Very relevant, and emotive stuff for me at the moment. I've recently started working on inner child imagery stuf in therapy, after years of stubborn, self-conscious resistance on principle...
So this is another twist on bonkers, but we've been working on identifying multiple, inner sub-selves/children, at different ages and developmental states and in various events/scenarios that were poignant to them. We've been working on engaging the child in dialogue with T, introducing him into the image and into discussion with her about how she feels, what she wants/needs, and ultimately, trying to encourage her to go with him to safety.
We're using T at this point, as opposed to my adult self, as I currently can't engage in this with my adult self at all and absolutely do not feel safe to do so, and as a result, my inner children feel profoundly unsafe with my adult presence. So the idea is to gradually (and it does take time) teach them to trust and to "escape" with T first, and then to slowly, hopefully, work on exchanging T with my adult self.
Like I said, it might sound bonkers... but so far, it's proving to be some of the most emotive, challenging, but implicitly meaningful and helpful work we've done, and both T and I were sceptical for a long time.
It's very early days yet, but it's truly liberating. Speaking from the place of my inner children is the only way I have found to date to give voice and expression to some of my most painful and suppressed feelings and experiences that I simply can't access from an adult place without them being suffocated by shame and self-judgment.
And I've been following up the imagery exercises by writing letters, again to T for now, from that child, reflecting and expanding on the experience of engaging with T and anything else that comes out as I start to write. Again, these have been almost mesmorising in their intensity and usefulness, for both T and I.
Initially accessing the children came through a range of exercises that I first read about in a book by John Bradshaw called "Healing the shame that binds you", as well as some modified EMDR sessions we had worked on. We did a lot of general imagery exercises relating to my childhood experiences, and in time, the children emerged and took on shape and form in the context of those images.
This isn't work I could have done until I felt very very safe with T and in the therapeutic environment, and I wouldn't recommend doing this sort of work until you have a very well-established and functional therapeutic relationship in place, because it does cut to the core and takes you very deep into both conscious and unconscious places that you can't often predict in advance. Both you and your therapist have to be comfortable and secure in your mutual communication in order for that to be safe.
Maddog
