All children, however young, picks up messages way long before they are able to process their meaning conceptually. From birth, we immediately begin to construct our our ego, our lens, through which we perceive and engage the world using the impact of those messages, good and bad. We all hold emotions, memories and beliefs from our early past that are experienced well before language and logic forms. The critical, initial connection we make, that we are hardwired to make, is to our immediate caregivers – usually our parents.
Despite our most fervent wish and attachment, no parent can be perfect. Why? Parents are also influenced by their early experiences, good and bad, as well as those subsequent life circumstances they have encountered. It is not possible for parents to easily navigate their own life journey in ways that would enable them to fully insulate their children from the experience and aftershocks of difficult circumstances that arise in the child’s life. This is true for everyone. So, it is not surprising that we all have an aspect of ourselves that was never quite loved the right way or the way we needed as a child.
But, not everyone experiences the depth of trauma that results in DID. In DID, the question is not whether one has been loved the right way, or of having some of our conventional needs unmet. For those with DID, instead of love they were given terror. The needs that were “unmet” so deeply as to result in DID were not simply some of a child’s conventional needs. The unmet needs of individuals with DID were so basic, so fundamental, as to undermine the child’s very ability to survive.
For Those Without DID
There are two kinds of “inner child” one might consider in psychotherapy. There is the metaphorical inner child one can use in encouraging patients to uncover and touch in to difficult circumstances they experienced in the past that still impact them. This approach, of seeing the inner child as metaphorical, can be helpful for patients without DID. This is not the approach to take when treating or dealing with DID, as will be discussed below.
Jung first wrote of connecting with our playful, childlike selves. Since then, many people find “inner child work”, a loosely defined term, to be very useful. While we cannot go back in time, we can imagine that inner child so as to explore the parts of our selves that still bear scars, or even open wounds, from our early past experiences. We try to connect with that inner child so that we can imagine what that child experienced. We do this by using the images we hold of ourselves as that young child.
It is noteworthy that the idea of the inner child is not exclusively raised by Jung. The Buddhist spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh said,“The cry we hear from deep in our hearts comes from the wounded child within.” Any wounded child, inside or out, cries out for healing, for kindness, warmth and compassion. It is the therapist’s task to stop, notice, and listen to this wounded child within. We cannot fully develop our potential without healing that inner child’s pain. Healing begins with acknowledging that sadness, fear or anger.
In the self-help movement that developed in the 1970s and 80s, people having difficulties were encouraged to connect with their metaphorical inner child as a means to acknowledging and understanding how they felt when they were actually young and failed to get the nurturing support they needed from their parents.
The inner child self-help movement was prominently promoted by John Bradshaw during the 80s and 90s in the USA, with his works translated into 42 language. Born into a troubled family, he was abandoned by an alcoholic father, who himself was also abandoned by his father. In working on his own healing, Bradshaw came to the idea that there was a metaphorical inner child in himself, who had been deprived of a protective and loving father during his growing up years.
He needed, but never had, a loving father, and realized that his own father had that same unmet need. This is an excellent example of trans-generational transmission of psychopathology, rooted in a lack of nurturing rather than a genetic error. His approach was to encourage people to address those still unmet needs of that inner child which continued to impact them as adults.
This idea of a metaphorical “inner child” makes sense in guiding therapists and patients in their non-DID work. Once can imagine the patient experienced as a child, in the form of that metaphorical inner child, and then consider a path to meeting those unmet needs and healing. In short, that inner child needs to be listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood, to be valued. That “child” needs to be metaphorically held, as a way to respond to that previously unmet need which continues to be a burden.
Simply using that imagined child increases the chance of patients healing. It may be that it opens the possibility of quickly establishing a therapeutic alliance between the patient and the therapist with the result that the inner child finally feels heard. This is far better than categorizing the patient with a DSM label, sending them with some psycho-active medicine, while ignoring that still unmet need from the past.
