Understanding Your Child as Needed – Round Up

To further transfer the principles of this chapter to the relationship you have with your

inner child, I would also ask you now to complete the following sentence with as many

different endings as you can think of.

For the life of me. . . I can’t understand why I . . .

If you came to see me for counselling in attaining a greater understanding of your inner

child, I would probably have a chair sitting in a corner of the room. I would ask you to

imagine a little child sitting in that chair. It would be a little girl if you were a woman and

a little boy if you are a man.

Then I would tell you a little about the child — feeding back to you facts from the

information you gave me about your childhood. After I had shared that information with

you, I would then tell you that this child is not understood very well. In fact we would

work together to answer some of the completions of your “For the life of me. . . “

exercise.

We would talk together about this little child until the list of things we don’t understand

would continue to shrink and shrink. At that point I would turn to you and ask if you felt that you could go over and put your arms around that little child — hugging them close to

yourself and telling them that you love them. Some break down in tears because the

experience has been such a release for them. Some honestly indicate that they can not

hug that child — indicating that more work needs to be done.

Some begin by apologizing to the child. With their new understanding, they realize for

the first time just how hard they’ve been on the internal child. As the child tried their

best time after time, all it ever received was criticism from the parent. Have you ever

considered apologizing to yourself for the way you’ve treated yourself? If earlier in the

book my suggestion that you begin complimenting yourself seemed strange, this must

seem beyond strange. However, it is often the beginning of the healing process in

which following the apology, the child forgives the internal parent and is willing to come

out and be more honest within the relationship.

Can you think of anything(s) that you’ve done to your internal child for which an apology

would be appropriate?

As with all relationships, the pyramid described must be maintained on a

regular basis. As the internal child changes and discovers more about himself/herself,

as the parent changes, and as external circumstances change, new understandings

must be forged. However, this initial cleaning up of the relationship will set the pattern

for what to do when changes occur or the internal parent responds inappropriately to

the child. Apologizing, forgiving, and moving on becomes a familiar pattern in the life of

the internally motivated.

As this chapter concludes, please take a moment to consider yet another application of

its truths. The pyramid forms the model for maximizing the motivation of others too! My

encouragement to you would be to now reread this chapter from that perspective and

see just how much this chapter has to say about how to successfully keep others

motivated too!