the concept of your inner child

your brain is a really, really big filing cabinet. 

that’s how i think of it, anyway. as stacks and stacks of papers, all organised neatly where they belong. your brain is just a little dude working happily to sort these memories in their place, some going under the label of “happy” or “sad” or “random facts about the deep marine life” or “that one time you went exploring in the snow near a frozen river and the whole ground underneath you collapsed and you literally almost died in that cursed snow hole but you managed to climb out and you went back shaking and didn’t tell anyone”. 

anyway. 

sometimes, the memories are bad. really, really bad memories that your brain considers as mould that would hurt the other memories in their own cabinets. so, your brain throws them out in order to prevent the mould from spreading. 

this is called dissociative amnesia. that’s why sometimes you don’t remember much things from your childhood, or even what you were arguing about with your partner last week. because your mind forces you to forget. it’s very common in the world, even if certain things didn’t affect you directly. this is the reason why eyewitnesses are less than reliable in a court of law, and also why sometimes we experience deja vu over simple, everyday tasks. a certain smell can bring you back to an argument you had with your parent. the taste of a certain kind of food can cause a spiral. trauma is a very complex, individualistic thing in our brains, and everyone has something different to deal with it. 

such as the concept of an inner child. 

it’s very common, separating parts of yourself. it’s not as extreme as dissociative identity disorder, but still offers a piece of comfort to your own mind after going through traumatic experiences. 

i once read somewhere “treat yourself as you would treat your own daughter”. which hit me harder than it should’ve, but it also taught me something about how i look at myself. would i ever tell my daughter she was ugly? of course not. would i ever tell her she was worthless? never. so why did it come so easily to me when i said it to myself instead? 

the concept of an inner child is very interesting to me. it’s talking to a part of yourself in its purest form of trauma, and a lot of people when talking about healing their “inner child”, do things like buying things they couldn’t have as a kid, taking more time for themselves, having the bubble baths you were never allowed to have, and so on and so forth. 

it’s performing your own love language on yourself. because, like i said, i’ve come to realise that your love language is what you were most deprived of as a child. that’s why i love quality time with people, because i used to be so ignored and left alone, and also how i deeply appreciate compliments and validation, because i used to endure harsh verbal insults from even my own parents from a young age. that’s how i knew someone i know craves acts of service because their own parents wouldn’t even lift a finger to help them.

it’s the things like that in which we can heal ourselves in a way a therapist cannot. sure, a therapist can tell you to do all these things, tell you to write a journal or an angry letter, but only you can know yourself. only you know the full extent of what happened, and how you can fix it. 

“but i barely know myself. i’m lost”. 

and that’s okay too. it’s okay to feel like you don’t really know yourself, after forgetting your entire childhood because half of it was filled with things you didn’t want to remember, so your brain decided to scrub it all out. but just because there are holes in your memory, doesn’t mean you aren’t still a person. swiss cheese is full of holes, and it still tastes amazing. bread can be full of holes too, and i’ll still happily make a nutella sandwich out of it. 

i think the hardest thing for people to do is to love themselves. you can love someone who has almost the exact same traits and characteristics as you, but as soon as your eyes meet the mirror, everything turns grey. because you’ve been stuck in your body your whole life, you’ve become desensitised to the things that make you, you. 

someone once told me that “it’s like how when an artist looks at their own artwork for too long, they start to notice all the tiny flaws and begin to hate it” and that really stuck with me. you don’t realise how dazzling that smile of yours is because you’ve seen it your whole life. you don’t see the way your laugh makes everyone grin because, well, that’s just your laugh. to you, there’s nothing special about it. but you just need some fresh eyes. a different perspective. 

that’s exactly what your inner child is. the eyes of a child, the little you. the you that would be wide-eyed with wonder if they saw you right now. saw how much you’ve grown as a person. to them, you’re the big sibling or the better parent they could never have. so as much as you might find it hard to, treat yourself as you would treat them. and i think that’s the first step to loving yourself.