Dear Dan,

I know what I need to do I just can’t get started and would rather drown my pain.

I hear you, and I know exactly what you’re talking about… I used to sabotage myself with binge eating, for many many years. The pain was just so big. I believed I was unlovable and unworthy – and that’s the pain I was trying to soothe. In vain, of course.

Only much later have I come across the concept of the inner child. And realized that the child within each of us is so lovable and worthy, but he/she had been told, or had been treated by others in a way that he concluded that he is unlovable, that he is a freak, a nobody, that there is something terribly wrong with him.

The child concludes that he is bad, even if he had done nothing wrong but was in fact a victim of abuse. In fact, the child believes that they deserved the abuse, and if they would only change and become “perfect” and “good”, that’s when the abuse would stop and their parents would finally love them.

I’ve realized that there was a precious little girl inside of me, who was so heavily criticized and put down, who was never good enough for her mother, whose achievements were taken for granted and her even the slightest mistakes punished… I’ve realized that that girl needs my love and compassion, not my condemnation and judgement. She was a victim, not a villain. She needs my protection, but above all, my compassion.

Dan, I know you’re hurting, and I am pretty sure that a lot of that pain is your inner child hurting… because he feels rejected and unloved, and probably unlovable too. But he is not unlovable – he is so precious and lovable! He’s been through a lot and he hasn’t deserved the abuse he went through. He needs your help, he needs your compassion, he needs you to take him into his arms and soothe him.

That too is one important aspect of self-parenting: self-soothing.

It’s good that you are in therapy. If you want to talk about anything at all, I am here…