Applying the HEAL Process

Healing your lost inner child wounding takes time, gentle care, and learning to love and embrace your wounded parts. In earlier chapters you learned about the wounded inner child, how wounding happens, how triggers affect the wounded child in adulthood, and how healing these wounds will allow you to live a healthier, happier life. You have been uncovering childhood memories and events that led to core woundings that still affect you today. You have learned about why you have impulsive reactions and what some of your emotional response tools are. All of this information and understanding is going to come into play now. The deep self-exploration you are about to do in this chapter will allow you to heal your inner woundings and embrace an authentic life.

Before you start on this phase of the HEAL process, it is important that you set aside some common defenses that come up in this type of therapy. These fearful objections can derail the process and hold you back. To get the most out of this process, it is crucial that you recognize and consciously avoid the following defenses.

• Discounting—Set aside the temptation to discount or minimize the difficult or traumatic experiences you had growing up. In other words, don’t normalize your emotional pain. (“It wasn’t that bad”.)
• Normalizing the abnormal—Resist the urge to make the abnormal normal. (“Everyone was beaten.”)
• Protecting others—Resist the urge to protect your parents, guardians, family members, and others. This work is not about dishonoring them, it is about honoring yourself.
• Denying that healing is possible—Avoid the temptation to think you can’t heal because you can’t change the past. (“Why would I want to go back and look at that if I can’t change it? What has happened, happened, and nothing can be done.”)
• Avoiding bad memories—Let go of the idea that you can heal without exploring bad memories. It takes courage to heal, and you are worth it. (“I can’t remember much of what happened, and what I do remember I don’t like, so why go there?”)

Many people don’t want to look at their childhood woundings because doing so is painful. If you have this reaction, you may be compartmentalizing these painful experiences and pretending that things weren’t that bad. I turned out OK, didn’t I? Such rationalizations give you an excuse to avoid feeling or looking at things. However, as you have learned in earlier chapters, touching on the events you have experienced is not going to kill you. It may hurt or sting, but you are stronger than you know, and with some self-care you will get through this process intact and feel much better.

If you start feeling resistance to the work, know that this is a normal reaction. Acknowledge the defensive reaction, then give yourself permission to look at all aspects of your childhood to see how they feel to you today.

In the next section, you are going to create a timeline that will help put your early woundings and standout events in perspective. This living blueprint of your life will help you to see yourself and your life events from a different perspective.

The timeline focuses on your developmental years from birth to age twenty. Don’t be concerned about keeping to this specific age range, as some people have deep, painful wounding experiences in their early twenties and even later, so this isn’t a hard and fast rule. However, the earlier years tend to be when deep wounding or trauma impacts people the most, and this is when these lifelong wounding patterns become established.

The Childhood Timeline

Many people say that they don’t remember a lot from when they were really young, and that is pretty common. Most of us do not recall many memories from the very young and toddler stages. However, when we are very young we do begin to develop two types of long-term memories: implicit and explicit. An implicit memory is one that is stored in the unconscious before the age of three. For example, you may not remember specific outings with Dad every Saturday morning, but you get a warm, emotional, fuzzy feeling whenever you think of being with him. At about three years old, explicit memories begin to be stored, such as consciously recalling Dad taking you out for breakfast every Saturday morning, where you went, and how you got there.

The majority of our memories up until the age of seven are implicit memories, but age three is the turning point when explicit memories become more frequent. Most people are able to recall events or situations from about age five and up. Starting at age seven, a child’s memories are similar to that of an adult. If you have gaps in your memory, you may have used repression, suppression, or dissociation to cope with your feelings. The memories are there, but don’t force them if they do not naturally surface into your consciousness.

Before you create your own timeline, let’s look at an example.

Nicole is a thirty-year-old single woman who lives on her own. She feels closer to her dad than her mom, and has a younger brother with whom she is close. She has a professional job and a few close friends she meets for drinks. She is dating, but nothing too serious.

We can see in Nicole’s timeline that some situations in her young life would be considered good events and others bad. She has included all of the events that stand out in her memory, describing each one in broad terms.

The descriptions are just enough to jog Nicole’s memory and see some patterns. Let’s look at some of those patterns and standout memories.

Five years old was hard because her parents were divorced and her mom remarried. Life settled down, but then things started to get bad again around age sixteen, when her dad almost died. At age seventeen she no longer wanted to be in school. She was not suicidal, she just didn’t want to be in her life anymore. It felt like too much.

We can see that the wounding from Nicole’s early years lands around the age of five, when she was having a hard time emotionally with her mom remarrying and a step-dad entering her life. She starting feeling lost around age seventeen. These two specific emotional standouts on her timeline, at ages five and seventeen, represent her age of wounding. She can focus first on the age of wounding that feels the “loudest” inside of her.

Creating Your Timeline

It is time to take a deep dive into your own timeline and identify your emotional standouts. Take your time with this process, and be gentle with yourself. Set aside plenty of time, and be in a place where you won’t be disturbed or interrupted. You are about to do some deeply personal and important work. All of that said, do not overthink it. This is your story, and you know the details.

In your notebook, orient a blank sheet of paper horizontally. Draw a line across the middle from left to right, then make marks to denote the years between birth and age twenty. Read the next several paragraphs to see how to recall standout events, then start writing.

Be quiet and let your mind wander. Begin to picture the events of your past unfolding like a movie. As your mind flows, jot down some events that stand out. Write down short phrases along the timeline next to the age you were when each event occurred. Some people write out incredibly detailed memories, and others write brief notes. Do what works for you.

Avoid discounting events by thinking they weren’t a big deal or that those things happened to everyone. That may be true, but it will all contribute to your understanding of yourself. Just let things come up. Continue writing these events on your timeline.

Some situations may be uncomfortable to think about, so for now just make a mark or write down just enough of a description to remind you later. Suppose you remember an event from when you were seven when someone touched you inappropriately and it felt icky. Just write down “icky.” This work is not about resurfacing trauma just to get through the exercise, so be gentle with yourself as you go through this process.

If you have difficulty remembering events, it may help to talk with a trusted friend or relative who knew you before you were twenty. If you feel comfortable, tell them what you are doing and see if they have any insights into your early life. They might remember something about you that stands out for them but for you it was just another day.

Continue filling out your timeline. You may have more information to write down as you get into your teenage years, which is normal.

The Emotional Response Scale

Once you have filled in your timeline, you are ready to determine the level of intensity that each event holds for you using the Emotional Response Scale. This exercise will help you to better define how you feel about these events today. It is based on your subjective measurement, so honoring how you feel about each event is important. These ratings are going to help you determine your age of wounding.

The Emotional Response Scale uses a scale of 0 through 10, with 0 having the lowest emotional intensity (neutral, happy, or joyful) and 10 the highest emotional intensity (great shame or sadness). The scale is not used to rate an event as “good” or “bad.” It simply rates the level of intensity inside of you when you recall the event.

You will be using the following descriptions of the Emotional Response Scale to determine the level of intensity of each standout event on your timeline.

Examples of a low intensity rating are:

• This event really bothered me as a kid, but the memory doesn’t bother me now.
• I feel neutral most of the time when I remember this event.
• This event was happy and full of joy.
• I just shrug over this memory, and I can move on.
• I can be around the person who hurt me, I have forgiven them and let it go, and it is not a big deal anymore.
• I used to get really angry at this situation or person, but I have worked through the pain and have a greater perspective today.

Examples of a mid-range intensity rating are:

I have seen pictures of a time when I know things weren’t good, but I look happy, so I am confused about how I “should” feel.

• Sometimes I am upset about what happened to me but not all the time.
• I can be around these people or situations sometimes but not all the time.
• This type of situation (family dynamic or chronic issue) still creates turmoil in my life; I don’t like it and want it to go away.
• When I remember this event it stings, but the bad or shameful feeling comes and goes.

• I get really angry or feel hurt or sad whenever I think of what happened.
• I withdraw, get very quiet, and shut down whenever I think of what happened.
• I have a physical reaction if I am in a certain area or around people who remind me of my abuser.
• I am filled with shame and pain when I remember this event.
• I wish this memory would just go away. I want to erase the whole event.
• I dissociate or “zone out” when I think of this event or when I get triggered. (This is a level 10 intensity.)

Look over your timeline, and as you remember each situation, rate the intensity of the feeling between 0 and 10. Write this number down next to each event using a colored pen or pencil. This information is just for you, so be honest with yourself.

Once you have rated each event, sit back and look over your timeline again. What does this big picture tell you about your early life? Are there a lot of low- to mid-range ratings next to each event? Or did you rate many of them mid- to high-intensity? What do the ratings reveal? Are the high-intensity ratings clumped together, or are they scattered throughout the timeline?

Remember that the ratings exercise is a way to measure the events of your life and to recognize that some situations were very intense. It can help you to determine an age of wounding that will help you to see the symptoms manifesting in your adult life.

Your Childhood Household

Another way to look at your timeline and the events that happened in your first two decades is to think of your childhood household and all of its members and what the interactions were like. The following are descriptions of how a household may have felt as it relates to the Emotional Response Scale, and how growing up in such a household may manifest emotionally and relationally in your adult life.

If you grew up in a household with an overall low-intensity rating, you probably felt good about yourself most of the time. There were situations that occurred now and then that upset you but nothing bizarre or odd. You were able to brush off most things that were unpleasant. You met and kept friends, and even though life wasn’t perfect, you had more happy times than angry or hurtful times. Consistent, loving adults were always present. The adults had their own issues, but they could regulate their emotions and provide a flow of stable love and reflection back to you. You felt validated, honored, and cherished by the adults in your life. You still feel this feeling as a warm glow in your heart or belly when you think of specific times growing up.

As an adult, you are able to check in with your partner or friends when things are bothering you. The overall good feeling from your childhood experiences carries over into your adult experiences. Your adulthood mirrors the type of childhood and family environment that you had growing up.

If you grew up in a household with an overall mid-range intensity rating, you probably feel that your home life was OK for the most part, but you didn’t always feel OK. What was happening on the outside didn’t always match the inside, like the beautiful house that the neighbors see doesn’t always match what is going on behind closed doors. You felt puzzled about yourself and thought, No one understands me or No one likes me.

Growing up in a mid-range intensity household indicates that your childhood was not filled with big emotional or traumatic events that happened over and over, but at times the family could tip over into bad times. This is a childhood in which the hurtful or angry times could overshadow the happy times. There were adults who you felt were safe and in charge, but there were also those who frightened you, and you tried to stay away from them.

In a mid-range intensity household, alcohol, drugs, gambling, and other addictions may show up in parents, siblings, or other relatives.

You came away from this type of childhood feeling more battle-scarred than your friends but generally OK. You feel good about yourself most of the time. You may take or have taken medications or therapy for anxiety or depression in your adult life, but this is, for the most part, not an ongoing need. You may be able to stay in a long-term relationship, but it will require work to make it functional, as many of your unresolved issues from childhood will be brought into your adult relationships.

An overall high-intensity household indicates a childhood with consistent turmoil and upset. There may have been stable adults around, but this was not a constant. You were always searching for someone in charge, and if you couldn’t find a grounded adult, then you felt like you had to be in charge and stay in control because everyone else was out of control. You often had physical issues such as headaches, gut issues, nervousness, and being hypervigilant. This watchful feeling would happen even when things were good because you were always waiting for the next explosion to happen.

Chaos, alcohol abuse, and multiple addictions by the parents or primary caregivers are often seen in this type of household. The caregivers were often lost in their own troubles and didn’t have time for you. The first-born became super responsible, or the kids all checked out and looked for ways to escape.

As an adult, you have tried therapy multiple times and have been on and off different types of medications in your desire to feel better. Your early life and adult life are confusing to you, and you wonder how other people are able to be happy. You have difficulty maintaining emotionally close connections with your partners, and you are drawn to the same type of person over and over even though you know they are not good for you. You may say you don’t want the type of household you had growing up, but it seems like chaos is inevitable.

For example, I rated my age of wounding at ten years old, and rated my traumatic memory of getting my sister and myself to safety as high in intensity, at a level ten. I evaluated that my childhood family experience went from the mid- to high-intensity household range.

Look over your timeline, your intensity ratings, and these household descriptions. What patterns do you see? Do you see your childhood household experience from a different perspective? These intensity ratings help to illustrate and quantify your experiences so you can be objective with your own history. I include them as reference points so you know that you are not alone, that many others come from similar experiences.

You have been doing some difficult searching inside, probably looking at things you haven’t thought about for a long time. At times this emotional excavation is really heavy, tiring, and overwhelming. We will continue to go even deeper, but for now, let’s take a short break and give your emotions a rest.

Exercise: Your Treasure Chest

I want to teach you a meditation and visualization technique that is useful for when you bring up emotionally heavy parts of your past, as you did in the last exercise.

Picture all of the things you have been thinking about from your childhood, all of the emotional wounding events that are in your conscious mind. Imagine these events scattered on the floor like little treasures. As you begin to connect to them, remember that you are discovering a lot of emotion that is packed within each situation.

Picture a treasure chest on the floor along with all of your scattered childhood memories. The treasure chest is the safe cocoon that will hold all of these emotionally laden events so you don’t feel like you are walking around open and exposed, raw with emotion. It will magically expand to hold everything you will be putting into it.

Pick up and hold a memory, and thank it for being in your life. Even if it was painful to go through when you were younger, it is still a treasured part of you because all of you is treasured. Hold this memory, thank it, and place it in the treasure chest.

Continue to put your emotional memories into the treasure chest one by one until you have gathered them all. Once they are all in the chest, close the lid.

Put this treasure chest in a safe place inside of you. Know that when the time is right you will open it and gently bring out these emotional memories. In time, you will be healing the emotions that are wrapped around each of the more painful events, but for now, keep them in a safe place so you can begin to feel whole again as you do this healing work.

Emotional Standouts

Look at your timeline again and note the events that you rated between 7 and 10 on the Emotional Response Scale. These are the emotional standouts that have a high emotional intensity, the experiences that were difficult for you and impacted your life path. When you are triggered or remember these standouts, you remember them very clearly, and they really hurt. Use a highlighter to mark these emotional standouts on your timeline, or write them on another piece of paper.

Your Age of Wounding

In earlier chapters we touched on the age of wounding, a dramatic or emotionally significant event you experienced as a child that resulted in a core wounding. This wounding event gets linked with the age you were when it occurred, which results in the wounding becoming frozen in time, trapped in a snow globe within you.

Let’s look at another example of determining the age of wounding. John’s parents divorced when he was seven years old, but the upset and turmoil between his parents carried on until he was twelve. This five-year range was an emotionally difficult time in his life because he was constantly shuttled back and forth between their houses. He could not process everything that was happening when he was so young, and toward the end of the period he was entering puberty. He felt overwhelmed and confused.

John’s emotional memory around the age of seven carried some heavy weight, as did the age of twelve. It was hard to say which felt more intense as he looked over his timeline. To pinpoint the age of wounding, John asked himself if the wounding from ages seven to twelve was at its worst at the beginning of this timeframe, with his parents’ divorce when he was five, or when his mom remarried when he was twelve. He determined that it was most intense when his mom remarried. His dad, whom he was really close to, was pushed to the background, and now he had another man whom he had to call dad. On the surface it seems like the divorce would have been the hardest emotional part, but in fact it was when his mom remarried. The age of wounding of twelve was heavier on his heart.

To determine your age of wounding, look at your emotional standouts—the high-intensity events on your timeline—and make note of your age or age range during those times. Your wounding may have a specific age, but you don’t have to be precise. As with John’s example, it could be a timeframe, such as seven to twelve years old. Physical, mental, emotional, or sexual abuse may have happened over a period of years or at one specific time. It is not important to get the exact age right, and in fact, if you had multiple periods of extreme situations in your young life, you may have multiple parts of you that carry this wounding.

Many people intuitively connect with an age that carries their wounding, but none of this is an exact science. If you determine that age five, for example, works for you at first but later in the process your age of wounding feels older or younger, then simply adjust it.

Be gentle with yourself through this entire process, as a lot of emotional residue will be stirred up. If you find that recalling these memories is too much for you, then seek professional help. Don’t force yourself to remember the really bad stuff, and don’t force yourself through the process. If something deeply traumatic did happen to you, know that you are in control today. When you were a child you were not in control of what was done to you, but today you are. You set the pace for how you go through this process.

You have a great wisdom because of your experiences. Know that you carry a light of emotional wisdom within you because you have been to some dark places within yourself, you have come out on the other side of these experiences, and now you know more. This wisdom helps you more than you may think. See if you can call on your inner wisdom to help guide you through this process of unfolding.

Other Ways to Find Your Age of Wounding

If you are having trouble identifying an age of wounding, don’t worry; there are other ways to approach it. You can look at the feelings, behaviors, and wounded emotional response tools you use as an adult, and refer to that part to determine your age of wounding. You can recall from the stories you have read so far how the person’s behaviors were those of a child’s and how this often correlates to their age of wounding.

Sometimes when a client tells me about impulsively acting out, I ask them how old they feel. Every one of them is able to identify an age pretty quickly, such as, “I feel like a little kid when I yell and scream.” I then ask them how old that little kid is inside. Or you might see that acting impulsively reminds you of when you were a teenager, for example. This is a reverse-engineering approach to identifying your impulsive part, your selfish part, your hurt part. It is another way to understand the emotional dynamics that keep showing up in your adult relationships and how they correspond to a younger age.

You can also turn to trusted people to help you determine your age of wounding and to help you see patterns and themes in your life, which we will explore next. Keep in mind that when you ask your friends about your life, you open yourself to being vulnerable, so be careful when doing so. If you do decide to open up to another, choose a close friend who will be gentle in their assessment of you and your patterns.

When you feel safe and secure, ask your friend the following questions:

• What do you often see me do that keeps me small and doesn’t help me grow?
• What type of people do I gravitate toward?
• What type of people do I attract?
• How do you see me react to upsetting situations?
• What do you hear me say when I have big reactions?
• Do you see me giving away my power to other people?
• What do you often hear me talk about?
• Do I keep telling the same stories? Do I complain about certain things over and over?
• What do I tend to focus on and repeat?
• When I behave certain ways or make certain choices, how old do I sound to you?

This feedback can be hard to hear, but if you choose someone whom you trust and who knows you, they can give you some insight into yourself to help you narrow down your childhood wounding ages.

Suppose your friend says that you often act like a teenager. When you ask them to be more specific, they say you sometimes act like a fifteen-year-old. Look at your timeline and determine what was going on in your life at age fifteen. There are a lot of ways to go about getting to your age of wounding.

Remember that your friend’s answers will be their own subjective measure or even a projection, but they may help you to clarify parts of your timeline or your triggering experiences as an adult.

Recurring Patterns

Now that you have your timeline filled out as much as you can remember, take a step back and look over what you have created. Do you notice any big gaps between ages? Are there certain ages where events are clustered together?

You may be starting to see patterns or themes pop out. What memories do you keep recycling? What is on your “highlight reel”? What memories can’t you forget, can’t get past, or don’t want to remember at all? Can you see a pattern to these memories?

Here are some examples of patterns you may notice from your timeline exercise:

• Feeling sad, lonely, isolated, not good enough, or misunderstood
• Attracting the same type of friends or relationships into your life (narcissistic or manipulative people whom you are always doing something for but who do not reciprocate)
• Feeling less-than; everyone else is superior
• Feeling left out, never included
• Feeling like the victim and blaming others for your pain
• Constantly seeking outside approval
• Getting angry and lashing out but feeling hurt inside
• Doubting yourself and giving others power

Notice the patterns or themes that your timeline reveals. They are clues to your healing path. Also look at the choices you keep making. What would your friends say about your patterns?

Look at the themes in your childhood family. Was your family respectful of boundaries? Did you feel close? Or was each person like an island, isolated from the rest? Did everyone do their own thing? Or was your family enmeshed, where everyone knew everything and got into everyone else’s business?

You may find themes of abandonment or loneliness in your timeline. Or perhaps nothing relates, and you just experienced random events. However, if you look at these random events more deeply, you may see relationship dynamics or situations happening in your life now that are similar to situations from your childhood. You could even be in a relationship with the same type of person you were interested in when you were in high school. We are creatures of habit; it is easier to keep doing the same things over and over, even if they are not healthy for us.

You may have periods of dormancy in your timeline when nothing major happened. The dysfunctional family dance may have still been happening, but you were not being triggered to the point of having to defend yourself. All through this dormancy period, your wounded and functional emotional response tools were right by your side in case you needed them.

Maybe you were like me and had a parent who abused alcohol or were alcohol- or drug-dependent, and you learned to blank out big parts of your childhood. This self-protective measure helped us to cope during times that were overwhelming. It was our way of pushing away the memories of the feelings or events that were painful or hurtful. To this day there are sections of my childhood that I cannot recall, which most likely means I suppressed these memories even though I have seen pictures and know those experiences happened.

You have been doing some difficult work, and this is a good time to take a break. When we are reliving past events that are emotionally charged, we often hold our breath as a trauma response to determine what the threat is and whether or not we have to take quick action. We take shallow breaths in the upper chest, which reinforces the message to the body and mind that we need to be on alert and ready to fight, flee, or freeze.

The following exercise will help you to breathe more deeply, which in turn will relax your whole body. You can do it anywhere and anytime you need to tell your body, mind, and spirit system that it can relax, there is no threat, no one is running after you, and you can be still and quiet. I advise most people to do this exercise once an hour if they are really wound up.

Exercise: Simple Breath

This process rebalances your system and tells all parts of you that you are safe and there is no need to feel scared. Looking out at nature or listening to some relaxing music adds to the experience. Give yourself this gift of gentle breathing.

Sit comfortably in a quiet place. Close your eyes, place one hand on your belly, and take a long, slow breath in through your nose, then gently exhale through your mouth. Don’t force it, just breathe gently in through your nose and out through your mouth, as if you are gently blowing out a candle. At first you may breathe faster than you need to, but just relax into the flow and go slowly.

Identifying Triggers

Triggers can be actions, words, people, and events that activate your impulsive reactions and cause your lost inner child to act out. Identifying these triggers is a way for you to connect to your core woundings. Now that you have determined your age of wounding, identifying your triggers will help you to know in real time when your emotional wounding is showing up in your adult life. You will then be able to choose mature responses that will help calm this part of you so that your responsible adult self can remain in control.

Triggers can come from sight, sound, smell, touch, or a situation. A trigger can be something or someone that immediately scares you, angers you, irritates you, offends you, disrespects you, minimizes you, discounts you, shames you, or ignores you.

Exercise: Identify Your Triggers

Get out your notebook and look over your list of wounded emotional response tools that you identified in chapter 1 in “Exercise: Your Impulsive Reactions.” Use this list to help you identify some of your triggers.

Think about a situation that upsets you, then write down your answers to the following questions in your notebook.

• When and where does this situation usually happen?
• Is this a sight, sound, smell, or touch?
• Is your trigger a person, a thing, or a situation?
• How often does it occur?
• What are some immediate feelings you have when this situation occurs? (I immediately feel . . .)
• Where do you feel this in your body?
• Do you find you want to say or do something, or do you want to be super quiet and withdraw?
• Are the same people or same type of people involved in this situation?
• Of whom or what does this situation remind you of from your early life?

Don’t overthink your answers to these questions. Your first instinct is usually your hotline to your subconscious.

Do you notice any patterns and themes that stand out in your answers? How do your answers here compare to the other exercises you have completed? You are developing more of an understanding of how, when, and why you respond the way you do in certain situations. You are getting to know yourself in a deeper way.

Now look over your answers from the exercise in chapter 1 and think about what happens when you use these impulsive reactions. In your notebook, write a trigger that precedes the impulsive reaction. What are the situations or things that prompt your impulsive reaction response? Do you self-sabotage, avoid, or lash-out? For example, self-sabotaging may be connected to the trigger of feeling like someone is criticizing you. If you lash out, the trigger could be the feeling of not being heard. This is another way to determine some of your triggers.

Suppose you have identified that you shut down and pout when you don’t feel heard or acknowledged. What does this remind you of from your early life? Perhaps you tried to get your mom or dad’s attention and you were ignored, shut down, or discounted. Now think about how this wounded part shows up in your adult life. Does this behavior happen in your primary relationship, with friends, or with coworkers? When you are triggered in this way, do you become really quiet? How old do you feel when this happens?

Now think about what you want to say or do when this hurt gets triggered. You may either shut down or want to scream and shout and run about. Do you want to yell so that you are heard? Do you react by shouting and raging? Does this impulsive reaction match the age of wounding you identified earlier? Save your answers to use in another exercise later in the chapter.

Once I became an adult, whenever someone around me was mad, angry, out of control, or I was in a chaotic situation, my age of wounding, my little ten-year-old self who was trapped in that snow globe, was reminded of my childhood household all over again and would get scared and triggered. I would shut down, try to be perfect, and try to control my surroundings. In other words, I was doing the same things as an adult that I did as an ten-year-old boy. Once I was triggered, my little boy self would shove my adult self out of the way, step in front, and take control. This all happens unconsciously until we identify the triggers, see the patterns, and heal the lost inner child.

Take a moment now to go within and look at the ways your wounded little child inside has tried to communicate with you over the years. How has this part reacted when it was triggered after becoming afraid, scared, terrified, betrayed, or hurt? These behaviors and impulsive reactions will continue to play out until you can correlate triggers to the emotional wounding.

If you were able to identify some of your triggers with these exercises, wonderful. If not, it’s OK. You will understand more about yourself and the triggers that activate your wounded inner child as we continue, and all will become clearer.

In the next section you will begin to have a dialogue and develop a connection with your wounded, lost inner child. This part of you is buried deep, but as you have learned, it still comes out to protect you when it is triggered and then goes dormant again, waiting for the next trigger.

Your next goal is to develop a connection with this part so that it is no longer isolated, cut off, and invalidated. Through this process you are learning how to characterize this wounded part of yourself so that you can develop a connection. One of the ways you can connect to this wounded part is through writing healing letters to yourself. But first, let’s look at Judith’s story.

Story: Judith, a Rejected Teenage Girl

Writing Healing Letters to Yourself

Writing healing letters to and from yourself is a great way to immediately get feelings out and connect to that wounded part of yourself. These letters are written in a stream-of-consciousness style, that is, fast and without editing or judging. With this style of writing, you sit down and get it all out without overthinking or pre-thinking what you are going to write. That inner wounding is looking to be heard and acknowledged, and this process is a helpful and efficient way to do so. These letters are meant just for you.

The main goal in writing these letters is to connect to the frozen part of you that carries the wounding. Once you form this connection you will begin to see, hear, and feel how your wounding shows up in your adult life. The letters will create a bridge that will bring your frozen wounding into the light of day.

The process sounds simple, and it is, yet it does many things all at once and works on many levels. After you have written the first letters, you will be able to connect to your feelings in a different way than when you just think about or express the thoughts verbally. You will be giving yourself permission to fully and freely express emotions that have been bottled up or unexpressed for a long time. Letter writing provides a safe outlet for this contained and bottled-up energy.

Putting pen to paper accesses a deep part of us. The kinetic movement forms a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious. When we use our fine motor skills to write out our feelings, we are giving the heart a pathway to release pent-up emotion.

Once we put our thoughts and feelings onto paper, we can face them and learn how to hold them in a new way. This takes tremendous courage, which is why people will put off doing this simple exercise. However, you have come this far in the process and can no longer deny that events happened in childhood that affect you as an adult.

Please remember that these letters are a form of focused writing. They are not meant for anyone other than you. Please keep them for now, as you will look back over them when you get to chapter 8.

Letter from Your Younger Self to Your Adult Self

The first letter you write will be from a younger wounded part of you to your adult self. The goal of this letter writing exchange is to bring into the light of day the pain, confusion, misunderstanding, distortion, and false narrative that the younger self carries. After all, it is this lack of perspective that keeps the younger self stuck and always on guard. This letter exchange is designed to clearly state what those issues are and spell out how they got that way. The responsible adult self then has the opportunity to respond, clear up misconceptions, and give the younger self the love, validation, trust, and respect that it has never have had before.

I have found that it is more effective to have the inner child write the first letter because this is where the pain is held, and the inner child will reveal the emotional woundings for the adult self to address in the return letter.

Before you write your first letter, it may be helpful to read a sample letter. The following is a letter from my little boy self to my adult self.

As I wrote this letter from my little boy self, tears were flowing and I was flushed with sadness, frustration, anger, and rage. I was barely able to read my writing because I had scrawled across the page so fast and furiously.

Through writing these letters, I gave my younger self a voice. I could see, hear, and feel the deep anguish that I carried all those years. I was connecting the dots and seeing how my younger wounded parts were showing up in my adult life by my attempts to control others, feeling less-than and lonely, and letting my anger come out passive-aggressively.

By writing these feelings out, I began to feel a shift and a release. I was learning to describe those feelings from long ago, and I felt grateful that I could get them out of me. I was acknowledging all of those feelings that had been trapped, and in doing so, I could stop using the impulsive reactions that were negatively impacting my adult life.

Do not overthink what you will write before you start writing. This is an immersive, reflexive experience, where you let the words flow naturally. Your inner child has a lot to say, so you will not need to script it. The younger self will state its clear emotions, which will become the road map for the letter from your adult self in response.

To write this first letter from your younger self, you need to get inside your own head and heart at the age of wounding. In other words, start to remember what was happening at that age, where you were living, who was there, what the mood was, and most importantly, what you were feeling. Connecting with some emotional pain here is a key part of this process. If you keep these letters on a superficial level, you will not get the results you desire. Give yourself permission to pull up the hurt, pain, anger, sadness, and frustration that lives inside you and in this wounded part.

Putting pen to paper establishes a deep connection with your subconscious emotional memory. There is something about forming the letters, words, and sentences with pen in hand that unlocks emotional memories buried deep inside as you describe the pain. Your younger self may be skeptical of this first attempt, so don’t think that there is going to be a tremendous breakthrough all at once. The first letter will set the stage and prepare you to go deeper with subsequent letters.

Your Turn

Find a quiet place to do this work. If you can’t find a quiet place at home, be creative. Is there a secluded place or backyard you can sit in for privacy? Before you start writing, read through the instructions so you won’t have to stop in the middle of writing.

Start with a blank sheet of paper. Look over your timeline, and identify the specific age of wounding and the event that you are ready to write about. Close your eyes and begin to ask that wounded part to describe how they feel. Begin to connect with your wounded and lost inner child. The following questions can help you visualize the setting.

• How old is this part of you?
• What was going on in the household?
• Who was there?
• What did it feel, sound, and smell like?
• What was happening?
• What you were feeling?
• What are the secrets this part has been holding on to?
• What are the deep, heavy hurts this part carries?
• What does your child self want to say to your responsible adult self?

When you are ready, start writing. Don’t think about it, just write. Keep pushing your pen or pencil to move, and let out whatever comes. It doesn’t have to make sense, and you don’t even have to be able to read it. Write fast and furiously; don’t edit or worry about good penmanship. Be in the flow of the moment. (Sometimes people ask if they can type their letter, and certainly that works, but there is a difference between the two modalities. Try both ways to see which one gives you deeper results.)

Transfer your feelings and thoughts onto the paper. Write for as long as it takes. Don’t stop until you feel you have said what you wanted to say. If there is more inside of you, keep going until you can’t think of another thing your wounded part wants or needs to say.

Don’t rush through the exercise or think you have to quickly move ahead to the next part of the process. Be gentle with yourself right now; pushing yourself through the work is not going to heal you faster.

Letter writing will help you begin to understand what this wounded part feels and sounds like, and to identify when it shows up in your adult life. Once you can recognize what your wounded part does and says and what triggers it, then you can address your impulsive reactions in real time.

If you find writing from the perspective of your younger self difficult, try describing the wounding events from your childhood by symbolically writing to a friend or an anonymous person. The key is to connect with the emotions related to the situation, as this is going to help in the next step, when your adult self writes back.

Letter from Your Adult Self to Your Younger Self

Now you are ready for your adult self to connect with your younger self. Ideally your adult self will be loving, caring, and nurturing. After all, you just heard your younger self reveal all the painful emotions that it has been holding on to for so many years.

As you already know, your responsible adult self is the part of you that has matured, pays the bills, and does the work of being an adult in the world. It is your grounded part. Your younger self needs to hear from your protective, responsible adult self that you will set strong boundaries, and that you can handle whatever it was that created the woundings and triggers in the first place. If the younger self doesn’t believe you, or if you do not create strong boundaries, then the younger self will not put down its wounded emotional response tools.

As before, it can help to see an example of this letter writing. The following is the response from my adult self to my younger self.

Take a deep breath. What was it like for you to read this letter? What feelings came up? Pay attention to those feelings, as they are clues to help you know more about yourself and your woundings.

You can see the consistent messages of love in my letter to little Bobby. My responsible adult self reassures him that my boundary setting is strong and that it is OK to have feelings. When you write your letters, you can write about the events that were happening to establish a context, but focus on the emotions you felt at the time. The wounded child self needs to have emotional validation in order to begin the healing process. In doing so, your inner child will begin to trust you, to know that you will be there and that you won’t abandon this part. Resist the urge to admonish, criticize, or tell the wounded inner child what it should be doing or what needs to be done to fix everything. This part already worked overtime to try and make this out-of-control situation better. What it needs now is acknowledgment, love, kindness, and validation.

Before we move on to the next letter writing, here is another sample letter from the adult self to the child self that a patient of mine gave permission to share.

Becky’s letter connects with the wounded inner child self that still spins in the dysfunctional feelings and illusions of her youth. Her adult self is reaching through time and extending herself emotionally to connect with this wounded part. She addresses some of the struggles from that time and emphasizes what is happening emotionally.

Becky’s wounded part shows up in her adult life through low self-esteem, emotionally shutting down, avoiding confrontation, and feeling lonely and isolated. The letter is her invitation to her younger self to let go of some of this wounding because her adult self is learning how to take care of and set boundaries for herself. She is trying to give perspective to the emotions and the situation.

When you write your first adult letter, you may not know where to begin. If this is the case, start by describing the situation your younger self wrote about in the first letter. Use the same feeling words your younger self used. The language you use with your younger self is all about emotional validation and acknowledgment.

Once you know the type of the language to use and what you want to acknowledge, you are ready to write to your younger self. Explain that you know the situation and that it was painful. You know the hurts and sorrows and that this younger part was betrayed, for example. You may remember how you wished that someone older could have explained things to you. This is what you will be doing as you write this letter to your younger self.

Before you start writing, keep in mind the key elements that the wounded part needs to know, hear, and feel from your adult self:

• Acknowledge all of the pain and wounding that this part carries, and validate specific feelings from that time.
• Let this part know that you will not abandon or ignore it until it is healed and integrated with your adult self.
• State that you will protect all parts of your wounded inner child by establishing strong boundaries for yourself and others.

Your Turn

As before, find a quiet place to do this letter writing. Sit quietly for a minute or two, and take a few deep, relaxing breaths. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Begin the letter with “Dear little . . .” Tell your inner child what you know it is yearning to hear. Tell this part that it is being cared for.

Your inner child may need to hear a lot of reassurance from you, especially if you grew up in a highly dysregulated household or experienced multiple betrayals or severe traumas. If this is the case, your inner child is pretty well guarded. This part has learned to protect itself and may not trust you even as you say that everything will be OK. Be patient, as this wounding has been there for years, and it is going to take a while to process the hurts.

Above all, don’t stop and shut down. You are at a crucial part of your journey of healing. Don’t leave your younger self hanging out there after it bared its soul. Write from a place of loving kindness, understanding, and compassion for this wise part of you.

Writing these letters is tough work. After you have written your letters, go out and take a walk, connect with nature, and drink lots of water. These actions are great grounding exercises and will help you to feel more solid within yourself, especially after you have processed deep emotional pain.

Moving through the Process

Once you have written a few letters back and forth with your younger self, ask yourself if this wounded part of you is shifting inside. Is it evolving or transforming? Are things moving around a bit so that you are beginning to have a different perspective? Does the event still feel as intense as it once did? Are emotions easing up, or are they staying the same? Review your timeline and your Emotional Response Scale ratings. Are the ratings still the same, or have they decreased?

If the letters are not creating any shifts inside, you may need to dig deeper and be more heartfelt with the writing. If you are keeping it all on a surface level and not going deep within yourself to find the pain, you will not have much movement from this exercise. If you feel resistant to going deeper, then look at that issue. Do you not want to feel the pain again? Are you afraid that if you heal the pain, you won’t know what your life will be like in the future? Be gentle with yourself. Observe, don’t condemn, yourself.

One challenge you may have is that you are still learning how to set boundaries and are not good at it yet, so you are not sure how to reassure the wounded part. That’s OK. The biggest thing I find is that the wounded part just wants to be heard and validated. You may need to fake it before you make it with boundary setting, but as long as you are moving forward with the letter exchange and are strong and loving with yourself, you are making progress.

Another challenge is that you may still feel the same way you did as a child, so you don’t feel that you can write your adult letter yet because the pain you feel as an adult mirrors how you felt as a child. Or you may wonder how you can reassure your child self when you don’t know if things are going to be OK. Just remember that you do know how your life story turns out so far because you are here reading this book and doing this work.

Your life may not be perfect, but whatever was happening in your childhood has ceased. You have the battle scars from that time, but those harmful experiences are no longer happening. If you are unsure of what words to use, I recommend that you write the adult letters in the words and intentions of a respectful, loving, and kind teacher or coach you knew growing up. Pick up on this strong, loving energy and then put into words what the wounded part needs to hear.

Every child wants to hear that things are going to be OK. The adult may not always know if things really are going to be OK, but the adult carries that hopeful strength for the child. The adult can shoulder the responsibility for saying things are going to be OK because the adult is going to do everything they can to make it OK for the child. It is their highest intention.

Again, be gentle with yourself. The process of opening up pathways inside that you have not uncovered for years is magical. It is a journey into a familiar place that has been in the dark for a long time. There is a wellspring of emotion that reveals itself in this expression, but you have to give yourself permission to be vulnerable to touch this treasure.

Story: Letters from Jason, a Teenage Boy

Jason is a forty-three-year-old married man with children. He came to see me because he was not fulfilled in his marriage. He and his wife have no emotionally intimacy. He avoids discussions, and at times lies to her to get out of any conflict.

Jason has given permission for me to share his healing letters. The following is a back-and-forth exchange between his fourteen-year-old wounded self and his responsible adult self. The first is from his younger self.

In Jason’s adult response, notice how loving and supportive he is toward his younger part.

I feel fortunate that Jason allowed me to share his letter exchange with you. His letters demonstrate his heartfelt nature and his intimate connection with the pain his younger self carried. In his letter to his fourteen-year-old self, you can hear the language of an older brother or mentor. He is kind and clear with his words and perspectives. He also reassures his younger self by saying, I see you, I hear you, and I know you’re going to be OK. He encourages his younger part that he doesn’t need to stay stuck, that he can feel his feelings, let go of some of the pain, and mature emotionally.

Jason went on to write more back-and-forth letters to help his wounded inner child heal and to stop some behaviors he was doing in his adult life that were rooted in his adolescent wounding. His younger part showed up in his adult life by lying, avoiding, being passive-aggressive, and wanting covert control. He had tried other types of therapies, but none of them got to the root of the issue. His goal now is to bring forth the wounding so he can heal it with the adult self ’s grounded emotional maturity.

You could probably feel the pain and sincerity in Jason’s letters, which set the path for his younger self to heal. Making this sort of connection with your younger self will create emotional shifts inside of you, too. That is the difference between writing a letter just to do the exercise and writing a letter to bring about lasting change within yourself.

You may be wondering how many times you need to do this back-and-forth letter writing. Most people do so four or five times. I find that this number of exchanges is effective in helping to process many of the feelings that the younger self holds and the adult self needs to address. Your letters may be many pages or just one page, but I do encourage you to write more than just a few sentences.

If you don’t feel any emotion and just state the facts as you write your letters, you need to get out of your head and spend more time sitting and accessing your emotions. Stick with it. (Refer to the Feelings Chart in appendix A if you are stuck for words and need some prompting.) Your younger wounded self has a lot to say to you. When the younger self doesn’t have any further urge to express the pain through letters, you will have released everything that has been pressing up against the doorway, and you will feel the shift within.

How do you feel now that you have written your letters? Over the next few days, notice how your younger self shows up in your adult life. Just live your life, and see if you can make some connections between the emotions you felt during the events on your timeline and the emotions you feel now. Learn to listen for this younger part of you. Notice the words you use to tell people how you feel.

Notice how you may be pausing for a moment before you respond to a situation. Notice when you are not quite feeling yourself; this indicates that a shift is occurring. Take a moment to acknowledge that you used to react a certain way to your triggers but can now choose how to respond. You can determine whether the younger self is stepping in front or your adult self is taking charge, setting boundaries, and reassuring the younger wounded self that everything is going to be OK. Remember, the younger self is not going to put down the impulsive response tools until the adult self becomes the one in charge and is protective of all the parts.

Assess Your Progress

You have done a lot of deep healing work so far. Let’s take a moment to take inventory, assess your progress, and see how you are doing.

You are looking at yourself in new ways as you determine when and how this younger wounded self starts to step in front of you. You are looking over your letters and hearing what the younger part is saying. You are seeing where this part is getting stuck. You are hearing what this part is looking for, yearning for, and desperate for. The more you address these core emotional needs, the more the younger self is going to start to heal and integrate with the adult self, which is the final goal of the HEAL process. Pay attention to what the younger self says and how it communicates.

You may now see that this wounded part is sad, lonely, childish with words, or even a brat. You may see how this part demonstrates itself with throwing tantrums or withholding or controlling. In whatever way your wounding comes out, remember that this is just how it is trying to get your attention. It is not good or bad. Give yourself permission to just observe this and hold it, knowing you are working on transforming this emotional energy inside of you.

Exercise: Developing Functional Tools to Manage Triggering Events

This exercise will help you to identify more clearly where each trigger came from, what it needs in order to heal, and how to make a plan for using functional tools.

Take out your notebook and review the list of triggers you wrote down in “Exercise: Identify Your Triggers” earlier in this chapter. Next to each trigger, write down where that trigger came from and what it needs in order to heal. For example:

Once you have identified the source of a trigger, come up with a plan for your responsible adult self to remain in charge. For example, you can make an agreement with the younger wounded part that you are going to be proactive and take care of all of this wounding now that you have a good idea of where your triggers come from, what they are, what your impulsive reactions are to your triggers, and what you want to do to HEAL this cycle. You are building a set of functional response tools to add to your toolbox.

This trigger list and your functional response toolbox will help your adult self remember what you need to do to take care of yourself emotionally every day. The more you consciously work on developing new functional tools and addressing your triggers each day, the sooner you will shift out of the dysfunctional dance with your wounding. This is a daily practice that you will need to remind yourself to do at first, but once you get in the habit, it will feel natural.

The emotional shifts you are making at this time are big, but there will still be times when the shadows of your emotional pain or wounding show up. For example, you may yell, act impulsively, throw tantrums, or be moody. That’s fine. It means that the wounded part is still getting triggered. This work is not about being perfect, it is about acknowledging and discerning what is working for you and what is not.

After you have responded to a person or situation, ask yourself if the response was the best grounded response you could have given at the time. Look below the surface of the pain, disappointment, and hurt to determine the root of these behavioral choices. If emotions and impulsive reactions keep resurfacing, you may need to do more letter writing to understand the origins of the wounding better. Be patient and stick with it.

As you progress along in the HEAL process, you may find that after you have addressed the needs of one wounded part of you, another one bubbles up to the surface, and along with it a second age of wounding saying, Now it’s my turn.

If other areas of wounding start coming forward, go through the letter writing process again with these new wounded feelings. Notice the language that your younger self uses to express the feelings and experiences from that time, then take your time responding in the same gentle way you did before.

You may also have an issue resurface that you thought you had already dealt with, or you may feel like you are going backward when these old patterns and feelings show up. This is just the shadow of old emotional programming presenting itself at a different time in your life. It is showing up again because you need to examine a different part of this dynamic. It is not good or bad, it is just a natural part of the healing progression. If this happens, repeat the HEAL process you have done so far, and address this shadow.

You have explored a lot about yourself in this chapter by creating your timeline, rating the intensity of your experiences, determining your age of wounding, understanding your triggers, and writing healing letters back and forth with your younger self. If you completed all of the exercises and processes in this chapter, congratulations! That is tremendous work. If you shied away from some of them, that’s OK, too. This resistance is just fear of the unknown. Keep on your path, and do the work as you are able to. All is in the right time and order.

You are well on your way to healing the woundings that you suffered during childhood. You know much more about yourself now than you ever have, and you are setting yourself up for living an authentic life.

In the next chapter you will begin the work of learning to set healthy boundaries, a major key in healing your lost inner child.