One

The Walking Wounded

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloud cover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I’m already under and living within the ocean.

—RUMI

Have you ever noticed how some people seem like they have it all together and are good at just being themselves, and others are fragmented and scattered and have the same dramas in their life over and over?

Maybe you are one of those folks who don’t understand why you keep attracting people who don’t treat you very well. Or perhaps you attract people who say they are your friends but who just bring more drama into your life. What is most likely happening is that the wounded part of you is unconsciously choosing other hurt people with whom to be in relationship. Hurt people find other hurt people.

This wounding comes about innocently enough through our growing-up experiences, when we were ignored, rejected, or dismissed. For some, it comes about in dramatic ways through abuse, neglect, or other traumas. Along the way, we were doing the best we could with the tools we had at the time. However we take on this wounding, it settles deep within us, taking up emotional space and impacting how we feel about ourselves in relationship to the rest of the world.

Not everyone is affected by a traumatic event or experience in the same way. For some people a hurtful experience rolls off the back, but for others the hurt goes deep into the core. We each have our own resilience in how we process, cope, and survive beyond emotional wounding and trauma, and sometimes the trauma or wounding stays with us, tucked away as we go about our lives. We push this wounding down deep inside as we try to ignore it, because it is so painful to remember and feel again.

When we don’t acknowledge the pain and the wounding, they start to come out in distorted ways, attempting to be acknowledged so we will deal with them. Emotions are internal messengers trying to get our attention. Most people just push the signals down or ignore them altogether.

You may have gotten used to feeling the wounding you carry and have become a member of the Walking Wounded. You may think, I know this happened to me, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t want to remember it anymore. But the pain is going to stay with you, trying to find a way to get you to acknowledge it. It is not going anywhere until you deal with it. It is going to keep showing up, usually indirectly, throwing you off course, off balance, and contributing to depression and anxiety.

I have seen people with all sorts of wounded and traumatic histories. Many had deeply hurtful things done to them, including mental, physical, and sexual trauma wounding, often by close family members. This kind of traumatic event is often extremely difficult to think about, much less explore deeply. Most people try their hardest to forget or push away such trauma. I am often the only person they ever tell about what happened to them. The emotions surrounding these experiences need special handling and care.

If you suffered such a trauma as a child, here are some things to know:

If you feel damaged and broken from what you experienced, know there is a part of you that is intact and whole. It is the part of you that they didn’t get to, your authentic part. It is the part of you that holds the key to your healing.

If I don’t invest in me, no one else will.

When I was a young adult I would unconsciously pick narcissistic, wounded people as friends. I didn’t know it at the time, but I eventually learned that this was a result of my wounded little boy part that instinctively knew how to interact with someone who needed attention and validation, and for me to promote them and put myself down at the same time. I didn’t have to think of what to do or how to interact with this type of person because I already understood them—but I barely knew myself.

I came from an alcoholic household. The early childhood wounding caused by my home environment helped me to develop my codependent skill set, the tools I used to monitor and adapt myself to others who I thought needed me to do for them rather than just me being myself for them. In my healing journey I learned how to hold that pain, examine it, and work through some complicated feelings so that I could rejoin with my authentic self. I learned that I could just be myself and that I did not have to do anything for anyone else to have value. Using the HEAL process (healing and embracing an authentic life), I was able to heal that wounding so that I could integrate all of my fragmented parts and become a whole adult, surrounded by people who respect and love me. I now do the same for those whom I see professionally.

I often use my own story as a way to help those I am working with know they are not alone. As I tell my story, my patients hear the pain I went through and the process of self-awareness I came upon through my own therapy work. I often receive thanks after telling my story, because my experience helps the person know that someone else went through something similar and that they are not alone. Witnessing another’s work is a great healing tool. We don’t feel alone, we feel connected, and we grow. (You will read more of my story in chapter 3.)

Our pain is looking for acknowledgement.

Once we connect to our wounding, a doorway for healing opens.

I believe most people walk around with a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I don’t mean to diminish a full PTSD diagnosis or those who suffer from it, but rather to put into context that we have all experienced events that we can’t shake off or that we keep replaying in our heads.

Your emotional pain is relative to you, meaning that it is most relevant only to you. Someone else may look at your story and say, “Oh, that’s nothing. I had it a lot worse.” Maybe they did, but this is not some sort of contest for the winner of the “Most Dramatic Childhood Trauma” award. We all carry harmful wounding, and this is your opportunity to honor and validate your feelings and finally heal.

Recycled Pain

We all carry what I call recycled pain, the wounding that keeps showing up when something triggers an old hurt. You have deeply buried this familiar part of yourself hoping to just forget it, even as you feel like you can’t escape it at times.

The following is an example of a series of events that illustrates this recycled pain. This is how these wounded illusions become a part of you and how you become numb to them.

An event happens in childhood that startles or confuses you. It is a new experience, and you don’t know what to make of it. You only know you don’t like the experience and the resulting feeling.

An emotional part of you feels hurt and in pain. It stores the experience as something that doesn’t feel good, or in severe cases, as a trauma. This is the initial core wounding.

The core wounding, the emotional pain, gets frozen in time and at the age you were when the significant emotional event happened. (Let’s say age five for this example.)

When you get older, the younger hurt part that is frozen and is not maturing with the rest of you gets triggered by events similar to the one that happened when you were five. This part reacts as though the original bad experience is happening all over again. The pain is recycling.

This part of you goes into action and either gets defensive and protective or shuts down, becoming quiet and invisible.

You have now developed a wounded emotional response tool to these specific situations. When they arise again, you automatically employ this impulsive reaction, your tool, to the trigger.

Your wounded five-year-old is always standing by, feeling lost and hypervigilant that something bad may happen again.

Asan adult, your five-year-old that carries this wounded emotional response tool steps in front of your responsible adult self when triggered. This part makes decisions and reacts emotionally as a five-year-old would, using a five-year-old child’s logic, words, and expressions. This is the origin of the expression, “You’re acting like a child!”

Your responsible adult self, transfixed by this wounded illusion, is in the background watching everything, feeling helpless as the situation unfolds. The five-year-old self is strongly committed to protecting all parts of you and doesn’t want the bad thing to happen again.

After the drama unfolds and completes, your wounded five-year-old goes dormant and vigilant again, waiting for the trigger to reappear.

Your responsible adult self is dazed and confused; what just happened? Why did I do that?

You begin the process of either cleaning up or ignoring what just happened, and try to move on, oblivious to the toxic recycled pain that plays out every time this wounded part gets triggered.

Dealing with this recycled pain is exhausting. Think about how many times you reenact this wounded child drama; perhaps it is multiple times each day. If this recycled pain is not healed, it will keep getting triggered, showing up, and repeating. I believe that this is a way the subconscious is trying to heal the wounding. The body, mind, and spirit are not meant to hold on to this heavy emotional weight.

How often are you in these cycles of pain? What examples are coming up in your mind regarding how this recycled pain shows up in your life? These are reactions that feel out of control or exaggerated.

Repeating Poor Choices

Another way this wounding recycles is through repeating poor choices. You probably know friends or family members who keep dating or even marrying the same type of person over and over, someone who isn’t a great match for them or is not a good person. You are puzzled why someone would consciously bring someone into their life who was just like the last person they were with. You can see this, so why can’t they? Perhaps you even do this yourself.

Without consciously realizing it, we often bring people into our lives in an attempt to play out these childhood wounded dramas, and the person we bring into our life as our partner often has a type of wounding that we intimately understand from our childhood. This is the root of the pattern of marrying our mother or father. We are unconsciously trying to heal this part.

Do you keep dating or marrying the same type of person? Do you keep choosing toxic people or emotional vampires as friends? Do you have the same type of reaction to an event or experience, such as lashing out and yelling or withdrawing? If this reaction is noticeable and stands out, you might later realize that you were overreacting. You may wonder why you had such a big reaction when the event itself was not a big deal. This is your wounding coming out. It happens because something inside is triggered and sets off the deep emotional wounding-recycled pain pattern. The unresolved part of you gets triggered and then makes decisions about how to react to the situation. This wounded part is tied to the original significant emotional event, and you keep repeating poor choices based on this deeply buried emotional wounding. This wounded part is not integrated with your mature, responsible adult self; it is separated out from the other parts.

Impulsive Reactions

Martin and Laura, a married couple, came to see me. Martin was prone to having big reactions to things that make him nervous. When he was triggered, he would impulsively send texts to people saying things like, I can’t keep on doing this and I can’t take it anymore. Understandably, friends and family who received one of these texts would become concerned about his welfare.

Laura would step in, try to make things better, and reason with him. But Martin was caught in an emotional loop, thinking and feeling that everything he was doing was bad and was not going to get better. With his lack of perspective, he was approaching the situation emotionally, but Laura was looking at it logically. They were crossing over each other, unable to hear the other.

I created a metaphor for Laura to help her understand Martin’s behavior. I explained that when Martin was emotionally acting out, he was not using the language of a mature adult but the words and reactions of a much younger part of him that was overwhelmed. He was like an upset five-year-old little boy who wants someone to hear him and see his distress. Martin’s wounded inner child wanted his feelings acknowledged. He did not want Laura to try to intellectually reason with him.

Laura immediately understood. This explanation helped her to understand Martin’s reactions, and she was able to be more patient. Of course, Martin is an adult man with a job, mortgage, and family. He is not a young child, but there was a part of him that was stuck at a much younger time in his emotional development. When this wounded part of him got triggered by things that were overwhelming, this part thought that what happened at that young age was happening again. It would step in front of his adult self and start impulsively reacting.

Through his healing work with his wounded little boy self, Martin now finds it harder to have these big reactions because he understands the dynamic of the wounding he carries. Laura is no longer responding to him by trying to explain away or intellectualize his experience; she is attentive to his emotions and acknowledges what he feels. Martin is learning how to relate to this wounded part and how to express his feelings in a more regulated way, and Laura is learning how to listen to him in a new way.

Those who can’t embrace their shadow can’t embrace their light.

It’s all, or it’s nothing at all.

—JEFF BROWN

Impulsive reactions are the tools we use when we react to a situation from our wounded part, when we react impulsively instead of respond maturely. They become our go-to reactions to the events we experience in life. We developed these impulsive reactions over time as children and young adults, and they became part of our collection of wounded emotional response tools to use as needed. We bring these impulsive reactions with us through the teenage and young adult years and into our mature adult lives. We unconsciously use these impulsive tools, unaware of how doing so reinforces our recycled pain dramas.

Your impulsive reaction tools all work together to support the wounded narrative of your lost inner child.

As adults, we respond to situations based on our collective experiences from birth. We develop these responses based on behaviors that were modeled by the adults in our lives or by developing responses on our own. We carry these emotional response tools with us wherever we go. Some of these tools help us to create better relationships, and some we use damage or destroy relationships.

There are two types of emotional response tools, functional responses and impulsive reactions (also referred to as wounded emotional response tools), and they are all jumbled together in our emotional response toolbox. Sometimes using an impulsive reaction tool, such as yelling or blaming, is easier because when we are deeply upset, it is easier and quicker to grab the tool of lashing out in anger rather than maturely and responsibly talking about what is happening. At other times, finding functional response tools, such as being respectful and reasonable, is easy if we take our time. We choose this type of tool when we can take a deep breath and become grounded and clear, because we have learned that when we use a wounded impulsive reaction we don’t always get a good outcome.

To recap, our mature, functional responses are those we use when we feel secure and responsible. We use our impulsive reactions, which come from a place of hurt and pain, when we are not grounded and feel the need to be defensive.

We know our impulsive reactions because we have had them for a long time, and they have served us. They may not serve us well once we are adults, but they certainly helped out when we were younger. Our impulsive reaction tools helped us navigate what life gave us. They helped us in moments when there was chaos in the house or when something bad was happening. They were our wounded adapted responses to situations that felt out of our control. We used them to gain a sense of control within ourselves, even if it was just a self-made illusion. Using these reactions helped us feel better. We felt like we were making choices instead of having someone else make choices for us or project their own wounding onto us. We did not realize that we were creating a toolbox of sophisticated emotional response tools so that we could deal with what was a confusing, overwhelming world.

These tools worked for us then, but they do not often work for us today. Still, we unconsciously carry them with us and use them in our adult relationships because they are what we know.

Exercise: Your Impulsive Reactions

Do you know what your impulsive reactions are? In this exercise you will explore some of the wounded emotional response tools you use as an adult but were crafted in childhood.

The following is a list of common impulsive reactions that are developed in childhood and then carried into adulthood. These are the impulsive reactions we have to a trigger that brings our wounding to the foreground. In your notebook, write down the ones from the list you think you learned as a child or that you have used in your adult life. On your list, circle the ones you still use as an adult. As you read over the list, gently observe. Avoid condemning or harshly judging yourself.

These are just some of the wounded emotional response tools you may have developed as coping skills while dealing with chaotic, uncertain, and disrupted households when you were young. They are the impulsive reactions you may use when you later sit back and say to yourself, Why did I do that?

(If you feel overwhelmed by reading over the list in this exercise, take a deep breath. As you go through this process you will gain clarity as to why you do these things, and learn ways to heal this wounding.)

Look within to see what other wounded tools you use that aren’t listed here. Make a note of what you find, as this insight will give you clues to help you on your healing journey. You may also want to look back over your list and begin to connect with how, when, where, and why you developed these wounded emotional responses. (Save your answers from this exercise to use again in chapter 5. The impulsive reactions you identify now will show up throughout your work within the HEAL process.)

Some of these wounded tools are connected to early childhood development (e.g., yelling, raging, shutting down), while others are expressions of a teenager or young adult (e.g., drugs, alcohol, self-harm). You may have used these wounded emotional response tools because they made you think and feel that you were grown up and in control.

The various tools you put into your toolbox are a reflection of your emotional development growing up. Some of these tools were useful to you at one point, but now they are working against you. As you progress through the HEAL process, you will be transforming these reactions that no longer work for you into functional responses that are appropriate for your life today.

How Wounding Shows Up

There are many ways that our childhood woundings can show up in our adult lives. As you found in the previous exercise, these behaviors vary widely, from using sex and gambling as avoidance techniques to yelling and being sarcastic or withdrawing and becoming invisible. For example, you may have discovered that you act out by overspending, overdrinking, using pornography to escape a feeling, or getting into arguments with others. This behavior comes from the part of you that carries the wounding; it is trying to be acknowledged. Your core wounding, your lost inner child, is indirectly asking to be healed so that all of you can move on and become fully integrated.

These types of impulsive behaviors are the aspects of your wounding that never emotionally grew up with the rest of you. They are the emotionally frozen parts of you that keep repeating the patterns. You are an adult today, with adult responsibilities and many types of relationships, but the minute you hear, see, feel, or are otherwise emotionally triggered by something in your outside world, that dormant wounding awakens, causing you to exhibit, express, and interact as a much younger version of yourself. And just like a child, you may want to throw tantrums, run away, yell at the top of your lungs, break something, or sit in a puddle and cry.

Our woundings are an inconvenient truth that we wish would just go away.

Let’s look at how these inner woundings become triggered. Suppose that a family member was of the opinion that you were stupid when you were little. They mentioned it repeatedly, and others said something similar. You started to feel ashamed about yourself. You hid that part of you they didn’t like. You didn’t talk about it, denied it, and pushed it away, even though you knew at some level that it wasn’t true.

Over time you began to believe that this part of you was bad and was therefore less-than or inferior. Every time someone brought it up, you would start to feel warm, uncomfortable, embarrassed, and squirmy. You wanted to hide or become invisible. That emotional wounding was becoming conditioned to be activated by external triggers.

Many physical issues can be related to early woundings, too. For example, I internalized many of my early childhood wounding experiences. I took in the turmoil in my family, which then lived in my gut. As a result, I had all sorts of intestinal distress as a child. My tummy aches were caused by harboring all of the agitated feelings that were going on in the household. I absorbed the emotional chaos because I was an empathic little boy, and I didn’t know what to do with the intensity around me. I held my breath and pushed it down, and this manifested as an anxious feeling in my gut that I didn’t know what to do with or how to name.

I tried to tell my mom what was going on, but I was literally at a loss for words. I was using the words and understanding of a young child. How could I have explained the swirling kaleidoscope of emotions that I was absorbing and that were overwhelming me? I later learned that I was also trying to protect my mom from my feelings. I didn’t want her to feel bad, so I didn’t tell her that I didn’t like my parents yelling. I thought that she would be disappointed in me, so I just kept on getting tummy aches, swallowing my feelings, and internalizing the intense emotional energy of the household. I was protecting her, but I was also trying to protect myself.

A Word about Parents

I want to take a moment to address feelings about parents. These feelings can be highly complex, but it is important to remember that your parents or guardians, like mine, did the best they knew how. It may be tempting to blame them, or maybe you already blame them, but I would like for you to suspend that blame and see your parents in a soft gaze of acknowledgment for their efforts.

This is not about denial but about looking at your situation objectively instead of getting lost in the ego habits of blaming, shaming, and finger-pointing. Most of us have already done enough of that, either toward others or toward ourselves. This is about a respectful regard for the human experience, knowing that we all have our struggles and triumphs and that most of us have many unresolved woundings, including our parents.

I was fortunate to come from a household where I knew and felt in my heart that my mom and dad loved me unconditionally. Out of all the love, kindness, and pride they instilled in me, their unconditional love was and is a tremendous gift. It is my greatest treasure.

We have to learn how to give to ourselves as adults what we didn’t receive in childhood.

I know that many people did not receive the gift of unconditional love as a child. I know that parents can be less-than-stellar examples of love, but I do believe that they all do their best. I know my parents were doing their best; I also know that I needed more at times than what they could give me. The idea of this healing process is that you know what happened in the past, but now you have an opportunity to create what your inner child needs today.

Our Wounding Stories

Perhaps you resonate with what I described about my childhood but still insist that your childhood was fine. This is normal, and in fact, when I first meet with new patients, most of them tell me they had a fairly normal childhood and that nothing major happened. They developed this coping skill to help them feel better about some of the events and experiences that did happen in their childhood family.

Our core wounding experiences developed over the course of our formative years, from birth to age twenty, and created lifelong dysfunctional patterns in how we look at and interact with ourselves and others. These woundings created our wounding story, the narrative we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are like, and what we deserve. We start to believe these half-truths and untruths about ourselves. We merge our sense of self with those things we experienced. Our unhealed core wounding is the root of the emotional patterns that keep showing up in our lives.

We think, I was abused, neglected, hurt, and rejected, and therefore I am a bad person and not worthy of much in my life. If we don’t have strong boundaries, we give others the power to create our sense of self-worth and identity, foregoing any sense of self and essentially abandoning ourselves. We begin to carry other people’s woundings, their pain, and their projections as ideas of who we are or should be. We push down and bury our authentic selves in the process, giving up any sense of self-worth, self-love, self-trust, and self-respect.

We learn to hate ourselves a hundred times more than someone else hates us.

As we grow up, we can be tempted to wrap our good and bad memories into a Hallmark movie moment, so we normalize all the bad stuff that happened by telling ourselves that “everybody” got that kind of treatment growing up. As adults, we intellectualize these experiences to rationalize and ignore our wounding. It is our intellectual attempt to try to move on and minimize what happened to us, but that core wounding is still sitting there ready to react until we deal with it.

When people tell me about their “fairly normal” childhood with no big issues, I believe them. However, I also know they have been, say, married three times and are unhappy. What they say about their life experiences and what they tell me on the surface about their childhood don’t add up. They have normalized what happened to them. They are unconscious to the fact that hurtful things happened to them as children that are now contributing to their unhappiness and failed relationships. They have been telling themselves this story so they don’t feel so bad or ashamed, and they promote it to others. They are not lying; rather, they are minimizing what happened and do not understand the long-term effects of those events and the wounding they carry. They are looking at what happened in their childhood using adult rationalization.

We develop this “emotional amnesia” to some of our harsher realities because we instinctively know the deep pain that lies beneath the surface. For most of us, all it takes is some scratching at the surface to reveal the wounded pain that is waiting to be acknowledged. The internalized shame we carry gets wrapped around these wounded memories and contributes to how we feel about ourselves.

As we heal, our minds open up space for old memories to resurface.

It is natural for us to want to deny our emotional wounding, but the more we push it away, the louder and more insistent it will become until it finds a way out. When it does come out, it often does so indirectly, affecting our choices, our lives, and our sense of self-worth.

As children, we take in the words, judgments, and criticisms of others, essentially taking on their projected shame. We unconsciously say to ourselves, I love this person, or I respect them and want them to like me. I must not be thinking the right way about myself, so I’m going to start thinking and feeling this way about myself because that’s how they see me. This is how we start to believe we are ugly, bad, wrong, stupid, ignorant, and so on. When we accept, incorporate, and carry this projected view of ourselves it becomes real to us, and we lose our connection to our authentic self.

These ideas of ourselves don’t always come from outside of us, however. We can make up stories about ourselves—how we need to be better, or do this faster, or simply by comparing ourselves to someone else. Regardless of where it originated, what began as an innocent comment someone made or an idea that we have of ourselves can turn into a wounded, distorted self-concept. We accept this false perception and incorporate it into our wounding profile and narrative. This distortion stays with us until we begin to heal and neutralize this negative self-talk.

These are just a few examples of how we pick up and develop triggers that activate old woundings. There is a way out of this maze, though, by learning the right tools to use to do this work.

If we have to chase love, it isn’t love.

Love meets us halfway.

—JEFF BROWN

Story: Steven, an Emotionally Abandoned Teenage Boy

Steven is a thirty-year-old blue-collar man. He wanted to stay with his girlfriend, but she kept pushing him away and did not treat him very well. He persisted, and like most people who really want something, he went out of his way to try to make the relationship work. He didn’t want to give up on her or the relationship, so he kept changing and adapting himself to who she wanted him to be so she wouldn’t be upset. He kept giving away his power, over-compensating and compromising himself without recognizing what he was doing.

Steven’s relationship was unsteady, like a three-wheeled wagon. Sometimes the wagon is upright, carrying its cargo and moving along. But then it tips over, spilling everything it is holding and scraping bottom. Steven’s desire for the relationship to work was preventing him from seeing that it was not working. He continued to compensate by denying himself and ignoring his needs. He saw only the smooth movement of his relationship wagon, which was rare, and ignored all the times the wagon dumped over and spilled everything, creating a mess that took a while to put back together.

Much of the therapy process is teaching introspection. We have a lot of information, but most of the time we are not still enough to listen to ourselves. Sometimes we know that a relationship or a situation is not good for us, but we stay in denial, hoping it will change. Steven kept distracting himself with what he wanted the relationship to be instead of what the reality was.

When I asked why he thought he kept pursuing her, what it was inside of him that wouldn’t give up, he said he just wanted the relationship so much and would do whatever it took. Then he said, “She yelled at me in front of a group of people the other day, but I guess I deserved it.” He was ignoring the telltale signs of the abusive nature of the relationship, of being shamed, pushed away, and treated badly.

Steven couldn’t see this relationship from a healed place. His responsible adult self and his wounded self were receiving all of the incoming messages, but his emotionally wounded part interpreted that he deserved this treatment—and this part was loud. He had closed himself off to what his authentic self was feeling and instead gave power to the illusion. All he knew was that when he wasn’t with her he felt depressed and uncertain, so he held on tight and stayed with her to avoid feeling lonely and abandoned.

When we first started working together, he said that nothing major had happened in his life. He then went on to say that as a young boy he had been very close to his aunt, with whom he had shared many adventures and confidences. When he was fourteen, he started wanting to do other things instead of hanging out with her. He still wanted to do things with her, but his life had rapidly expanded, as he was a freshman in high school and was noticing girls. His aunt took offense to this change for some reason and abruptly dropped him from her life. She no longer checked in on him or asked him to do things, and she ignored him at family functions. Steven was devastated. He was confused, hurt, and deeply missed his relationship with his aunt. He took the hint and didn’t try to connect anymore, but the hurt stayed with him.

Steven told me that a part of him died after this rejection, and he blamed himself. When he began to date girls he was very clingy, doing whatever they wanted and not wanting to disappoint them—just as he was doing with his current girlfriend. He didn’t want them to leave him like his aunt had left him. His wounded part didn’t want to have that feeling again.

Steven was experiencing emotional kickback from his aunt’s rejection. A part of him was frozen in time at age fourteen, when his aunt emotionally left him, and this emotional abandonment had stayed with him. He had internalized the idea that he had done something wrong to create the shift in their relationship and that he was the problem.

As an adult, Steven knew only that he had lost a significant relationship once, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again. As a result, he could not let go of this toxic relationship. His fourteen-year-old wounded part was holding on, desperately trying to keep this woman with him. He couldn’t be fully present in the relationship because his teenage wounded self was the one in the relationship, not the grown man.

I guided Steven to write a timeline of his life during the years from birth to age twenty that described the events and emotions he remembered. (You will write your own timeline of events in chapter 5.) He quickly saw the pattern he was following from his early years. He saw that he was trying to recreate the relationship he had with his aunt. He desperately missed the closeness, the validation, and the fun and adventure he had had with his aunt, and he was trying to make the relationship with his girlfriend work to fit his narrative instead of seeing reality for what it was. This realization allowed him to start breaking the pattern.

Steven could see that he was holding on tight to a relationship that wasn’t good for him so that he could avoid feeling abandoned and alone again. He thought his only choices were to either be in a bad relationship or be lonely and rejected. Once his adult self saw the cycle he was in, he felt sad and then angry at himself. He realized how much time he had wasted by dating someone who was interested only in playing out her wounding in this dysfunctional dynamic.

He began to set boundaries by becoming clear about what was OK and not OK for his girlfriend—or anyone, for that matter—to say to him. For example, it was not OK for anyone to talk down to him, ignore him, or be mean to him. It was OK for someone to respect him, validate him, and be a consistent friend.

During our time working together, Steven’s abusive girlfriend dumped him, saying he wasn’t the man she thought he was or the man she needed. She continued her own cycle of crash-and-burn, projecting all of her pain onto him. Now, however, he had some boundaries in his emotional response toolbox. He used these boundaries to protect himself emotionally and to tell her how he felt hurt by her comments and actions.

Through the process, Steven’s fourteen-year-old wounded self began to heal. This part integrated with his responsible adult self, who was now setting the boundaries. His teenage self wasn’t freaking out over the girlfriend having left because all parts of him now understood that she was toxic for him. He later realized how much of his own power he had given away in order to get her back, and he saw how he would lose himself in the process.

At the beginning of our work together, Steven was so focused on the events that were happening in the moment that he couldn’t see how his early emotional wounding was getting in the way. His fourteen-year-old self was so frantic and desperate to keep her that he sacrificed himself. Now, all parts of him know how to stand up for himself, and he is learning how to not give away precious parts of himself in relationships.

The Inner Child

Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood.

—ALICE MILLER

Most of us have a part within that feels younger and more immature, reactive, and out of control. We can think of this part as our lost inner child, that part of us that carries our emotional pain. Simply put, your lost inner child carries the wounded emotions and impulsive reactions that your adult self then acts out when old issues are triggered.

Sometimes the childhood wounded self overshadows the other parts of the personality. This part that has learned to be protective and defensive and can be loud and abrasive. It never wants anything bad to happen ever again; it is hurt and scared and frozen in place, not growing or maturing. The wounded part lives in a state of fear rather than a state of trust, and it begins to dominate the emotional landscape. Based in fear, the wounded self lashes out at anyone who tries to help, even those who are kind. This part defensively guards the wounding, believing that others are a threat.

Because this part of the personality is often so developed and large and loud, it is useful to look at how a person was before this wounding happened and the conditions within the family. For example, by his own description Steven had a relatively good childhood until his mid-teens, so we looked at how he was before then and encouraged and gave this part a voice. He was able to connect with this strong, authentic voice within to help him form boundaries as an adult.

If you are beginning to see that your wounded part is loud and dominant inside of you, try to sit in stillness with this part. In your quiet moments, see if you can ask this part to share some wisdom with you. Your inner child may be angry, smiling, happy, sorrowful, hurt, or self-pitying. It is simply asking for a voice and to be acknowledged for the deep wounding it carries for you.

In my own personal work, I learned that I was ten years old when I experienced a key wounding event. Other events had happened before and after, but ten was the age at which my emotions became frozen and held the wounding in place. I was scared and confused, and did not understand why my parents argued. I would try to be the peacemaker and attempt to control my parents so that the chaos I experienced in the household and what I felt inside would not be so overwhelming.

I believed, as most children believe, that I was powerful, that I could be the hero and influence my parents. I believed, through a child’s magical thinking, that if I became perfect, did things that were asked of me, and never caused my parents to be mad at me, then they would not argue and my world would feel safe. But no matter how good I was, I was unable to get my parents to be loving to each other all of the time. I couldn’t change my parents or their behaviors, but the belief that I needed to be perfect stayed with me. This wounding carried through to my teenage years and into adulthood.

Things that happened to us when we were children tend to have a bigger impact on us than events that happen to us as adults. When we were children our worlds were smaller, we didn’t have much power or control, and our brains were not fully developed, so we perceived many experiences as highly important. As we grew up our world expanded, and because of this larger world view, we started to think that what happened to us in childhood was not a big deal.

When we look back at our childhood from the vantage point of adult reasoning, we think we should just get over whatever happened. We minimize our childhood feelings and experiences and tell ourselves that everybody’s household was “like that” at the time. While this may be true, we are also looking back from the lens of an adult. We don’t want to remember the bad things that happened, but they are there, waiting to be explored. The lost inner child has recorded all of these events, and they are as emotionally real today as they were then. A throwaway comment from an adult can become a defining moment for a child’s sense of self.

The HEAL process will help you directly access these wounded parts in a safe, gentle, and loving way so that you can start to integrate your wounded child and become a whole, emotionally healthy, mature adult.