The child...within?

I have been talking more and more about my “inner child.” I realize that this might be kind of strange, maybe even unsettling to readers, especially Christian readers. “Does he have a demon? Does he have a split personality? Is he healthy?”

So here’s the thing: as I mentioned at the beginning of my first hypnotherapy session, I know that this is a game. It is a serious game, a beautiful game, a meaningful game…but a game nonetheless. There isn’t really a child living inside of me. I’m not really separated from another person inside.

Except…I kind of am. I am realizing, we all kind of are.

When I first left home and went on missions, I suddenly broke out in a full-body rash. From neck to ankle, I was covered in itchy red spots. They stayed with me for nearly a year, and it still comes back sometimes. Due to stress. When I was going through burnout, I thought for a while that I was allergic to the coffee at the ministry house: every time I would drink it, my lips would go numb. I realized later this was not because of the coffee, but because of the stress.

The funny thing is, during these times I would not have told you that I felt stressed. But my body knew. 

When I was having my first EMDR session, the counsellor told me that when one does EMDR (which is as simple as looking back and forth rapidly, or tapping each side of the body rhythmically, to activate both hemispheres of the brain), “sometimes, the deep wisdom of the brain can speak.”

This is what I did, and it resolved the deepest traumatic event of my life: the time I was kidnapped in Africa. The truth I had believed, “I was a fat white guy that didn’t have a clue,” was replaced by a truth I now know, “I was competent…and God came to save me.” That statement became so true, that it still gives me courage in every obstacle that I face. It is like a cornerstone of my life. Then, I went on a run, and entered the same mental space while focusing on the “left-right-left” of my running. Suddenly, the statement, “It wasn’t me” came hurtling out of my subconscious. That truth rocked my life. Shame disintegrated. I am a changed man. 

Then, I began working with hypnotherapy. There is no hypnosis in this therapy, despite the name: no altered states of consciousness. One just becomes very relaxed, and the therapist creates a mental symbolic place, such as a garden or a library. “Just answer the first thing that comes to you mind…” And she asks questions. And as one answers, the subconscious speaks. And in that speaking…things change. BIG things change!

I know that it is a lot of reading, but I hope that there are at least a few people out there that are really reading along. Because there is so much change in how I see things. I am not the same man I was three months ago. Not at all.

And the changes have been happening in my subconscious mind. 

You see, it is all me. The little boy who lives deep down, at the bottom of a well and is not usually able to speak, but sends me images and stories when I sleep? That little boy is me. He is the more emotional part of me. He is deeply connected to my “guts.” 

When I ignored him too much, he began rattling and shaking my body. He (I) gave myself a full-body rash from stress, and numb lips. The boy wanted me to pay attention to him.

And now, I am beginning to learn to pay attention. 

“Pay attention to what? To whom?”

To myself.

That sounds like a terribly self-centred, new-age sort of thing to say. And yet, I cannot stress how true it is. 

In a post a few months (feels like years) ago, I said, “Chase health, find God…and ministries will find you.” A friend tried to reverse that order: “Chase God, find health, ministries will find you.” But that has not exactly been the order I have followed.

My parents wrapped me up in thick cords of religious duty. I cannot find health directly from my religion. As I have sought help, “reconciliation” and “forgiveness” seems to be on everyone’s lips. Many seem to be protecting the narcissism in our midst. I need a different guide. 

And I believe that there is a guide. It is deep, and it speaks.

Months ago, I was talking to my wife about cutting ties to my parents. “It just feels so wrong,” I said, “..and yet…so right.” And then I said (with so much power…I just felt it was so true) “this is the deep magic…generations will be changed. Everything will be different. Aslan is on the move…”

It’s backwards. It is bizarre. it seems wrong. And yet…it is right. 

What my “gut” fears at times is that I will not listen to it. That the conscious mind will be convinced that it must “stuff” down all of this emotion, tell it all to “shut up,” and to force some sort of a reconciliation. Go back to the “happy days” of making my parents happy, walking on egg shells, and doing things their way. 

This situation my inner child represented to me in dreams as like having my insides removed: like never going back home to the milky way (the only place in the universe with colour). It was like taking one’s liver, and putting a cow’s tongue alongside of it to “help it do its job.” It was like taking an important muffler off of a very complex system: it would all blow up.

And it would all blow up. I have realized that I have been dizzy for months, as I process this. And were I to force something that my “guts” are not happy with…who knows what other physical symptoms would appear?

How many of the illnesses that we face are as a result of not really “listening to ourselves”? Not being united, mind and emotions, body and spirit?

“But,” you may ask, “what are you listening to?” That Christian fear of demonic possession or whispering may linger. 

I wrote at length about spiritual warfare in a previous post. I feel that I know a spiritual presence — whether good or bad — when I sense one. This is something else. This is emotional, and it is me talking to me. Talking to my deep subconscious. Really, deep. Honestly, I think I could tell that little child to do something crazy — like cause me to sweat, or cause my heart to beat faster or slower, or fight a disease harder or in some other way to control a bodily function not normally under the control of the conscious mind. I believe it is just that: a way of talking to “all of me.” 

…but…how does one’s body know what is healthy?

In listening to the psychologist Jordan Peterson, he spoke of “becoming the dream and hero of our ancestors.” There is an archetypal theme (which comes up often in dreams) of rescuing one’s father. Why rescue one’s father? Because symbolically, when we are the best version of ourselves, we are simultaneously the best version of our father — of all our fathers, throughout history. We become like their hero, as we become the best version of ourselves that we can be. I think this theme may have been present in a recent dream.

And so I think that Jordan Peterson would say something like, “health is coded into your DNA. It is the dreams and wishes of your ancestors.” Certainly, the body does know what health is. How do I know that? Because out of all of my experiences, I cannot recollect but a small fraction of them. And when I ask my subconscious questions, it brings them up. It has carefully catalogued memories that it knew were off. Oh, sure. We needed to make choices. We needed to make sacrifices and decisions: we needed to survive. And to do that, we needed to become hyper-sensitive to dad’s emotions (so that he wouldn’t explode in terrifying rage) and we needed to serve mom emotionally (so that she wouldn’t melt down and disintegrate and not help us). We needed to do those things, and more. But….he was never really happy with it. He knew something was off. It was a dream that had scratchy organ music in the background. Not quite wrong. But not quite right either. Worth cataloguing: maybe someday this will be important. 

The body knows dysfunction when it sees it. It knows. But most of the time, we are too busy living in our rational conscious minds to pay any heed.

And then I thought, while talking about this with my wife, But of course…I’m made in the image of God! 

And just like that, two poles came together. 

Often, science and religion are seen as opposites. But they are not. God speaks through nature, He speaks through scriptures. If there is a conflict, it is because we’re not reading one of His “books” right. Sometimes it’s because we’re not reading nature right, sometimes we’re not reading the Bible right. But the two are never really in conflict.

And then I realized, God made me. He made me. He made me with a mind that would never be happy with a teacher saying, “2+2=5.” Nobody knows how this works, but nobody accepts that. Mathematical facts, are just true to our minds. As soon as we see them we say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” There’s an image of God in our rational minds, and it guides us.

And there is also an image of God in our subconscious. That little child within doesn’t have all of the answers. Sometimes, he is just scared, confused, and curled up in a ball crying. Sometimes, he is standing up and raging: grabbing the walls of his room, shaking, tearing. Making rashes, invoking chaos. Sometimes, he decides he doesn’t even want to live. 

Today, a friend told my wife and I a surprising and terrifying story of a Bible teacher that we all knew twenty years ago. The founder of a ministry: had a role in some of our childhoods. He “snapped,” killed his wife and child, then drove to his daughter’s school and started strangling her. Stopped, then drove away and killed himself. 

“Crazy!” Said our hostess, in shock.

Now there’s someone who hasn’t been listening to his inner child, I thought. There are consequences to living a double life.

Some people “snap.” But more often…(as in the case of my mother) there are simply pains and diseases that nobody can diagnose. The child inside is just sad, hurt, angry, fearful. Try to be heard. 

What a powerful thing to be able to listen to that voice!

The inner child is not always right. Sometimes (often) he is wrong. But he is always good. No, that is not quite right. He is always valuable. In the same way that a newborn baby, or a toddler is precious, the chid within is precious. That is perhaps the most important thing that anybody can ever know: that little person inside is precious. That is one of the earliest lessons in the Bible: that little person inside is made in the very image of God. Sleep in quiet love, my precious. You are loved. God loves you, I love you. You are valuable. 

And the little one inside…I am testing this out to see if it is true…I don’t think it can be sinful or good. I know that throws Christian doctrines all out of order. “The heart is deceitful above all else — who can understand it.” But I think that sins happen at the level of our conscious minds. Yes, our conscious minds are themselves devious and confusing. Once we convince ourselves, “What I really need to be happy is to obtain x, by any means necessary,” then our inner child will get on board with that. And desire it with the rest of us. But the inner child doesn’t really desire sin. I don’t know that it knows those categories. 

All it wants…all it has ever wanted…was to be loved. And (here is a strange, but very true thing) it wants to give that love back to the conscious mind. I think that is simple and true, because what is a better word for a well-functioning body than love? If we could speak in emotional terms about how the heart pumps to the lungs, and the lungs bring in air, and the liver and kidneys purify, and the mind oversees it all…if we could enter into that dance, that song…that rush of blood and oxygen and the rhythmic pulsing of electrical stimuli, with conscious words…would “love” be the best word to describe it? All is selfless, all is commitment, all is reliance on the other, all is harmony. That is love.

And that is what the inner child wants with the conscious mind: and, it is what it wants with the spirit, and with God. It wants all to be aligned, in harmony. To give, receive, be heard, be committed. 

What power lives in that person who is fully aligned! Whose mind and body and soul are united, and who is in a right relationship with God!

And so I am making my long way around to saying this: that so often, religious ideas (which live primarily in the conscious mind, in the realm of ideas) deal in abstractions, perfections of things, rules, obligations. They can be helpful guides: but applied too strictly, can restrict, bind, control, deaden, terrify our inner child. 

In seeking to listen to the voice within, I am seeking to (here is a word I haven’t used often) find a “wholistic spirituality” in which my whole body, soul, mind and body worship God.

I want to close this with one experience. I meant to add it elsewhere, but it will serve well as a conclusion.

I alluded to the fact that when I do EMPR and speak to my inner child…I never really know what it will say. The experience is often somewhat surprising. A bit like praying and hearing what seems to be God’s voices in one’s head (although it is possible one was thinking them one’s self…discernment is needed, as well as caution). On this particular occasion, I bowed my head to do some EMDR in the shower. It really felt like there was a deep well. And I could hear a child speaking to me from the bottom of it. I listened to him: what was really bothering him. I comforted him, told him he was loved. I forget the experience exactly, but it was something like that.

And then…this part is really hard to describe…but I felt like the child inside began to worship God. It did not worship God like my conscious mind does. There were no words. But a beam of pure light and joy shot out of that well, straight to the Father. My conscious mind began singing a praise song. In that moment, there was so much joy, and holiness. It was beautiful. And surprising. I had thought of my inner child as spiritually neutral: unable to be either good or bad. But there it was. Rich, pure worship.

It is hard to explain.

But that was the first time that I experienced what the Psalmist sang of so often, “Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoices; My flesh also will dwell securely.” Psa. 16:9, For our heart rejoices in Him, Because we trust in His holy name. Psa 33:21, “And my soul shall rejoice in the Lord; It shall exult in His salvation.” Psa. 35:9, etc.

…and that is what I am seeking to find more of, and to convey in some way to my children. That is what this journey is all about. Finding health, and passing that health on to the next generations.

So that future generations will not blossom under the withered shade of their grandparents, but in better soil, and healthier meadows far, far away.