GROWTH DISORDER

Fritz Perls described neurosis as “growth disorder.” I like that. It’s a good way of expressing the problem of your wounded inner child’s toxic shame and resulting co-dependence. We would not be codependent adult children if our developmental needs had been met. When these needs are not adequately met in infancy, severe problems result. The Index of Suspicion at the beginning of this chapter describes some of these problems. They can be summed up under the term narcissistic deprivation. We did not get the mirroring and echoing we needed. We were not loved unconditionally; as a result, we didn’t develop a basic sense of trust. This sets up the insatiable cravings that some people act out with ingestive addictions. It also sets up the need to be continually validated—almost as if we would cease to exist without such validation. Other consequences include insatiable cravings to be touched and hugged; too great a focus of your sexuality on orality; being out of touch with your physical needs (the signals from your body); a tendency to "swallow things whole"—to be the sucker who is born every minute. Most of all, when your infancy needs are not met, it sets you up to feel ashamed of yourself, to feel deep down that something is wrong with you.

The grief work has to be done. Fritz Perls said: “Nothing changes till it becomes what it is.” Only by demythologizing our parents can we gasp the real harm that was done to us. To grasp that real harm was done to us allows us to own our feelings about being violated. To feel the feelings is the original pain work. Once we’ve connected with and expressed those feelings, we are free to move on. Since we no longer carry unfinished business from the past, we no longer contaminate the present. Our energy is now available for empowering our lives. We can live in the now and create the future.

Forgiveness allows us to leave our parents. Our frozen grief formed the deep resentments that kept us attached to them. Resentments cause us to recycle the same feelings over and over again. Our wounded child’s payoff for this is that we never have to separate from our parents. As long as we spend our energy secretly hating them, we remain attached to them, and this provides us with a way to avoid growing up. Forgiveness heals our resentments and enables us to divorce our wonder child from the shaming voices of our internalized parental figures. Forgiveness is the way we leave home internally.

Once we’ve reclaimed our wounded inner child, we must make a decision about our real parents, if they are still alive. What kind of relationship will we have with them? For those whose parents are still offenders, the decision should be to stay away from them. I recommend that you leave them to their fate! I know of many cases where parents continue to violate their adult children.

If your parents refuse to take any responsibility for their own wounded inner child, you need to remember that your primary obligation to your own life. You didn’t come into this world to take care of your parents. I’m not speaking here of infirm or disabled parents. I’m speaking of parents who refuse to take responsibility for their own inner woundedness. Each of you must let your adult decide on your boundaries with your real parents. Remember, your inner child is in your trust now. He expects you to protect him.

For most people, the reclaiming of their wounded child creates a context for a new and richer relationship with their real parents. By becoming a new parent to your inner child, you help him finish the past and fill the void in his psyche. As the child feels new hope, autonomy, purpose, initiative, and competence, he can establish his own identity. Then he can have a healthy relationship with his parents.

FINDING A NEW FAMILY

Championing your inner child involves getting him a new family of choice. A new family is necessary in order to give your child protection while he is forming new boundaries and doing his corrective learning. If your family of origin is not in recovery, it is almost impossible to get support from them while you’re in your own recovery process. Often they think that what you’re doing is stupid and they shame you for it. Often they are threatened by your doing this work, because as you give up your old family roles, you disrupt the frozen equilibrium of the family system. You were never allowed to be yourself before. Why would they suddenly start allowing that now? If your family of origin was dysfunctional, it is the least likely place to get your nurturing needs met. So, I advise you to keep a safe distance and work on finding a new, nonshaming, supportive family. This could be a support group of friends, it could be the group you joined to work on your inner child, or it could be any one of the myriad 12 Step groups now available all over the country. It could also be a church synagogue, or therapy group. Whatever your choice, I urge your adult to find a group for both of you. You are the champion for your inner child and he needs the support and protection of a new family of affiliation.

Corrective work is the most hopeful aspect of inner child work. Our woundedness is partly the result of learning deficits, and we can correct those deficits with new learning. We do some of this new learning incidentally as we respond to the social demands of growing up. But for most of us with a wounded inner kid, there are still large areas where the lack of these developmental skills causes great pain and discomfort. Many adult children do not know that their abortive behavior is due to learning deficits. They relentlessly shame and blame themselves for their failures and character defects. Doing corrective exercises helps your wounded inner child to understand that your defects are actually deficits. The behavioral contaminations from your wounded inner child are actually ways he learned to survive. Psychiatrist Timmen Cermak compares these survival behaviors to the characteristics of postraumatic stress disorder. Soldiers in battle, and other people going through traumatic events, must use all their resources to survive. They do not have time to express their feelings, which is necessary to integrate the trauma. Later on, the unresolved grief manifests itself in traits such as anxiety attacks, overcontrol, memory lapses, depression, age regressions, and hypervigilance. These are the traits associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If I gave you the entire list of PTSD traits, you’d see how closely they resemble the wounded inner child’s contaminations I described…

Archetypes embody both positive and negative aspects of the patterns they represent. In the mother archetype the positive aspect is the nurturing and life-giving mother; the negative aspect is the mother who smothers, devours, and destroys her children.

In the father archetype, the positive aspect protects and sets limits for his children and passes on the laws and traditions of the culture. The negative father is the tyrant who, fearing the loss of his power, keeps his children in bondage and refuses to pass on the traditions.

In the child archetype, the positive child is vulnerable, childlike, spontaneous, and creative. The negative child is selfish, childish, and resists emotional and intellectual growth. The negative aspect of the child is the wounded child. It is only in our century that the wounded inner child has received our attention.

In times past, the abuse and subjugation of children were commonplace and often taken for granted. As late as 1890, there was no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, although there was a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

One of the great advances of our generation has been the exposure of child abuse. We have come to see that our prevailing rules for raising children shame and violate their uniqueness and their dignity. Such rules have been a part of our emotional endarkenment. Alice Miller has shown with painful clarity how our current parenting rules have aimed at making the child fit the projected image of the parent. They have also enforced the idealization of parents by the wounded child. Such idealization creates a fantasy bond that assures the wounded child of his parents’ love for him. But it has also perpetuated the abuse of children for generations.