Inner Child and Creative Recovery from Trauma
Relearning How to Create Spontaneously
Most of us had our spontaneous creativity trained at an early age when we felt pressured to please others by striving for a "talented" end product in school.
This documentary film by intuitive painting teacher Michele Cassou is well worth watching if you are having trouble accessing your spontaneous creativity.
“I also invite you to recollect and reflect upon when you halted your authentic creative expression to fit in. Be compassionate if your authentic self-expression feels awkward and childlike at first.” - Shelley Klammer
You are meant to be innocent, organic, and blossoming as children.
Yet, so much happens before you reach six. You are born into families that sometimes hurt your heart rather than nourish your soul. You are taught patterns, beliefs, and feelings that are the result of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. You are taught, ‘you should, should you should. You have to, have to, have to.’ Act appropriately, walk straight, cross your legs, be polite, don’t make waves, keep secrets, and never tell anyone what happened. You minimize your sensitive nature, believing feelings are weak, emotions are immature, and you hide your deepest needs.
Your adult behaviors stem from your childhood experiences. Inner child work involves recognizing, remembering, and releasing frozen emotions from childhood trauma.
My granddaughter Bella’s drawing, 8 years old
‘Inner child work’ is work either by yourself or with a therapist to resolve the childhood emotions and experiences your ‘inner child’ still holds and harness the joy, innocence, and confidence that were your birthright.
Inner child work is shadow work. It is where you hide, neglect, shame, and judge. It is where your saboteur and critic punishes the child and blames her for what was not her fault. The work is to understand, discern, sort out, feel into, identify, track, imagine, re-parent, reclaim, and rebuild the unworthy wounded child and reintroduce her to the true you and true love.
Ordinarily, we do not let ourselves experience ourselves fully. We have a fear of facing ourselves. Many people try to find a spiritual path where they do not have to face themselves but can still liberate themselves. In truth, that is impossible. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts.” - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist
The process addresses unmet and unexpressed needs by reparenting and catheterizing trapped emotions that limit and paralyze our choices and actions.
As unhealed victim adults, we unconsciously play out the victim child’s behaviors, including people-pleasing, manipulation, blame, shame, and control, and either attack or collapse out of fear and protection. Unlearning learned reactive, called family patterning, self-protective behavior is a large part of recovery.
Everyone has a wounded inner child. Everyone powers through the intellect to be an adult. Everyone has some shame and fear around their young, unhealed feelings.
Feelings are natural to being human. Discerning the reactive victim child's frozen feelings and the victim adult's hidden and judged feelings, as well as finding the voice and emotions of the compassionate parent/adult, is the most trusted relationship you can build with yourself.
To differentiate between your wounded child's feelings and your adult victim's feelings is conflictual and chaotic. It is a sorting, discerning feeling and between reactive response and assertive expressive responses.
‘Inner child work’ is ‘healing the child within’ or ’embracing your child archetype’. Often, the child learns to repress emotions like sadness and anger, which then become the hidden shadow.
Inner child work is any form of creative, nonlinear, nonjudgemental self-discovery that helps you access the child you were before the trauma. The general idea of inner child work is that if you try to contact, listen to, communicate with, and nurture your inner child, you can find and heal the roots of your issues as an adult.
Inner child work might take the form of:
dialoguing (talking) with your inner child
journaling from your inner child’s voice
talking with a therapist from your inner child’s voice
meditating to feel in touch with your inner child
working with a pillow, doll, or stuffed toy that represents your inner child
‘play’ and self-care to begin to calm the nervous system of the frightened child
being creative without any goal.
learning to ‘parent’ yourself (nurture and care for yourself)
Ask: What did my child desire?
What did she imagine?
How did she play?
How did she smell?
Did she shout and jump?
What did the sky and trees mean to her?
How did she hide from her parents?
The more you ask questions and feel her pure and direct feelings, the more you will know how to nurture and talk to her. It can be as simple as hugging yourself, swinging on a swing, crying and expressing yourself with someone you trust, coloring, or lying in the grass. The child does not compete, compare, or force anything. She is in the moment, experiencing and feeling.
Your wounded Inner child is where the ghosts live. Your adult victim/victimizer protects her from frozen trauma, fear, flight, and flee. Trauma shapes your shadow side. The side you hide from the world. The shadow side is your adult persona—the adult who survived but never healed.
The inner child lives in the adult psyche and body. She is the wounded, shadowy, magical, and joyful part of your life experience. She is the mysterious, mystical, imaginative, primal, and emotional being who survived her parents' messy, painful, and contradictory world.
How does creativity in the inner child work?
Creativity takes us beyond our own limits, which can be called spiritual. This “right brain” experience taps into the primal organic, intuitive, and spontaneous energy that children are born with. Entering institutional learning, creative instinct is suppressed to teach children to memorize what the system wants them to learn. Techniques, strategies, concepts, and theories shut the door of the right brain and disassociate the child from their natural and organic ways of learning, which is creative.
How is creativity a feminine process
The creative process is an expression from the gut—a flash of insight, a gut knowing, the unknown, the mystery from within. Some call it the “Duende.” The feminine is the soul and psyche of creativity and creation.
The duende is the energy of creativity. It is an emotion, intuition, a non-verbal knowing that comes from the deep mysteries of spontaneous emotional response. It is difficult to translate duende. Can you ever really translate a feeling? Only the feminine, the right brain, the woman’s heart, body, and soul, can language this experience. This is where all creativity and creation exist.
Seven traits of the creative feminine energy
Emotional/fiercely sensitive
Languages through the senses, not words
Experiential
Seeks individuation
Resilient
Connection, relationship, and merging through meaning
Creates art based on intuition
How is the cyclic pattern of nature, birth-death-rebirth, the same as the creative process?
All creation is a creative, organic, natural, cyclic process. We create as the universe creates. In nature, there is birth, a seed, the surrender to something unknown and mysterious (death), and rebirth into something new, visionary, and innovative.
Woman in the Tree, by Marta Luzim
Three Stages of Creativity
Stage 1: Preparation – Birth of the seed
This is an internal process: Meditating, visualizing, imagining, and intuiting deeply to generate and engage with ideas.
Stage 2: Incubation – Surrendering: (death) Letting go of the outcome
Surrender. Feelings, ideas, and images marinate in the mind. As ideas slowly simmer, the work deepens, and new connections are formed. During this germination period, the artist takes their focus off the problem and allows the mind to rest. While the conscious mind wanders, the unconscious engages in what Einstein called “combinatory play”: taking diverse ideas and influences and finding new ways to bring them together (dancing, listening to music, spontaneous play, intuitive writing or painting) “Imagination is the highest form of Intelligence.” Albert Einstein
Stage 3: Illumination – Rebirth
Next comes the elusive aha moment. After incubation, insights arise from the deeper layers of the mind (duende), sorting through and breaking through to conscious awareness, often dramatically. The sudden Eureka! comes when you’re in the shower, daydreaming, having psychic dreams, doodling, walking, or being occupied with something completely unrelated. Seemingly, out of nowhere, the creation presents.
How is creativity a feminine awakening?
Creativity takes you beyond your limits and yourself in a way that can be called spiritual. This “right brain” experience taps into the feminine brain and energy. The creative process is an expression from the gut—a flash of insight, a gut knowing, the unknown, the mystery from within. Some call it the “Duende.” The feminine is the soul and psyche of creativity and creation.
What is duende and creativity?
The duende is the energy of creativity. It is an emotion, intuition, a non-verbal knowing that comes from the deep mysteries of spontaneous emotional response. It is difficult to translate duende. Can you ever really translate a feeling? Only the feminine, the right brain, the woman’s heart, body, and soul, can language this experience. This is where all creativity and creation exist.
How is the cyclic pattern of nature, birth-death-rebirth, the same as the creative process?
All creation is a creative, organic, natural, cyclic process. We create as the universe makes. In nature, there is birth, a seed, the surrender to something unknown and mysterious (death), and rebirth into something new, visionary, and innovative.
Stage 3: Illumination – Rebirth
Next comes the elusive aha moment. After incubation, insights arise from the deeper layers of the mind (duende), sorting through and breaking through to conscious awareness, often dramatically. The sudden Eureka! Comes when you’re in the shower, daydreaming, having psychic dreams, doodling, walking, or being occupied with something completely unrelated. Seemingly, out of nowhere, the creation presents itself.
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