Cage-free Living in an Adult World
When you are here, talk only about your own experience. Is it not your child’s consciousness that is responsible for your knowledge of your world? If that child consciousness had not appeared, who would have asked any questions now?
Nisargadatta – Nothing is Everything
Many paths of self-development and modes of therapy address the concept of an inner child or soul child. What is this inner child or soul child?
Dictionary – a person’s supposed original or true self, especially when regarded as damaged or concealed by negative childhood experiences.
Wikipedia – Carl Jung is often referenced as the concept’s originator in his Divine Child archetype. Emmet Fox called it the “Wonder Child.” Charles Whitfield dubbed it the “Child Within.” The inner child broke into the mainstream primarily through Hugh Missildine, MD, “Your Inner Child of the Past” (1963), which has retained its usefulness, and through Transactional Analysis (circa 1965-1969) with its model of Child-Parent-Adult, which has retained less utility. John Bradshaw‘s use of the “wounded inner child” is a version of the inner child skewed towards topics germane to individual and group therapy settings.
The inner child is often characterized as a subpersonality within the framework of psychosynthesis or may also be seen as a central element surrounded by subpersonalities. Virtually every talk therapy approach acknowledges and ascribes some meaning to the inner child, even if they use a different label.
Wounded inner child vs. joyful, spontaneous inner child
Some teachers and therapists work with a wounded inner child, while others work more with an inner child full of spontaneity, joy, and curiosity. The Diamond Approach recognizes both manifestations but is only two presentations of a more complex constructed sense of self.
Inner child and soul child are often used to refer to the same psychic structure. In the Diamond Approach, the soul child is seen as a deeper or earlier structure closer to one’s essential nature and resources. The inner child is an over-arching term that refers to any inner structure with child-like qualities and associated history.
- The inner child is a deep structure of the person you take yourself to be, the image you have adopted to form you. It is important to understand that the inner child is simply an inner structure, a construct of history. It neither exists on its own nor has to continue existing as a formative structure in our experience.
- The soul child becomes repressed and/or split off from the central ego early on because it contains the main elements of the soul that were not adequately held by the environment. These elements include essential qualities, but the repression happens mainly because of the animal and emotional forms that the environment found unacceptable or inappropriate to the structures of civilized social life.
- The soul child can experience essence (the fundamental nature of being), but it is not its constant state. Essence appears in the soul child when experiencing satisfaction and contentment or expressing one of its original positive qualities.
- The inner child needs to be educated to mature little by little through a gradual and gentle learning process. This education should be done with love, gentleness, kindness, and understanding. The inner child will allow itself to melt into essential nature and get integrated only if it feels loved and secure.
Many systems claim that the personality does not exist, that ego does not exist. It is true that from a certain perspective one can see that it does not exist. But at the level where personality does not exist, neither does anything else. Your body does not exist on that level, nor does physical reality for that matter. As long as there is conceptualization, your personality exists just like anything else, just as Essence exists. – Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence
Some orientations see the wounded inner child in need of healing. From a spiritual perspective, such as the Diamond Approach, the inner child represents a “false self,” a set of self-images within a constructed and developed sense of self we call ego. Being and the individual consciousness are more fundamental than this collection of historical self-images and reified concepts. This more fundamental self cannot be blemished nor wounded and thus does not need healing – only a process of disidentification with the past – which may feel like a healing process in the beginning stages but can also be experienced as a dissolution or a waking up.
The less primitive group has more ego structure, and hence tends to be formed by the body image. These structures are formed by an image of being a young child, who is still somewhat in touch with its animal, instinctual, primitive impulsive emotionality, and with the remnants of some essential aspects. The primary structure is what we call the “soul child,” which is the state of the soul before she was completely structured and became estranged from her primitive animal forms and her essential ground.
This is the structure popularly known as the “inner child”—the child of joy, the emotional child that is still in touch with its original qualities of aliveness, curiosity, mischievousness, openness, and so on. It is what is popularly called the emotional child, but slightly different. The emotional child is only the emotional part of the soul child. In reality, as children we were not only emotional; we were livings souls, full of life and vigor, adventurous and curious, joyous and playful, but also capable of exploding in rage and frustration, or going into fear and terror. Our emotions are still fully present, but so is our animal nature in its aggressiveness and excitement about life and its pleasures and objects.
At this level there is some ego structure, for there is a body image of a child patterning the soul, but the soul still retains her original aliveness and responsiveness. The soul child can experience essence but it is not its constant state. Essence appears in the soul child when it is experiencing satisfaction and contentment, or expressing one of its original positive qualities like those of boldness, brightness, or cuteness.1 The dominant condition of the soul child is a soul presence patterned with the child’s image, but presence mixed with emotions and impulses. It is fluid and emotionally labile in a passionate way. It is the core of the soul that becomes repressed or split off. It is not the dissociated essence, but a soul structure that still has some ability to experience it. In fact, it is the most developed structure of the soul in which we can still experience the soul as a medium. It is the most developed of the structures that still retains the basic properties of the soul. Nonduality between experiencer and experienced is still present to some degree.
This soul child becomes repressed and/or split off from the central ego early on, because it contains the main elements of the soul that were not adequately held by the environment. These elements include essential qualities, but the repression happens mainly because of the animal and emotional forms that the environment found unacceptable or inappropriate to the structures of civilized social life.2 The soul child is the site of the classical passions of pride, covetousness, anger, envy, and so on, and hence clarifying these passions from the soul will bring an encounter with this structure.
One way of understanding the soul child is to contrast it with the central ego. The latter becomes the adult ego, but the soul child is the part of the soul that is split off and/or repressed, and hence does not have the chance to grow. It remains in its original condition of primitiveness and relative structurelessness. It has the aliveness and joie de vivre that characterizes children, while the central ego is the serious, civilized, and functional adult who mostly means business.
The soul child contains most of the more primitive structures of the soul, but it also contains the child structure in its various stages. So it includes the infant, the toddler, and the young child. The soul child is usually fixated at around age three or four, but can be as young as an infant or as old as seven years. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality
Buddha’s Brain: Because your brain changes its structure, your experience matters beyond its momentary, subjective impact. It makes enduring changes in the physical tissues of your brain, which affect your well-being, functioning, and relationships. Based on science, this is a fundamental reason for being kind to yourself, cultivating wholesome experiences, and taking them in.
A person who grows up in a Christian community believes in Jesus or the Virgin; a person who grows up in a Buddhist community believes in Buddha or enlightenment; if you grow up in a Muslim family you believe in Mohammad and the Qur’an. Regardless of the truth of these things, people mostly use them as transitional objects. They use them as security blankets to go through life because it is very hard to go through life on your own. Your blanket might change throughout your life, but in some very deep way you always have one. You internalize the feeling of comfort and safety, carrying it around as your mother image in your mind. Ultimately, religion, God, and enlightenment become symbols indicating that you are too scared to be completely on your own. In some very deep but real way, you are still that little kid holding on to the blanket. Whatever the blanket may be—mommy, career, God, husband, Buddha, reality, essence—it is the child who needs to be seen and understood. We need to recognize that child, understand her fears, acknowledge her needs, respect her desires, and hold and comfort her directly.
This child within you, which is the core of what we call the ego or the personality, feels totally alone without these comforting objects. This child comforts itself with all kinds of blankets, transitional objects, teddy bears, and soft things to help it feel that things are okay. The ego self, or the inner child at its core, is not enlightened; it does not know it is okay to let go of the blanket. This part of your soul is scared, angry, hurt, and full of doubt. This inner child needs to be educated. Your essence is the educator, the teacher. This perennially infantile part of the soul will not listen, let alone learn, unless there is enough compassion, love, and acceptance. The child is scared and doesn’t know who to trust. It doesn’t know who to turn to. So when it hears you or me talking about ego death, it thinks, “Uh-oh, now they are going to kill me.” This deep part of your personality doesn’t understand what ego death means; it hears death and gets terrified.
In other words, a deep and central part of you thinks like a child. Rational things neither reach nor touch it. We need to approach this part of us with love, gentleness, kindness, and understanding. We need to understand its helplessness, fear, vulnerability, hatred, anger, dependence, and ignorance. Ultimately, the inner child isn’t real, but it doesn’t know that. You know that but it doesn’t. The inner child takes for granted that it is you. It feels terrible about itself, angry, guilty, but it doesn’t know how else to be. This is a real dilemma. We each have an inner child that is ignorant, scared, and disconnected from the real essence, that is not touched by our lofty and transcendental experiences, that still needs to be cared for and loved.
We cannot try to get rid of it nor does it simply vanish because of our enlightenment experiences. Trying to get rid of it is both impossible and the wrong way to go. If we try to get rid of it, the inner child only becomes more obstinate and more scared. We need to educate it gently and lovingly. Then, in time the inner child will dissolve, mellow out, and become softer. It will naturally melt into essential nature and get integrated. But it will allow itself to melt only if it feels loved and secure. If we reject it and judge it, it will tend to isolate and protect itself.
The inner child is a deep structure of the person you take yourself to be, the image that you have adopted to form you. Of course, you do not always experience yourself as a child. Sometimes you feel like a child, sometimes like an adult, other times somewhere in between, and sometimes even like an infant or an embryo. The image changes all the time; it does not stay exactly the same. Sometimes it is just a little thing floating in space, sometimes it is the image of a man or woman, sometimes a teenager, sometimes grandiose, sometimes helpless. The image structures the soul into an ego-self, which we end up believing is who we are, all that we are, while it is actually only one form that the soul assumes. But it is important to understand that the inner child is simply an inner structure, a construct of history, and neither exists on its own nor has to continue existing as a formative structure in our experience.
All of the manifestations of essence, truth, and reality are needed to deal with this infantile part of us. True nature, with all of its qualities of compassion, love, acceptance, will, strength, and so on, ultimately needs to become the teacher for the immature part of our soul. We understand and accept this ego structure and immature part of the soul by allowing it to feel whatever it feels and think whatever it thinks, without judging its feelings or thoughts or needs. We don’t reject it because it has a bad thought; rather, we look and see what is happening. If it is angry, let it be angry, even if you can’t understand why it is angry. Most likely, there is hurt under the anger. If it is grandiose and proud of itself, find out why, because it probably feels deficient and scared. If it is scared and terrified, it needs your compassion more than anything else. It is important to understand this infantile part emotionally and psychologically, not only epistemologically as a construct, for it to yield to being integrated into our maturity. – Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery
How Emotions are Made: Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts representing your past experience, all your sensory inputs would be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.
FAQ
- What is Child Identity in the Diamond Approach?
Child Identity in the Diamond Approach refers to the development of a stable sense of identity or separate self, which is not something that a human being is born with but is a result of a developmental process. At birth, there is no awareness of an entity separate from its environment. A psychologically separate identity develops slowly as the infant interacts with its environment, especially with its mother. - What is the Soul Child in the Diamond Approach?
The Soul Child in the Diamond Approach is the state of the soul before it was completely structured and became estranged from its primitive animal forms and essential ground. This structure is also known as the “inner child,” characterized by its original qualities of aliveness, curiosity, mischievousness, and openness. - What is the difference between the Soul Child and the Inner Child?
The Soul Child and the Inner Child are similar concepts, but the Soul Child is seen as a deeper or earlier structure closer to one’s essential nature and resources. The Inner Child is a more overarching term that refers to any inner structure with child-like qualities and associated history. - What is the Libidinal Soul in the Diamond Approach?
The Libidinal Soul is a more primitive structure than the Soul Child. It is the animal soul at the beginning of ego structuring, where the soul’s animal potential is all contained in one structure. This structure forms the more primitive ground of the Soul Child. - How does the child-identity develop according to the Diamond Approach?
According to the Diamond Approach, the child-identity develops as the infant interacts with its environment, especially with its mother. This identity, with its mental apparatus (psychic structure), is a construction in the mind. The particular structure of the mind, the particular patterning of the contents of the psyche (ultimately resulting in the sense of self), develops and grows. - How does the Soul Child relate to the concept of Essence in the Diamond Approach?
The Soul Child can experience essence (the fundamental nature of being), but it is not its constant state. Essence appears in the Soul Child when it is experiencing satisfaction and contentment or expressing one of its original positive qualities.