My Inner Child Healing Journey
I remember the first time I ever did any inner child healing work. It was 2009, I was 22 and taking a class at Delphi University to teach me how to guide others through an inner child healing process called Yhandi’s Inner Light. As I learned this process, I also had to go through it myself as the client. This allowed me the opportunity to experience the deep and profound healing that is available in the Yhandi inner child process. In case you are wondering, yes, I do still offer this inner child healing process as one of the services I do.
This class and process was the most intense of all the courses I did in the Doctorate of Metaphysical Healing program at Delphi. It was also the biggest catalyst I had to steering my soul into a new direction in life.
Many of you see the version that I am now, all these years later, after 23 years of walking a path of healing. Before Delphi, I had been working on my healing but it was nothing as deep and transformative as the Yhandi process was. Most of my healing before Delphi was focused on cultivating awareness and reframing how I was relating to myself and my life.
By the time I got to Delphi, I was ready for something deeper and more transformative.
As a child, I experienced an immense amount of trauma; from abandonment, abuse, bullying and growing up in a violent and chaotic home. I had more than enough pain from childhood that I was ready to no longer be consumed by it and have it drive my decisions and the ways that I showed up in life.
I learned two profound things in the Yhandi process about how my trauma had impacted me up to that point in my life.
The first was when I learned that responsibility was my prison. As the oldest sibling, it was always my responsibility to take care of myself and my brother and sister. It was my job to make sure we all were ready for school everyday. It was my job to make sure all our chores were done which seemed to be neverending. It was my job to make sure we were all on our best behavior. The expectations and pressure that I experienced as a child were extreme and outside of the “norm”. Our mom was not around and our dad and his girlfriend had an abusive and tumultuous relationship that spilled over onto us kids. It was my job to be the carer and the protector. None of this should have fallen on a child, but it was my reality.
I never had the luxury of being a kid and just being able to play. For us, play was used as a punishment. When my dad and his girlfriend did not want to deal with us, we would be told to go outside and play. It wasn’t an option, as we were locked out of the house and only let back in when they were ready.
For me, play was something that seemed more of an adversary than something safe. All that felt safe to me was to be the responsible one so that I would have a better chance at not being punished. The truth is that it didn’t work, but being responsible at least led to less severe punishment.
When I learned in the Yhandi inner child process that responsibility was my prison, so many things clicked in place for me. That awareness put me on a journey of learning that play was safe for me and I was allowed to do it. That does not mean it automatically became so easy. It has actually been difficult for play to become my default mode. Still, at 38, it takes effort for me to get myself into play mode. The difference now is that my playful inner child is far more accessible and lives on the surface instead of buried deep within me for protection.
A lot of the people that know the version of me today might describe me as a playful person. That is because I work hard to share that part of me because I know it brings healing to me and to others. Even with seriousness and responsibility being my default mode, I am doing better than ever at balancing it out with play. And, I still have room to grow, which excites me.
The second thing is something that I have shared with only a few close friends and my husband. In the Yhandi process, I learned that I had been prostituting myself out in order to get Love and affection from men. When my class partner was guiding me through the process, I got to a point where I was blocked and having a hard time moving forward. My partner called our teacher over to ask for help. My teacher, Judy, looked at me and said, “You’ve been spending your entire life prostituting yourself out in order to get Love.”
She was being more metaphorical in that I was always making choices in order to earn Love and affection by doing whatever anyone wanted of me. When she said this, I lost it and started sobbing intensely and then started laughing hysterically, which I felt weird about. It did not feel like something to laugh about. But, Judy assured me that it was a way of moving energy and that was okay.
What she did not know was that from 16 - 21, I had taken money for sex from older men many times. It wasn’t something I ever sought out, but each time it was offered, I would say yes. I didn’t feel like I could say no. It was something that I carried deep shame about for many years. I was very promiscuous at that age, even outside of the men I would take money from for sex. I had my first sexual experience with another boy when I was 10 years old and was exposed to porn younger than that. My distorted relationship with sex started far younger than it ever should have.
I learned in that inner child healing process that my relationship with sex was one of seeking validation and not really knowing what I was doing. No one in my family ever taught us about sex, and especially not gay sex. I was left to figure it out on my own and was easily manipulated by these older men into having sex. From 15 to 21, I had well over 100 sexual partners, most of which I barely remembered because I was usually disassociated out of my body.
Having my teacher bring awareness to this pattern and create a safe space of compassion, empathy and acceptance was one of the most healing moments of my life. This shifted my patterns with sex, honestly to the opposite extreme where I barely had sex for many years because I was so afraid of falling back into those old patterns.
For me, focusing on healing my inner child literally changed the trajectory of my life. I will always be grateful for that process.
I am sure many of you can resonate with your own experiences from your childhood. And for some of you, my experiences may seem like a cakewalk compared to your own pain and trauma. Regardless of what you consider to be the severity of the trauma you experienced as a child, inner child healing has the potential to free you up and shift your life path into a new direction.
If you are clear that your experiences in childhood are still affecting and limiting you today, I recommend doing some inner child healing work.
