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Deleted member 47099
I went through childhood trauma, but have always had a good bond to my inner child of the pre-trauma age range.
(The trauma started at age 7/8 and I'm not so good at accessing my inner child age 7 and up, and the trauma was worst in the teenage years and I have a lot of trouble accessing my inner teen kid - but that's another topic.)
So, I've always been good at accessing my inner kid at a young age - say 3 to 7 years old. This has always been a strong, safe connection and played a big role in my trauma therapy and recovery.
Several years ago, I got into a relationship that was first very deep and loving and the turned abusive and then turned into a nightmarish breakup.
Ever since, my (young) inner kid has felt totally dead.
I've been working through the breakup and the post-mortem of the relationship in therapy ever since and have made some slow and confusing progress.
To make a long (and boring) story short, we finally worked out in therapy that because this relationship was incredibly deep, it touched on very core early childhood issues, including early childhood attachment trauma that had been untreated, up to that point.
So when the relationship turned abusive and then spiralled into an unbearably painful breakup, it seems to have torn open all the old, partly-healed-over early childhood attachment wounds.
From a logical/ rational point of view, this makes sense to me and I've tried to work with it as best I can.
But emotionally, it just feels like my inner child has been dead ever since.
And given that the bond to my inner child used to be so strong, it feels really chilling and haunting.
And to make matters worse, my inner kid disappearing has taken a lot of other things with her - joy, happiness, hope, optimism, sense of purpose, sense of meaning, warmth, caring, etc.
I've heard people talking about dead parts countless times and the general consensus seems to be that parts don't "die".
So, from a logical point of view, I'm going to rule that out.
It just *feels* like my inner child has died.
I just don't have a clue of how to even start accessing/ healing my inner child.
Do I try and resuscitate it?
Do I talk to it and if it doesn't answer, just keep talking regardless?
Do I tell it I feel like she's died?
It's so weird to have had a massively negative event in my adult years deeply trigger childhood trauma stuff like this.
I get the normal/ daily triggers that we all get - some incident sets off trauma memories and trauma thinking and I dissociate.
But to have an event actually unpack childhood trauma that previously was never unpacked before... That's not just a trigger, that's something more major.
I don't know what it's called (should probably read up on it) when some key life experience rips open past traumatic material that your brain had neatly packed up and put aside.
Before this happened, I literally wasn't "aware" of this early childhood trauma.
I knew about it in a part of my brain - there was evidence in photos and in family stories about my first 3 years of life.
So logically I knew it existed, but emotionally I had zero access to it, so it never really "bothered" me, so I basically ignored it, figuring it was not important.
But this particular event in adult life just ripped right through those layers of trauma and spewed them all out in gory, painful detail and I've been struggling with it massively ever since.
And a huge part of that has been numbing.
I've felt so numb for the last 4 years... I've never felt this degree of numbness before, ever. Not during the later childhood trauma, not during previous trauma therapy.
And yeah, it just feels like my inner child (of all age ranges) is dead now and I feel like an empty shell, a zombie.
I need to find some way of dealing with this... Getting the dynamic to shift... Cos it's just no way to live.
(The trauma started at age 7/8 and I'm not so good at accessing my inner child age 7 and up, and the trauma was worst in the teenage years and I have a lot of trouble accessing my inner teen kid - but that's another topic.)
So, I've always been good at accessing my inner kid at a young age - say 3 to 7 years old. This has always been a strong, safe connection and played a big role in my trauma therapy and recovery.
Several years ago, I got into a relationship that was first very deep and loving and the turned abusive and then turned into a nightmarish breakup.
Ever since, my (young) inner kid has felt totally dead.
I've been working through the breakup and the post-mortem of the relationship in therapy ever since and have made some slow and confusing progress.
To make a long (and boring) story short, we finally worked out in therapy that because this relationship was incredibly deep, it touched on very core early childhood issues, including early childhood attachment trauma that had been untreated, up to that point.
So when the relationship turned abusive and then spiralled into an unbearably painful breakup, it seems to have torn open all the old, partly-healed-over early childhood attachment wounds.
From a logical/ rational point of view, this makes sense to me and I've tried to work with it as best I can.
But emotionally, it just feels like my inner child has been dead ever since.
And given that the bond to my inner child used to be so strong, it feels really chilling and haunting.
And to make matters worse, my inner kid disappearing has taken a lot of other things with her - joy, happiness, hope, optimism, sense of purpose, sense of meaning, warmth, caring, etc.
I've heard people talking about dead parts countless times and the general consensus seems to be that parts don't "die".
So, from a logical point of view, I'm going to rule that out.
It just *feels* like my inner child has died.
I just don't have a clue of how to even start accessing/ healing my inner child.
Do I try and resuscitate it?
Do I talk to it and if it doesn't answer, just keep talking regardless?
Do I tell it I feel like she's died?
It's so weird to have had a massively negative event in my adult years deeply trigger childhood trauma stuff like this.
I get the normal/ daily triggers that we all get - some incident sets off trauma memories and trauma thinking and I dissociate.
But to have an event actually unpack childhood trauma that previously was never unpacked before... That's not just a trigger, that's something more major.
I don't know what it's called (should probably read up on it) when some key life experience rips open past traumatic material that your brain had neatly packed up and put aside.
Before this happened, I literally wasn't "aware" of this early childhood trauma.
I knew about it in a part of my brain - there was evidence in photos and in family stories about my first 3 years of life.
So logically I knew it existed, but emotionally I had zero access to it, so it never really "bothered" me, so I basically ignored it, figuring it was not important.
But this particular event in adult life just ripped right through those layers of trauma and spewed them all out in gory, painful detail and I've been struggling with it massively ever since.
And a huge part of that has been numbing.
I've felt so numb for the last 4 years... I've never felt this degree of numbness before, ever. Not during the later childhood trauma, not during previous trauma therapy.
And yeah, it just feels like my inner child (of all age ranges) is dead now and I feel like an empty shell, a zombie.
I need to find some way of dealing with this... Getting the dynamic to shift... Cos it's just no way to live.