by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Sometimes, our anxiety and negative thoughts result from not addressing our shadow self, or doing our inner child work.
The Third Part of Self-Love
I've been talking about prioritizing ourselves and loving ourselves well. First, boundaries: keeping them where they need to be, in a place that gives us success without keeping us too tied down. Then, strengths: knowing and using them in our day-to-day lives, so we can feel real fulfillment and see a real decrease in anxiety and negative thinking.
This week is tougher: shadow work, sometimes called inner child work.
I Didn't Think This Applied to Me
I remember the first time I heard about inner child work and shadow work. I thought, I'm not sure that applies to me. My life's been pretty easy. I haven't gone through that much. I think I'm fine. I don't have a lot of dark sides, I'm just nice and bubbly and happy.
I was wrong. So, so wrong.
Why We All Have a Shadow Self
We all have a shadow side, and we all have an inner child. Every one of us was a child once, and every one of us has suffered some kind of trauma. It could be neglect or abuse, or it could be something less dramatic. There are countless kinds of trauma that might've happened to you, and that have happened to me.
As adults, we can look back on those events with new eyes, new understanding, and a new ability to process them. But when things happen to us as children, we process them as a child would, and children are very focused on themselves. The long-term result is a lack of love for self. We blame ourselves for what we went through, and we keep blaming ourselves as we grow older, often subconsciously, the whole time.
The solution is to dig into your shadow self and do some inner child work. I'll give you a simple tool that's helped me start this process. As always, I recommend therapy as an excellent container for walking through what you experienced as a child.
The Photo Exercise
When I'm working with a client and I see there's inner child work to be done, I typically recommend this to start:
Find a photo of yourself at an age where you felt innocent, beautiful, and wonderful, whatever age that was for you.
Keep that photo in front of you as much as possible, for at least three days. Make it your screensaver. Put it on your steering wheel or your desk. Somewhere you'll see it often.
As you look at it, start talking to little you. Ask how they're doing. Tell them what they have to look forward to. Assure them of who they are, and how wonderful and phenomenal they are. You'll find your own words when you look at your own photo.
Continue the conversation for the rest of your life.
Why It Works
At the root of this exercise is the chance to take out your inner child, address the traumas that baby girl or baby boy went through, and reparent the child within you with love, compassion, acceptance, and communication, whatever might have been missing the first time around.
Embrace your shadow self. Embrace your inner child. Embrace, ultimately, the traumas you've gone through. They were terrible. That's true. You were hurt, and you didn't deserve it, not at all. That was probably the result of someone else's wrong actions. But you were hurt, and you had the strength to survive. You came through it. You survived it, and hopefully even thrived despite it. Now you're a successful grown-up.
You have the opportunity to give young you, still inside of you, the security you've built for yourself now.
I know it sounds a little wild. It does work.
So do your shadow work. Get to know the traumas. Open your eyes to them. Flip on the lights. Talk about it. Work it out. Get a therapist. Do all the things, so you can reparent that inner child and get to a fuller place in the here and now.
It's not about the destination. It's about the journey. Enjoy it.
Recommended resources:
Tepeyac Consulting
The Amazing Clarks
BetterHelp Online Therapy
Calm
Question of the day: How has doing inner child work helped you? What was challenging about it?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Yesterday I talked about how our imperfections are part of what makes each of us perfect, in our own particular way. Today I want to show you how to actually move with those things, by sharing the deep, dark secret that kept me hidden and held back for years.
There are layers and nuance to this, so parts two and three are already brewing. But first: do you still love me after hearing my secret? Do you think the people around you would still love you, if you shared yours?
Doing Everything "Right"
Rewind to when I began the work that's now The Hart Habits. I was about 30. I'd done all the things I was supposed to do, and hadn't done the things I wasn't supposed to. College degree. Graduated high school first, then college. Never got pregnant. Stayed in church, wherever I was, for years. I wasn't an alcoholic. I'd checked every box.
By that point I'd also been through a lot of trauma. I'd been raped, and I spent the five years following it in an abusive relationship. I worked my way through those things. And in doing that work, I gave up one of the tools that had actually helped me survive them, in the way that made sense for the life I was living at the time: cannabis. It helped me work through the trauma of the rape, through the abusive relationship, through getting out of it.
A Decade of Believing It Was My Fault
Once I got to the other side of all that, I believed the bad things that happened to me were my own fault. I genuinely embraced that. I believed there was something else I wasn't doing right, and that was what kept bringing the bad things to me.
Around that same time, I started drifting from organized religion, from church. I'd been using cannabis the whole time, in and out of church, though it always had to be a secret part of my life, kept carefully put away. I'd quit for stretches, for different jobs, whenever it was worth quitting, and it was never a big deal to stop. But it was something I genuinely enjoyed, something that genuinely helped me. I liked having it in my life. And I felt a lot of shame around that, because of every message I'd absorbed about what it meant to use it.
Note: if this brings up shame for you around your own choices, on your own path, I'd point you to Brené Brown's work, especially Daring Greatly, for more on shame specifically. It helped me understand mine.
So I got to this point and decided: I need to put cannabis away for good. I also quit having sex outside marriage, because that was my other greatest sin, or so I believed at the time. That was it. My two deepest, darkest secrets, at 30: I smoked cannabis regularly, and I'd had premarital sex, though I already believed I'd been punished for that with the rape.
I want to be very clear: that belief was not true. It was the story I told myself for years. But it's what I believed at the time.
Four Years of Checking Every Box
Fast forward, and I was in complete ruin. Four years with no sexual contact with anyone. No cannabis in my daily life. Church, regularly. Checking every box there was to check. Good job. Good money. My own home.
And I was lonely. Devastatingly lonely. Every single person I'd ever been with had cheated on me, church or no church, it didn't matter. I felt broken. I was broken, honestly.
So I asked myself the real question: how could I have given up all of it, done everything by the book, exactly the way Christianity told me to, and still be suffering like this? Still struggling? Still, honestly, feeling suicidal?
If you're feeling suicidal right now, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can call or text 988, anytime. You matter, exactly as you are, right now.
The Love Chapter
I decided to dig into the one source I knew at the time: the love chapter. Love never fails, it said. I wanted to know how to actually get that. The next sixteen years were the journey that followed, though I didn't understand at the time how deeply the two threads, the cannabis and the church, were tangled together.
In that moment, I decided I was choosing cannabis. And since the church I'd known my whole life wasn't going to be sympathetic to that, wasn't going to be open to me being honest about it, I was going to have to move away from it. There was too much shame built into that environment, too much judgment placed on something I'd now had four full, sober years to actually, objectively evaluate. I understood what it did for me, what it meant in my life, by that point, better than I ever had using it thoughtlessly.
So I moved away from church. I moved toward love instead. Sixteen years later, here I am.
The Secret I Kept From Everyone
This was the thing I hid from almost everyone, including my employers. I worked in the education system, where getting caught meant real consequences. I wasn't doing drugs. I was using cannabis, for my own mental wellness. But the stigma around it was strong enough that I kept myself segregated from a lot of my life because of it, and missed real opportunities along the way. More on those stories another time.
That's my biggest secret. I've been using cannabis for 25 years now, just about every day. How does that land for you? You can be honest. Tell me how you feel, because we're going to need to actually talk about it. Not everyone's going to be fine with this. People have strong opinions. So tell me, what's yours?
