2022
Is Book It my entire personality now? Not quite! It was part of a bigger project I’ve been working on this summer, in service of little-Sarah.
To back up just a bit, and hopefully not make a long story longer, I was inspired to do this from a few conversations and tarot readings with my friend Angeliska of Sister Temperance Tarot. Trauma from my childhood was a theme that was repeatedly discussed, and the subject of reparenting was introduced to me. Growing up in dysfunctional families or in homes where parents were overwhelmed, grieving, depressed, or where there was substance abuse, many of us did not have the loving parent we desired or deserved. Our bodies store that trauma, neglect, and rejection, and, that yearning for the parent that you never actually had, or emotional childhood needs that were never met, to quote my friend on a recent blog post of theirs, is a hunger that never, ever goes away – and is never really sated or fulfilled. Reparenting the inner child focuses on making sure it feels the value, love, and protection it lacked during childhood, where, as adults, we learn to nourish ourselves, and tap into that connection within, and elsewhere in my life.
There is a whole lot of stuff to address in this conversation, and it involves a lot of tools that I don’t have, but which I am very slowly adding to my arsenal, among them some suggested reading, therapy, and showing up for myself every day in the act of lovingly tending to little me. I am not so naive as to think that any of this stuff in the video is an entire solution, and hopefully it doesn’t come across that way in my presentation! I know that would be pretty irresponsible. But these are things I started doing for myself and seemed like a fun, not too intimidating place to begin. As an adult, I’m not even sure that I know how to have fun, and I am fairly certain this has roots in the things that happened when I was a kid. Hypervigilance about things and situations feeling or seeming too good (because historically, mom- disaster was always looming and there was just no point in feeling good) and repression of my feelings overall (because in addition to her struggle with alcoholism, my mother was BPD with those erratic mood swings and behaviors) and I think in never wanting to be like that, I squashed all feelings altogether. Fun …just seemed like something that other children got to have.
In this video, I chat about treating my inner child, and some of the activities I engaged in as part of that. There’s a lot of work to do in service of healing my little-me, it’s hard to know where to start …so I thought I might begin with things that are fun! If you are interested, I hope you will go have a peek…even if you just keep it on the background, while you do some fun things for your little-you.
If you do have a visit, please leave me a comment if you hear something that resonates with you, or if you have ideas of your own that you’d like to share!
Writing and sharing on the internet can feel kinda lonely sometimes and I am always so appreciative of the folks who take a moment to say something nice, or even just say, hi! Or hello! Or, I see you there!
So…see you there! The Summer of the Inner Child on YouTube
If you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?