Innerchild Healing

Inner Child Healing
The Path to Empowerment,

Inner Peace, and Freedom from the Past
by Robert Burney
Copyediting by Barbara Bell

Cover Design by Bert Markgraf
2004 Suite101.com and Individual Authors

All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-894781-65-1
Published May 2004 by Suite101.com
Introduction
Inner Child Healing ~ The Path to Empowerment, Inner Peace, and Freedom from the
Past (aka A Formula for Spiritual Integration and Emotional Balance)
By Robert Burney
"It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And
the only way to do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and release
the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around."
Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney
Learn to Love your self. Easy to say, hard to do. Love is like faith, in that both are pretty
meaningless as intellectual concepts. Love is a verb. Verbs are about action, behavior.
Learning how to be more Loving to our self is the challenge.
The approach to healing detailed in this e-book is a formula that can help people learn to be more
Loving to themselves. We learned how to relate to self, to life, and to other people in early
childhood from people who were wounded in their childhoods. We have been reacting to the
intellectual programming and emotional wounds of our childhood ever since then. In order to
change our relationship with self and life, it is necessary to change the subconscious and
conscious programming that is causing our relationship with self and life to be dysfunctional. In
order to start having some peace within us, it is necessary to heal our emotional wounds and stop
our minds from being our own worst enemy.
The approach to inner child/emotional healing shared herein is the missing piece - the missing
perspective - of the puzzle of life that so many people have been seeking. It is a formula for
integrating intellectual knowledge and spiritual Truth into one's emotional relationship with life.
It is the key to learning how to be more Loving to your self - and to turning life into an adventure
to be experienced instead of an ordeal of suffering to be endured.
Robert Burney is a codependency therapist, Spiritual teacher, and author of Codependence: The
Dance of Wounded Souls. His work has been compared to John Bradshaw's "except much more
spiritual" and described as "taking inner child healing to a new level." He lives in Cambria CA
and shares over 200 pages of content on his web site at http://Joy2MeU.com. He has been the
editor of the Inner Child/Codependency Recovery page of Suite 101 since March 1999.
Table of Contents
Inner Child Healing Part 1 - The Condition of Codependency

Inner Child Healing Part 2 - How to begin
Inner Child Healing Part 3 - Why do it?
Inner Child Healing Part 4 - Internal Boundaries: the Key to self-Love
Inner Child Healing Part 5 - Loving the Wounded Child Within
Inner Child Healing Part 6 - Emotional Healing
Inner Child Healing Part 7 - Emotional Defenses
Inner Child Healing Part 8 - Stopping the War Within
Inner Child Healing Part 9 - More on Internal Boundaries
Inner Child Healing Part 10 - Inner Child Healing Paradigm
Inner Child Healing Part 11 - Internal Census
Inner Child Healing Part 12 - Building Relationships Within
Inner Child Healing Part 13 - Setting internal boundaries
Inner Child Healing Part 14 - Emotional Honesty
Inner Child Healing Part 15 - Choosing a therapist
Inner Child Healing Part 16 - Emotional Incest
Inner Child Healing Part 17 - Emotional Release/Deep Grieving Techniques
Inner Child Healing Part 18 - Spirituality
Inner Child Healing Part 19 - True Self Worth
Inner Child Healing Part 20 - Reprogramming our ego defenses
Inner Child Healing Part 21 - Positive Affirmations
Inner Child Healing Part 22 - Polarized Thinking
Inner Child Healing Part 23 - Recovery from Codependency
Inner Child Healing Part 1 - The condition of Codependency

"The word changed and evolved further after the start of the modern Codependence movement in
Arizona in the mid-eighties. Co-Dependents Anonymous had its first meeting in October of
1986, and books on Codependence as a disease in and of itself started appearing at about the
same time. These Codependence books were the next generation evolved from the books on the
Adult Child Syndrome of the early eighties."
"The point that I am making is that our understanding of Codependence has evolved to realizing
that this is not just about some dysfunctional families; our very role models, our prototypes, are
dysfunctional. Our traditional cultural concepts of what a man is, of what a woman is, are
twisted, distorted, almost comically bloated stereotypes of what masculine and feminine really
are."
"We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal.
We are taught to repress and distort our emotional process. We are trained to be emotionally
dishonest when we are children."
So often when I am working with someone, helping them to understand their codependency, they
will say, "Why didn't I learn this sooner? I feel so stupid that I have wasted so many years in
denial about how much my childhood experiences were running my life."
What I need to remind them, is that the information we have now wasn't available when they
were growing up. It was in only the late 70s and early 80s that researchers were able to identify
the Adult Child Syndrome, that family dynamics researchers were starting to speak of the
concept of dysfunctional families. Before Betty Ford had the courage to go public with her
recovery from alcoholism in the late 70s, there was very little information widely available about
alcoholism. Phil Donahue started bringing controversial topics out of the closet in the 70s, and
was followed in the 80s by Oprah Winfrey. These were the first times that such subjects as child
abuse and incest were openly discussed in American society. Denial, keeping secrets, has been
the traditional norm in both families and society.
Children now are being taught in school and through the media, that it is good to have
boundaries ("just say no") and to talk about their feelings. There are books and classes now in
healthy parenting. This is a major leap forward for society. It was not long ago, that the
philosophy of child-raising was based upon a "this is right and this is wrong - and you better do
right or else."
Unfortunately it still is for many families. And even more unfortunately, most of the kids that
are being given healthier messages are still not getting healthy role modeling. Role modeling is
just as important - if not more important - in the developmental process for children than direct
messages. "Do as I say, and not as I do," does not work when it comes to parenting.
The reality of human development is that we form the foundation dynamics of our relationships
with self, with life, and with other people in early childhood. Our relationship patterns are pretty
embedded by the time we are 4 or 5 years old.
Since there is no integration of the human developmental process into society - no real training
of how to be healthy adults or real ceremonies/initiation rites to mark vital milestones/passages
in development, such as puberty (junior high school as is it experienced in society is not a
celebration of adolescence) - and no culturally approved grieving to take the emotional charge
away from wounds caused by childhood trauma, we are stuck with those early childhood
patterns.
We are trained in childhood to be emotionally and intellectually dishonest, through both direct
messages and watching our role models. We learned that it was very important to keep up
appearances - to wear a mask. We watched our parents say nasty, judgmental things about a
person when they weren't around and then be nice to them in person. We were told that it was
not okay to speak our truth. There was an old song I always thought described how I saw people
interacting, which went something to the effect "The games people play now, every night and
every day now, never saying what they mean - never meaning what they say."
We were trained to be dishonest. We also got taught to be emotionally dishonest. We were told
not to feel our feelings with messages like, "don't cry, don't be afraid" - at the same time we saw
how our parents lived life out of fear. We got messages that it was not okay to be too happy
when our exuberance was embarrassing to our parents. Many of us grew up in environments
where it was not okay to be curious, or adventurous, or playful. It was not okay to be a child.
In any society where
emotional dishonesty is not just the standard but the goal (keep up appearances, dont show
vulnerability);
as children we learned that we had power over other peoples feelings (you make me angry,
you hurt my feelings, etc.);
being emotional is considered negative (falling apart, loosing it, coming unglued, etc.);
gender stereotypes set twisted, unhealthy models for acceptable emotional behavior (real
men dont cry or get scared, it is not ladylike to get angry);
parents without healthy self esteem see their children as extensions of self that can be either
assets or deficits in their own quest for self worth;
families are isolated from any true reality of community or tribal support;
shame, manipulation, verbal and emotional abuse are considered standard tools for
behavior modification in a loving relationship;
long embedded societal attitudes support the belief that it is shameful to be human (make
mistakes, not be perfect, to be selfish, etc.);
any human being is denigrated and held to be less worthy for any inherent characteristic
(gender, race, looks, etc.)
results in a very emotionally unhealthy society.
We were set up to be codependent. We were trained and programmed in childhood to be

dishonest with ourselves and others. We were taught false, dysfunctional concepts of success,
romance, love, life. We could not have lived our lives differently because there was no one to
teach us how to be healthy. We were doing the best we knew how with the tools, beliefs, and
definitions we had - just as our parents were doing the best they knew how.
We have new tools now. We have information and knowledge that was not available until
recently. We can change the way we live our lives. It is important to stop shaming ourselves for
living life the way we were programmed to live, in order to start learning how to live in a way
that is more functional - in a way that works to help us have some peace and happiness in our
lives. The only way to be free of the past is to start seeing it more clearly - without shame and
judgment - so that we can take advantage of this wonderful time of healing that has begun.
Codependency has been the human condition. We now have the knowledge and power to
change our relationship with ourselves. That is how we can change the human condition.
Inner Child Healing Part 2 - How to Begin

"Recovery involves bringing to consciousness those beliefs and attitudes in our subconscious
that are causing our dysfunctional reactions so that we can reprogram our ego defenses to allow
us to live a healthy, fulfilling life instead of just surviving. So that we can own our power to
make choices for ourselves about our beliefs and values instead of unconsciously reacting to the
old tapes. Recovery is consciousness raising. It is en-light-en-ment - bringing the dysfunctional
attitudes and beliefs out of the darkness of our subconscious into the Light of consciousness.
On an emotional level the dance of Recovery is owning and honoring the emotional wounds so
that we can release the grief energy - the pain, rage, terror, and shame that is driving us.
That shame is toxic and is not ours - it never was! We did nothing to be ashamed of - we were
just little kids. Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and
their parents before them, etc., etc. This is shame about being human that has been passed down
from generation to generation.
There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and
scrambled minds."
Inner child work is in one way detective work. We have a mystery to solve. Why have I been
attracted to the type of people that I have been in relationship with in my life? Why do I react in
certain ways in certain situations? Where did my behavior patterns come from? Why do I
sometimes feel so: helpless, lonely, desperate, scared, angry, suicidal, etc.
Just starting to ask these types of questions, is the first step in the healing process. It is healthy to
start wondering about the cause and effect dynamics in our life.
In our codependence, we reacted to life out of a black and white, right and wrong, belief
paradigm that taught us that it was shameful and bad to be wrong, to make mistakes, to be
imperfect - to be human. We formed our core relationship with our self and with life in early
childhood based on the messages we got, the emotional trauma we suffered, and the role
modeling of the adults around us. As we grew up, we built our relationship with self, other
people, and life on the foundation we formed in early childhood.
When we were 5, we were already reacting to life out of the emotional trauma of earlier ages.
We adapted defenses to try to protect ourselves and to get our survival needs met. The defenses
adapted at 5 due to the trauma suffered at earlier ages led to further trauma when we were 7 that
then caused us to adjust our defenses, that led to wounding at 9, etc., etc., etc.
Toxic shame is the belief that there is something inherently wrong with who we are, with our
being. Guilt is "I made a mistake, I did something wrong." Toxic shame is: "I am a mistake.
There is something wrong with me."
It is very important to start awakening to the Truth that there is nothing inherently wrong with
our being - it is our relationship with our self and with life that is dysfunctional. And that
relationship was formed in early childhood.
The way that one begins inner child healing is simply to become aware.
To become aware that the governing principle in life is cause and effect.
To become aware that our relationship with our self is dysfunctional.
To become aware that we have the power to change our relationship with our self.
To become aware that we were programmed with false beliefs about the purpose and nature of
life in early childhood - and that we can change that programming.
To become aware that we have emotional wounds from childhood that it is possible to get in
touch with and heal enough to stop them from dictating how we are living our life today.
That is the purpose of inner child healing - to stop letting our experiences of the past dictate how
we respond to life today. It cannot be done without revisiting our childhood.
We need to become aware, to raise our consciousness. To create a new level of consciousness
for ourselves that allows us to observe ourselves.
It is vitally important to start observing ourselves - our reactions, our feelings, our thoughts from a detached witness place that is not shaming.
We all have an inner critic, a critical parent voice, which beats us up with shame, judgment, and
fear. The critical parent voice developed to try to control our emotions and our behaviors
because we got the message there was something wrong with us and that our survival would be
threatened if we did, said, or felt the "wrong" things.
It is vital to start learning how to not give power to that critical shaming voice. We need to start
observing ourselves with compassion. This is almost impossible at the beginning of the inner
child healing process - having compassion for our self, being Loving to our self, is the hardest
thing for us to do.
So, we need to start observing ourselves from at least a more neutral perspective. Become a
scientific observer, a detective - the Sherlock Holmes of your own inner process as it were.
We need to start being that detective, observing ourselves and asking ourselves where that
reaction / thought / feeling is coming from. Why am I feeling this way? What does this remind
me of from my past? How old do I feel right now? How old did I act when that happened?
One of the amazing things about this process, is that as one starts to become more aware of our
own reactions, we also start to become more aware of others. We start seeing when the people in
our lives are reacting like a little kid, or adolescent, or teenager, or whatever. The more we
become aware of their reactions the easier it becomes to stop taking their behavior personally which then makes it easier to detach from our own reactions and observe ourselves.
It is an amazing, miraculous process, which can help us to change our relationship with our self,
with other people, and with life. Becoming more aware, becoming conscious of a new way of
looking at ourselves and life is the beginning of a process of learning to forgive and Love our
self.
A detective always looks at cause and effect. By becoming a detective, solving the mystery of
why we have lived our lives as we have, we can start to free ourselves from our past. By doing
the inner child healing, we can start to learn how to really be alive instead of just surviving and
enduring.
Inner Child Healing Part 3 - Why do it?

"We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal.
We are taught to repress and distort our own emotional process. We are trained to be
emotionally dishonest when we are children.
This emotional repression and dishonesty causes society to be emotionally dysfunctional.
Additionally, urban based civilization has completely disregarded natural laws and natural cycles
such as the human developmental process. There is no integration into our culture of the natural
human developmental process.
As just one blatant example of this, consider how most so-called primitive or aboriginal societies
react to the onset of puberty. When a girl starts menstruating, ceremonies are held to celebrate
her womanhood - to honor her coming into her power, to honor her miraculous gift of being able
to conceive. Boys go through training and initiation rites to help them make the transition from
boyhood to manhood. Look at what we have in our society: junior high school - a bunch of
scared, insecure kids who torture each other out of their confusion and fear, and join gangs to try
to find an identity.
This lack of integration of the natural human growth process causes trauma. At each stage of the
developmental process we were traumatized because of the emotionally repressive, spiritually
hostile environment into which we were born. We went into the next stage incomplete and then
were retraumatized, were wounded again."
For all of the so called progress of our modern societies, we still are far behind most aboriginal
cultures in terms of respect for individual rights and dignity in some kind of balance with the
good of the whole. Nowhere is this more evident in terms of our relationship to our children.
Modern civilizations - both Eastern and Western - are no more than a generation or two removed
from the belief that children were property. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the belief
that women were property. The idea that children have rights, individuality, and dignity is
relatively new in modern society. The predominant and underlying belief, as it has been
manifested in the treatment of children, has been that children are extensions of, and tools to be
used by, their parents.
A very telling insight into the basic beliefs underlying Western attitudes towards children is
shared by inner child pioneer Alice Miller in her book The Drama of The Gifted Child. She
shares how the 19th Century German Philosophers who laid the groundwork for modern
psychology, emphasized the importance of stamping out a child's "exuberance." In other words,
a child's spirit must be crushed in order to control them.
Children are to be seen and not heard. Spare the rod and spoil the child.
It is only in very recent history, that our society has even recognized child abuse as a crime
instead of an inherent right of the parent. The concept of healthy parenting as a skill to be
learned is very new in society.
Any society that does not respect and honor individual human dignity, is going to be a society
that does not meet the essential needs of its members. Patriarchal societies, that demean and
degrade women and children, are dysfunctional in their essence.
We form our core relationship with our self and with life - and of course with other people - in
early childhood in reaction to the messages we get from the way we are treated and the role
modeling of the other people in our lives. We then have no training or initiation ceremonies, no
culturally approved grieving process, to help us let go of the old programming and learn a
different relationship with our self and life. So, we build upon the foundation laid in early
childhood.
As adults, we react to the programming of our childhood. To contend that our childhood
emotional wounds have not affected our adult lives is ridiculous. To think that our early
programming has not influenced the way we have lived is to be in denial to an extreme.
Because societies' standards for what constitutes success are dysfunctional, many people can be
pointed out who "have risen above" their past to be a success. It is those people, who are
supposedly successes, which are running the world. How good a job do you think they are
doing?
The dysfunctional belief systems underlying civilization are what give us war and poverty,
billionaires and homelessness.
My book, Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, evolved out of a talk that I first did in
1991. In the talk, I stated that I would like to one day make up a bumper sticker that said "Work
for World Peace, Heal Your Inner Child." I did have these bumper stickers printed when I
published my book. It is, I believe, an essential Truth. We will never have world peace, or a
civilized society which is based upon respect and dignity - to say nothing of Love - unless we
can heal our relationships with ourselves enough to learn to Love and respect our self.
We cannot Love our neighbor as our self, as long as we are judging and comparing our self to
them in order to feel good about our self. We cannot have a society that meets the essential
emotional and spiritual needs of its members as long as we are reacting to life in alignment with
rules of interaction that we learned in junior high school.
We are all connected - not separate. We all have worth and deserve to be treated with dignity
and respect - instead of earning society's version of worth by stepping on and over our fellow
humans, to say nothing of destroying the planet we live on.
It is through healing our inner child wounds that we can learn to respect and Love our self so that
we can know how to treat others with respect and Love. It is through healing our inner children
that we can save our planet and evolve into a society that does meet the essential needs of its
members.
Inner child healing is not some fad or pop psychology. Inner child healing is the only way to
empower ourselves to stop living life in reaction to the past. We have been ignoring history and
repeating it for centuries. If we are going to have a chance to reverse the self destructive patterns
of human kind, it is going to come from individuals healing self. By healing our inner child
wounds, we can change the world.
Work for World Peace, Heal your inner child
Inner Child Healing Part 4 - Internal Boundaries: the Key to self-Love

Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos
in order to meet our need to survive as a child. Because we had no tools for reprogramming our
egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation
rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the
programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met - our emotional, mental, Spiritual,
or physical needs. Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and
dead inside. Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.
Codependence is a dysfunctional defense system that developed in reaction to feeling unlovable
and unworthy - because our parents were wounded codependents who didnt know how to love
themselves. We grew up in environments that were emotionally dishonest, Spiritually hostile,
and shame based. Our relationship with ourselves (and all the different parts of our self:
emotions, gender, spirit, etc.) got twisted and distorted in order to survive in our particular
dysfunctional environment.
We got to an age where we were supposed to be an adult and we started acting like we knew
what we were doing. We went around pretending to be adult at the same time we were reacting
to the programming that we got growing up. We tried to do everything right or rebelled and
went against what we had been taught was right. Either way we werent living our life through
choice, we were living it in reaction.
In order to start being loving to ourselves we need to change our relationship with our self and
with all the wounded parts of our self. The way which I have found works the best in starting to
love ourselves is through having internal boundaries.
Learning to have internal boundaries is a dynamic process that involves three distinctly different,
but intimately interconnected, spheres of work. The purpose of the work is to change our egoprogramming - to change our relationship with ourselves by changing our emotional/behavioral
defense system into something that works to open us up to receive Love, instead of sabotaging
ourselves because of our deep belief that we dont deserve love.
(I need to make the point here that Codependence and recovery are both multi-leveled, multidimensional phenomena. What we are trying to achieve is integration and balance on different
levels. In regard to our relationship with ourselves this involves two major dimensions: the
horizontal and the vertical. In this context the horizontal is about being human and relating to
other humans and our environment. The vertical is Spiritual, about our relationship to a Higher
Power, to the Universal Source. If we cannot conceive of a God/Goddess Force that Loves us
then it makes it virtually impossible to be Loving to ourselves. Changing our relationship with
ourselves on the horizontal level is both a necessary element in, and possible because we are
working on, integrating Spiritual Truth into our inner process.)
These three spheres are:

1. Detachment
2. Inner Child Healing
3. Grieving
Because Codependence is a reactive phenomenon it is vital to start being able to detach from our
own process in order to have some choice in changing our reactions. We need to start observing
our selves from an objective witness perspective instead of from the perspective of the judge.
We all observe ourselves - have a place of watching ourselves as if from outside, or perched
somewhere inside, observing our own behavior. Because of our childhoods we learned to judge
ourselves from that witness perspective, the critical parent voice.
The emotionally dishonest environments we were raised in taught us that it was not okay to feel
our emotions, or that only certain emotions were okay. So we had to learn ways to control our
emotions in order to survive. We adapted the same tools that were used on us - guilt, shame, and
fear (and saw in the role modeling of our parents how they reacted to life from shame and fear.)
This is where the critical parent gets born. Its purpose is to try to keep our emotions and
behavior under some sort of control so that we can get our survival needs met.
So the first boundary that we need to start setting internally is with the wounded/dysfunctionally
programmed part of our own mind. We need to start saying no to the inner voices that are
shaming and judgmental. The disease comes from a black and white, right and wrong,
perspective. It speaks in absolutes: You always screw up! You will never be a success! these are lies. We dont always screw up. We may never be a success according to our parents or
society's dysfunctional definition of success - but that is because our heart and soul do not
resonate with those definitions, so that kind of success would be a betrayal of ourselves. We need
to consciously change our definitions so that we can stop judging ourselves against someone
elses screwed up value system.
We need to own that we have the power to choose where to focus our mind. We can consciously
start viewing ourselves from the witness perspective. It is time to fire the judge - our critical
parent - and choose to replace that judge with our Higher Self - who is a Loving parent. We can
then intervene in our own process to protect ourselves from the perpetrator within - the critical
parent/disease voice.
This is what enlightenment and consciousness raising are all about. Owning our power to be a
co-creator of our lives by changing our relationship with ourselves. We can change the way we
think. We can change the way we respond to our own emotions. We need to detach from our
wounded self in order to allow our Spiritual Self to guide us. By having internal boundaries we
can start to relate to our self in ways that are Loving instead of being our own worst enemy.
Inner Child Healing Part 5 - Loving the Wounded Child Within

"The hardest thing for any of us to do is to have compassion for ourselves. As children we felt
responsible for the things that happened to us. We blamed ourselves for the things that were done
to us and for the deprivations we suffered. There is nothing more powerful in this
transformational process than being able to go back to that child who still exists within us and
say, It wasnt your fault. You didnt do anything wrong, you were just a little kid.
"As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are giving power to the disease. We are
feeding the monster that is devouring us. We need to take responsibility without taking the
blame. We need to own and honor the feelings without being a victim of them. We need to
rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling our lives.
STOP them from driving the bus! Children are not supposed to drive, they are not supposed to be
in control. And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned. We have been doing it
backwards. We abandoned and abused our inner children. Locked them in a dark place within us.
And at the same time let the children drive the bus - let the children's wounds dictate our lives."
When we were 3 or 4 we couldnt look around us and say, Well, Dads a drunk and Mom is real
depressed and scared - that is why it feels so awful here. I think Ill go get my own apartment.
Our parents were our higher powers. We were not capable of understanding that they might have
problems that had nothing to do with us. So it felt like it was our fault.
We formed our relationship with ourselves and life in early childhood. We learned about love
from people who were not capable of loving in a healthy way because of their unhealed
childhood wounds. Our core/earliest relationship with our self was formed from the feeling that
something is wrong and it must be me. At the core of our being is a little kid who believes that
he/she is unworthy and unlovable. That was the foundation that we built our concept of self on.
Children are master manipulators. That is their job - to survive in whatever way works. So we
adapted defense systems to protect our broken hearts and wounded spirits. The 4 year old learned
to throw tantrums, or be real quiet, or help clean the house, or protect the younger siblings, or be
cute and funny, etc. Then we got to be 7 or 8 and started being able to understand cause and
effect and use reason and logic and we changed our defense systems to fit the circumstances.
Then we reached puberty and didnt have a clue what was happening to us, and no healthy adults
to help us understand, so we adapted our defense systems to protect our vulnerability. And then
we were teenagers and our job was to start becoming independent and prepare ourselves to be
adults, so we changed our defense systems once again.
It is not only dysfunctional, it is ridiculous to maintain that what happened in our childhood did
not affect our adult life. We have layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, buried
trauma, unfulfilled needs, etc., etc. Our hearts were broken, our spirits wounded, our minds
programmed dysfunctionally. The choices we have made as adults were made in reaction to our
childhood wounds/programming - our lives have been dictated by our wounded inner children.
(History, politics, success or lack of success, in our dysfunctional society/civilizations can

always be made clearer by looking at the childhoods of the individuals involved. History has
been, and is being, made by immature, scared, angry, hurt individuals who were/are reacting to
their childhood wounds and programming - reacting to the little child inside who feels unworthy
and unlovable. )
It is very important to realize that we are not an integrated whole being - to ourselves. Our self
concept is fractured into a multitude of pieces. In some instances we feel powerful and strong, in
others weak and helpless - that is because different parts of us are reacting to different stimuli
(different buttons are being pushed.) The parts of us that feel weak, helpless, needy, etc. are
not bad or wrong - what is being felt is perfect for the reality that was experienced by the part of
ourselves that is reacting (perfect for then - but it has very little to do with what is happening in
the "now"). It is very important to start having compassion for that wounded part of ourselves.
It is by owning our wounds that we can start taking the power away from the wounded part of us.
When we suppress the feelings, feel ashamed about our reactions, do not own that part of our
being, then we give it power. It is the feelings that we are hiding from that dictate our behavior,
that fuel obsession and compulsion.
Codependence is a disease of extremes.
Those of us who were horrified and deeply wounded by a perpetrator in childhood - and were
never going to be like that parent - adapted a more passive defense system to avoid confrontation
and hurting others. The more passive type of codependent defense system leads to a dominant
pattern of being the victim.
Those of us who were disgusted by, and ashamed of, the victim parent in childhood and vowed
never to be like that role model, adapted a more aggressive defense system. So we go charging
through life being the bull in the china shop - being the perpetrator who blames other people for
not allowing us to be in control. The perpetrator that feels like a victim of other people not doing
things right - which is what forces us to bulldoze our way through life.
And, of course, some of us go first one way and then the other. (We all have our own personal
spectrum of extremes that we swing between - sometimes being the victim, sometimes being the
perpetrator. Being a passive victim is perpetrating on those around us.)
The only way we can be whole is to own all of the parts of ourselves. By owning all the parts we
can then have choices about how we respond to life. By denying, hiding, and suppressing parts
of ourselves we doom ourselves to live life in reaction.
It is impossible to truly love the adult that we are without owning the child that we were. In order
to do that, we need to detach from our inner process (and stop the disease from abusing us) so
that we can have some objectivity and discernment that will allow us to have compassion for our
own childhood wounds. Then we need to grieve those wounds and own our right to be angry
about what happened to us in childhood - so that we can truly know in our gut that it wasnt our
fault - we were just innocent little kids.
Inner Child Healing - Part 6 - emotional healing

"We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great
Spirit. But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted,
distorted attitudes and false beliefs.
We can intellectually throw out false beliefs. We can intellectually remember and embrace the
Truth of ONENESS and Light and Love. But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our dayto-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional
behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds.
Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.
We cannot learn to Love without honoring our Rage!
We cannot allow ourselves to be Truly Intimate with ourselves or anyone else without owning
our Grief.
We cannot clearly reconnect with the Light unless we are willing to own and honor our
experience of the Darkness.
We cannot fully feel the Joy unless we are willing to feel the Sadness.
We need to do our emotional healing, to heal our wounded souls, in order to reconnect with our
Souls on the highest vibrational levels. In order to reconnect with the God-Force that is Love
and Light, Joy and Truth."
Emotions are energy that is manifested in our bodies. They exist primarily below the neck.
They are not thoughts (although attitudes set up our emotional reactions.) In order to do the
emotional healing it is vital to start paying attention to where energy is manifesting in our bodies.
Where is there tension, tightness? Could that "indigestion" really be some feelings? Are those
"butterflies" in my stomach telling me something emotionally?
When I am working with someone and they start having some feelings coming up, the first thing
I have to tell them is to keep breathing. Most of us have learned a variety of ways to control our
emotions and one of them is to stop breathing and close our throats. That is because grief in the
form of sadness accumulates in our upper chest and breathing into it helps some of it to escape so we learned to stop breathing at those moments when we start getting emotional, when our
voice starts breaking.
Western civilization has for many years been way out of balance towards the left brain way of
thinking - concrete, rational, what you see is all there is (this was in reaction to earlier times of
being out of balance the other way, towards superstition and ignorance.) Because emotional
energy can not be seen or measured or weighed ("The x-ray shows you've got 5 pounds of grief
in there.") emotions were discounted and devalued. This has started to change somewhat in
recent years but most of us grew up in a society that taught us that being too emotional was a bad
thing that we should avoid. (Certain cultures/subcultures give more permission for emotions but
those are usually out of balance to the other extreme of allowing the emotions to rule - the goal is
balance: between mental and emotional, between intuitive and rational.)
Emotions are a vital part of our being for several reasons.
1. Because it is energy and energy cannot just disappear. The emotional energy generated by the
circumstances of our childhood and early life does not go away just because we were forced to
deny it. It is still trapped in our body - in a pressurized, explosive state, as a result of being
suppressed. If we don't learn how to release it in a healthy way it will explode outward or
implode back in on us. Eventually it will transform into some other form - such as cancer.
2. As long as we have pockets of pressurized emotional energy that we have to avoid dealing
with - those emotional wounds will run our lives. We use food, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs,
relationships, work, religion, exercise, meditation, television, etc., to help us keep suppressing
that energy. To help us keep ourselves focused on something else, anything else, besides the
emotional wounds that terrify us. The emotional wounds are what cause obsession and
compulsion, are what the "critical parent" voice works so hard to keep us from dealing with.
3. Our emotions tell us who we are - our Soul communicates with us through emotional energy
vibrations. Truth is an emotional energy vibrational communication from our Soul on the
Spiritual Plane to our being/spirit/soul on this physical plane - it is something that we feel in our
heart/our gut, something that resonates within us.
Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult
to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes
from our childhood wounds. When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the
insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid,
etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 - not to
what is happening now. Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust
our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways both when we
were kids and as adults.)
4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level - which means (until we
start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally/vibrationally feel like our parents
did when we were very little kids. At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a
woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more
unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the
message that I wasn't good enough, that I was unlovable. Until we start releasing the hurt,
sadness, rage, shame, terror - the emotional grief energy - from our childhoods we will keep
having dysfunctional relationships.
Emotions are messy. Many people want to get Spiritual without dealing with the emotions. That
is a normal human reaction. It is dysfunctional however. Our emotions are a vital part of our
being. It is crucial to honor and respect our emotions in order to discover our True Self. In
denying the feelings, we are denying a part of self. In denying our childhood emotional
experiences, we are abandoning and betraying that child. That wounded child within us, is the
portal to our soul, the key to reconnecting with Spiritual Self.
Inner Child Healing - Part 7 - Emotional Defenses

Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work. Emotions are energy: Emotion = energy in motion. It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow.
Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be - even those emotions that feel
uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing.
These are not negative emotional responses! We were taught to react negatively to them. It is
our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.
Emotional honesty is absolutely vital to the health of the being. Denying, distorting, and
blocking our emotions in reaction to false beliefs and dishonest attitudes causes emotional and
mental disease. This emotional and mental disease causes physical, biological imbalance which
produces physical disease.
Growing up in emotionally dishonest societies with wounded parents forced us to learn ways to
distance ourselves from our feelings. In this article I am going to talk about three common
defensive strategies we learn to protect ourselves and help us deny our emotions.
1. Speaking in the third person. One of the defenses many of us have against feeling our
feelings is to speak of ourselves in the third person. "You just kind of feel hurt when that
happens" is not a personal statement and does not carry the power of speaking in the first person.
"I felt hurt when that happened" is personal, is owning the feeling. Listen to yourself so that you
can become more aware of this defense and start changing it. Listen to others - both in person
and on TV - refer to self in the third person and you will gain some insight into how they are
wounded. You will probably be surprised at how often you hear this defense in the course of a
day as you become more conscious.
To say, I feel angry or I feel sad is owning the feelings. It is emotional honesty and helps us
to get in touch with the emotional energy that exists in our bodies. Referring to our self as you
is a form of emotional dishonesty.
2. Story telling. This is a very common method of avoiding our feelings. Some people tell
entertaining stories to avoid feelings. They may respond to a feeling statement by saying
something like 'I remember back in '85 when I. . .' Their stories might be very entertaining but
they have no personal immediate emotional content.
Some people tell stories about other people. They will respond to an emotional moment by
telling an emotional story about some friend, acquaintance, or even a person they read about.
They may exhibit some emotion in telling the story but it is emotion for the other person, not for
self. They keep a distance from their emotions by attributing the emotional energy they are
touching on to being about someone other than self.
Then there is the stereotypical Codependent of the joke: when a Codependent dies someone
else's life passes before their eyes. If this type of Codependent is in a relationship, everything
they say will be about the other person. Direct questions about self will be answered with stories
about the significant other. This is a completely unconscious result of the sad fact that they have
no real concept of self as an individual entity.
Perhaps the most common story telling diversion is to get very involved in the details of the story
'she said. . . . . then I said. . . . then she did. . . . .' The details are ultimately insignificant in
relationship to the emotions involved but because we do not know how to handle the emotions
we get caught up in the details. Often we are relating the details in order to show the listener
how we were wronged in the interaction. Often we focus on how others are wrong in reaction
to the situation as a way of avoiding our feelings.
If someone is telling you a story and you find your mind wandering and boredom setting in - it is
because they are not being emotionally honest. Often the person will be coming from a
victim/self pity perspective and may even be crying while telling the story - but the crying they
are doing is not emotionally honest, it is part of a role they are playing and probably have been
playing for years. Expressing feelings in a martyrs role created by the false self is very different
from expressing grief in relationship to self. The martyr who is blaming is being dishonest both
emotionally and intellectually.
3. Avoiding using primary feeling words. There are only a handful of primary feelings that all
humans feel. There is some dispute about just how many are primary but for our purpose here I
am going to use seven. Those are: angry/mad, sad, hurt, afraid/scared, lonely, ashamed, and
happy/glad. It is important to start using the primary names of these feelings in order to own
them and to stop distancing ourselves from the feelings.
To say "I am anxious" or "concerned" or "apprehensive" is not the same as saying "I feel afraid."
Fear is at the root of all of those expressions but we don't have to be so in touch with our fear if
we use a word that distances us from the fear. Expressions like "confused," "irritated," "upset,"
"tense," "disturbed," "melancholy," "blue," "good," or "bad" are not primary feeling words.
We were trained to be emotionally dishonest in childhood. In order to start peeling the layers of
denial it is vital to get aware of our own emotional defenses. In order to start getting emotionally
honest with ourselves - let alone with anyone else - it is vital to start recognizing our own
emotional defenses. The little tricks of language and focus that we learned to help us distance
ourselves from feelings that we did not know how to deal with.
Becoming willing to get conscious of our own defenses is a vital step to getting in touch with our
own feelings. Learning to be emotionally honest with our self is an important part of a
recovery/healing path.
Inner Child Healing Part 8 - Stopping the War Within

The dysfunctional dance of Codependence is caused by being at war with ourselves - being at
war within.
We are at war with ourselves because we are judging and shaming ourselves for being human.
We are at war with ourselves because we are carrying around suppressed grief energy that we are
terrified of feeling. We are at war within because we are damming our own emotional process
- because we were forced to become emotionally dishonest as children and had to learn ways to
block and distort our emotional energy.
We cannot learn to Love ourselves and be at peace within until we stop judging and shaming
ourselves for being human and stop fighting our own emotional process, until we stop waging
war on ourselves.
Our relationship with self is dysfunctional (i.e. it does not work to help us feel happy and whole,
have inner peace and enjoy life) because we have so much internal conflict. We have a
multitude of dysfunctional relationships within us, a large dysfunctional family inside of us which is the cause of our dysfunctional relationships externally. The two primary dysfunctional
relationships we need to focus on in inner child work are the relationships with our own mind
and our own emotions.
(Intimately interrelated with this inner work is changing our relationship with life itself. Finding
a relationship with life, with being human, that works to enhance our potential to be happy and to
feel worthy of Love, is what I refer to as spirituality. Having a spiritual belief system that
supports the possibility that we are Lovable and worthy is possible because of, and facilitates, the
healing work in relationship to our other relationships - both internally and externally. I will
speak more of this in future articles in this series.)
There is a part of our mind that judges and shames us because it got programmed very badly.
Our ego programming in early childhood - because of the messages we got directly and from the
role modeling of the adults in our lives, plus the lessons we interpreted from the emotional
trauma we suffered - caused us to learn to relate to life from a place of fear and shame, lack and
scarcity. We learned to try to control our behaviors and emotions using the same tools that were
used by our parents - fear, guilt, and shame. Thus was born the critical parent voice in our mind
that judges and shame us, that beats us up and sabotages our ability to relax and enjoy life.
Our attitudes, definitions, and beliefs - both conscious and subconscious - set up our expectations
and perspectives. Those expectations and perspectives are what dictate our relationships with
everything. We give away power over our own emotions through the expectations and
perspectives of life that we empower. If, for instance, I am allowing myself to buy into the belief
that everyone should drive the way I want them to - then I will have a dysfunctional
relationship with driving. I will give other drivers the power to make me angry because they are
not driving right according to my definition of what right is - thus is road rage born.
It is not only dysfunctional, it is insane to expect everyone else to behave in the manner that we
think they should. By having expectations that are insane, that do not align with the realities
of life, we are giving other people the power to dictate our emotional reactions to life. This sets
us up to feel like a victim - of other people not doing it right, of life not being what it should
be.
It is vital to start taking responsibility for the ways in which we set ourselves up, that we give
power away, in order to stop living life as a victim. Personal empowerment involves seeing life
as it is and making the best of it - instead of being the victim, wishing it was different. This
starts with our relationship with ourselves. If we expect ourselves to be perfect - to never make
mistakes, to never be scared and confused, etc. - we are then set up to be the victim of our own
humanity. If we expect other people to always be nice and kind in a world full of wounded souls
- then we are set up to be the victim of other people. If we think that falling in love is going to
lead us to happily-ever-after - then we are set up to be a victim in romantic relationships.
The most pervasive way we were programmed in childhood to be a victim, is in our relationship
with our self. In order to stop setting ourselves up to be a victim - both of others because we
have insane perspectives, and of ourselves because we have unrealistic expectations - it is vital to
become more conscious of our own internal process. Then we can learn to stop giving power to
concepts and beliefs we learned in childhood about the nature and purpose of life. We can learn
to start being Loving in relationship to our own emotional wounds instead of judgmental and
shaming.
It is through starting to become more conscious of how we were programmed to have a
dysfunctional relationship with self in childhood, that we can start clearing up our relationship
with our self. When we start to change the insane expectations and unrealistic perspectives of
life that are causing us to give away power over our emotions - then we can start seeing our own
emotions more clearly.
Emotions are not thoughts. Emotional reactions to life are generated by the intellectual paradigm
- the beliefs, attitudes, and definitions - that we are empowering. Until we start to become aware
of how our old tapes are controlling our emotional relationship with ourselves and with life, then
we are powerless to change our behavior patterns. We need to start getting conscious of reality
that we can change our intellectual programming. Through making a conscious effort to change
our intellectual paradigm, we can change our relationship with life and with self into one that is
more aligned with Love than with fear.
We can then start to heal our emotional wounds from the past by doing the grief and forgiveness
work that is so necessary to change our internal relationship. It is changing our mental
programming and healing our emotional wounds through releasing the grief energy from the
past, that will allow to have a more functional, healthier, and more Loving relationship with
ourselves.
The tool that is so valuable in this process, which is so valuable in stopping the internal conflict
so that we can find some inner peace and start Loving ourselves, is to learn to have internal
boundaries. I will talk about internal boundaries in the next article in this series.
Inner Child Healing Part 9 - More on Internal Boundaries

"It was vitally important for me to learn how to have internal boundaries so that I could lovingly
parent (which, of course, includes setting boundaries for) my inner children, tell the critical
parent/disease voice to shut up, and start accessing the emotional energy of Truth, Beauty, Joy,
Light, and Love. It was by learning internal boundaries that I could begin to achieve some
integration and balance in my life, and transform my experience of life into an adventure that is
enjoyable and exciting most of the time."
The first time I am conscious of hearing the term "internal boundaries" was in a Co-Dependents
Anonymous meeting sometime in 1990 or 91. It resonated with me at the time as being an
important term. It wasnt until a few years later that I really started focusing on the concept and
how it could be applied to recovery from childhood wounding.
Now, as I look back, I can see that internal boundaries were the key from the beginning.
Internal boundaries could also be described as self-discipline or taking responsibility or growing
up. They are what are necessary for any real growth to occur. It is necessary for an alcoholic to
start having internal boundaries in order to stop drinking - for anyone to stop any addictive,
compulsive, or obsessive behavior.
In order to start changing our behavior it is necessary to have an internal boundary with the child
in us who wants immediate gratification/immediate relief from the feelings. In order to change
what we are doing so we can change what we are getting - it is necessary to start having some
internal boundaries with ourselves.
Terms like self-discipline or responsibility carried for me the shame and guilt of the
dysfunctional society I grew up in - whereas internal boundaries was a much cleaner term, and a
much more accurately focused term. I came to focus on internal boundaries in my private
therapy practice and in my personal recovery - and found application of the concept to be
powerful and effective in starting to help myself and others become more integrated and
balanced.
The key, in terms of the concept of internal boundaries as I use it and apply it, is to set those
boundaries from a loving place instead of from a shaming and judgmental place. We all learned
to try to control our behavior and feelings with shame, guilt, and fear because those were the
tools used in our society. The critical parent voice is the part of us that is attempting to have
internal boundaries through shame, criticism, and fear of consequences.
To set internal boundaries from shame and fear is dysfunctional in the long term. When we try
to control our behavior out of shame and fear it doesnt work because we end up rebelling
against that attempted control. We rebel by acting out in the self abusive ways that we are
shaming ourselves for in the first place. Thus the codependent cycle of shame, blame, and self
abuse is fed by the very shame and fear messages that we are using to try to stop it.
The reason we rebel is because when we are shaming and abusing ourselves we are betraying
ourselves - and on some deep level we know that is not right. The rebel in us fights against this
self abuse - but at the same time because we are reacting out of dysfunctional programming, the
rebel within has become allied with the very addictions and dysfunctional behavior we are trying
to stop with the shame. On the highest level the rebel within is trying to get us to be True to our
True self - but because of our dysfunctional programming, it identifies the ways we learned to
protect and nurture ourselves, the ways we learned to go unconscious to the pain, as our ally
instead of as self abusive behaviors.
Part of the task in recovery, is to learn to realign our defense system with healing and Love
instead of with self destruction. We need to retrain the rebel to fight the good fight on behalf of
what is healthy and aligned with growth - instead of aligned with unconsciousness.
This is part of the process of learning to be our own best friend, our own protector, our own
Loving parent. By learning how to have internal boundaries we can fight the good fight in a way
that serves us instead of hurts us.
When we get into recovery, we are given access to a new tool box. A tool box full of tools that
work in our best interest. A big part of making progress in recovery is transitioning from using
our old tool box - the tools we learned growing to cope with the pain and go unconscious - to
learning how to use the new tools.
This of course, is possible because we are becoming more conscious of our inner process. We
are observing ourselves enough to start understanding our patterns and triggers. As we raise our
consciousness and become aware of our reactions, we can begin to consciously start setting
internal boundaries out of Love rather than fear and shame.
Those boundaries include: a boundary within the mental to help us tell the critical parent voice
to shut up and start owning our power to reprogram our intellectual paradigm and change our
perspective on our self and life; a boundary between the mental and emotional so that we can
learn to feel and release the feelings while not buying into the false beliefs; a boundary within
the emotional so that we can start discerning with more clarity which emotional reactions are
coming from the wounded parts of us - and which are intuitive messages from our Spirit; and
boundaries that help us separate being from behavior, so that we can start affirming our worth as
beings while recognizing that we can change any behavior that is dysfunctional, any behavior
patterns that do not work to help us be happy and enjoy life.
In the next article in this series, I will discuss some of the tools and techniques that I have found
work in helping to develop healthy internal boundaries.
Inner Child Healing Part 10 - Inner Child Healing Paradigm

"As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are giving power to the disease. We are
feeding the monster that is devouring us.
We need to take responsibility without taking the blame. We need to own and honor the feelings
without being a victim of them.
We need to rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling
our lives. STOP them from driving the bus! Children are not supposed to drive, they are not
supposed to be in control.
And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned. We have been doing it backwards. We
abandoned and abused our inner children. Locked them in a dark place within us. And at the
same time let the children drive the bus - let the children's wounds dictate our lives."
The above passage from my book is one that I really like. It says a great deal in just a few
words. It speaks to the balance that is the goal of the healing process. Take responsibility for
my side of the street without blaming - me or anyone else. Feel my feelings without letting
them run my life. Learn to have Love and compassion for the child that I was, at the same time
I take control of my inner process in a Loving way by not continuing to give power over how I
live today to my past emotional wounds.
In order to become empowered and stop being the victim of our self it is very important to
recognize the different parts of ourselves so that we can set boundaries out of the adult that has
knowledge, skills, and resources, the adult that is on a Spiritual/healing path. We can access our
Higher Self to be a Loving Parent to the wounded parts of our self. We have a Healer Within us.
An Inner Mentor/Teacher/Wise Wizard that can guide us if we have the ears to hear - the
consciousness to become aware. That Adult within us can set a boundary with the Critical
Parent to stop the shame and judgment and can then Lovingly set boundaries with whatever part
of us is reacting so that we can find some balance in the now - not overreact or under react out of
out fear of overreacting.
We all have a whole family (seems like a community sometimes) of wounded components that
make up our being. Having a lot of conflicting feelings within is not a sign that we are crazy - it
is a sign that we have different parts of us that want different things/are reacting to different
impulses. The more we become aware of those parts of us the more we can stop being an
unconscious victim of those conflicting feelings.
And what is very important - and the biggest difference between the techniques that I have
developed and teach from so many others - is to build a Loving ongoing relationship with those
wounded parts of us. Inner child healing is not something that we do and then move on with our
lives. Our wounded inner children are going to be with us for the rest of our lives. The wounds
are not going to go away - they have progressively less power as we heal - but they do not go
away. So it is important for us to recognize what part of us is reacting so that we can respond to
that wounded part of our self in a Loving, patient, and mature way when one of our buttons is
pushed/wounds is gouged.
This work is about becoming an integrated, whole, mature, adult person in action, in the way we
live our lives and respond to life events and other people. The only way we can be whole is to
own all of the parts of ourselves. By owning all the parts we can then have choices about how
we respond to life. By denying, hiding, and suppressing parts of ourselves we doom ourselves to
live life in reaction.
The technique that I have found so valuable in this healing process is to relate to the different
wounded parts of our self as different ages of the inner child. These different ages of the child
may be literally tied to an event that happened at that age - i.e. when I was 7 I tried to commit
suicide. Or the age of the child might be a symbolic designator for a pattern of abuse/deprivation
that occurred throughout our childhood - i.e. the 9 year old within me feels completely
emotionally isolated and desperately needy/lonely, a condition which was true for most of my
childhood and not tied to any specific incident (that I know of) that happened when I was 9.
We can get in touch with the feelings of an age of our inner child without having any specific
memories to explain those feelings. We can get in touch with feelings that are preverbal from
early childhood - or even feelings from the womb. For many of us our wounding began in the
womb, where we incubated in our mothers fear and shame or became addicted to adrenaline
because of what our mothers were experiencing.
As long as we are reacting unconsciously out of a mass of unresolved grief and rage, it is nearly
impossible to have any clarity about our inner process. It is vitally important to start separating
out the different wounded parts of us, so that we can start healing the individual wounds/issues.
That is the way we start to take power away from those wounds.
The inner child healing paradigm is a structure that facilitates healing. We all had our
relationships with ourselves fractured into pieces as we were growing up. It is very important to
start bringing some peace to our inner process by owning those different wounded parts of us.
Those different wounded parts of us - which involve both repressed emotional energy and frozen
splinters of ego - are what I refer to as our inner children.
In the next few articles in this series, I will be talking about getting in touch with (an internal
census) and building a relationship with, the different wounded parts of us. We need to shine
light into the darkness in order to stop giving power to the past. The inner child healing
paradigm is the most powerful technique that I have ever encountered for facilitating the healing
of our emotional wounds.
Inner Child Healing Part 11 - Internal Census

We have a feeling place (stored emotional energy), and an arrested ego-state within us for an
age that relates to each of those developmental stages. Sometimes we react out of our threeyear-old, sometimes out of our fifteen-year-old, sometimes out of the seven-year-old that we
were.
If you are in a relationship, check it out the next time you have a fight: Maybe you are both
coming out of your twelve-year-olds. If you are a parent, maybe the reason you have a problem
sometimes is because you are reacting to your six-year-old child out of the six-year-old child
within you. If you have a problem with romantic relationships maybe it is because your fifteenyear-old is picking your mates for you.
The next time something does not go the way you wanted it to, or just when you are feeling low,
ask yourself how old you are feeling. What you might find is that you are feeling like a bad
little girl, a bad little boy, and that you must have done something wrong because it feels like you
are being punished.
In the second article in this series I spoke about the importance of becoming aware, of raising our
level of consciousness. It is vitally important to start observing our own internal process in order
to start becoming aware of when we are reacting.
Once we get aware that we are reacting, then we can start figuring out where our reactions are
coming from - do an internal census as it were. Anytime we have a strong emotional reaction
to something or someone - when a button is pushed and there is a lot of energy attached, a lot of
intensity - that means there are unresolved emotional wounds from the past involved.
It is the inner child who feels panic or terror or rage or hopelessness or desperate loneliness, not
the adult. The more we can become aware of our buttons, our emotional wounds, the more we
can have some Loving control over them instead of judging and shaming ourselves for our
reactions.
When we have a strong reaction to outer stimuli - other people or life events - it is important to
learn to separate the inner childs reaction from our adult reaction. I usually figure that about
80% of a strong reaction is about old unresolved issues and only 20 % about what is actually
happening now. Until we start separating now from the past, we are incapable of responding to
what is happening now in an age appropriate manner. It is impossible to be present in the now
and respond honestly to what is happening if we are not conscious of how much inner child
reaction is involved.
As I described earlier in this series - we need to start being a detective, observing ourselves and
asking ourselves: Where is that reaction/thought/feeling coming from? Why am I feeling this
way? What does this remind me of from my past? How old do I feel right now? How old did I
act when that happened?
We need to ask ourselves and then listen for an intuitive answer. When we get that answer then
we can track down why the child was feeling that way. What was happening when I was __ ?
(whatever age pops to mind.) What house were we living in? What grade was I in school? Was
that before a certain event happened or after?
It is very important to get in touch with the different ages of the child within because the
emotions of the toddler are very different from the feelings of the teenager. A five-year-old's
anger is a different kind of energy from a twelve-year-old's. When the primary button that is
being pushed is the twelve-year-old's, it is important for us to recognize that so we can deal with
it appropriately.
I believe that we have at least one age of the inner child that relates to each developmental stage.
We also have archetypal aspects of our personality. The archetypal facets - such as the rebel or
the maiden, etc. - can be very much tied into a specific age or relate strongly to several ages. For
instance, we all have a romantic within. I have found that there are usually at least two ages that
are tied to the romantic. A young child - around 5 or 6 - who is magical thinking, who believes
in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and in happily-ever-after. Then there is a teenage romantic
part of us who wants to find our mate, live out our fairy tale.
The romantic within is a wonderful, magical part of us - the idealistic, dreamer, lover, creative
part of us that is a wonderful asset when kept in balance - and can lead to disastrous
consequences when allowed to be in control of choices. In our unconsciousness, many of us
swung between the extremes of letting the romantic within be in control of our choices - in
which case we cast the wrong person in the part of our Prince or Princess and then because we
wanted the fairy tale so badly we denied any evidence to the contrary and ended up heartbroken and reacting to our heartbreak by slamming the romantic into an inner dungeon and believing we
will never find love.
It is important to get in touch with our inner romantic so that we can have Loving boundaries that
do not allow the romantic to lead us into dysfunctional relationships with unavailable people, at
the same time we do not have to disown or deny this part of us.
I will sometimes refer to those inner child places (as well as the archetypal aspects of our
psyche) as personas. They are not actual personalities. People who suffer from multiple
personality disorder/defense are beings who were pushed farther than the rest of us. The
wounding process involves the same basic dynamic - in fact, I learned a lot about my own inner
process by studying cases of multiple personality - but multiples were broken in harsher ways
(usually in an intentional and/or ritual abuse manner that amounted to torture.)
In the next few articles in this series I will give some examples of how to get in touch with our
inner children - and how to start building Loving relationships with those parts of our self.
Inner Child Healing Part 12 - Building Relationships Within

The hardest thing for any of us to do is to have compassion for ourselves. As children we felt
responsible for the things that happened to us. We blamed ourselves for the things that were
done to us and for the deprivations we suffered. There is nothing more powerful in this
transformational process than being able to go back to that child who still exists within us and
say, It wasnt your fault. You didnt do anything wrong, you were just a little kid.
It is impossible to Truly love the adult that we are without owning the child that we were. In
order to do that we need to detach from our inner process (and stop the disease from abusing us)
so that we can have some objectivity and discernment that will allow us to have compassion for
our own childhood wounds. Then we need to grieve those wounds and own our right to be angry
about what happened to us in childhood - so that we can Truly know in our gut that it wasnt our
fault, we were just innocent little kids.
By searching out, getting acquainted with, owning the feelings of, and building a relationship
with, these different emotional wounds/ages of the inner child, we can start being a loving parent
to ourselves instead of an abusive one. We can have boundaries with ourselves that allow us to:
take responsibility for being a co-creator of our life (grow up); protect our inner children from
the perpetrator within/critical parent (be loving to ourselves); stop letting our childhood wounds
control our life (take loving action for ourselves); and own the Truth of who we really are
(Spiritual Beings) so that we can open up to receive the Love and Joy we deserve.
As we start discovering our emotional wounds, we can start building a relationship with those
wounded parts of us. What I have seen work in a very powerfully transformational way, is to
actually talk to the children within us. It sounds kind of crazy - but it works.
I wrote a column 5 years ago called Union Within (it can be found on my web site at
http://Joy2MeU.com/innerchild7.htm) In it I describe this process briefly:
The despairing seven year old is always close by, waiting in the wings, and when life seems too
hard, when I am exhausted or lonely or discouraged - when impending doom or financial tragedy
seem to be imminent - then I hear from him. Sometimes the first words I hear in the morning are
his voice within me saying I just want to die.
The feeling of wanting to die, of not wanting to be here, is the most overwhelming, most familiar
feeling in my emotional inner landscape. Until I started doing my inner child healing I believed
that who I really was at the deepest, truest part of my being, was that person who wanted to die.
I thought that was the true 'me'. Now I know that is just a small part of me. When that feeling
comes over me now I can say to that seven year old, I am really sorry you feel that way Robbie.
You had very good reason to feel that way. But that was a long time ago and things are different
now. I am here to protect you now and I Love you very much. We are happy to be alive now
and we are going to feel Joy today, so you can relax and this adult will deal with life.
I mention this as an example of the kinds of things that I learned to say to my inner child - but
also to make the point that I havent heard the voice saying I want to die in three or four years
now. That was an almost daily voice in my life - and it represented a belief that I would never
have peace in my life until death. That was an ingrained part of my perspective on life that
greatly influenced my relationship with life. Through doing the inner child work, I have
eliminated that negative belief from my programming. That is a miracle. I believe that it is
actually possible to change the neural pathways in our brain through positive affirmations and
self talk.
I had to make a real effort for many years to gradually take the power away from that
programming - and then eliminate it all together. I did not know that I would be able to
eliminate it. I just kept working on taking the power away from that wounded part of me that
tried to commit suicide when I was seven.
One of the ways that I took power away from that message was to focus attention on not letting
the old tape run. I would try to catch the thought before it was complete. As I mentioned in the
article, the thought would come as I was waking up in the morning. As I was coming to
consciousness, that wounded part of me would react to the burden of realizing that I was going to
be alive another day, with the plaintive groan of I just want to die.
Because of the effort I was putting into my recovery, I developed a recovery voice that was
poised to pounce on any negative thoughts or spoken words as soon as I became aware of them.
As I was waking up in the morning, the want to die thought would start surfacing and the
recovery voice would spring into action inserting live into the sentence to replace die.
The last time I ever heard from that seven-year-olds voice, the recovery voice in me actually
burst into song. The old tape started in I just want to - and the recovery voice came in
singing Live a little, love a little, followed by a bunch of do, dahs because I didnt know
any more of the words of the song. It is not unusual in the last few years for that recovery voice
of mine to start out the morning with a song. (I must admit, I was a bit taken back when it
started out one morning with I feel pretty, Oh so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and wise. - kind
of disconcerting that one.)
This inner child healing does work. It takes effort and focus and years of recovery sometimes but it does work!
Inner Child Healing Part 13 - Setting internal boundaries

"It was vitally important for me to learn how to have internal boundaries so that I could lovingly
parent (which, of course, includes setting boundaries for) my inner children, tell the critical
parent/disease voice to shut up, and start accessing the emotional energy of Truth, Beauty, Joy,
Light, and Love.
I have had many people ask me what I mean when I refer to setting boundaries for my inner
children. People have asked for examples, for how it looks on a practical level to set a boundary
with an inner child.
Several years ago, when I first had a crude web site of 30 or so pages of content explaining my
beliefs and my perspective on both the disease and the recovery process, I would get e-mails
from people asking me for further explanations. I started getting so many e-mails that answering
them was taking too much time and energy. I knew that I had to take some action to take care of
myself and to set some boundaries about where I expended my time and energy.
One day while I was working on a reply to a person who had written saying that it would really
help to have an concrete and explicit example of how to set a boundary with an inner child, an
interesting thing happened that is a perfect illustration of how my process works - and how I
apply 12 step principles in my process.
I was trying to figure out a simple, easy way to explain the process, and my writing just was not
flowing. So I gave up.
Actually what I did was work my program. I have found that when I am feeling blocked, when I
catch myself trying to force the process when it is not flowing, that I need to let go. I needed to
let go of my belief that I had to answer that question right there and then. I needed to accept that
it was not flowing and be willing to let go of what I wanted to happen so that I could be open to
seeing what the Universe had in store for me.
So, I closed my word processing document, took a deep breath and asked for guidance. This has
been a very valuable tool for me in my process. I let go of my expectations, my agenda, take a
deep breath to get myself into my body in the moment. Once I am present in the now - instead of
caught up in trying to control how my day is unfolding - then I will get a message from the
Universe about what my Higher Powers plan is for the next thing for me to do.
In this case, I noticed a book and tape set that I had packaged ready to ship off to England. So, I
decided to take a walk to the post office to mail the package and check my mail. As I was
walking to the post office I was observing what was going on around me and within me - just
being in the moment observing.
I got an idea during that walk to start posting question and answer pages on my site. Then I
could address the questions in a way that would be helpful to more than just the person who had
asked - thus utilizing my time and energy in a more efficient manner. (Today, with close to 150
pages of content on my site, I can refer people to specific pages that may help them - but I still
budget 8 to 10 hours a week for answering e-mail.)
As the idea appeared and took shape in my mind, a perfect example of setting some internal
boundaries took place in my inner process. I got the answer to the dilemma about how to take
care of myself in relationship to e-mail questions - and internally then had to set some boundaries
in relationship to the idea. (This process is so fascinating and magical sometimes, I really Love it
- most of the time.)
So, I am walking to the post office exploring the idea of this new type of web page and the
following interaction took place within me (in my inner reality these are fleeting thoughts rather
than a formal conversation.)
ego/critical parent: "You're giving away all of this information for free and meanwhile you can't
even pay your rent. Thats really stupid."
Magical thinking inner child (who believes in fairy tales): "Oh, but we're going to be rewarded.
All kinds of good things are going to happen - including getting a lot of money."
Adult on Spiritual Path: "Now, settle down you two. In the first place, it is very important and
wonderful to give away what I have been given - that is how to keep the energy flowing - and
that is what works, it is what I need to do for me/us. And I am going to do it because it feels
good, it feels right - like the next thing in front of me to do. We'll worry about the rent when it is
time to pay the rent - for today, for this moment, we will do what feels right for today. And I
need to tell you that our reward may just be to feel good about what we're doing - and if that is
all there is, that is still a wonderful gift. On top of that we are getting positive feedback from all
over - and that is a great bonus. There may never be a lot of money, but that is not important.
There is enough money for today. And we are very blessed to have something to do today that is
fulfilling and makes us happy."
So I set a boundary with the critical parent by not buying into the criticism, I set a boundary with
my inner child by not building up expectations of some kind of reward, and I worked my
recovery program by focusing on the half of the glass that is full (my needs that have been met)
and being grateful for the gifts I have been given, instead of allowing the disease to focus on fear
and scarcity, on the half that is empty (my wants that have not been met.)
The purpose of doing the inner child healing work is to improve the quality of my life today - not
to reach a destination or reward. Today, I have choices about how I respond to my internal
process. Today, I can let go of the future and the past for this moment, which gives me the
freedom to be happy and joyous in the moment for quite a few of the moments of my day.
Inner Child Healing - Part 14 - Emotional Honesty

"Codependence is a form of Delayed Stress Syndrome.
Instead of blood and death (although some do experience blood and death literally), what
happened to us as children was spiritual death and emotional maiming, mental torture and
physical violation. We were forced to grow up denying the reality of what was happening in our
homes. We were forced to deny our feelings about what we were experiencing and seeing and
sensing. We were forced to deny our selves. . . . .
The war we were born into, the battlefield each of us grew up in, was not in some foreign
country against some identified "enemy" - it was in the "homes" which were supposed to be our
safe haven with our parents whom we Loved and trusted to take care of us. It was not for a year
or two or three - it was for sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years.
We experienced what is called "sanctuary trauma" - our safest place to be was not safe - and we
experienced it on a daily basis for years and years. Some of the greatest damage was done to us
in subtle ways on a daily basis because our sanctuary was a battlefield."
In a Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting last week, I heard someone share a very telling insight.
A woman at the meeting had run into an old friend from her childhood. In reminiscing about
growing up together, they discovered that each had memories of times together in the others
home - but no memories of being together in their own homes.
It was in our own homes that most of us suffered the most damaging trauma. Rather our families
were overtly dysfunctional because of alcoholism, physical abuse, physical or mental illness, etc.
- or covertly dysfunctional because of parental emotional dishonesty, unreasonable expectations,
unresolved emotional currents, emotional incest, etc. Our parents did not know how to love
themselves or to be emotionally healthy, and as a result they were at war within themselves - the
codependent battle of self judgment and shame, of repressing and denying (and/or expressing
abusively) ones own emotions - and were doing a dysfunctional dance with each other and with
life.
Our homes, our sanctuaries, were not safe places. Our parents - who were our Higher Powers were not healthy, so it was impossible for them to parent us in a healthy way.
It is actually quite normal for most of us to have very few memories inside of our homes with
our family members. We may have memories of being alone in our homes, or memories outside
of the home - but since home was where we suffered the most traumatic emotional wounds (the
disapproval of our gods), it was where we most needed to use denial in order to cope.
It is normal, for most of us when we start doing the inner child work, to have few memories. We
have spent many years purposely not looking back.
There are also some people who have a lot of memories. Some of us have memories that we
look at through rose colored glasses - the good memories of what a happy childhood we had while suppressing and denying the painful ones. Some are stuck in looking at the past from a
victim perspective that allows them to abrogate taking any responsibility for their lives.
What is important for any of us, is to get emotionally honest with ourselves about our
childhoods. We need to look back at the past as a way to free ourselves from the past. In order
to do that, it is important to see our past more clearly - and to get in touch with our emotional
wounds.
I did not have very many memories of my childhood when I got into recovery. In doing the
inner child healing, I regained some memories - but I still have relatively few of them. It is not
important to remember a great deal. What is important is to get honest with ourselves on an
emotional level in our relationship with our childhoods.
Often we have memories that have no emotional charge. They are just events or snapshots that
we remember - and we are not conscious of, have never stopped to ask our selves, what we were
feeling at the time.
Once such memory that I started to look at in early recovery, is a graphic example of the power
of denial. In the memory, I was standing in the kitchen with my mother when I was about 8 or
so. Her back was to me, and I was standing staring at a butcher knife on the counter. In the
memory I was wondering what it would feel like to stab her with it.
In looking at this memory in early recovery, I dismissed it as alcoholic thinking. It wasnt until
some 2 and 1/2 years later that I started to look at what emotions may be attached to that
memory. One day it occurred to me that I may have had some anger at my mother.
My mother was perfectly what she had been trained to be: a self sacrificing martyr with no self
worth and no ability to set boundaries. Her definition of love was that one cannot be angry at
someone they love. My father was what he was trained to be: a raging perfectionist who had no
permission to acknowledge any emotion except anger.
So, my mother was the good guy and my father was the bad guy. It was all right for me to be
angry at my father (not to his face of course) - but absolutely not okay to be angry at my mother.
What I eventually discovered was that I had a great deal of rage towards my mother. More rage
towards my mother - because I had to deny it since she was the one who seemed the most loving
- than towards my father who it had always been okay for me to own anger towards.
I have found this to be a common dynamic: that most people have more anger suppressed against
the good parent (the one that was less abusive), than toward the more overtly abusive parent.
Until I became emotionally honest with myself in relationship to my feelings about my mother, it
was impossible for me to have any kind of an honest relationship with any woman. There are
many men who say they love women and trust them more than men - because their mother was
the good parent - who are actually carrying a great deal of rage at women because of the rage
they havent owned against their mothers.
Getting emotionally honest with ourselves in relationship to our childhoods is absolutely vital in
order to be able to start having healthier relationships today.
Inner Child Healing - Part 15 - Choosing a Therapist

"It is also a vital part of the process to learn discernment. To learn to ask for help and guidance
from people who are trustworthy, that means people who will not betray, abandon, shame, and
abuse you. That means friends who will not abuse and betray you. That means counselors and
therapists who will not judge and shame you and project their issues onto you.
(I believe that the cases of "false memories" that are getting a lot of publicity these days are in
reality cases of emotional incest - which is rampant in our society and can be devastating to a
person's relationship with his/her own sexuality - that are being misunderstood and misdiagnosed
as sexual abuse by therapists who have not done their own emotional healing and project their
own issues of emotional incest and/or sexual abuse onto their patients).
Someone who has not done her/his own emotionally healing grief work cannot guide you
through yours. Or as John Bradshaw put it in his excellent PBS series on reclaiming the inner
child, "No one can lead you somewhere that they haven't been.""
In his PBS series on healing the inner child, John Bradshaw talked about how important it is to
choose counselors and therapists who have done their own emotional healing. He stated that he
had been in recovery for 10 years and counseling for that period of time before he started doing
the emotional healing. Prior to starting that process if someone he was working with started to
get emotional, he would immediately take steps to pull them out of the emotions back onto an
intellectual level.
One of the most important things to check out when you are interviewing a new
counselor/therapist - is whether they have done any emotional healing. If they have not done any
grief and anger work - actual emotional release work involving the deep grieving of sobs and
snot running out the nose, and anger work, beating on cushions while they shout out their rage then they will not want you to get emotional. Doing the deep emotional work can be terrifying and unless the person who is facilitating your work has been through it themselves, they will be
scared by your emotions. They will try to get you back into an intellectual framework - and
many of them will tell you that you need to go on medication.
Too often, when we start counseling or therapy, we feel it is somehow shameful, or weak,
because of our cultural programming - and come kind of hat in hand, as it were. We come to the
professional from a place of hoping they won't tell us we are the sickest person they have ever
met, and there is nothing they can do for us - or at least that was what I was sure was going to
happen.
It is important to remember that the person going to the therapist is the employer. You are the
one doing the job interview with the power to decide who gets the job. You are the one that is
going to be paying for services and you have a right to ask any questions you need to - including
what healing they have done personally. Because someone has degrees, credentials, and is
licensed does not mean they have done any healing on a personal level. In an emotionally
dysfunctional society, the standards used to judge qualifications are based on the dysfunctional,
emotionally dishonest standards of the society.

My first experience of going to a licensed therapist in my recovery from codependence, was a
very telling one. I went to a therapist that was recommended by a friend. I told her that I wanted
to deal with emotional enmeshment issues with my mother. (In a future article in this series I
will talk about the emotional incest that is mentioned in the quote above - and that I was calling
emotional enmeshment at that point in my recovery.) The third session I had with this person,
she delightedly told me that she wanted to line me up with a blind date. A blind date with
someone who worked for her husband, who had his office in their home as she did. Duh! The
therapist I am seeing to sort out emotional enmeshment issues wants to line me up on a blind
date - absolutely inappropriate and very codependent, thinking a relationship would fix me - with
someone who works for her husband in the same building we are in - talk about enmeshing and
incestuous.
She could not understand why I was upset. I left that day, and went home to process what had
just happened. In processing through the issue, it was obvious to me how inappropriate and
unhealthy this therapist was. So, I called her up that evening and fired her. I was very proud of
myself because I did not buy into the guilt trips she laid on me as she tried to convince me that I
was the one with the problem and that there was nothing wrong with her suggestion.
There is no one as good as a therapist at turning issues back on you so that it seems to be all your
problem. Therapists can be very difficult people to have personal relationships with - unless they
are working an honest recovery program, and sometimes even then. And if they are not involved
in a personal recovery program, it is inevitable they will project their issues and judgments onto
their patients. Even therapists who are seeing another therapist for supervision, can only be as
healthy as the belief systems which he/she and the supervising therapist are empowering. And if
those belief systems do not include an understanding of the importance of emotional healing,
they will not be able to help someone do the emotional healing.
Another experience came shortly after I had started in a therapist position at an outpatient
chemical dependence program in Van Nuys California in 1987. One evening in a Family Group
I was talking about how grateful I was to be in recovery and I teared up from joy - I didn't cry,
just teared up. The next week the Clinical Director - my supervising therapist - came marching
into our office and proceeded to lecture me about getting emotional in front of the clients. This
psychiatrist, who was on anti-depressants because he was suicidal over a relationship breakup,
warned me to never let it happen again.
Often the more credentials someone has, the more tendency they have to wear blinders. To see
things only within the traditional paradigm - which labels and pigeon holes individuals - and
more often than not, discounts emotions while worshiping chemicals.
Allow your Spirit to guide you - not your shame. Talk to a person, meet with them, and see how
you feel about them. Do they feel like someone you can trust? Does what they have to say
resonate? Do you feel like they are really hearing you? Are they empowering a belief system
that is black and white, right and wrong? (If they are, they will judge you.) Do they talk to you or down to you?
It is your choice. You are the one holding the audition. Going to see a counselor or therapist can
be a very important and invaluable experience - but it is important to remember that choosing a
therapist is not a commitment to them, it is a commitment to you.
Copyright 2000 by Robert Burney
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote in my book from: Bradshaw On
Homecoming "Reclaiming and Championing you Inner Child", a PBS series by John Bradshaw.
Reprinted in Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by permission of John Bradshaw
2412 South Boulevard, Houston Tx 77098.
Inner Child Healing - Part 16 - Emotional Incest

"Consider a scenario where mother is crying in her bedroom and her three year old toddles into
the room. To the child it looks as if mom is dying. The child is terrified and says, "I love you
mommy!" Mom looks at her child. Her eyes fill with love, and her face breaks into a smile. She
says, 'Oh honey, I love you so much. You are my wonderful little boy/girl. Come here and give
mommy a hug. You make mommy feel so good.'
A touching scene? No. Emotional abuse! The child has just received the message that he/she has
the power to save mommy's life. That the child has power over, and therefore responsibility for,
mommy's feelings. This is emotional abuse, and sets up an emotionally incestuous relationship in
which the child feels responsible for the parent's emotional needs.
A healthy parent would explain to the child that it is all right for mommy to cry, that it is healthy
and good for people to cry when they feel sad or hurt. An emotionally healthy parent would "role
model" for the child that it is okay to have the full range of emotions, all the feelings - sadness
and hurt, anger and fear, Joy and happiness, etc."
I witnessed a scene a few years back that was graphic proof that the best thing any of us can do
for our loved ones is to focus on our own healing. At a CoDA meeting one day a little four-year
old boy, who had been going to twelve step meetings with his mother for two years, was sitting
on a man's lap only six feet away from where his mother was sharing and crying. He didn't even
bother to look up when his mother started crying. The man, who was more concerned than the
little boy, said to him, "Your mommy's crying because she feels sad." The little boy looked up,
glanced over at his mother and said, "Yea, she's getting better," and went back to playing. He
knew that it was okay for mom to cry and that it was not his job to fix her. That little boy, at four
years old, already had healthier boundaries than most adults - because his mother was in
recovery working on getting healthier herself.
There are several facets of that scene that are remarkable because of their rarity in our society.
One was that the adult had a safe place to share and express her feelings. The second was much
rarer, a child with some semblance of healthy boundaries between self and parent.
One of the most pervasive, traumatic, and damaging dynamics that occurs in families in this
dysfunctional, emotionally dishonest society is emotional incest. It is rampant in our society but
there is still very little written or discussed about it.
Emotional incest occurs when a child feels responsible for a parent's emotional well-being. This
happens because the parents do not know how to have healthy boundaries. It can occur with one
or both parents, same sex or opposite sex. It occurs because the parents are emotionally dishonest
with themselves and cannot get their emotional needs met by their spouse or other adults. Some
people in the field refer to this dynamic as a parent making the child their "surrogate spouse."
This type of abuse can happen in a variety of ways. On one end of the spectrum the parent
emotionally "dumps" on the child. This occurs when a parent talks about adult issues and
feelings to a child as if they were a peer. Sometimes both parents will dump on a child in a way
that puts the child in the middle of disagreements between the parents - with each complaining
about the other.
On the other end of the spectrum is the family where no one talks about their feelings. In this
case, though no one is talking about feelings, there are still emotional undercurrents present in
the family which the child senses and feels some responsibility for - even if they haven't got a
clue as to what the tension, anger, fear, or hurt are all about. The child feels responsible for it
because they suffer the consequences - rather it is through outbursts from the parents or being
shut out emotionally by the parents.
Often a parent who has a passive, traditionally codependent defense system will be married to a
parent that has an aggressive, counterdependent defense system. (As I say in my book,
traditionally in this society men were taught be John Wayne and women to be self sacrificing but that is a generality, it is entirely possible that your mother was the John Wayne aggressive
type while your father was the passive one.)
What happens in this dynamic - a very common one - is that the passive parent allows the
aggressive one to abuse him/her and the children in some way (verbal, emotional, mental, and/or
physical.) And then that parent turns around and makes excuses to the children for allowing that
behavior. A child that grows up hearing abuse being excused with rationalization and
justification, is going to become an adult that will swing between the extremes of tolerating an
abusive relationship or avoiding relationships altogether.
I came from a traditionally dysfunctional family, in that my father was the emotionally
unavailable angry person while my mother was the martyr with no boundaries. I so hated how
my father behaved that I became a martyr like my mother. I was a martyr because I did not
speak my Truth or set boundaries, avoided confrontations, tried to please the other person to
keep her liking me.
In my first relationship in my codependence recovery, I realized that for me, setting boundaries
in a romantic relationship felt to my inner child like I was being abusive. The very thing I had
sworn to myself I would never be - like my father. I had to constantly be alert to that childs
feelings and let that wounded part of me know that it was not only OK to set boundaries and say
no - but that it was not Loving to do otherwise.
I discovered that there was a 4 or 5 year old age of my inner child who felt overwhelming shame
that I could not protect my mother from my father. I thought that was my job. To make my
mother happy.
I thought that I was not worthy of Love because I had been unable to do my job. So, in my adult
life I was attracted to emotionally unavailable women who were verbally abusive. To my
disease, it was better to be in relationship with someone like my father, than to fail to do my job
in a relationship with someone who was available emotionally.
I had a relationship phobia that for the most part kept me from getting into relationships because
I felt I was defective in my ability to be responsible for another person's happiness.
Until we do some healing of our childhood wounds, it is impossible to really understand our
adult patterns. If we have never experienced ourselves as independent emotional beings separate
from our parents, we can not truly be present for a relationship in our adult lives.
Emotional incest is a violation and invasion of our emotional boundaries. It is not sexual abuse,
nor is it sexual in nature - although sexual incest is often accompanied by emotional incest. It
can however cause great damage to our relationship with our own gender and sexuality.
Emotional incest, along with religions that teach that sexuality is shameful and societal beliefs
that one gender is superior to the other, fall into a category that I call sexuality abuse - because
they directly impact our relationship with our own sexuality and gender.
Our parents were our role models. We learned how to be emotional beings from their behavior
and attitudes. We learned what a man is, what a woman is, from their example. We cannot undo
that programming without being willing to heal those emotional wounds. We cannot know who
we truly are without separating ourselves on the emotional energetic level from our parents.
Inner Child Healing - Part 17 - Emotional Release/Deep Grieving

Techniques
We are all carrying around repressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods,
whether it was twenty years ago or fifty years ago. We have this grief energy within us even if
we came from a relatively healthy family, because this society is emotionally dishonest and
dysfunctional.
When someone pushes your buttons, he/she is activating that stored, pressurized grief energy.
She/he is gouging the old wounds, and all of the newer wounds that are piled on top of those
original wounds by our repeating behavior patterns.
We are terrified of this pressurized pain, terror, shame, and rage energy - of having our buttons
pushed - because we have experienced it in the past as instances where we have explosively
overreacted in ways that caused us to later feel ashamed and crazy, or as implosive reactions that
have thrown us into that deep dark pit of emotional despair within. . . .
We carry this set of buttons, this baggage, with us until we release that stored, pressurized grief
energy in a healthy grieving process. This societys answer to behavior caused by unresolved
grief is to shame you, label you, lock you up, and/or give you drugs. We do not have to play that
game anymore. We have new tools now, and we have rediscovered the healing power of the
natural grieving process.
In an earlier article in this series, I made mention of the energy / breath techniques that help me
to access grief and release it. Belatedly I realized that I havent shared those in this series as yet.
I have been so caught up in the philosophy of doing the work, that I neglected one of the most
vital techniques for actually releasing the grief. Oh well, better late than never.
Grief is energy that needs to be released through crying and raging. In order to own our self, it is
vitally important to feel our pain, sadness, and rage. If we are blocking these "negative" feelings
from flowing - then we also limiting our ability to feel the Joy, Love, and happiness.
It is very important to own our feelings about what happened to us - and extremely important to
own our right to be angry about how their behavior affected us - in order to start forgiving
ourselves and learning how to have a healthy, Loving relationship with our self.
Part of grief work is simply owning/feeling the sadness and the anger. We need to feel the grief
about what happened to us as children and then we also need to own the grief over what effect it
has had on us as an adult. Grieving is a very different experience from being depressed. While
we are grieving we can still appreciate a beautiful sunset or be happy to see a friend or be
grateful to be sad. Depression is being in a dark tunnel where there are no beautiful sunsets.
The deep grieving work is energy work. Once we can get out of our heads and start paying
attention to what is happening in our body then we can start releasing the emotional energy.
When we get to a place where the emotions are coming up - when the voice starts breaking - the
first thing I have to tell people is to keep breathing. We automatically stop breathing and close
our throats when the feelings get close to the surface.
At the point where the voice starts breaking and the eyes start tearing, the technique is to locate
where the energy is concentrated in the body. It can be any place from head to feet - much of the
time it is in our back because that is where we carry stuff we don't want to look at, or in the area
of the solar plexus (anger or fear) or heart chakra (pain, broken heart) or chest (sadness). It can
be very revealing what side of the body it is on (right - masculine, left - feminine) or what chakra
it is near.
I tell people to scan their bodies for tension or tightness and then to breathe directly into the
place we have identified. Visualize breathing white light directly into that part of the body. That
starts breaking up the energy and little balls of energy start getting released. These balls of
energy are sobs. This is a terrifying place to be for the ego because it feels out of control - it is a
wonderful place to be from a healing perspective. Empowering the healing is going with the
flow - inhale the white Light, exhale the sobs. Sobs, tears, snot from the nose, are all forms of
energy being released. You can be in the witness watching yourself - owning and releasing the
emotional energy that has been trapped in your body - and control the process at the same time
you are in the pain. (It is very important to give our self permission to feel and honor our grief.
If we are crying or angry and then shame our self for those feelings, we are not healing the
wounds no matter how much crying we do.)
Developing the observer level of consciousness makes it possible to exert some control over the
process by choosing to align self with the energy flow, surrendering to the flow, instead of
shutting it down as the terrified ego wants to do. It is possible to learn how to facilitate your own
grief processing.
The anger work is also an energy flow process. The bat (tennis racket, bataka, pillow, whatever)
is lifted over the head as you inhale and then as you hit the pillow you expel the energy - in
shout, a grunt, a "f___ you", a scream, whatever words come to you. Inhale, exhale - open your
throat to say whatever needs to be said. Own your voice. Own the child's voice. Sometimes the
child in us will shout "I hate you, I hate you." That doesn't mean we necessarily hate the person it means we hate how their behavior hurt us.
It is vitally important for us to own our right to be angry about what happened to us or about the
ways we were deprived. If we do not own our right to be angry about what happened in
childhood it greatly impairs our ability to set boundaries as an adult.
Every time we go into the deep grieving place and release some of the energy through crying and
raging (sometimes we need to rage to get to the tears or vise versa) we take a little power away
from that particular wound. The next time we touch on that wound it won't be quite as emotional
or terrifying.
It is terrifying to face healing the emotional wounds. It takes great courage and faith to do the
grief work And it is what will change our relationship with our self at its core. Working from the
outside-in (i.e. learning how to have boundaries, be assertive, etc.) it will take a very long time to
change our behavior in our most intimate relationships. Working from the inside-out by owning
and healing our relationship with ourselves at a causal level - our childhood - will eventually
result in us intuitively owning our right to speak up and have boundaries without even having to
think about it.
It is our pain. It is our anger. If we don't own it, then we are not owning our self.
Inner Child Healing Part 18 - Spirituality

Perspective is a key to Recovery. I had to change and enlarge my perspectives of myself and
my own emotions, of other people, of God and of this life business. Our perspective of life
dictates our relationship with life. We have a dysfunctional relationship with life because we
were taught to have a dysfunctional perspective of this life business, dysfunctional definitions of
who we are and why we are here.
It is kind of like the old joke about three blind men describing an elephant by touch. Each one of
them is telling his own Truth, they just have a lousy perspective. Codependence is all about
having a lousy relationship with life, with being human, because we have a lousy perspective on
life as a human.
The only way that I was able to make significant progress in the process of stopping selfjudgment and getting rid of the toxic shame was to become conscious of the larger perspective.
When I started to believe that maybe a Higher Power, a Universal Force, existed which was
Truly All-Powerful and Unconditionally Loving then life started to become a lot easier and more
enjoyable. Then I could start to see that the accidents and coincidences are really miracles.
That the mistakes are really opportunities for growth."
The approach to inner child healing work I am sharing in this E-Book, is one that I was lead to
discover in my quest to find a way to live life that worked for me. A way of living life that made
it possible for me to transform my experience of life from one in which I was miserable and
wanted to die on almost a daily basis, to one that allows me the freedom to be happy and Joyous
in the moment for most of the moments of most every day.
The tools, techniques, and perspectives for inner child healing that I share here, on my web site,
and in my book, provide a framework which makes it possible to stop allowing our childhood
experiences to dictate how we live our lives today.
This healing paradigm is one that can be utilized by anyone - regardless of their religious or
spiritual beliefs, or lack of same. All that is required is enough open mindedness to be willing to
look at some alternative perspectives and consider some different ways of relating to life and
self. Discernment - being able to pick the baby out of the bath water - is a key. All religions,
spiritual belief systems, theoretical concepts for explaining the meaning and purpose of life,
contain some Truth. All of them also contain distortions, misinterpretations, and mistaken
beliefs.
I state in my book, that I believe that many aboriginal cultures were far more functional in terms
of the Spiritual, mental, and emotional health of the individual members of their societies, than
any of the so called civilized societies on this planet have been. The thought that occurred to me
as I was writing this article, is that maybe there is also a correlation in regard to a society having
a written language. In tribal societies with an oral tradition, stories were told - parables - that
passed on the values of the society. Histories that are written down in words are subject to the
interpretations and translations of individuals who had their own agendas. Words became set in
stone - and often the spirit of the message was lost, distorted, and manipulated. Interesting
thought but not what this article is about.
As I mentioned in an earlier article in this series, changing our relationship with life, with being
human, is intimately interrelated with this inner work. Finding a relationship with life, with
being human, that works to enhance our potential to be happy and to feel worthy of Love, is what
I refer to as spirituality. Having a spiritual belief system that supports the possibility that
inherently we are Lovable and worthy, is an invaluable aid in facilitating the healing work in
relationship to our other relationships - both internally and externally.
My conscious recovery from codependence started when I became willing to look at the cause
and effect relationship between my childhood and my adult life. More specifically, it involved a
paradigm shift which allowed me to stop empowering the shame based religious beliefs I was
raised with, and start empowering myself to own that I had choices.
As I have stated earlier, our perspectives and expectations dictate our relationships and our
emotional experience of life. Perspectives and expectations are set up by the intellectual
paradigm we are empowering - the attitudes, beliefs, and definitions that we are allowing to
define life for us. Becoming aware that my relationship with life was being dictated by beliefs
from my childhood that were not what I believed as an adult, was the shock that forced me into
codependence recovery.
By starting to become aware that I had choices about what beliefs I was empowering, I was able
to change my relationship with life and vastly improve the quality of my life experience.
I have chosen to develop a relationship with a concept of Spirituality that works very well for
me. It works to make my life easier and more enjoyable today. It works to help me: relax and
let go of some of my fears; let go of shame and self judgment; to be in the moment today and
have the freedom to be happy and find Joy in being alive - no matter what the outside conditions
in my life may be today.
My relationship with my concept of Spirituality today, is one that both brings me inner peace and
empowers me to take responsibility for being a conscious co-creator of my life. My philosophy
in regard to Spirituality is summed up pretty well in a quote from one of my next books which I
use on the Spiritual Pages index page of my Joy2MeU site.
(http://Joy2MeU.com/Spiritual.htm)
"Spirituality is all about relationships. One's relationship to self, to others, to the environment, to
life in general. A Spiritual belief system is simply a container for holding all our other
relationships. Why not have one that is large enough to hold it all."
Spirituality is a word I use to describe my relationship to life. I was raised with beliefs that were
based on fear, shame, and separation. In my recovery, I have chosen to empower a belief system
that is based on Love - and my connection to everyone and everything. It works very well for
me, in terms of improving the quality of my life experience today.
Inner Child Healing Part 19 - True Self Worth

As long as we look outside of Self - with a capital S - to find out who we are, to define
ourselves and give us self-worth, we are setting ourselves up to be victims.
We were taught to look outside of ourselves - to people, places, and things; to money, property,
and prestige - for fulfillment and happiness. It does not work, it is dysfunctional. We cannot fill
the hole within with anything outside of Self.
You can get all the money, property, and prestige in the world, have everyone in the world adore
you, but if you are not at peace within, if you dont Love and accept yourself, none of it will
work to make you Truly happy.
When we look outside for self-definition and self-worth, we are giving power away and setting
ourselves up to be victims. We are trained to be victims. We are taught to give our power
away.
"As was stated earlier, Codependence could more accurately be called outer or external
dependence. Outside influences (people, places, and things; money, property, and prestige) or
external manifestations (looks, talent, intelligence) can not fill the hole within. They can distract
us and make us feel better temporarily but they cannot address the core issue - they cannot fulfill
us Spiritually. They can give us ego-strength but they cannot give us self-worth."
On the question and answer pages of my original web site, which I mentioned in the article
before last, someone asked me for my opinion about an article on the internet where a marriage
counselor contends that the codependency movement is ruining marriages. What he wrote was
so codependent that it was a perfect example of codependency.
He stated that self esteem is based on what we do. He actually stated in this article, If I can't do
anything, I'm certain I'd have no reason to have self-esteem. (A multi-part reply to this article
can now be found at http://Joy2MeU.com/codependency_marriage.html)
This is a great example of the dysfunction of codependence. Anyone who feels they have to be
productive to feel good about themselves, is set up to feel like a victim when they aren't
productive. If this guy were to get sick, or when he gets old, he has no reason to feel good about
himself. When someone determines their self worth by what they do, they are being
codependent.
I have found it important and helpful in my work to draw a clear boundary between what I call
ego strength and self worth. Ego strength is obtained externally. We were taught in this society
- as in any codependent culture - to look outside to define ourselves and give us a feeling of
worth. We have worth if we are better than others. We are validated in comparison to others, for
being: smarter than, richer than, prettier than, more talented than, having better grades than, etc.,
etc. This empowers the illusion of separation and feeds the fear of not being good enough.
Everyone in a codependent society has to have someone to look down upon in order to feel good
about themselves.
Ego strength is not a bad thing, just as being productive or pretty or smart are not bad things. It
is just dysfunctional if we base our self worth on these external sources. All external
manifestations are potentially temporary. If we base our relationship on temporary conditions
we are setting ourselves up to be a victim of change, of aging, of being human. That makes such
a dynamic dysfunctional in the long run.
My Spiritual belief system is based upon the belief that we are connected to everyone and
everything. I believe that we are all extensions of the Great Spirit, children of God, created as a
reflection of The Goddess. I believe - and as I point out in my book, it has now been
scientifically proven by quantum physics - that we are all ONE energy. That we are all
connected to each other, to our planet, to everything in our environment, on higher vibrational
levels. The highest vibrational energy exists in a state of eternal bliss and perfect harmony always has, always will. That highest vibration level - which I call LOVE - is our True home.
We are extensions, manifestations, of what I call the Holy Mother Source Energy - experiencing
an illusion of reality that exists at lower vibrational frequencies. We are here in human body
going to boarding school, and are evolving back to consciousness of our True Self - are going to
get to go home.
As I said in my last article, it is certainly not necessary for you to agree with my Spiritual beliefs
in order to apply the inner child healing paradigm I share in these articles. It is however, very
important to choose a belief for yourself that allows for the possibility that maybe, just maybe,
you are inherently Lovable and worthy. It is an invaluable aid in starting to remove the toxic
shame about being human from our relationship with self and life.
We learned to relate to ourselves, to life, to other people, in early childhood from people who
were wounded in their childhoods. Toxic shame about being human - being imperfect, making
mistakes, being emotional, being sexual, being female, etc. - has been passed down from
generation to generation.
Toxic shame is the enemy. It is an enemy that we do not defeat by fighting - although it is vitally
important to develop an internal defense attorney to set boundaries with the critical parent /
disease voice within so that we can change our ego programming.
The way we defeat this enemy is with Love. By learning to be more loving to our self and
accepting of our humanity, we can start to access our True nature and purpose, our True Self.
In my belief, who we really are is: Spiritual Beings having a human experience. It is a belief that
serves me. It helps me to be more Loving to myself and have healthier relationships with others.
It is a source of real Self worth that is not temporary or based on external sources. We were
taught to make other people, success, external sources our Higher Powers that determine if we
have worth. We were taught to worship false gods.
Recovery is a process of recognizing that we are powerless out of ego-self to control life - while
at the same time learning to access all the power in the Universe through our connection to
Spiritual Self. Doing the inner child healing work is the way to clear our inner channel so that
we can tune into the higher vibrational emotional energy of Love. Love is the answer. Love is
the key to True self worth.
Inner Child Healing Part 20 - Reprogramming our ego defenses

Recovery involves bringing to consciousness those beliefs and attitudes in our subconscious
that are causing our dysfunctional reactions so that we can reprogram our ego defenses to allow
us to live a healthy, fulfilling life instead of just surviving. So that we can own our power to
make choices for ourselves about our beliefs and values instead of unconsciously reacting to the
old tapes. Recovery is consciousness raising. It is en-light-en-ment - bringing the dysfunctional
attitudes and beliefs out of the darkness of our subconscious into the Light of consciousness.
We need to let go of the illusion that we can control this life business. We cannot. We never
could! It was an illusion. And we need to let go of the false beliefs that tell us that we are bad
and shameful. We cannot become whole as long as we believe that any part of us is bad or
shameful.
That includes the ego - that bloated out-of-balance dragon within. . . . now is the time to get
things into balance - the time to bring ego-self into alignment and balance with Spiritual Self.
That is the transformation which is known as the death of the ego.. . . The death of the ego is
not an event - it is a process. It is not an act of violence - it is an act of Love. A process of
learning to Love.
We are bringing ego-self into alignment with Spiritual Truth. We are reconnecting with our
Spiritual nature and Spiritual purpose so that we can find some fulfillment and happiness in life.
Our experience of reality, of life, is determined by the interpretations of our mind - by the
intellectual paradigm which we are using to define/determine/translate/explain our reality. The
attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally create our perspectives and
expectations - which in turn dictates our relationships and our emotional reactions.
In order to have healthier relationships - with self, with our inner children/emotional wounds,
with other people, with concepts like romance and success, etc. - it is very important to become
conscious of, and be willing to change, the intellectual paradigm we are empowering both
consciously and subconsciously. Our subconscious intellectual paradigm was adapted by our
ego in early childhood in response to our emotional experience of being a child.
The ego is the part of us that is charged with responsibility for our survival. The ego is the seat
of the disease of codependence.
Being born into an emotionally dishonest, fear and shame based, Spiritually hostile environment
(based on separation rather than connection) caused us to be emotionally traumatized in
childhood. In response to that emotional trauma our egos adapted some very dysfunctional
programming. (Functional in terms of survival, but dysfunctional in terms of helping us to be
happy and at peace within.)
For some of us, the wounding started in the womb where we: incubated in our mother's fear and
shame; or got addicted to adrenaline because of the emotional volatility of our mother's life; or
could feel our mother's waiting for us to arrive to give meaning and purpose to her life; or felt
how unwelcome we were because she had already had too many children and was feeling
overwhelmed; etc.
We exited the warm nurturing cocoon of our incubator into a cold, harsh world. A world run by
Higher Powers (parents and any body else bigger than us - siblings, grandparents, hospital or
orphanage personnel) who were wounded in their childhood. Gods who were not emotionally
healthy, and did not know how to Love themselves. Our egos were traumatized - and adapted
programming to try to protect us from the pain of emotional trauma that felt life threatening.
The people we Loved the most - our Higher Powers - hurt us the most. Our emotional intimacy
issues were caused by, and our fear of intimacy is a direct result of, our early childhood
experiences. Our lives have been lived in reaction to the intellectual paradigms our egos adapted
to deal with emotional trauma.
The part of a child's brain that is logical and rational, that understands abstract concepts (like
time or death), that can have any kind of an objective perspective on self or life, does not develop
until about the age of 7 (the age of reason.) As little children we were completely ego-centric
and magical thinking. We did not have the capacity to understand that our Higher Powers were
not perfect. We watched their role modeling, experienced their behavior as personal, and felt the
emotional currents of our environments - worry, frustration, resentment, fear, anger, pain, shame,
etc. - and were emotionally traumatized.
Our ego adapted itself to the environment it was experiencing. It developed emotional and
behavioral defense systems in reaction to the emotional pain we experienced growing up with
parents who were wounded codependents.
If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or
animals, here is your answer. It was people who wounded us in childhood. It is people who our
egos developed defense systems to protect us from.
I have told people for years, that the only reason to do inner child healing work is if we are going
to interact with other people. If one is going to live in isolation on a mountain top meditating, it
will be fairly easy to feel Spiritually connected. It is relating to other human beings that is
messy.
In order to start being able to have healthier relationships with ourselves - and therefore with
other people - we need to start changing that ego programming.
The way we do that, is to first become aware of it, and aware that we have the power to change
it. Then we start learning how to catch it - as I talk about in my article that is Part 12 of this EBook, Building Relationships Within.
The programming is so powerful and entrenched that we cannot really rid ourselves of it.
Unfortunately, it is not like software that we can delete and replace with new software - Love
4.0. It is wired into the hardware.

So, what we need to do is tape over the old tapes. Positive affirmations are the single most
powerful tool that I have found for doing this. We need to do positive affirmations to reprogram
our subconscious intellectual paradigm. We need to do them because we dont believe them.
The times we need to do them the most are the times when we least feel any belief in them. If
we believed them, we wouldnt need to say them.
My next article in this series will be about positive affirmations and one of the ways that they
have helped me change my life.
Inner Child Healing Part 21 - Positive Affirmations

"A "state of Grace" is the condition of being Loved unconditionally by our Creator without
having to earn that Love. We are Loved unconditionally by the Great Spirit. What we need to
do is to learn to accept that state of Grace.
The way we do that is to change the attitudes and beliefs within us that tell us that we are not
Lovable."
Positive Affirmations are one of the single most powerful and vital tools in the Recovery
process. Codependence is a condition caused by growing up in a shame-based, emotionally
dishonest society which teaches us false beliefs about the nature and purpose of life. We are
Spiritual Beings having a human experience, not shameful, sinful human creatures who have to
earn Spiritual salvation.
I am a Magnificent Spiritual Being full of Light and Love!
Our attitudes create our perspectives which in turn dictate our relationships. In order to change
our relationship with life, and with ourselves, we need to change our attitudes and belief systems
about the nature and purpose of life.
God wants me to be happy, healthy, Loved, and successful!
The Light within me is creating miracles in my life here and now.
Abundance is my natural state of being. I accept it now!
All of my experiences are opportunities to gain more power, clarity, and vision.
Positive affirmations are so vital in Recovery because we all have a critical parent voice inside
that judges and shames us; that negatively affirms us hundreds of times a day. It takes a lot of
reprogramming to start accepting that we are Lovable and unconditionally Loved.
The entire Universe Loves me, serves me, nurtures me, and wants me to win.
I am a radiant expression of the Goddess energy/Great Spirit/Christ within.
I am always in the right place at the right time, successfully engaged in the right activity.
I am radiantly beautiful and vibrantly healthy and Joyously alive.
What we focus on is what we create. In order to change what we are creating we must choose to
change the way we think and work on letting go of the subconscious beliefs we learned in
childhood.
I am the co-creator of my life, I am fully involved in co-creating my life in an exciting, Joyous,

and harmonious way.
I am now celebrating life, having fun and enjoying myself.
I am glad I was born and I Love being alive.
I Love myself and naturally attract Loving relationships into my life.
I send Love to my fears. My fears are the places within me that await my Love.
Large, rich, opulent, lavish, financial surprises are now manifesting in my life and I am grateful!
Affirmations work! They work miraculously because they help us align with the Universal Truth
of an Unconditionally Loving God-Force.
This is an article that I originally published in 1995 in the Information Press of San Luis Obispo
California. The positive affirmations come from a variety of sources - some are original, some
unknown. Many come directly from, while others are inspired by, the work of Shakti Gawain whom I recommend very highly. She and Louise Hay are the two most important teachers of the
power of positive affirmations that I have experienced. (You can find Shakti's work at
http://www.shaktigawain.com/. There are more affirmations and information on the
integration process on my site at http://Joy2MeU.com/PositiveAffirmations.htm)
I also wanted to share an excerpt from a Newsletter that I wrote for my original web site in 1998.
It demonstrates the power that Positive Affirmations have had in transforming my experience of
life.
Working on the positive affirmations page was also a perfect part of my process as usual.
While I was doing it I got a perfect example of how wonderful and powerful positive
affirmations are - and how dramatically they have changed the quality of my life.
My car broke down.
It was a wonderful opportunity to be reminded of how much work I have done over the years in
integrating my Spiritual belief system into my emotional responses to life. When some seeming
tragedy occurs, like my car breaking down, my very first reaction is gratitude that it happened
when and where it did instead of when and where it could have. I used to react to life events
(like car break downs) and other people's behavior out of my childhood programming that told
me that if something "bad" happened it was because I was bad. I had gotten the message in
childhood (in a variety of ways) that there was something wrong with me, that I was unworthy
and unlovable, and that God was going to punish me for it. So life events felt like punishment.
Due to all the work that I have done in changing my subconscious programming (including at
several different times making recordings of positive affirmations and messages of Love in my
own voice to myself that I would play as I was going to sleep at night) my first reaction to life
events now, and for the last 4 or 5 years, has been acceptance followed by gratitude because
whatever it was could have happened at a worse time and place than it did.
It is amazing to me to see my capacity to let go of things that used to drive me crazy with worry
and feel like punishment. The key for me has definitely been integrating the belief that
everything is unfolding perfectly into my emotional process - it makes life so much easier.
Of course, that does not mean to ignore the feelings. Unfortunately, a lot of people use tools like
affirmations, meditation, gratitude lists, etc. as another way of denying the feelings. These tools
are meant to be used to balance the feelings not negate them. After my initial reaction of
gratitude, then I let my adult take charge in terms of doing the footwork - finding a mechanic,
calling a friend, calling a tow truck. As the car was being towed and I was following with my
friend, then I relaxed into the feelings and let myself cry with the pain of how hard life can feel
sometimes. And when I say cry, I mean cry - with heaving sobs. I can access those feelings and
release them because of the energy / breath techniques that I have learned on the way.
Just using the affirmations to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just staying
in the adult to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just feeling the feelings
and letting myself feel like a victim is also out of balance - we need to be able to use all of the
tools and own all of the parts of ourselves.
What we are working toward is to find balance. That means using tools like the positive
affirmations to integrate a supportive Spiritual belief system into our inner process, as well as
using them to balance the feelings that come up. It does not matter what happens in my life - I
start immediately to tell my self and my inner children that it is all perfect somehow, that
everything is going to work out in the long run - that way I can keep from buying into the shame
and doom messages that are coming from the disease so that I can maintain some emotional
balance.
(Joy to You & Me Newsletter III 10-98. Links to Joy to You & Me Newsletters, like the
question and answer pages, can be found on my web page http://Joy2MeU.com/index.htm)
Inner Child Healing Part 22 - Polarized Thinking

"One of the core characteristics of this disease of Codependence is intellectual polarization black and white thinking. Rigid extremes - good or bad, right or wrong, love it or leave it, one or
ten. Codependence does not allow any gray area - only black and white extremes.
Life is not black and white. Life involves the interplay of black and white. In other words, the
gray area is where life takes place. A big part of the healing process is learning the numbers two
through nine - recognizing that life is not black and white.
Life is not some kind of test, that if we fail, we will be punished. We are not human creatures
who are being punished by an avenging god. We are not trapped in some kind of tragic place out
of which we have to earn our way by doing the "right" things.
We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We are here to learn. We are here to go
through this process that is life. We are here to feel these feelings."
In one of the first sentences of the second article in this series, Inner Child Healing - How to
begin, I made the point that codependence involves reacting to life from a polarized belief
system - black and white thinking.
"In our codependence, we reacted to life out of a black and white, right and wrong, belief
paradigm that taught us that is was shameful and bad to be wrong, to make mistakes, to be
imperfect - to be human."
In the writing that I have been doing lately (which has turned into an online book that I am
publishing on my web site as I write it) I have been writing a lot about how important it is to stop
giving power to polarized thinking. It was intellectual polarization, right and wrong thinking,
that actually caused the toxic shame that is our core emotional wound. The little boy or girl
within us who feels defective, feels unworthy and unlovable, because we got the message it was
shameful to be human.
We then adapted an emotional defense system to try to protect us from the unbearable pain and
shame of feeling like our being, our essential self, is unlovable. That defense system, which is
codependency, was based upon the same polarized thinking that caused the core wounding - so
we reacted to our emotional wounds by going to polarized extremes: Blame them or blame me,
overreact or underreact. Our emotional spectrum swung wildly from one extreme to the other
because we did not know how to have balance, did not how to play safely in the gray area that is
the reality of life.
It is vital to start learning to stop the extreme reactions, so that we can be gentler and more
Loving to ourselves. The more we stop buying into polarized thinking the less our own mind is
our worst enemy.
It is because we are trying to control life that we get caught up in compulsive thinking - trying to
figure out what is right and what is wrong. We are scared of making choices because we are
afraid of the consequences of making the "wrong" choice. We get all caught up in mental
gymnastics trying to figure out what is the "right" thing to do. We procrastinate and resist and
avoid responsibility, because we are scared of doing something "wrong."
We have good reason to be afraid because of our experiences from the past. We were wounded
in childhood because our wounded parents were reacting out of the shame based, black and white
belief system that they experienced in childhood. Our churches and schools taught us that it was
shameful to be bad - and many of us were taught the Spiritually abusive concept that doing it
"wrong" could cause us to go to hell.
A really good reason for a little kid to be terrified.
And our codependent defenses set us up to keep repeating behavior patterns - making "wrong"
choices - that set us up to feel like we were being punished. We learned to call ourselves stupid,
and loser, and failure, because of our inability to respond to life in a healthy balanced way. We
were stuck reacting out of the polarized thinking that doesn't allow any choices - until we got
into recovery and started learning that there were other choices, better ways to live.
Writing my online book has caused me to decide to do some more articles in this inner child
healing series on how to stop buying into this very destructive polarized thinking. And it also
resulted in me sending out a plea - which I am going to repeat here on Suite 101 - to the many
spiritual teachers and New Age practitioners, healers, and writers who are giving out polarized
shame based messages.
After the terrorist attack of September 11th, an email message attributed to Marianne
Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch, James Twyman, James Redfield and Doreen Virtue
circulated on the internet and included these statements:
"There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the
second from fear."
"To us the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not
remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual
wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch
ourselves do ungodly things. The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all
one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only
cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, this and every moment."
Saying there are only two possible responses is polarized thinking, and gives the impression that
it is shameful to feel fear. I hate that some really wonderful, en-Light-ened people are giving out
this kind of message.
Their belief systems are not large enough to allow for a God-Force that is so powerful that
everything is happening for a reason. The very concepts of Love and ONENESS they are
teaching are negated by blaming the human condition on human beings - which diminishes and
insults the concept of an ALL-Powerful Unconditionally Loving Universal Source, and

empowers the illusion of separation.
A statement that Love and fear are the only two choices is polarized and indicates a lack of
discernment. Yes, we are trying to change our mental programming to be aligned with Love
instead of with fear. That is at the heart of this process. But aligning ourselves with Love
intellectually does not mean we will not sometimes feel the emotional energy of fear in our
bodies.
Love is the only Truth on higher vibrational levels. Here in the human body, fear is something
we cannot avoid sometimes feeling. We want to stop allowing fear to define us - but to imply
that we cannot be aligned with Love and still feel some fear is a shaming message.
PLEASE STOP giving out these Spiritually abusive, polarized, shaming messages! It is a
disservice to the people who look to you for some wisdom. PLEASE STOP IT!
Inner Child Healing - Part 23 - Recovery from codependency

"It is through healing our inner child, our inner children, by grieving the wounds that we
suffered, that we can change our behavior patterns and clear our emotional process. We can
release the grief with its pent-up rage, shame, terror, and pain from those feeling places which
exist within us.
That does not mean that the wound will ever be completely healed. There will always be a tender
spot, a painful place within us due to the experiences that we have had. What it does mean is that
we can take the power away from those wounds. By bringing them out of the darkness into the
Light, by releasing the energy, we can heal them enough so that they do not have the power to
dictate how we live our lives today. We can heal them enough to change the quality of our lives
dramatically. We can heal them enough to Truly be happy, Joyous and free in the moment most
of the time."
Codependency recovery/inner child healing is a way of life. It is a way to live life that works. It
works to help an individual gain some freedom from the past. It is a path for living that facilitates
developing a centered ground space within where inner peace exists. That creates the space for a
person to be present in the moment and be happy to be alive - to connect with Joy - some of the
time.
It is not something we do and then get on with our lives. It is something we do in order to Truly
be alive.
Life is a process - a journey. By being willing to do the inner child healing we can learn to be
present for the journey - and to have the capacity to actually relax and enjoy it at times.
One of the very valuable things that I have learned in my recovery is echoed in something that I
often say to people when I first start to work with them. Most of my counseling work is done by
phone these days, and often I will end the first session by saying, "Everything that happens in
your life from now on, is part of this process."
We are here to do this healing. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience - and we are
in body at this very special time in history to do this healing work.
The inner child healing work is part of our Spiritual evolutionary journey. Doing this work
requires consciousness raising - en-light-en-ment. We need to become conscious of our own
inner process - by developing the detached observer/witness/detective/defense
attorney/compassionate parent level of consciousness. The more conscious we become, the
easier it is to see how powerful our reactive programming has been. By becoming conscious of
it, we can change it.
By being willing to become more conscious we can start to reprogram our ego programming by
using positive affirmations and self talk, by developing a Spiritual belief system that allows us to
start being compassionate and Loving to ourselves.
By becoming willing to face the terror of healing the emotional wounds we can learn to release
the dammed, repressed grief energy within us so that it is no longer defining us and dictating our
experience of life.
Doing the healing work, making recovery a way of life, allows us to make choices to define our
reality from a place of faith and acceptance instead of victimization, fear, and shame. It allows us
to start having healthier relationships with our self and with others.
Becoming conscious and paying attention to the guidance from our intuition/Spirit, will help us
learn to stop reacting to life and start having choices about how we respond to life.
Responsibility - the ability to respond. We can take responsibility for our lives - and own our
power as a co-creator of our life.
As long as we are reacting to life unconsciously out of our childhood emotional wounds and
programming it is impossible for us to grow up. Recovery is about growing up - as I said in part
10 of this series on inner child healing:
"This work is about becoming an integrated, whole, mature, adult person in action, in the way we
live our lives and respond to life events and other people. The only way we can be whole is to
own all of the parts of ourselves. By owning all the parts we can then have choices about how we
respond to life. By denying, hiding, and suppressing parts of ourselves we doom ourselves to live
life in reaction."
Becoming an integrated, whole, mature adult does not come easily. It takes commitment. It takes
action and effort on our part. We need to be willing to do our part in the process. We need to be
willing to learn to be honest with ourselves intellectually and emotionally. We need to be willing
to do the grief work. We need to be willing to be conscious - and to live consciously.
We can't do it perfectly. We will make gradual progress. We will resist and procrastinate and
make excuses - because we are human. One of the trickiest things about his process is to stop
judging ourselves for being human at the same time we doing whatever it takes to align with
healing and transformation.
It is hard work. It is ongoing - it will keep changing and shifting and getting different, but it will
continue for the rest of your life.
The rewards are awesome however!
I am going to end this article and this E-Book with a couple of short quotes from near the end of
my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
"We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We are here to experience feelings and
touch and Love. The goal of the healing process is not to reach someplace where we are above
all the human experiences and feelings. We are here to feel these feelings.
When we become willing to feel the pain, then we become capable of feeling the Joy. The Joy of
doing this healing is incredible! Our job is to heal and enJoy. Our job is to be. We are here to be
human beings, not human doings.
Our job is to follow the Joy to the Truth. Our job is to feel in the moment.
As long as we are reacting to old wounds and old tapes we cannot respond to the now. The more
we heal, the more responsibility we have - that is, ability to respond. The ability to respond in the
moment."
"This is a process, a process we are going to be involved in for the rest of this lifetime. We will
never do it perfectly from a human perspective. But the more we are willing to choose to view
life as a growth process, and to feel and remember the Truth within us, the more we will become
conscious of the Truth that we are perfectly where we are supposed to be on our Spiritual Path and that we are being guided Home.
There is Truth all around us. And the Truth is setting us free.
Through healing the inner child, we access Truth and Love. And the little child shall lead them."
That little child is within you. That little child deserves Love. That little child is you.
These articles were originally published online on the Inner Child/Codependency Recovery topic page of the
Suite101.com Directory (http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/codependency_recovery ) - although bits and
pieces of the articles have been part of articles and web pages published previously.
Inner Child Healing Articles Copyright 1999, 2000 & 2001 by Robert Burney PO Box 977 Cambria CA 93428

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Inner Child Healing Part 1 - The Condition of Codependency

Inner Child Healing Part 1 - The condition of Codependency

We were set up to be codependent. We were trained and programmed in childhood to be

Inner Child Healing Part 2 - How to Begin

Inner Child Healing Part 3 - Why do it?

Inner Child Healing Part 4 - Internal Boundaries: the Key to self-Love

These three spheres are:

Inner Child Healing Part 5 - Loving the Wounded Child Within

(History, politics, success or lack of success, in our dysfunctional society/civilizations can

Inner Child Healing - Part 6 - emotional healing

Inner Child Healing - Part 7 - Emotional Defenses

Inner Child Healing Part 8 - Stopping the War Within

Inner Child Healing Part 9 - More on Internal Boundaries

Inner Child Healing Part 10 - Inner Child Healing Paradigm

Inner Child Healing Part 11 - Internal Census

Inner Child Healing Part 12 - Building Relationships Within

Inner Child Healing Part 13 - Setting internal boundaries

Inner Child Healing - Part 14 - Emotional Honesty

Inner Child Healing - Part 15 - Choosing a Therapist

emotionally dishonest standards of the society.

Inner Child Healing - Part 16 - Emotional Incest

Inner Child Healing - Part 17 - Emotional Release/Deep Grieving

Inner Child Healing Part 18 - Spirituality

Inner Child Healing Part 19 - True Self Worth

Inner Child Healing Part 20 - Reprogramming our ego defenses

4.0. It is wired into the hardware.

Inner Child Healing Part 21 - Positive Affirmations

I am the co-creator of my life, I am fully involved in co-creating my life in an exciting, Joyous,

Inner Child Healing Part 22 - Polarized Thinking

insults the concept of an ALL-Powerful Unconditionally Loving Universal Source, and

Inner Child Healing - Part 23 - Recovery from codependency

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