The Lost Inner Child

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1961. Growing up in the upper South in the 1960s was a wonderful time filled with long, hot summers, when I would escape into nature and come home with my pockets filled with rocks and sometimes frogs. It was the jet age, with fins on cars and rocket shapes and orbital patterns on things that had nothing to do with space exploration. It was a time of hope and optimism, but there was also a lot of racial unrest and protests. The nightly news, in black and white, would tell of the twisted carnage of the Vietnam War as I sat on the braided rug and watched in horror, confusion, and sadness. I clearly remember my dad asking me, when I was about five or six, if I would go off and fight in the war. This was an absurd question to ask a child, but with absolute certainty I said no, which, in retrospect, was the first time in my childhood that I made a conscious firm boundary statement.

I came from a large, extended family and was close to many of my relatives. I had some cousins who I rarely saw, though, so I was not always clear about which brown-haired kid was from what part of the family, much less what their names were. I learned that there was a Southern order of things, and proper manners and courtesies. There was a hierarchy of those who aspired to be well-to-do and the majority, who were just making do.

I was fortunate to grow up within a loving, intact family, with my mother at home caring for me and my younger sister. My father diligently worked hard at the same company for more than forty years, providing a comfortable lifestyle that put us solidly in the middle class. When I started high school, my mother returned to work at the company she had worked for before she married my father. Both my parents now worked for blue-chip companies, where they had a sense of place, connection, paternity, and longevity.

My parents created an environment in which I knew, in the deepest part of myself, that they loved me and would care for me. This solid foundation established a firm sense of unconditional love and resilience in me. They did their best raising my younger sister and me, even as their lives became more complex. The increasing pressure, though, led to yelling and my father’s alcohol abuse, and my mother’s physical illnesses created emotional ups and downs of uncertainty. My mother was the chief enabler, dancing to my dad’s poorly chosen outbursts of emotions.

In this dynamic, I learned the skills of the codependent, a category of behaviors, or skills as I call them, used to adapt to stressful or dysfunctional situations. The codependent skills I learned during this time were the first wounded tools I put into my toolbox. These emotional response tools were immensely helpful to me early on as I tried to figure out how to emotionally navigate my family. I was also in the process of developing a false self, a self apart from my authentic self. I was learning how to deny my own needs and push down my feelings. Beginning at around the age of six, in order to help my mom and dad and to relieve their stress so they wouldn’t argue, my little boy self thought, I’ll just do everything they ask of me perfectly, and then they won’t yell and argue and my dad won’t drink and rage.

This is a classic case of the child of an alcoholic taking on responsibility for the parents’ behaviors. I believed I could control my parents’ situation by changing myself. I was the oldest child and took on all the qualities of the firstborn in a family where alcohol is the main igniter of high emotion. I learned to be frightened of angry people, beginning with my dad; I sought out approval from others by overcompensating, primarily from my mom; and I developed an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the entire household. I felt all of the high emotion in the house intensely. I didn’t know what to do with these feelings, so I internalized them. The house was filled at times with electric tension, flashes of quick anger that manifested within me as worrisome thoughts and sadness. Then, confusingly, the polar opposite would happen, and we would experience moments of contentment and even joy.

My sister was born when I was seven. I was so used to being an only child that I was confused and hurt when she came along, but she eventually helped me not feel so alone. There were two of us now, and I became protective of her.

In my early years, from age six to eleven or so, I would become so overwhelmed that I would go to my room and cry face down on the bed. I tried hard to conceal my emotional outbursts because I thought that I shouldn’t display emotion. After all, I was focused on my parents’ emotions, and I didn’t want them to be upset with me. I was a very confused little boy. My mom, and sometimes my dad, would come into my room, sit on the edge of my bed, and gently ask me what was wrong. I could hear and feel their sincerity and concern, but they did not know what to do to make me feel better.

Their outreach was comforting, but I wasn’t able to articulate the feelings I was feeling, although I do remember saying to my mom that I wished she wouldn’t argue with my dad. Their yelling frightened me to my core, and I felt that the entire house was going to explode with the intensity of their arguments—or was it the intensity of the feelings I had inside? They saw that I was in distress, but they couldn’t see their part in my confusion and pain. They couldn’t see the cycle of everything being fine, and then changing as my dad, feeling anxious, drank a beer with a chaser and my mom tightening her lips in anticipation of a bumpy night. There I was, right with them, holding my breath and feeling my stomach clench.

I was using a number of wounded emotional response tools in order to cope, including being a caretaker, peace-maker, enabler, and conflict avoider. I felt needless and would isolate, become emotionally withdrawn, and try to be invisible. I practiced reading others, tried to control the situation, compartmentalized my emotion, and internalized that emotion into intestinal distress. Using the wounded tools I was developing, I tried to make it all better. I tried to be the hero and rescue the family.

I learned how to separate out my emotions and compartmentalize my inner life into different selves as a way to survive the intensity. I tried to make sense out of my deeply confusing feelings. I developed the tool of compartmentalization during my early years to cope with the emotional intensity of the household. Because I was shutting down and not talking about my feelings, I would often go into states of depression and sadness. On the outside I wanted others to see that everything looked fine, but inside I felt empty, ineffectual, and lonely.

I tried to become someone I thought my parents wanted me to be. I would watch their expressions and the way they walked, and listen to the tenor of their voices to see if it was a good day or not. I would look at their facial expressions to determine how I needed to change myself to help them out. Should I approach them and tell them about my day? Is this a good time to ask a question? Should I just be quiet and read or watch television, or should I get out of the house and go play by the creek? I was becoming an expert at reading people, and that tool went into my emotional toolbox.

Escaping into nature was a perfect way for me to self-soothe and ground back into myself. I would go down to the creek in the woods with my Matchbox cars and toy army men. I was trying my best to cope, and the isolation was restorative; it was a relief from the pressure in the household.

This withdrawal and isolation, signs of traumatic stress in a child, became two of my key coping skills. They later developed into the wounded emotional response tools of withdrawing into loneliness and not speaking my true feelings as I got older. I also developed the art of personal reflection, meditation in nature, and exploring as ways to reconnect with my authentic self. These became functional emotional response tools.

I was no different from my friends—or any other kid—in that I only knew my world. I was trying to figure out my confusing home life, and my solution was to change myself to accommodate the situation. The more I put expectations on myself that I should be able to handle the situation better, the more I began to think that something was wrong with me when this didn’t work. I thought I should be able to figure out why my parents were arguing; I thought I could make it all better and control their emotions. When they argued, I was not doing my job well enough. I thought I was failing at my job, that I wasn’t doing something right, that I was flawed.

I was developing a narrative about myself that I was less-than, or not good as others. I took on this illusion of self, and it became real. This misperception of self began to shut down my authentic self. I didn’t think I could be me; I needed to do for others and not give to myself, as I wasn’t worth that.

As my sister and I grew up, most days were pretty boring and mundane; my parents worked, I walked home from school, and when my sister was older, we came home together. I looked out for her, we did our homework, and in the evenings we all watched television in the family room. On the weekends my dad hitched up the boat to the car, my mom got the food and cooler ready to go, and we drove to a lake or the river, where we spent all day out with friends, having a blast. We came home like tired, soggy dogs, and fell into a deep, contented sleep.

I was a highly sensitive kid, so even with all this family normalcy, I learned to watch for things about to take a turn for the worse. I could go from feeling free and open to being hypervigilant, watching my mom and dad’s every move. I never knew when it was going to happen, and the random nature of the outbursts was unnerving.

My little-boy brain and heart began short-circuiting because the good times would get cut short by yelling and chaos. I started creating a false self as I suppressed big parts of myself to adapt to the environment and my family. I was giving more power and energy to this false self, the perfect Bobby self that believed he could control and change adult behavior and emotions. I was in a state of magical thinking, believing I could control the household, to make it happy—or at least calm—all of the time.

My mom was also trying to make the household calm and emotionally safe in her own enabling way. I learned that it wasn’t going to be a good night if we didn’t prepare the house before my dad got home from work. From as early as I can remember up until I left home to go to college, I took on my mom’s wounded emotional response tools as chief enabler and martyr, and the burdens that went with them. I could see and feel the tension she was feeling, so I became enmeshed, or entangled with her emotions. I didn’t know where her emotions ended and mine began. I was a little boy who not only had the job of being a little boy but also the responsibility of taking care of my mom and managing my dad’s mood so he wouldn’t get mad and yell at us.

Even though my dad drank and raged, I knew he loved me. He wasn’t an ogre, he wasn’t a mean man, he just had emotions (primarily undiagnosed anxieties) that he didn’t know how to express in a functional way. I remember, beginning around the age of eight or nine, sitting in the family room watching television, hearing the garage door open, and thinking, OK, what am I in for tonight? My stomach would tighten, and I would listen to the sound of his footsteps to see if they were light or heavy ones. I would watch him enter the family room and read his face to see how he was doing. Does he look upset? Is his face scrunched up? Are his eyebrows low or high? Did I do anything wrong today? Or—wait—does he look relaxed? My emotions were complicated because on the one hand I was glad to see him, but on the other hand I never knew which version of my dad was coming home that night.

After an outburst of anger and the foreseeable drinking subsided, my dad would try to make amends and connect. He showed me how to build things, took us on trips around the country, and gave me a much richer quality of life than many of my friends had. He sacrificed his time, money, and energy to build a multidimensional childhood for my sister and me. He was a man with his own complex emotions and inner pain, but he did not know how to express them effectively. I had to develop a set of emotional response tools similar to my mom’s so that I could find my place and join with him.

Once I was an adult, my mom would tell her friends, “We never had any problems with Bobby, he always did what we asked.” Well, of course Bobby did; that was Bobby’s J-O-B. I took on the responsibility of doing everything right. What pressure for a little kid!

I clearly remember one incident from when I was ten years old. My mom and dad were in the kitchen arguing, and my sister and I were on the couch in the family room; she was on “her” side and I was on “my” side. We heard them arguing in the kitchen, but we kept watching television as if everything was OK, because that is what codependent children do—we pretend. Their yelling back and forth got louder than it had ever been, much louder than the television set.

I became extremely stressed and overwhelmed, and wanted to crawl inside myself or have the couch swallow me up so I could escape. As their yelling continued to escalate, I moved over next to my sister to form a buffer between her and them. I wanted to protect her from the intense emotion and shield her from the blast of anger, but it kept up. Louder, more intense, more swearing. I had to get her out of there, I had to protect my sister, so in a big wave of courage, I took her hand, led her back to her room, and slammed the door shut behind us. We silently sat on the edge of the bed, and I just held her. Neither of us said anything as my parents continued to argue. Suddenly it got quiet, and then there were footsteps.

I was terrified, as perfect little Bobby had defied the family dance. I was standing up to the wall of anger and dysfunction, and I was saying no. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to get my sister out of the family room for her safety. I didn’t think about myself. I was following the playbook typical for codependents, as we are able to set boundaries to protect another person, but we will not necessarily do the same for ourselves.

My dad, red faced, opened the door and saw me with my arms around my sister. He told us that we needed to come back out to the family room now! He wanted us to return to the family dance, but that was the last place I wanted to go to. In a moment of time-stopping clarity, I wasn’t scared. For the first time, I really felt brave. I reached deep inside and found my authenticity, my resilience, and my determination. I said no. He reached over, grabbed my arm and my sister’s, and took us back out, placing us on the couch. He wanted everything to go back to “normal.”

I don’t know what was going on in his mind, but I am sure that some part of him realized what he was doing with his out-of-control anger. But I was fed up, and I had found a lot of courage to try to break out of and disrupt the family cycle. I was fundamentally saying that this couldn’t happen anymore. I was tired and overwhelmed by their arguing, and I didn’t want my sister to experience what I had for the first ten years of my life. I didn’t want her to be wounded by their dysfunctional dance. I thought, I’m in this dysfunctional dance with you two, but you’re not going to get her. I knew that I couldn’t fight or argue with my parents, but I could express my feelings with my feet and protect my sister. I remember everything from that scene—time of day, lighting, furniture, where everyone was standing or sitting—which is what makes this event one of my more emotionally traumatic memories.

(I would like to take a brief tangent here and explain what happens in the brain during and as the result of a trauma. When we have a traumatic experience, our brains record everything so that if the event were to happen again, we would know the warning signs and get ourselves to safety. This is a primitive survival response that happens deep in the brain, in the amygdala and the hippocampus.

During a traumatic event, the amygdala acts as the brain’s command center, assessing what action to take next based on the incoming data. It communicates with the rest of the body through the central nervous system to give us the energy to fight, flee, or freeze. In normal situations, the hippocampus puts a time stamp—a beginning, middle, and end—on all the events in our lives. During a traumatic event, however, the hippocampus is suppressed, and the traumatic memory doesn’t get stored like other memories. This is why, when we are triggered by something that reminds us of a traumatic event long after it is over, we re-experience the event through flashbacks; part of the brain doesn’t know the trauma has ended. This is also why some memories come back over and over.)

As I neared adolescence, I knew I needed to protect myself from my parents’ relationship, but I didn’t have any functional tools. At times I would have flashes of recognition of setting a boundary and feeling empowered, but most of the time I went back to the wounded impulsive tools that I started creating when I was a little kid.

When I was in my early teens, my mom began to have surgeries for various reasons. She would instruct me on what to get out to cook and how to put it together. I always tried my best to rise to the occasion, but this was different, as I had never cooked before. Cooking became a physical demonstration of what I could do to help the family and make things better. No matter how tired I was, I did all my chores and homework, then overextended myself and gave away all of my energy for the family. This lack of self-care was reinforced by the false self I had developed, because my authentic self was so shut down and cloudy at this point.

I also was trying to figure out how to make things better with my dad, but I was resentful of his anger and behavior. I was angry myself, and resented that he couldn’t control himself. It didn’t make sense to me how this man who I knew loved me, who had kindness for others, and who created wonderful experiences for me and my sister would also rage and say mean things. I was going through puberty and was even more confused, emotional, overwhelmed, and exhausted by the chaotic emotional dance with him. Then one day something in me just broke.

During my teenage years I was on emotional autopilot. I had adapted to my environment, and I was growing up and maturing. But even though I was physically getting taller and older, I didn’t feel older inside; I still felt like a hurt and confused little boy. I still reacted the same way when my dad got upset or my mom was sad. I had battle scars inside from all of the emotions I had absorbed, I had my playbook, and I knew what to expect. I felt emotionally beat up, I didn’t have good boundaries, and I had to forgo my sense of self in order to help and be present for others. I was still working my full-time job as the hero in my dysfunctional family.

I knew as a teenager that I wanted to go into a helping profession, which was natural considering the early childhood apprenticeship training I had. During my first years of undergraduate school I worked at a private mental hospital as an orderly. This experience took my caretaker, rescuer, and fixer skills to a whole new level. Working at the hospital was my own version of immersion training into the mental health field. It was 1980, so imagine the institutional white shirt, white shoes, and white belt. It was right out of the classic movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I was assigned to work on the men’s intensive care intake unit. This was where the patients who were the most severe—literally out of their minds and acting out—were first admitted. I had a unique vantage point to see severely mentally ill patients walking around in a catatonic state, drugged out of their minds, shuffling along, or staring into space.

At this time, new medications for mental health care were slowly being introduced, but for the most part there were just a small number of therapies and only a few anti-psychotic medications available to help patients with their symptoms. These broad-acting, brain-flooding drugs produced zombie-like responses in patients, but when I saw these large men out of their minds, I was grateful for the drugs. This was an era of long-term institutionalized asylum care for the “lifers,” the patients who were admitted when they were young, with budding mental illness raging, and stayed for most of their lives. I took patients to receive their electric shock therapy (today known as Electroconvulsive Therapy or ECT), stayed in the room as psychiatrists administered the procedure, and then escorted them back to their rooms.

Even though I had received training and knew the safety protocols, there wasn’t much that could prepare a skinny eighteen-year-old to deal with a wild-eyed grown man, in the midst of a psychotic episode, who wants to kill you as you and the other orderlies restrain his hulking body onto a bed with leather straps. My early childhood training of compartmentalizing my emotions and stuffing down my feelings helped me to stay calm in the midst of their psychotic delusions, hallucinations, and manic episodes. Thanks to watching my dad rage and my mom compensate by not showing her emotions, I had a toolbox full of emotional response tools ready to go when I clocked in at the hospital.

My parents wondered why I wanted to work at “the crazy hospital on the hill.” I couldn’t explain it other than I was interested in psychology. I now realize that I felt a great empathy and connection to these emotionally wounded individuals. I wanted to study psychology to figure myself out, and I thought that I could relate to the emotional suffering of these patients. I was maturing into a grounded world of feeling my own personal power, but I also knew the wounded feeling of being hurt and overwhelmed with emotions. I could contain my own emotions, so I could sit with these patients in the middle of a psychotic break. In a way, they were my people.

After two years at a local university, I left home to go to Loyola University of Chicago. At this point everything changed for me and for my sister. I was twenty years old and free from the dysfunctional dance, but when I left, my sister moved to the front line. I was no longer the buffer between my parents and my sister. I was no longer there to read everyone’s mood, moderate, smooth things over, and try to make it all better. These were skills I had developed to make the household as functional as I could. When I left with my unique wounded codependent tools, my sister was left alone with them, and she had to develop her own set of skills.

She had her own breaking point with our parents in her high school years. She would have to pull over when driving to high school from crying so hard after dealing with their arguments and stress at home. Sometimes she could not go to school because of being so upset. Our mom never questioned it and would just call her in sick for the day.

Our mom’s wounding wasn’t letting her see my sister’s pain because our mom was in so much pain herself. My sister didn’t feel like she was even on their radar. Neither of my parents took an interest to go any deeper to see what was happening because they were wrapped up in their own dramas. They loved her, but they couldn’t see what was going on with her. Later she found peace with our parents and has forgiven them and herself for the way things played out.

After earning my psychology degree, I moved to Chicago, worked in various fields, and experienced a lot of healing work. I eventually went back to graduate school and earned my master’s degree and my professional license. Even as I was doing all this education and personal work, I still had a conflict between my idealized perfect self and my authentic self. I didn’t know how disconnected I really was.

My life was new and exciting in Chicago. It looked functional, but I wasn’t feeling functional. I was performing functional adult activities, such as holding a job, maintaining an apartment, and covering a car payment, but I felt all the cracks and wounds from more than two decades of absorbing and storing others’ emotions. Between periods of learning to be a functional adult, my wounded self kept coming forward and making impulsive decisions.

At this point, in my mid-twenties, I was ready to break the illusion that I had had an ideal childhood, and I began therapy work that helped me grow from the inside out. I was tired of feeling less-than, confused, and having unfulfilling relationships. I knew something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what, and I certainly didn’t have any tools in my toolbox to fix it. My therapist helped me to explore my adult self and understand how I learned to compensate and adapt to my life experiences. I began to understand how I brought all of my childhood wounding and emotional response tools into my adult life. It was through this therapy that I began to reconnect with my little boy self.

The first time I did inner child work was like pulling a dusty photo album off the shelf and turning the pages. The story was familiar, and even though I was looking at it more objectively through adult eyes, I experienced a resurgence of emotions from an earlier time. As I recalled the memories, I began to see the little boy inside of me who was smiling and happy on the outside but confused, scared, unhappy, angry, upset at himself, and lonely on the inside. As I told my therapist my story, though, I instinctively protected my mom and dad. I was propping them up on a pedestal and didn’t want to dishonor or be disloyal to them. I didn’t want to badmouth them to a total stranger.

We all know our parents made some poor choices, but we don’t usually want to be mean; we want to protect them. This may be an attempt to keep them on a pedestal, to idealize them and our childhood. At some level we want to keep the illusion going, yet we also know that once we peek behind the curtain and shed light on what our childhood was really like, there is no going back. Keeping the illusion that everything was OK even when we know it was not is our way of protecting the false self.

As I told my story about growing up and learning my wounded codependent traits, my therapist asked me how old little Bobby felt. I had never thought of that before, but it was easy for me to determine that this part of me was about ten years old, as this was the time in my life when things became highly reactive in our household. It felt intuitive to me that my ten-year-old self was carrying the collective wounding from this time period.

I came to understand that little Bobby was still very much within me, and when I was triggered in my adult life by something that felt chaotic, loud, angry, uncertain, out of control, weird, icky, mean, or threatening, little Bobby would become triggered and step forward. I was still living my emotional life through the eyes and feelings of a ten-year-old boy.

It became clear that I was coping and dealing with life emotionally as this little ten-year-old boy. As an adult I would get scared, shut down, overthink, internalize, and compensate for others’ behaviors and choices. I would hold my feelings in, not show anyone my pain, and not let anyone in. Through my therapy I learned how to discern what was my emotional pain and what was someone else’s pain. I learned how my wounded parts reacted to situations. I learned how to pay attention to my own attunement, to set boundaries, and to invite my authentic self to come forward.

From the outside I wanted to be seen as happy and successful—of course I did, because I wanted to be perfect for the outside world just like little Bobby wanted. I was struggling with self-acceptance, escaping to an unhappy job, and avoiding looking at my past. I wasn’t living an authentic life; I was living as an adapted wounded child in a man’s body.

My self-perception was reflected in the friendships I had developed. Apart from my childhood friends who were like brothers to me, some of the friends I had gathered around me in my early adult life in Chicago were what I call the “wounded birds”: narcissistic, codependent, and dysfunctional, and in many cases also children of alcoholics. These friends reflected my codependent caretaker-rescuer-fixer self. They were the walking wounded just like me, but I thought I could help them, or at least relate to them. (Remember, hurt people find hurt people.) I was following the playbook of adult children of alcoholics. All of my wounded emotional response skills were the main characteristics of an adult child of an alcoholic: isolating, being overly responsible, caretaking, being needless, and focusing on others.

When I met people who were strong and authentic, I wondered how they did it. How were they so confident, and how did they know who they were? I could feel their inner strength. I wanted to be around them and would try to engage in friendship, but it never lasted long because I was not in a similar emotional space. It was as if I wanted to hang around them so some of their authenticity would rub off, but at the same time I didn’t want to be around them because they didn’t need my caretaking or fixing. I didn’t know how to be with them because there was nothing for me to do for them.

Little Bobby didn’t know how to be around or have friendships with others, especially men, who were confident, loud, rough, angry, or just guys being guys. It was scary and unpredictable for my little self, who thought that being loud and out of control and having big energy was too much like how my dad aggressively showed his emotions. I linked aggressive and even assertive male behavior to the trigger of being in an out-of-control situation.

As I healed my wounding, started to love and respect myself, and learned to set boundaries, my relationships improved. My outside world began to mirror my internal world, where I was beginning to feel strong, connected, authentic, free, and like myself. I was choosing to have others in my life who were living more authentically as I was living authentically. No longer was I making myself smaller for someone else’s comfort.

As I healed, my relationships healed. I learned how to integrate my younger wounded parts into my functional adult self. I started using the functional response tools I had learned from my parents and others, such as giving myself permission to dream, creating what I wanted in life, and showing love and compassion to others and myself. I was no longer disconnected from my wounded little boy, because this part was healing. It wasn’t getting triggered anymore, and my adult self was protecting all of me with healthy functional response tools, especially boundaries. Some of my friendships naturally faded away as my sense of self-worth grew stronger. As I set boundaries, my young adult friends who were around because I had always been there for them (but who never listened to me) no longer found me useful. I was seeing them for who they really were instead of who I wanted them to be. I learned how to respect myself, and I started emotionally cleaning house.

My mom and I always remained close, and as I got older and healed, I was able to have deep compassion and respect for her journey. I realized how much she sacrificed, albeit in an enabling way, in order to keep the family whole and intact for the greater good.

My relationship with my dad healed. I learned how to respect and love myself first, then I learned how to respect and love my dad for himself. I was able to fully accept and completely take in all of him to my heart. We were no longer me-against-him. I was able to forgive him for his shortcomings, his woundings, his anxieties, his drinking, his lashing out in pain. I was able to see his brightness, silent generosity, love, creativity, strength, and compassion. I was able to more clearly see both of us and how proud he was of me.

My parents have since passed away. I love and miss them all the time.

Part of our healing work is coming to terms with and accepting our past. The retelling of our stories can help this process of integration. We gain perspective about ourselves when we write and talk about our experiences. I wanted to share my story with you, as I will refer to it throughout the coming chapters as an example of core wounding and how the HEAL process can help you.

If you were deeply traumatized by physical or sexual abuse, please know the following: