Do you know what the child inside you need?

Trauma has its’ own way to be assessed. When we start to walk on the path of healing, we come across many things that seemed normal at that time. Without failure, we still think those things are normal years after they happened because that was the only reality we knew. For example, a lot of yelling and violence happened in my family since I was little. Normally, I would grow up thinking that violence was normal, it was the way a family worked. No fighting = no love, that sort of thing. However, we can be identifying ourselves with our experiences or anti-identifying. My experiences were one example in a multitude of less dangerous ones, and my brain decided that anti-identifying was the best mechanism of survival. Plus, I got extra points for not falling into the same trap as my family. Those issues you have at the moment in different areas of your life come from those experiences. Your subconscious mind does not hide anything that you haven’t experienced before.

The healing process starts with knowing yourself and connecting yourself with your inner child. Every child has the following needs:

1. Attachment and security

2. Autonomy and identity

3. Limits and control

4. Self-appreciation and spontaneous self-expression

5. Relaxation and play

During our childhoods, some of those needs were met, some of them weren’t, if not all of them. In my case, the consequences of those needs not being met are:

1. Lack of feelings, lack of trust, feeling abandoned, social isolation, defect thinking

2. Overcompensation, phobias, avoidance

3. Submissive behavior, self-sacrifice

Self-appreciation has been there with me, I would say by pure luck. However, I never had a moment when I could relax or play due to constant violence going on. As crazy as it sounds, you don't know what you are missing if you never had it.

When I first heard that those needs were never met, a side of me was furious on everything that happened because at that moment I realized why I was feeling so empty, so alien. The other side of me, the inner child, simply gave up on spot, assuming that my wounds would never heal and the scars would keep on hurting for as long as I lived.

My therapist reminded me the reason I started therapy. I wanted to be able to break free from the cage I have been living. In my mind, failing to break free from that cage meant that all my future goals couldn’t be achieved. The feeling of being a bird in a cage started early in my childhood, when I was asked to draw a tree, but I drew a bird. The psychologist at that time told me I felt like I wanted to be free and that moment defined the whole purpose of my healing.

From my session, I realized that both parents have certain duties and needs to meet. But an absent mother couldn’t meet any of them, and a violent father was doing more damage than good. In order to understand the mixture of feelings I was experiencing, feelings I never understood until they were explained to me by someone else, I was asked to write a letter in which I would tell my mother everything I needed to receive, but I did not and how it made me feel. The letter took off my shoulders a great amount of burden, and I felt eliberated for the first time. It is a great exercise, and probably many people write down their feelings as a way of eliberation, however, the letter would have been useless for me without having someone else look at it from a different perspective.

I also discovered that from the triangle of Aggressor – Victim – Savior, I was acting as the savior. You probably realized from above that overcompensating = savior. It is a mechanism people use to compensate that empty spot inside them. For example, I was anticipating everyone’s needs. I was offering my help without being asked to. I was expecting gratitude for all my unwanted and unrequested help. My needs were well below everyone else’s. I was my mother’s mother, my brother’s mother, even my boyfriend’s mother. On a closer look, I learned that I have my own role, toward my mother, towards my family, towards my team members, and towards other people. And the game suddenly changed.

Learning what needs were not met while you were a child, and in which category of those three you are, could give you a pinpoint of your direction. Understanding the basics would give you another perspective, and in time, you would be able to update those old beliefs with those of a healthy adult.

If you liked this journal page, please don’t forget to show a bit of appreciation with a share, a follow on my social media, and by commenting about your unmet needs and how it affected you.