Inner Child: I Am He And He Is Me

Within the context of my personal development work with The ManKind Project over the past few months, and my growing connection to Adult Children of Alcoholics or Other Dysfunctional Families, I have encountered a lot of talk and exercises around connecting with my inner child. The idea is that in healing the part of ourselves that was wounded as a child, we are able to break the patterns that keep us from having the kind of life we want in the present. This kind of inner child work makes sense to me on an intellectual level; the majority of the trauma that is negatively impacting me as an adult took place when I was a sexually abused child.

I've written before that for over thirty years I did my best to repress and deny my childhood sexual abuse. Even though it was impossible to really ignore nearly a decade of abuse at the hands of my stepfather and his friends, I did my best to not remember. Until very recently, I was unconsciously using my inner child work as a new method of repressing and denying the memories of my abuse. When I sat in MKP or ACA and talked about my inner child; the words I used were he and him. I talked about my inner child like he was a being wholly separate from myself. He was the one who spent a decade as someone's live in sex toy. He was the one who was abandoned and abused.

That started to change when I started writing this blog. I couldn't share my experiences with anyone if I didn't claim them as mine. A slow realization has dawned over the past couple of weeks in relation to my inner child. He is not separate from me. I am he and he is me. I am the one who was abandoned by my father and mother. I am the one who was raped by my stepfather and his buddies from the ages of three to nearly twelve. I am the one who was broken. I am the one with grade A abandonment and trust issues. I am the one with the black dog of depression hanging over my head tempting me with an easy way out of having to deal with the pain.

But I have to deal with it. My inner child is me, not he. If I am ever going to heal, if I am ever going to be the man that I want to be, then I am going to have to own my past and own my memories. No more repressing or denying what happened to me. No more passing the buck to a fictional "other". The little boy I once was is a part of me and the only way to heal him is to heal myself. I am frustrated and sad and angry and resigned to the reality that there is no easy fix. There are too many scars, there is too much pain, there is too much baggage that I carry as a result of my childhood sexual abuse for me to recover or heal from it as quickly as I wish I could. There is a long road ahead of me to heal that part of me that was broken. All I can do is lift my lantern to light my way in the shadows, grab my teddy bear for comfort when things get scary, and put one foot in front of the other every day until my past no longer controls my present or my future...