Healing Inner Child and Reclaiming Your Life

Hi everyone, long time no see. I had to take a couple of months off from the blog and news letter as a whole because truthfully I had no idea what to even say. I talk about healing my trauma a lot and once again I was in a pocket of healing that needed some processing before I was ready to talk about it. 

About a year ago I realized that I could conceptualize and analyze the root cause of my trauma into oblivion, but it wasn't until I got it out of my body that I could really move on. And truthfully, I so wanted to move on and claim my life as my own.

"The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk was the first book I read about truly healing the trauma out of your body and I knew I had to try it. To get the memory of being in survival mode out of the fibers of my being. That journey has taken about 9 months, and truthfully might take many more years to be completely done.

The idea of reclaiming my life was floating around in my brain for several months but something about it felt so far fetched. like that could never really be me. It's my life purpose to heal my trauma so once i'm done with that what will I even do? I kept on with the body healing anyway.

My therapist introduced me to yoga Nidra and y'all let me tell ya, its fantastic. In the scientific world it's called non sleep deep rest, and basically its a guided meditation practice where you intentionally relax your entire body and mind and get used to what it feels like to relax. It does feel like a nap when you're done. I usually feel super energized and refreshed after and I have noticed my ability to stay grounded has increased and just overall sense of relaxation in my body has been wonderful to notice. Yoga Nidra is for everyone, not just traumatized people. If you are stressed and having a hard time really feeling relaxed, have a hard time falling asleep, cant sit still etc. I recommend looking up a guided yoga nidra practice on youtube and trying it out. Even 15 minutes is enough to hit the reset button and start making serious changes to your nervous system.

Along with doing Yoga Nidra I have been doing EMDR therapy. Its a form of therapy using memory regression to reprocess traumatizing events so that you can live a normal life. It was developed for combat veterans who came home from a tour with PTSD but has expanded to all kinds of trauma and has been really proving to help heal people from these serious disorders. I can say from real life experience that it has been life changing. I have watched over the last 6-9 months my entire personality change.

I am still Sabina but in my EMDR sessions I have been working heavily with my inner child. Through this process I have come to realize that my inner child is where my inner critic lives, it's where my anger goes when I instinctually repress it. The patterns of self sabotage, all related to my inner child. With this knowledge I have been led to really give my inner child the life she could never have before. Constantly asking what she needs, and when my inner critic is flaring up or my anger is bubbling to the surface, treating myself like a child and getting my own needs met rather than spinning out in an emotional melt down. it's been quite empowering.

A layer that I never thought I would be dealing with is grief. It's been interesting to work with the inner child and want to give her the life I could never have, knowing that I still can't give her the life I never had because at the end of the day I am still an adult who has to work and make money and do things I don't want to do. The grief of knowing that my childhood is over and never coming back was a hard hit. I think it fueled my inability to really feel motivated and passionate about my work in any way.

While I know that I will never be able to re-live my childhood, that doesn't mean I am giving up. There are ways to still show up for that inner child without having to be a child. Talking to her like shes a person and not some evil creature has helped. Showing up for myself and getting my needs met is helping. The thing that really seemed to break my bubble of grief however was the idea that I can team up with my inner child in an act of radical defiance and give myself the life that I could never have had before. The truth is that my parents couldn't give me the skills that I needed to have the kind of life that I so deeply desire. Due to their own traumas and human experience they didn't have the tools needed to do that. Knowing that I can step up and take on the role of the parent who knows what to do and where to go has really helped me break free from my grief around my inner child and dare to ask what life would be like if I wasn't just the traumatized girl.

The truth is, healing is not my purpose. It's something that I have had to do in order to manifest the life of my dreams, still in progress but it's coming. It's something that I can hopefully turn into something that will help others heal themselves. But at the end of the day my healing is my own and if I decide to never do anything other than live my best life with it, that's okay. It's enough. I am enough just by purely existing. I don't have to be doing and grinding and hustling and proving how much i've healed to be healed.

Another truth is that healing will likely be going on for the rest of my life. And waiting to start my life until i've healed completely will leave me with nothing in the end. My life is my own and it's so much more than the traumatic things that happened to me as a child. It's time to move on and move forward with my inner child by my side. 

As far as what's next, I still have no idea. I have taken my time off from creating jewelry to really dive into ceramics. I have been working with clay in some form on and off for a decade. It's always been something I liked to do for fun and getting back into it has been so much fun. I find that I could just throw pots all day and not even worry about how or who i'm going to sell the pieces to. There's a lot of power in doing something just because it's fun. Hobbies are so important, an outlet of some kind, for us to find enjoyment and satisfaction in our lives outside of work and relationships. Something that is purely yours and just because, no greater purpose other than satisfying something in your heart. 

That kind of leaves me where I am now. I'm ready to start working again, and making beautiful things for the world. There is some underlying fear still to deal with, some resentment towards money, some fear of connecting to other humans, the fear of not being good enough, the fear of being a joke in everyone else's eyes. And the fear that I wont be able to sell anything ever again. All irrational and things I will continue working on with my inner child by my side. 

Thanks so much for reading this far. I hope that you are able to find peace in your mind and body. I hope you try the Yoga Nidra, and I hope you are being easy on yourself. The world is traumatizing us left and right and the best thing we can do during this is to take care of ourselves. Set boundaries when you need to and know that it's okay to not watch the news. I promise any information that you need to know about will find you. 

With peace and love,

Sabina