When Childhood Echoes Shape Adulthood: How to Reclaim Your Inner Child
Parts of our lives are heaped under mounds of memories. For some of us, moving forward becomes the only objective. Tasha Rube, a licensed social worker based in Kansas City, Kansas, alludes to the difficulties of trying to juggle a balanced adult lifestyle and connects it to neglecting the inner younger part of ourselves.
Confronting The Past
It takes real courage to look back into one’s past and hold oneself accountable. This isn’t about changing things. Rather, understanding that there are milestones in your formative years that didn’t go as intended.
Honoring your real feelings about your upbringing and experiences is a rigorous process.
Relinquish All Your Control
Here are three mantras you can come back to. Slip them in between prayers or chant them throughout the day.
‘I accept that I cannot change the past’
Is a little mantra that you can use to soothe yourself as you enter this new phase of your life. Who exactly are you set to forgive? No one in particular. Forgiveness is neither a debt to be owed nor is it an obligation.
Choosing to hold people accountable and, despite all odds, let the betrayal and humiliation go; it takes something that’s not of the material world.
‘So, I choose to forgive myself’
As toddlers, we didn’t know any better for a time; it was much blurrier in those early stages. Control over our surroundings is something we struggle with as adults and young adults. By choosing to forgive ourselves. Not for any particular wrong or for not knowing any better, but for wishing we could change our pasts when every primal instinct in our body knows that that is a form of self-harm.
‘So, I choose to forgive those around me’
Be it relatives, caregivers, siblings, educators, or people from days past. There are those who, in particular, left a larger impact than some. Others are in a positive light, while there are those we’d rather not give much dominion over our thoughts. The sacral chakra, according to Eastern religious teachings on spirituality, is responsible for emotions and is represented by water.
Water bodies vary in size and content, but one thing is for sure: they endure. Whatever disrupts the water surface simply sinks to the bottom, and when it does, the ripples on its skin can begin to disperse.
To utter the last mantra involves deep consideration and much thought; choosing not to is a powerful decision that doesn’t diminish your ability to heal.
Re-evaluate Your Relationships
A lot of being a child involves intuitively understanding your surroundings while also lacking a stake in them. As adults, we are thrust into an even larger cauldron. It is a fact that we may gravitate toward situations and people who remind us of home. Then we must ask ourselves, do they build me or burn me, or something else entirely?
Express Yourself
Maturity robs us of frivolity. Dance and play become tedious only because others think so. When was the last time you watched clouds aimlessly and decided they looked like a chipmunk with glasses, or walked in the rain pretending that all you were like something out of the matrix? Slipping between the raindrops. Whatever it is that brought you joy when you were younger, it’s time for you and your inner child to put it to the test. The choice is yours, only if you choose to take it.
