I brought home today (from the 12-step centre) the first video in a series about your ‘wounded child’ by John Bradshaw [John Bradshaw’s Homecoming: Reclaiming and championing your inner child] and just finished watching it. A lot of good stuff in there. I won’t bang on about it TOO much, suffice to say I ticked most of the boxes on the ‘wounded child’ questionnaire.
The consequences of having an ‘unfinished’ needy inner child are stuff like: co-dependence; narcissitic disorders; trust issues; intimacy dysfunctions; addictive/compulsive behaviours; thought disorders and an emptiness he describes as spiritual bankruptcy. Basically, you keep trying to fill the hole with something (probably something from the above list of problems!), but the only thing that will really satisfy the inner child is filling it with completing your developmental stages.
Some of it is tying in with stuff I’m reading in ‘The brain that changes itself’ by Norman Doidge, M.D. (about how your neural networks are a lot more plastic than people ever thought, and you can rewire just about anything with the right mental and physical exercises) and I can see that all this new learning I’m doing right now (when I put it into practice!) will eventually lead to real change in my brain. Which will lead to permanent change in my behaviour and responses, that will become inbuilt and I won’t have to make the effort to think before I speak or do, I will just spontaneously react appropriately and healthily. Hoo Boy. I am SO looking forward to that!
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