A CSA Survivor Shares Their Journey of Inner Child Healing and Recovery

The Child Inside

Connecting with the past, healing the present

By Christopher

The small boy has been around a while. Typically, he is wide-eyed and watchful, wanting to approach but too afraid to step out of the shadows and be seen. But today is not a normal day. Today feels tight, claustrophobic. There’s a disturbance in the field, crackling like static on a radio, emotions waiting to be formed. I lie back with my head on the pillow and the scene plays out; no visuals or audio to this, only the urgency of the past right here in the present, so physical I feel it like pain.

As the flashback unfolds the boy appears – in focus this time, his presence filling the room. Tattie, our long-haired lurcher, sees him clearly. She bounds onto the bed beside me and clambers to stand on my chest, wobbling about as my lungs heave, protecting this sobbing child the only way she knows how: with a paw on my shoulder and a nose in my ear. On an ordinary day her clowning would lighten the mood, send my demons scuttling for the door. But not today.

Five years old, this boy is desperate for human warmth but unable to ask or even hope for such a thing. So many emotions flicker through him it’s hard for me to keep up. And he is scared, the kind of all encompassing, life-consuming terror that perhaps only a child really knows.

The pain of complex childhood trauma

In the years following that first encounter with my five-year-old self, I was in no condition to help him. My life was a mess. Having worked in community mental health, I recognised the symptoms almost immediately: vague and persistent feelings of threat without any visible cause, over-stimulated by the slightest noise or light or touch, an ever-present sparking anger that could erupt without warning, and flashbacks that saw me writhing on the bed like a child in the throes of a nightmare.

CPTSD, or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, is no disorder at all. Quite the opposite. It is the basic animal survival instinct working faultlessly, the only way it knows how. Faced with unconscious projections of a traumatic past come to life in the present, what felt life-threatening to the small boy then, feels life-threatening now, forty-something years after the fact. As a result, I could no longer work, sleep, or concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes due to the turmoil in my head.

As the days pitched and swelled around me, I struggled to keep my head above the waves. I gave up my job, and the flat we were renting was sold. We moved into a bedsit around the corner and I began to feel – and behave – like a caged wild cat, snapping and snarling, prowling up and down the road in the dark, too scared to go back indoors. After a month of this, my partner moved out and into a van on the driveway. My emotions were so ragged my adult self couldn’t cope being around her for very long. But the boy desperately needed her close by.

Beginning to heal

In those early days, when the CPTSD symptoms were at their worst, my childhood was a blank screen. Any connection to myself as a boy had been severed thanks to a medical emergency that saw me critically ill on a hospital bed, aged seven. Along with the terror of white coats and tubes and transfusions, the episode erased from my memory everything that had come before – including years of sexual abuse.

Gradually that blank screen was now being filled. I began regular EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) sessions, then trauma counselling on a weekly basis, uncovering layer after layer of childhood pain and distress. There were still gaps in my memory, but at least now I was beginning to heal. Wasn’t I? Coming to terms with the trauma in my past felt like the hardest and most necessary healing. And it felt slow… slow like the deep time drift of glaciers in an ice field.

Exploring parts work

I’d heard about something called ‘inner child work’ but didn’t really know what this meant. I became interested in IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), and began to take ‘parts work’ more seriously. It made sense: a multiplicity of younger parts frozen in time by trauma, unable to rationalise their experiences, compensating for their terror by adopting more and more extreme stances in order to stay safe.

Since embarking on a journey to retrieve these lost boys, I’ve got to know the five year old well. For a long time this meant listening, reassuring, feeling the full spectrum of his emotions. Since then I’ve met many other parts, all the infants and boys of different ages who inhabit my skin. There are teenagers here, and grown-ups too, staunch protectors of the smaller ones, who over time were able to put down the roles they had adopted and trust me to hold those parts safely.

I’ve seen all ages relax and grow, re-emerge out of their fear, trust that things can be different. As the trauma begins to recede, other emotions push through: glimpses of playfulness, joy, curiosity and compassion that startle me and give me hope. These boys and teenagers are nothing if not resilient. They have seen, sensed and experienced firsthand what my adult conscious mind still struggles to conceive. From out of my half-remembered past they appear, showing me more of who I am and what I have to look forward to.

Walking your path

There are certainly advantages to walking this path with a practitioner or therapist, and in some cases this may be crucial in order to stay safe. But there remains a shortage of genuinely trauma-informed professionals out there, and it can be difficult to find one who isn’t booked out. If like me you don’t currently have access to an appropriate therapist, I believe you can still do some good work on your own.

What follows isn’t a guide, simply a few ideas and approaches that have worked for me. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own and I don’t claim to be any kind of expert. If there is such a thing as an expert in this field though, I’d say it’s the person with lived experience of their own trauma rather than the therapist or medical professional. The ‘one size fits all’ approach to mental health isn’t working and never did. I’ve yet to find a recipe for healing complex trauma, no single ‘treatment’ or method that works for everyone.

What’s worked for me is a multi-faceted approach to healing. This has included trauma-informed psychotherapy/counselling, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) in my early stages of recovery, exercises like TRE (Trauma Release Exercise) that help release trauma in the body and regulate the nervous system, IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), and healing with a somatic focus.

I’ve encountered many modes of healing, all of which held value and none of which were a ‘silver bullet’. Whether we work alone or with a therapist, I believe the challenge is to find our own unique path towards healing the pain of childhood trauma. Unique, because we are all individuals. While our suffering may be similar, it is never the same.

Some thoughts and ideas…

• We all have parts or younger selves. In complex or developmental trauma, these parts invariably become fragmented, ‘frozen’, or exiled as a result of trauma suffered in earlier life.

• I don’t think of my younger selves as being in the past, just as I don’t see trauma that way. They are part of who I am; their pain is real, and I feel the effects of their suffering in the present moment.

• My younger parts were alone and suffering for a long time. They learned not to trust me or anyone else, and I had to win that trust over the years. My commitment to them is repaid many times over as I recover parts of myself I was forced to shut out in order to survive.

• I’ve noticed that my parts’ pain, isolation, or happiness directly feeds my adult experience: my beliefs, emotions, triggers, and the ways in which I relate to others.

• Listening to younger parts talk of their pain helps me see the origins of my suffering more clearly. In parenting their fears, anxieties, grief, and shame, I’ve begun to understand and heal the wounds of early trauma.

• Learning to feel love and compassion for my younger parts encourages me to feel the same for my adult self. One feels like a natural step towards the other.

• I’m learning to take things slowly and gently. As soon as I rush on ahead or push for change, the younger ones invariably get scared and withdraw. Remember: one small, gentle step at a time.

• When I love and nurture these younger parts I feel I’m retraining and supporting my undeveloped, unregulated nervous system. My (over)reactions to stimuli which feel unsafe no longer feel on a hair trigger. And when fear arises I can generally talk to and reassure the part who feels scared.

• Research suggests a strong mind/body link between physical symptoms and psychological pain, and no more so than with complex trauma. I frequently find that behind many of my physical symptoms is a younger self trying to get my attention the only way he knows how.

Finding a way in

Learning how to connect with my younger selves initially felt like a leap in the dark. What separated us was their pain and isolation, and my inability to trust the process. Here are some approaches I found useful and which helped shine a light where it was most needed.

• Think of the things you loved when you were a child: favourite foods, hobbies, TV programmes etc… Reacquaint yourself with some of these, even if it feels weird at first. My teenagers love darts, ping pong, and the original Pink Panther films with Peter Sellers. My small boys love glasses of milk, Malteser bunnies, Wallace and Gromit, and my bear (more of which below). These might seem trivial to you, but for younger selves they are hugely important and can act as a bridge between you.

• If you don’t already have one, get yourself a bear (or furry equivalent). For younger parts – especially tiny ones – they represent safety and unconditional love. I have a large brown bear living in my bed. He goes on trips with us, occasionally sits at the dinner table, and is the best nervous system regulator I could hope to find.

• When I first began working with my parts, I found it less overwhelming to focus on a) my small boy (5 years old), and b)my teenager (14). Many more have revealed themselves since, but only as they learned to trust me to: listen without judgement, accept them unconditionally, understand their feelings, take better care of myself, set boundaries, and do my best to love and support them.

• As I get to know my younger selves better, I learn their triggers. This helps me pre-empt potential trigger situations by preparing, reassuring, and negotiating with them in advance so they felt less threatened.

• Many of my younger parts don’t know how old I am when I first meet them. They think I’m just a few years older than them. When I explain that I‘m a grown-up with a secure home, better choices and boundaries, and strategies for keeping myself – and them – safe, they are usually able to relax a little. I assure them that I’m responsible so they don’t have to be.

• I’ve built a daily check-in with younger selves into my morning routine. I do this after I wake up and as soon as I have enough tea in my system to think straight. This helps me know who is struggling and likely to need help during the day. I think of it as preventative support.

• Writing has become an important way for me to connect with my younger selves, both by journaling with a part (enables them to have a voice and express difficult emotions), and writing a letter to partsexpressing my love, support, and commitment to the work (validates their feelings and fears; lets them know… it will be different this time).

• I sometimes forget that those around me have younger selves too. Remembering this can take the sting out of tricky relationships, misunderstandings, or confrontations. Being able to say ‘I have a younger part who is feeling such and such right now’ has helped me diffuse what might otherwise have turned into painful and destructive arguments.

• Don’t be discouraged if you fail to see immediate results. My younger parts were alone for a long time. The real benefits only came once I’d built a trusting relationship with them.

Books that might help

No Bad Parts, Richard Schwartz

The IFS Workbook, Richard Schwartz

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, Janina Fisher

Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists, Janina Fisher

Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self, Lucia Capacchione