Do you carry around a beaten child within you? Do you find yourself looking out at the big bad world around you from the internal vantage point of a frightened, injured child who cannot trust anyone, who cowers in the corner of his or her own dark inner corner? You can be a large, strong looking man or woman on the outside and carry a wary, wounded, weak-feeling child bound up in a ball of too much vulnerability to deal with on the inside. This beaten child within you characterizes the traumatized portion or department of your core-identity. Until you entirely recover from this static condition of emotional injury, you live more or less on the defensive, expecting to be entirely consumed by the monstrous core area of weakness, and always partially consumed by it.
Your expectation of violent emotional assault remains with you because over and over again in childhood you found the emotional rug pulled out from under you just as you felt steady on your feet upon it. No matter how many times you trusted with an open heart, you found that trust was nothing but a set-up, to soften you up to receive another blow to shatter it. You were conditioned to anticipate the heart-stab of emotional betrayal at a core level, because in your early childhood all there was of you was your core.
When you left the home environment in which your emotional abuse took place, you found to your shock that the pattern continually repeated itself. Again and again you found the same cycle recurring: you open your heart, your emotional core is exposed, you receive betrayal that causes your emotional disassembly to spill out all over you, saturating your brain to the point of obliterating your ability to see your way. You return to being a lost child in the emotional brain fog of your original wounding and feel like a helpless, dependent, powerless blob of too much feeling. God itself seems to be your abuser and the universe as a whole becomes your hostile home environment.
Our recovery begins as we do for ourselves what was not done unto us during the period of original wounding. We pay attention to the shattered core of our internal condition. We recognize what we are going through. We do not ignore our own pain. We practice self-empathy. We begin to care for the beaten child that has been hiding within.
To care for the beaten child within takes great patience and discipline. We must stop what we are doing to attend to his/her needs. The first and foremost of those needs is to compassionately sit with the injured child within, to feel his/her misery and fear, to embrace his/her devastating feelings of helplessness, dependency and powerlessness. Many of us just don’t want to take the time to do this. We believe we need to attend to more adult responsibilities. Then we lack the patience to recognize and attend to the emotional injuries carried within by others, including by our own precious children. Beyond this, our rejection of the beaten child within us grooms us into being like our childhood injurers toward others, including toward our own children.
This is really what happened to us. Those who were able to produce the beaten child within us were themselves rejecting their own beaten inner child, or they could not inflict such pain upon us particularly during the most open and vulnerable period of our life.
By resisting the needs of our own beaten inner child we ensure that we ignore the core emotional needs of others. So, by embracing and loving and nurturing and healing the beaten child within us we not only liberate ourselves to trust and freedom and stable inner fortitude or grit. We also protect all of the others we would otherwise injure or re-injure.
The solution to what we can describe as The Emotional Syndrome of the Beaten Child – which is what we have been exploring here - comes down to forming a deeply loving, tender relationship with our core hurt self. Your beaten child within expresses to you what he / she needs to feel safe, cared about, empowered and joyful. But you must pay deep and close and sensitive attention within to receive the message. As we slow down and practice being more aware of how we feel in the present moment we begin to open the communication channel between our surface awareness and the core of childhood conditioning deep within. We must feel our profound sense of weakness and overwhelming vulnerability, without resistance. We must ask that emotionally battered, frightened, pessimistic, shrinking-from-reality child, “What do you need from me to feel better?”
We need to make attending to our core emotional needs our top priority, trusting that all other needs can and will be met as we meet this one. To ignore the core emotional need is like starving yourself to death as you focus on finding cosmetics to conceal the problem, as if that can serve as the solution. We need to slow down, even stop for as long as necessary, trusting that the universe will support us in this necessary self-care process, when we feel that bruised and emotionally battered child within rising into our awareness. We need to hear and attend to that child’s cries.
This process requires deep, skillful support.
In my phone-coaching and speaking I guide those who carry a core of bruised emotion into healing and recovery for a richer, fuller life. I also guide parents in ways of guiding and interacting with their children to avoid causing core emotional injury or trauma. See www.lovethemethod.com,www.themethodforparenting.comand www.exit abuse.com for more information.
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