Starting Inner Child Work And It Feels Weird

[samson]

This week my T explained to me that there was trauma that happened to me when I was a little girl and also as a young adult. Now, as an adult, I need to help those parts of me heal. I understand this process, but it feels so weird. This week he asked me to let the little girl tell me how it felt to be abused in this one memory while we were doing emdr. I didn't say anything outloud. We moved on to talk about other things (related to the trauma) and he looked at me and asked "how scared are you right now?" Apparently I was shaking and didn't even know it. My anxiety level was sky high.

I know others have worked through comforting your inner child. Was it weird for anyone else, or just me?

 

[Hashi]

I can't even use the phrase "inner child". I can't relate to it, and find it extremely offputting for various reasons. Luckily, I work with archetypes and can just about manage to talk about the Child archetype, which isn't exactly the same but at least is a way to work on things. Still very difficult and distressing, though.

I've found that trying to directly comfort the Child just doesn't work for me. For me, it feels fake and actually unhealthy since I see it as infantilising. I do more indirect things instead, like working on feeling safe and comforting myself generally. This is much better, and seems to lead me to things that also happen to be particularly good for the Child archetype without me setting out to do that.

It's all really weird.

*sighs*