Inner Child Healing Thoughts

Mars ingressed into my 5H and my mind was immediately overtaken by thinking critically about inner child healing. As a young adultish, I’m trying my hardest to establish the practice of play for the sake of itself. I’m trying my hardest to remind myself that I deserve the things that will make the space to play - rest, joy, and safety. I am practicing defending my right to play. I am practicing defending my right to joy.

I feel like we’re all in this ‘healing our inner child’ phase. Well, at least the hyper visible people on social media are. It’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about for a while. When I was a child, I was the most tapped in, most in tune with the world around me. I felt like I was watching my life as an outsider (?) but still within my own body and still within my own life. I felt observant and aware. I manifested like it was nobody’s business, my wishes became my reality. When I played I felt this deep sense of joy and fulfillment that I'm currently trying to find again. But then I switched schools. I went from a tiny classroom with other children who looked like me, other children who shared the same ideas of joy as me to a school with children who looked nothing like me. Children who did not think like me, children who had very different ideas of joy, safety, and play.

My little 9-year-old self, so excited to be in a new space, so naïve of the storm that would soon consume my psyche. I shortly became conscious of oppression. I lost touch with joy and was thrusted into survival mode. I treaded water for so long, for so many years trying my hardest to just stay alive. How can you play when you’re barely living? How can you find joy when you’re not safe? Actually being an outsider really consumed my mental, emotional, and spiritual bandwidth. It completely destroyed my sense of joy, safety, and play.

I realized their fun was not my fun, their play was not my play, and their safety was not my safety.

Healing my inner child is about involving play and pleasure into my life but, how can one truly have fun when they aren’t safe? When their wounds are constantly picked at?

Healing requires safety.

How can we heal if we’re not safe?