By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition. The inner child self-help writings can cripple people, yet they appeal to thousands because we have all been hurt in some way or another, to varying degrees of intensity and horror. The commercialized metaphor of the inner child has become an invisible media institution shaping and molding our lives.

The inner child is a subpersonality or archetype that has a positive or light side as well as a shadow or dark side. While some parents suffer the pain of having been molested or physically abused as children, even everyday, non-abusive life can bring suffering to everyone. Retraumatizing parents by constructing an inner dark child or an inner precious child that was lost in the past keeps the adult captive and undermines his or her safety, security, trust and hope needs. Creating monsters from childhood can make parents angry at their past and create fear and anxiety for their future, making them feel incompetent. Interrupting the competency needs of parents damages their capacity to realize their basic needs for love/non-violence and respect. Uniqueness needs are undermined when parents believe they are just extensions to their past sufferings. Power needs are not sufficiently met for them to be strong and loving parents when their past hangs over them like a phantom in the form of the entrenched wounded inner child.

The social construction of mental health problems can undermine the freedom and self-determination needs of parents. By continually recreating the dark inner child or not actualizing and expressing the precious inner child the parent always sees themselves as sick, saying, "I will never be a good healthy parent. I am always dysfunctional and I'll surely damage my children." This leaves parents dependent upon finding services that will heal them from their dysfunctional dependent behavior.

Being stuck in a traumatized past damages the creativity of our living in the present. Trauma hurts, but the story that surrounds the trauma can cause pain for years to follow. People can continue to suffer when they keep repeating the story, leaving himself or herself as the victim and loser while the perpetrator remains victorious over their Sacred Soul. This undermines their ability to change their life and damages their creativity and spirituality. Molestation, rape and physical abuse scar the soul and discount gender needs. Gandhi said, "You can traumatize my body but I am not going to allow you to traumatize my soul, my spirit." When a traumatized person continues to use symbols or words that maintain the picture of the traumatizing event in their mind they keep rehurting themselves and isolating themselves from intimacy. Framing life in terms of the wounded inner child threatens all of one's basic needs.

Liberation psychology seeks to liberate parents from their own past suffering and from inflicting suffering on their children. Buddha and Jesus taught us to transform suffering into love by changing our attitude toward suffering and trauma in life. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and spiritual teacher, worked desperately in his writings to free us from suffering. Jung, Buddha and Jesus trusted that human beings are resilient and flexible and that people are not fixed at some critical period of their life. Jung wanted us to work on the inner precious child or inner dark child (the shadow aspect of the inner child archetype) but there is more to life than a hurt childhood. Being stuck in the inner child does not release the creative and spiritual energy that is needed for authentic maturity. It leaves us helpless and always sick, or, as the current pop psychology would have us believe, always dysfunctional.

There is an inner strength, the Sacred Soul in liberation psychology or the Jungian Self, which can overcome the weakness of the inner hurt child. Another way to speak of this inner strength is the symbol of the Grail. In some stories the Grail is the cup that Christ drank out of at the last supper and it represents the center of the Soul, the potential for all healing. The Grail mystically provided for those who drank from it all the spiritual food that they needed. Jung once wrote somewhere in his works that when a person has had a genuine experience of the Self-the Grail, the inner Spirit-they live in the world with more courage and less fear. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are examples of people who had a true experience of the Grail and were able to live with courage by confronting their inner fears.

The Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism offers a psychology based on liberation. It can free us from resentment, hurt and suffering from the past and the future and can help to fulfill the basic needs of liberation psychology, opening the way to become liberated parents.

The Noble Eightfold Path

Right Understanding is interpreting and understanding the world by gradually getting rid of our distorted thinking. It does not leave one angry, resentful and hurt about the past nor afraid and hopeless about the future. It endeavors to see the world as it is in the moment. As parents, right understanding frees us from the tyranny of the hurt inner child and allows us to be more open, trusting, hopeful and loving toward our children.

Right Thought is having good thoughts about one's child. Distorted thought processes interfere with seeing the world without illusion. Personalizing is a distortion of thinking that leaves us feeling responsible for the moods of people around us. Even impersonal events are interpreted as reflections of self-worth. We are not responsible for the thoughts of others or for the thoughts of our children. We need to be present for our children and if we are stuck in personalizing we cannot be liberated to guide them clearly.

Right speech is not being triggered by some outer event or inner image to speak impulsively. Refraining from speaking out builds inner strength. However, staying silent out of fear or perfectionism undermines all of our basic needs. Being assertive, honest and clear with our children is right speech. We need to refrain from using the suffering images that were given to us as children to shape our world. This means withdrawing those images and refusing to project those feelings of hurt and trauma onto our loved ones. Restraint from distorted thinking helps parents express love and caring towards their children.

Right action is refraining from hurting our children. The fallacy of control is a distortion of thinking learned from suffering and trauma that says that if one can control their world they will not be hurt anymore. Parents who believe the fallacy of control think that if they control their children then they will be good parents and the children will be safe. There is no way, however, of making the world completely safe for anyone. The fallacy of control is that somehow we can save children from suffering by controlling their behavior, attitudes and ideas. Right action reassures children's trust and justice needs by not projecting negative images onto them and by not over controlling them.

Right livelihood is living in the present according to one's own inner integrity and disidentifying with the polarized images inherited from childhood or dysfunctional family life. To live without the distortion of polarized thinking is to stop thinking people and events are either all good or all bad. When inner voices or chatter tell a person they are better or worse than someone else this polarized thinking undermines their love/nonviolence and respect needs. Being liberated from comparison and polarized thinking raises self-esteem and leads to a life of creativity, hope and trust.

Right Effort is trying earnestly to break habituated patterns of doing and thinking, putting forth effort to overcome negativity and restraining the damaging images that people are led to believe make up the core of themselves. It is putting forth effort against every form of self-hatred and using all one's effort for self-compassion. It is the practice of acting in a loving and kind manner toward others, including one's children. Right effort is not being stuck in the inner child archetype, be it precious or dark, but moving on to the inner images of deep femininity and deep masculinity. Right effort is the search for the Grail, the inner Love-Force, the inner Buddha, the Jungian Self or the Sacred Soul of liberation psychology. The finding of the Grail develops a We-psychology that allows one to live in loving unity with their children.

Right Mindfulness is when a parent strives to be aware of what they are thinking, feeling and doing in every moment of their day. Recalling dreams are important in the practice of Right Mindfulness. Dreams are nightly images that influence and impact daily life by showing a person how they see themselves and others. Parenting is a good path of liberation and spiritual development when one is mindful while engaging one's children. Observing one's thinking, feeling and doing changes their thinking, feeling and doing. Right mindfulness is clearing one's mind of preconceived ideas or feelings about the world and their children so that they can see both directly. Letting go of blame, resentment, judgment, hurt and pain enable one to see without obstructions the loving world of the child.

Right Meditation is the practice of onepointedness and of being aware of the sacred and profane as a single enveloping reality. It is what Christianity calls being contemplative-making sacred every event and encounter with others from moment to moment. Parenting can be a path of action, a path of spiritual development and an ongoing meditation by practicing onepointedness. The practice of focused loving kindness in the lives of one's children reclaims the destructive images that create barriers and communication problems between parent and child. The idea is not to repress or to deny the parent's images of suffering and trauma, but to transform and change every suffering moment with one's children into a loving moment.

Liberation psychology's use of basic needs fulfillment and the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path to eliminate distorted thinking describe a path for parents that can refocus and realign their everyday thinking, feeling and doing. It brings a mystical experience of the Grail as a breakthrough of creativity-the change of heart, the change of attitude.

References

Beck, A. (1989). Love is Never Enough. New York: Harper & Row.

Shearer, A. (1992). Buddha: The Intelligent Heart. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Wolinsky, S. (1993). The Dark Side of the Inner Child: The Next Step. Connecticut: Bramble Books.