How might we connect with the energy of our Shadow?
And especially, how can we start a dialogue with our inner child who lives within the safety of the Shadow?
On one hand, we naturally tend to deal with the old “unfinished business” of our childhood; metaphorically, we tend to start a dialogue with our inner child, for many reasons.
Such a dialogue would mean making our Shadow more flexible, forming new connections with our inner reality, with a new perspective on the history of our life as well as our present; in short this would mean a new potential to take care of our present needs, because the energy expended on keeping our Shadow closed and frozen would become available for fresh experiences in the present.
However, on the other hand, when we sense the echoes from our Shadow, we are greatly scared of what will happen if our then feelings are set free into our
Now, letting loose all the pain that is locked up in our Shadow.
What should we do? How can we approach our inner child?
It is clearly impossible to change the events of the past so that our inner child does not get hurt.
Delete it, then? – this is equally impossible; we cannot cut out pieces of our existence.
Transform it into an adult? This can never be done because when our past traumas were frozen at that past time, our childhood time froze too; in our past traumas we are still children and we cannot transplant adult eyes into our inner child.
To give it other parents than those actual persons of the past? This idea will not work. What happened happened, and is not to be rewritten – like the blood that the crime scene investigators will find, no matter how thoroughly the murderer cleans up.
Might we grow backwards in time and become children in our present wholeness? This is clearly impossible because we cannot get rid of our adult features; it is totally impracticable to fool ourselves by pretending that, when in adulthood, we can live again in the universe of our childhood – we cannot do it simply because in our present we are no longer just children.
Besides, the inner child does not need a friend to play with, but our own adult version of self to nestle up to.
What our inner child needed then, and even more important, the way in which she or he needed it, is not some present adult need.
It is a past need, still pending, expressed in a language that we as adults no longer speak.
Experience then was recorded onto past background A, while current experience is being recorded onto another, present background B, which can neither replace nor erase A.
Sometimes we try to explain all this to our inner child. This is futile – in the language of children, an adult’s rational interpretations sound bizarre. If we say to a child, “Eh, what could the parents have done, hard times, that much they knew, that much they managed to do, they didn’t mean to neglect you, they were forced by hard times to do it”, we are expressing a correct but at the same time very complex adult idea that combines, associates and evaluates many factors.
If we say this, the child may justly reply, “I do not care at all about what you are saying, they should have taken care not to give birth to me – from the moment that they made me, they should have been able to see what I am and what I need”.
Using adult language to a child, it is as if
when a child has been hurt and is bleeding, we were to explain to him or her the clotting mechanism of the blood, using medical and scientific terminology, instead of just giving the child a big warm hug as well as suitable first aid treatment.
We cannot use adult language to approach the inner child; it’s not as if we were talking to a friend of our own age. We, as adults, and our own Shadowed aspects which we call “inner child” speak different languages. In all the above cases, it is as if we ignore and frustrate our inner child, cementing our Shadow, confirming that even to our own eyes our own wounded past aspects are still invisible, or deformed.
We must, then, find another modality, another code, another way to get close to the hurt child inside us – and this, as I have already noted, is something of which we shall speak at length later on, in Chapter F, once first we have got better acquainted with some notable features of the concept of the Shadow.
The theme of this book of Shadows
is about how some aspects of ourselves seem to escape us and, even if they are non-conscious and non- mentally perceived, they are able to critically affect whatever we are doing or not doing at any moment. It is a visit “down there”, at the sanctuary of our moments and of our selves.
This book is actually a thorough study and at the same time a proposal
about (a) the grandeur (and the drama) of how our experience is composed on both a micro (no-conscious) as well as on a macro (conscious) scale, (b) the architecture of the Shadowed “home” of what is usually called “inner child” – who is not only sad but also very angry…
SHADOW: our silent companion through life’s journey
INFO: [378 pages] [14,2 X 20,2 cm] ISBN 978-618-00-1371-9
1st edition in English: 100 numbered and signed copies.
This edition is published by the author and is to be distributed exclusively
in Greece or delivered in other countries only by order to the author:
[email protected] +30-6977-210469 +30-2310-262872
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