EP 0048 – The Inner Child

EP 0048 – The Inner Child

It’s Not You – It’s Your Frozen Seven-Year-Old

You’ve spent decades hating and shaming the terrified child still screaming inside you from the beatings, the abandonment, the moments you learned the world wasn’t safe. Passive therapy-speak and quick-fix meditations won’t touch that wound. Only raw, repeated, adult presence—feeling what that kid couldn’t—will ever quiet the chaos.

The Stuck Child Running Your Life
When abuse or terror hit you young, a piece of your emotional self froze right there. If the blows landed at seven, that seven-year-old fear, shame, and helplessness never grew up. The adult you built a life on top of it, but the child stayed locked in panic, undisciplined, craving instant relief. That’s the inner child: not a cute metaphor, but a developmentally arrested part that hijacks your emotions, sabotages your boundaries, and fuels addiction, rage, and self-loathing. You matter because until you parent that part, you stay fragmented—half adult, half terrified kid—and no amount of success, love, or distraction changes the math.

Why You Keep Punishing Instead of Parenting
You avoid this work because going back feels like dying. That child’s terror is overwhelming; your nervous system spent years building walls to keep it buried. Reopening the gate means facing the original helplessness, the size difference between a small body and a violent adult, the certainty that safety would vanish if you ever let the feelings out. So you turn the abuse inward—shaming, criticizing, calling that kid weak, stupid, unlovable. It’s easier to hate the child than to feel the pain he carried alone. Compassion feels dangerous; it threatens the only protection you had.

The Brutal Price of Staying Split
Avoidance keeps you small. You shrink your world to feel safe, cut people off, choose toxic familiarity over real connection, numb out with substances, sex, work, anything that drowns the noise. The child runs wild—tantrums last days, impulses rule, self-discipline collapses. You live on autopilot, chasing external fixes that never fill the hole, trapped in a prison of caution and self-hate, convinced freedom is for other people.

The Fierce Freedom on the Other Side
When you finally sit with the fear, rage, and grief—not once, but again and again—you start to rewire. The child learns he’s not in danger now. You grow boundaries, tolerate discomfort, choose consciously instead of reacting. Self-hate quiets. Space opens inside. Joy becomes possible, not effortless, but real. You stop abandoning yourself. Discipline arrives—not harsh punishment, but firm adult guidance that says, “You get your feelings, but you don’t run the show.” Wholeness replaces fragmentation.

Three Important Takeaways

• The inner child isn’t a victim to pamper forever; it’s an emotionally arrested part that needs both fierce love and firm discipline to grow up.
• Avoiding the original terror only lets it control you longer—freedom comes from repeatedly feeling and re-parenting what was frozen.
• Real safety and connection become possible only after you stop outsourcing protection to toxic people, substances, or isolation and start showing up as the adult for that scared kid.

Conclusion
The lake fire burned away the last excuse. You stared into the flames and finally spoke the boundary the child never heard: enough. No more endless loops of terror and shame. You claimed the wheel—not out of anger at the kid, but out of cold, unshakable refusal to let the past dictate one more sunrise. That single sentence—“This is not about you and the trauma anymore”—drew a line in ash. Walk it. The ground is still hot, but it’s yours now.