One of the most important therapies I've done on my healing journey is Inner Child Therapy.
By using meditation you "meet" your inner child. Now, I'm not a big fan of psychiatrist couch meditation or past lives meditation and fully went into inner child therapy with an attitude of "this will never work".
It did work though.
I worked through the guides. I remembered where I was happiest as a child, the place I loved the most. The place I thought my childhood was the happiest.
That was the big house and as a child it was my favourite place to live. The house was huge, we often had bats coming in through the attic or birds drowning in the water tank.
We had horses and paddocks and an orchard full of apple, pear, plum trees and bamboo. The bamboo area had a small field of moss before it and we built dens in the rhodedendron bushes. A lime tree grew by the driveway and every summer hundreds of bees would drink the flower nectar and roll around drunk on the gravel.
We had a stream and tree houses and hedgehogs. I thought it was magical place to grow up.
I met my inner child there, I'd hidden her there in my memory, somewhere I thought was filled with happiness.
In the meditation I was back at that house, standing in the middle of the driveway by the rose beds, she was running towards me with tears streaming down her face. She reached me, just a little kid of about ten, grabbed hold of me and sobbed choking tears.
I'd left her somewhere she was scared and unhappy.
After that initial meeting I had to work through why I'd thought that place was my "safe place". I even went to visit it again. Someone posh had bought it and built a wall and 6ft gate with fake gold on it at the entrance. It is a lovely place but being honest with myself, it was full of bad memories.
They were the best memories I had though.
After working through those memories I was able to take her out of that place and into a new place we've made together.
Now we live on a hill, it's a big hill surrounded by fields below and covered in flowers in bloom. There are always hundreds of seeds floating in the air.
In the middle of the hill under a big old oak tree, is a wooden picnic table.
We sometimes sit there or we lay out a blanket and sit on that. The suns always golden and in the mid afternoon. It is calming and serene just thinking about it.
My inner child is always happy and laughing and full of fun there.
Three of us visit there, me, my inner and dark figure. I can't make out any features of him, he's like a child's drawing, filled in with black pen but real and 3D.
I think he's the security in case something, someone, a bad memory tries to break through into our safe place.
We like him being there, although sometimes he isn't.
It is really worth doing inner child therapy. Not only does it help you reconnect with who you where as a child, it can help break down some of the coping therapies you created and give you great insight into who you were and what you went through.
In some ways my childhood was privileged, we were well off, we lived in a big house, we never had money worries or heating worries or work worries. We were tucked away from the world in a secret idyll.
And that made it not a good place.
