Introducing the Child Within

Like most children, when I couldn’t get what I needed from my parents, I looked for it elsewhere. This began a life-long pattern of looking for love outside of myself. It never once occurred to me that I could love myself.

As an adult, I was introduced to the concept of self-parenting (or reparenting) in a support group. Self-parenting is a therapeutic approach to healing the wounds of our childhood. It is an attempt to give ourselves now what we did not get as children.

The “inner child” is a term adopted from a concept introduced by Eric Berne in his book, The Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. In his book, Berne introduces the world to Transactional Analyses, a revolutionary new way of looking at the human psyche. Later Thomas Harris in his book, I’m OK, You’re OK, popularized this idea. The child ego state eventually became the “inner child,” which in turn led to a series of popular books: Hugh Missildine’s, Your Inner Child of the Past; Charles Whitfield’s Healing the Child Within; John Bradshaw’s Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child; Philip Oliver-Diaz and Patricia O’Gorman’s Twelve Steps to Self Parenting; and Cathryn Taylor’s The Inner Workbook: What to Do With Your Past When it Won’t Go Away--just to name a few. Over the years the concept of the inner child has been both applauded and trivialized, but it is still an important tool to help us finally grow beyond an arrested state of development.