Dear hopeforamal:

You wrote: “I feel like I’m constantly being chased by myself… I just want to be at peace and not feel this constant anxiety…I just want to be the young, confident, bubbly woman that I know I am. I feel like I lost her through the battle field, yet sometimes she comes out of the blue and then I lose her again.”

Here is my take on what you wrote: first, there is a part of you, the child part which you describe above as “young, confident, bubbly.” And there is the internal critic part of you, one who is chasing the child part (“being chased”) and scaring the child part (who is in “constanct anxeity”) and is fighting against the child part (“battle field”). The child part of you comes out once in a while but you lose her because the internal critic part of you is scaring her away, abusing her, really.

In this battlefield, the child part in you is not dead so it comes up once in a while but most of the time she is hiding- can you blame her? With such a threatening enemy, the internal critic- no wonder she is hiding.

Who is going to save the child in you? Not the internal critic! There is a third part if you that needs to grow and mature- it is a part that will step into this battlefield and take care of things: protect the child part, remove the internal critic into a jail cell like where it is the least dangerous…

If anything of what I wrote speaks to you, let me know how and I will write you some more.
anita