A Lullaby for The Inner Child
“You need to talk to your inner child,” said the first therapist I ever saw.
It was more than two decades ago when this advice was first given to me. At the time, I was wavering between leaving an abusive partner or staying put and hoping for the best. I was surprised to find my therapist wanted to talk more about my childhood than the adult relationship that was the source of all my woes.
It took me a while to understand the connection. It took me even longer to start processing the childhood trauma I’d been carrying around all my life, and piece together how it had shaped me into the person I am.
My therapist had asked me to envision myself as a child – a separate person outside of me, someone I could sit down with, talk to, listen to, embrace, and love.
It took me a while to actually do it. I had to resist the temptation to laugh it off as woo-woo, had to struggle through the discomfort and weirdness I felt at first. It was tougher than I ever imagined.
But it got easier with practice.
And it actually helped me.
“It’s about reparenting yourself and giving yourself the emotional response you would have needed or wanted as a child, but doing it right now at your current stage in life,” explains psychologist Dr. Susan Albers in the article How to Heal Your Inner Child by Cleveland Clinic. “It’s about understanding the very vulnerable parts of ourselves and nurturing ourselves with self-compassion and self-acceptance. The goal of healing your inner child is to make sure you fully process both positive and negative experiences from when you were younger so you can move past them with a renewed understanding of your worth as a human being with very real thoughts and feelings.”
Talking to my inner child is part of what helped me find the strength to leave my abuser and rebuild my life all those years ago.
I thought my inner child was properly healed, and we were cool after that.
Current events have shown me otherwise.
Many of us who remain Covid Conscious have found there’s a lot of overlap in the identities we hold. An overwhelming number of us are neurodivergent. Many of us were born with disabilities or chronic health conditions. An awful lot of us have felt the weight of loneliness throughout our lives, as human beings in general have a low tolerance for those who don’t fit in.
And in spite of that, many of us are deeply empathetic. We’ve lived through pain we wouldn’t wish on anyone else. We’re driven to protect others from having to experience it.
The Covid pandemic showed us these feelings are not reciprocated by the vast majority of people. When masking and other precautions became a matter of personal choice, most Americans opted out, accepting that some people would just have to die so they could get back to all the comforts of 2019-style normalcy.
As an adult, I have agency. I can choose to continue masking and accept the social consequences of it. I can advocate for myself and my needs. I can seek out data and facts to inform my choices. I have some control over my situation.
Children don’t.
And as the cumulative harm piles up from all the infections they’ve endured, it gets harder to overlook the devastation they face in the present moment. It gets harder to think about how they’re being screwed out of their futures.
As if Covid wasn’t enough, we’ve watched policy changes happen in the United States over this past year that will take food, healthcare, and childcare away from families living in poverty.
We’ve witnessed scenes from war zones and genocides halfway around the world. Videos of weeping parents embracing the bodies of their children after they’re pulled from the rubble of collapsed buildings. Pictures of children suffering from malnutrition and infectious diseases as they wither away in hospital beds.
Now we watch in horror as children are rounded up, separated from their families, and placed in detention centers, where they literally cry out for help to the world outside of the gates.
Now we watch as mountains of damning evidence are brought to light, revealing unimaginable abuses of children by the world’s most powerful people in a decades-old global human trafficking operation. We’ve been told by those in power to move on, to accept that there will be no justice for the victims.
My inner child has been screaming for months now.
Little me wants to know how we’re supposed to go on in a world that treats children this way.
And honestly, I’ve been putting off the conversation because I have no fucking idea.
But my inner child wouldn’t be ignored.
So without knowing what to say, I sat down in a quiet place and brought childhood me to life in my mind.
I pictured us on the swingset in the back yard of my childhood home.
Little me was swinging away. Stimming, soothing the anxious mind. Swinging was a good thing for me. I had to keep both hands on the chains so I didn’t fall off. That kept me from twirling strands of hair around my fingers, sometimes to the point it would leave bald spots. That was an embarrassing look, my mom had told me.
I stared at my little bare feet each time my toes touched the ground, remembering how natural it had felt to walk around on tip toes. The pediatrician had told my parents I couldn’t keep doing that without messing up the way the muscles and bones in my feet were growing. I’d been put in clunky orthopedic shoes to cure me of that affliction. I’d take them off and hide them; my parents would find them and call me stubborn and difficult.
I watched little asthmatic me breathe in fresh air without wheezing. In spite of all I was allergic to outdoors, it was easier to breathe there than in my cigarette smoke-filled home. I remembered how frustrated my family was by my wheezing. How the inhalers would make it stop for a little while, but it would always come back. How sometimes the medicine in the inhalers would cease to work, and I’d be struggling so hard to breathe I’d be crying and vomiting. How the Emergency Room became not just familiar, but one of my favorite places because of the breathing treatments that made my lungs work again, and because everyone was kind to me there. It was the one place in the world where you could be broken and no one would be upset about it.
I spied a book on my little lap – ‘Curious George Goes to the Hospital.’ The Emergency Room staff would give them to little kids, so I had a few different copies of it at home from the many times I’d been a patient. I remembered I’d taken it to my 2nd grade class when it was my turn to read a book to my classmates. I remembered how, to my surprise, I had teared up at the part where Curious George had a stomachache and had to go to the hospital. My classmates laughed at me for crying over a cartoon monkey’s anguish.
I understood in that moment what my inner child needed to hear.
That there was nothing inherently wrong with me.
That I wasn’t as flawed and problematic as I’d grown up believing I was.
I didn’t need to be fixed.
I just needed to feel good about who I was, and confident that I had a purpose. I needed to know that everything about me which makes me weird and different are the very things that make me special.
So I almost launched into a pep talk about how the enduring fight to breathe throughout my childhood would leave me with boundless empathy for those at highest risk for SARS2 – a virus which harms the whole body, but is often first felt as its namesake symptom – severe acute respiratory distress.
And how my stubbornness and being a loner for all the right reasons would shield me against peer pressure and likely save my life someday.
How my entire life would be reinvented into resistance against the mainstream acceptance of living with deadly airborne pathogens.
How I would use this time to build community with others who are existing in reality with me. How I would tell stories and create art which validates our experiences and helps us find levity and hope on the darkest of days.
How I'd join a local advocacy group and help lead the fight against the first mask ban bill in the nation in my home state. How there’d be an incremental victory in the hard-fought health exception that was added to the bill at passing, setting a precedent for the exclusion of health-related masking from ban legislation elsewhere in the nation.
And how it would so quickly become clear that this fight does not end with an ongoing pandemic.
How every other societal injustice and moral injury are interconnected with each other, and the fight is bigger, and the stakes are higher than my childhood self could have ever imagined.
I almost launched into the whole spiel, but stopped myself from becoming a target of my own oversharing.
Little me needed to hold onto some childhood innocence and not have the weight of the world hoisted upon my little shoulders.
The words of my therapist from all those years ago bubbled up in my mind. “The point of talking to your inner child is that you become the voice you needed to hear when you were young. Whenever you felt unsafe or unworthy or simply misunderstood, what were the words you needed to hear to feel better?”
I channeled my late, sweet, southern grandma. She was the most loving person I’d ever known. She called everyone she loved “my darling.” There was always a smile in her voice whenever she said it.
When I was really little, she’d sing a song and we’d skip together. “Skip, skip, skip to my lou, skip to my lou, my darling.” She would squeeze my hand when she’d say 'my darling.' I’ll always remember that. I was loved and I knew it.
My darling.
I found myself writing a song on the fly for my younger self:
A lullaby for my inner child
Keep being you
And do what you do
My darling, don’t let the world break you
Every day it will try
But that gleam in your eye
Is the fire in your spirit that makes you
You’re bright but informal
They’ll say you’re not normal
You won’t fit in at their insistence
But stay who you are
And when you get this far
You’ll learn you’re part of the resistance
You won’t bend or cower
You’ll speak truth to power
And nothing and no one can shake you
So keep being you
And do what you do
My darling, don’t let the world break you
Little me giggled and went back to swinging; my words seem to go right over my inner child’s head.
They cast out into the universe, followed the curve of the earth, wrapped all the way around it, and snuck up on present me from behind.
Then future me whispered in my ear:
Keep being you
And do what you do
My darling, don’t let the world break you.
And who knew – it was exactly what I needed to hear at this moment in time.
In good humor and solidarity,
Guiness Pig
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