be strong, well-behaved, invisible, responsible, or independent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A familiar song takes on a different meaning, then, not because the lyrics changed, but because the place inside us that listens to them has changed.\n\nSame song.\n\nDifferent listener.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be tempting to say that a moment like this \"frees the inner child.\" But the inner child isn't a locked room we open in a workshop and walk out of, healed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An experience can open a door. It can make something visible. It can create a link between a reaction today and an experience back then. It can allow an old emotion to be felt in a new context. It can bring, for the first time, compassion where there used to be shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are important things. But they're beginnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working with the inner child can take months. Sometimes years. Because we're not just working with memories. We're working with the adaptations built around them. With the way we enter relationships. With the fear of abandonment. With the need for approval. With the difficulty of saying \"no.\" With perfectionism. With hyper-independence. With the tendency to rescue others. With shame. With anger we learned to hide. With the need to be seen that we learned to deny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems, calls these parts \"exiles.\" Vulnerable parts, carrying pain, fear, shame \u2014 kept as far from awareness as possible, because their suffering feels unbearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his model, changing our relationship with these parts doesn't necessarily come from a single encounter, however intense. It comes from repeated, safe returns. From the way the exiled part learns, gradually, that it's no longer alone. And that it's no longer there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of these mechanisms once protected us. That's why they don't disappear just because we understood where they came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can't change what happened. We can't go back and give the child exactly the family, the protection, or the love he would have needed then.\n\nBut we can change the relationship we have today with what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can notice when the child from back then starts speaking through the adult of now. When an unanswered message becomes abandonment. When criticism becomes rejection. When someone's distance becomes danger. When a mistake becomes shame. When conflict becomes the fear of losing love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, slowly, we can introduce something new between the trigger and the old reaction: presence. discernment. choice. compassion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe this is one of the deepest forms of integration. I've already written, in the article about the body that remembers, about integration as the linking of the felt part with the told part, into one coherent whole. Maybe, here, it means the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not making the inner child disappear. But building a relationship with him in which today's adult can stay present when the past wakes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \"Tell us a memory from your childhood.\"\n\nIt sounds like a simple exercise. Until we notice how much life can fit inside a single memory. And how close the child we once were can be to the adult we are today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe the first step isn't to heal him. Maybe the first step is much simpler, and sometimes much harder: to meet him. To let him show us what he lived through. To listen without rushing. To feel without turning being overwhelmed into a goal. And to stay close enough that, when his story opens, he's no longer alone with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because maybe true maturity doesn't mean leaving the child behind.\n\nMaybe it means finally becoming the adult who can go back for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.<\/mark><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Negativity Bias<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\"But that happened thirty years ago\"<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The child didn't have the words we have today<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A few of the idea's roots<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Why do we choose the painful memory?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Feeling something isn't the same as being overwhelmed by it<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
When a song you already knew becomes a different song<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
And maybe this is where the real work begins<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Integration doesn't mean erasing childhood<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes it all begins with a story<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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