Sarah Smith’s Path to Healing

I have recently let go of my inner child. This means I do not have an inner child anymore. I don’t have a part in me that needs attention, is emotionally dysregulated, or has tantrums. It’s not that I pushed it away. It’s more like it dissolved, like it became one with something larger, like it returned to the universe. I don’t carry the energy of it anymore. The wound has closed, and with that, the part of me that held the wound no longer needs to exist.

I have tried to find something about this topic. I’ve searched the internet high and low. I haven’t found anything on it. So, dear reader, if you know anything about this, feel free to share it. I’m kind of winging it here, and I don’t feel ready for it, even though I might be, if I’ve reached this point in my life.

I honestly don’t really know how to start this post, because I’ve never addressed my readers like this. But here it goes. A friend asked me to write about my theory of the inner child because she said it resonated and made a lot of sense to her. It’s also the only thing that makes sense to me.

See, here’s the thing. Everybody says the inner child is a part of you. And I don’t disagree. I do, however, disagree with what I used to believe the inner child to be.

I used to believe that the inner child was the child who was hurt and neglected. I also used to believe that it had to be integrated and healed. That’s not completely wrong, but it’s also not the whole truth for me.

What I believe now is that we see it as an inner child because the trauma and hurt happened when we were children. So this part of us was never able to grow with us. It stayed fixed in the state that it was captured in.

Where I think the theories and teachings are incomplete is in what the inner child actually is. I believe it’s not entirely a part of us. I think it’s parts of us that are captured in structures that do not serve us.

For example: I was taught that my curiosity was something to be managed by rules handed down to me. So I managed my curiosity by those rules. But they weren’t good for me, because I need to live my curiosity. I need to use it in a way that serves me. I do not need to manage it.

So I believe the teachings and theories are right in a sense. There are parts of the inner child that need to be integrated and healed. There are also parts that need to be released, because they are not parts of us—they are structures given to us by our parents to keep us safe. The thing is: we were never supposed to keep those structures. We were meant to form our own.

By holding on to those structures (structures can be: rules, traditions, expectations, behavioral patterns, or even entire belief systems imposed on us, beliefs we inherited before we knew we could choose) we keep ourselves trapped.

Sure, those structures can be exactly right for us, but more often than not, they harm us, because we were never allowed to discover who we truly are.

The things that were meant to keep us safe turned into cages that cost us our freedom.

So, where do we go from here?

Honestly, I can only tell you what I did, and you can use that as a way to find your own path. I am not a guru. I am not a healer. I am not a therapist. I’m just someone who has found something and wants to share it with someone else. If you choose to try what I have done, then I ask you to please seek support. This isn’t an easy path, and it’s easy to get lost along the way. You should have people in your life who can guide you back to yourself.

Here’s what I did:

I accepted that I am who I am because of the parents I had. I accepted that I was in a very painful situation and that I wanted to change it but hadn’t yet. I accepted that I did not like myself. I accepted that I hated myself. I accepted that I thought I was stupid. I accepted that I thought I was ugly. I accepted that I thought I was worthless. I accepted that I hated myself, my life, and everything in it.

And it hurt like hell.

Accepting tore my soul apart because it destroyed the picture I had of myself. It destroyed any illusion I wanted to keep intact. It destroyed the very core beliefs I had clung to.

I didn’t accept everything at once. I don’t think I could have handled that. Healing should take time. It should be done properly and carefully. When rushed, it’s not something that can be sustained, or worse, you could end up like me and fall into a full-blown psychosis. That’s fun while you’re in it… but the consequences are anything but fun.

You can’t just accept those parts and leave it at that. Acceptance includes feeling what comes with the thoughts. For me, it meant grieving for the 12-year-old girl who was told she was “thick as pig shit” because she couldn’t find a hammer in the shed. It meant grieving for the 24-year-old who was rejected because of how she looked. It meant feeling the feelings that came up with the thought. And that is the scariest part about it. Those feelings can feel like life or death.

Accepting means feeling every feeling you have suppressed with the thought.

So now that I’ve scared you, here is the beautiful part of accepting: it frees you to really be yourself. If you can accept the dark parts and the parts that hurt you, then you can accept the beauty and the love that you are. Acceptance doesn’t just mean accepting the bad. It means accepting the good. It means accepting that you are smart and lovely. It means accepting that you love to give. It means accepting that you have so much joy waiting to come out.

Once I learned to accept things, I was able to learn from them. Everything we do has a reason, even if we don’t know the reason yet.

Take the “I’m stupid” belief. Once I accepted it, I could dig into it and find out why I believed it. I believed it because it was safer to be stupid than to be smart. Every time I was smart, people put me down or made me feel delusional. It was safer to go along than to say, “Hey, that’s wrong because…”

When we have things others cannot accept in themselves or desperately want, they will try to take them from us.

So believing I was stupid was a structure my parents gave me because they couldn’t handle me being smart. I don’t want to speculate why, that’s not my burden to carry. And that’s okay.

As an adult, that structure didn’t serve me anymore. It was outdated, and I had outgrown it. So I had to teach myself that I am safe when I’m smart. I did that by letting myself be smart without judgment. And that takes time. When I started, I had my parents’ voices in my head all the time, and I had to talk out loud to myself to override those voices. But I did it. I created a new structure for myself.

That structure became a container for different beliefs, ones aligned with who I am now. I believe the universe is working for me, not against me. I believe I am truly unique and enough just as I am. I expect honesty, not perfection. I expect integrity, not obedience. I expect transparency, not loyalty.

And I guess that’s why I could let go of the inner child.

I was able to accept that I am smart. I found a new way of thinking that works for me. And I let go of what I was taught as a child.

This is how I did it for all my trauma and all the other things that were blocking my growth.

I know it sounds simple, but it’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I let go of every “safety” I was taught from a young age and created my own safety.

I let go of everything I believed to be true that wasn’t serving me. And I created my own beliefs. I knew they were mine because my body felt peaceful when I lived by them. Not relieved, not numbed. Calm. When something is true for me, I don’t brace against it. My nervous system recognizes it before my mind does.

The thing is: by doing that, I healed my depression, my anxiety, my PTSD, my CPTSD, and my suicidal thoughts. I am in a place in my life where I can get up on a Sunday and do stuff. I can go outside just because. I can enjoy doing nothing for hours on end. I spent my Saturday in a garden just sitting there. I didn’t feel the need to use my phone. I didn’t feel like I had to do something like tidy up or clean or just be active. I was able to enjoy the quiet and the still.

So yeah, the inner child does not need to stay. It needs to be released because it’s stuck energy that isn’t serving us anymore. It’s a burden we carry that isn’t even ours to carry.

But that doesn’t mean we throw away what it held. I think we’re meant to keep the qualities the inner child protected, like joy, curiosity, spontaneity, softness. Those were never the problem. It was the structures that crushed them that created the pain. So when we release the inner child, we’re actually freeing those qualities to come back in their true form.

Thank you for reading this far. I truly hope that this has resonated and maybe even helped you.

Lots of love,

Me

P.S. I would like to add that in my post, it may come across as though healing was a linear process. That’s not true. I needed a lot of compassion and patience with myself because I fell back into those patterns many times. It has taken me years of active work, and for every two steps forward, you’ll often take one step back. It’s the consistency, the love, the compassion, and the patience that you give yourself that will truly allow you to heal.