Hi Anita

I’ve often felt the same, that I never truly experienced being a child in the way others describe it. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my memories of feeling like a child are at best unreliable, fragmented, or shaped survival and insecurities than innocence. Funny I couldn’t tell you if the survival and insecurities of child hood that influenced the future or if its my adult insecurities coloring the past… such a tangled web.

This makes me wonder if it’s helpful to distinguish between our personal experience of childhood and the archetypal inner child. The former is shaped by circumstance, memory, and emotion which are often tangled with unmet needs or early wounds. The latter, though, is symbolic: a living presence within us that represents vulnerability, playfulness, creativity, and the longing to be held and seen.

When we speak of healing the inner child, we’re not necessarily trying to reconstruct or validate our actual childhood. We’re tending to something deeper, a part of us that still needs care, even if our early years didn’t provide it. A invitation not to recover what was lost, but to begin offering now what was never given, or understood or felt as given.

I’ve found the same approach helpful when working with the archetypes of mother and father. Not as literal parents, but as symbolic presences within. Just as with the inner child, it helps to separate the lived experience from the archetypal energy. The personal stories may be tangled, painful, or incomplete, but the archetypes offer a way to relate to, develop and reclaim within, qualities like protection, nurture, strength, and guidance.

In attempting integrating these archetypes, I’ve had to wrestle with the idea of unconditional love. A work in progress, as I’ve found that its to often misunderstood as unconditional allowing, sentiment without integrity. For me Love without accountability isn’t love, it’s enabling…

It’s difficult to articulate how we can love someone unconditionally… to accept them as they are in the present moment, even when and as they fail us… its difficult enough to love ourselves that way. But I’m learning that unconditional love holds it all… the failures and the boundaries.

I wonder that to love someone unconditionally is to hold their humanity with compassion, even when they fall short. Isn’t that now how we love our children? I’ve often wondered if its the reason the wisdom traditions turn to the word compassion more often then the word love…

For me the word Compassion, is spacious… less about how we feel and more about how we relate. Compassion includes empathy, but also clarity. Compassion can hold pain without needing to fix it, and can set boundaries without withdrawing care. It’s love with wisdom, love that sees clearly. Unconditional Compassion?

Hi Anita

Thank you for your trust and for sharing this poetic post.

There’s real beauty in the way you’re expressing your inner child and how you are finding connection to her… running on green grass, fresh green, forever fields… Green the color of the heart chakra… the color of healing, innocence, and renewed possibility.

I hear the longing, the imagery, the sense of something awakening that was long held in silence. There’s something powerful in expressing that in a space where it can be witnessed.

I do feel some discomfort, not because of what you’ve expressed, but because I don’t see my connection to the inner child in the same light. That may be resistance… perhaps relating to my own process and current capacity. Something to reflect on.

I may not fully relate in the same way, but very much appreciate what you’ve shared and the courage it takes to do so. Thank you for letting me witness it.