Let’s Time Travel
I visited a friend with a 2 year old and newborn this weekend, and the 2 year old got pretty upset when she didn’t get chosen during a game. I watched as her body curled up, hands hiding her face, as she tried to physically manage the upset of feeling rejected. Seeing her little body go through this somatic process, and then co-regulating with her dad, hammered home some things…
At those ages you *literally* cannot regulate larger emotional experiences like rejection, abandonment, fear, terror. Your nervous system is still developing and requires co-regulation with a safe adult to manage. I mean, look at the size of a 5 year old—that's a tiny body to be handling such big complex emotions!
There’s a little one alone and upset inside many of us. A living imprint in our nervous system, brain and psyche. How so? You ask …
Your autonomic nervous system, which runs internal bodily functions, is responsible for managing energy and wellbeing. It assesses levels of safety and threat—and it does not have a chronological understanding!
Past experiences—especially those that rang the overwhelm alarm when we were small—are data points without a time stamp. A data point of interoceptive sensations, external situation markers through the 5 senses, thoughts, and feelings. These points form a data bank that your system pulls from. Matching the familiarity of experiences with known vs unknown and/or safe vs threat to engage a response.
We're not small anymore, but without updated experiences we can be running Windows 95 on a 2024 laptop. Our body's capacity, especially with somatic healing, is much bigger than what we had at 2, 6, 8 years old. We can learn to hold what was previously too big to handle on our own.
Enter inner child work… A fundamental for me in cultivating more joy, understanding what I need day to day, and working with my capacity to hold and process system activation—aka upset. It developed the inner parent I needed, which goes back with me to heal younger parts.
With inner child work we can literally travel back in time. Remember from above: the autonomic nervous system does not have chronological organisation. When we work with a past data point it updates the whole data bank.
No one is going to know better than you what that little one needs to feel safe to express and free to play. After all, the inner child holds all the gifts of awe, creativity, curiousity, and play that we need now. More joy! More life-force energy!
