CODEPENDENCY: GASLIGHTING OUR INNER CHILD

In many ways, codependency starts for many of us in our childhoods. Therefore we treat our inner child as we were treated in childhood. We learn to parent our inner child, punish them, neglect, reject or abandon – if this is what was done to us. We do these things to our inner child, then look outside of ourselves to be rescued FROM OURSELVES.

Oftentimes, this means we look to our partners, bosses, “false idols” for some type of permission to love and own ourselves. We always hope this external validation will allow us to be less hard on ourselves and calm our inner critic. We become “dependent on undependable people.” Because they are not your inner guidance and do not know what is ultimately in YOUR BEST INTEREST, these people are undependable. Also, people and their opinions change.

Gaslighting the inner child occurs when we intellectualize our trauma, pain, and experiences. An example of this would be justifying that our parent treated us poorly because they were treated poorly. Our attempt in this is not personalize the pain they cause us and allows us to “deal” with it. Unfortunately, this does not work. While we use our logic to understand, we don’t allow ourselves to feel the pain of the mistreatment. Our inner child is not able to understand this The inner child emotionally imprinted this experience and now needs YOU to help integrate the experience with your body and mind. If we continue to feel triggered, we know this continues to happen. This is often followed by shame and sometimes causes us to sabotage our own joy.

Instead of justifying why we were treated this way and excusing the behavior of the adults in our lives, we need to validate the childhood experience. “I felt unloved. I was neglected and did not get my needs met.” Many of us feel guilt for even thinking this. Like we are doing something wrong when being honest with ourselves. This part is critical for reconnecting us with our inner child and allows the emotions to become unstuck. Doing this allows us to reconnect with our sense of WHOLENESS, ENOUGHNESS, and PURPOSE. By validating the unvalidated feelings, our stuck emotions are able to mature through our own reparenting and we are able to bridge the gap between our past childhood pain and our current adult reality. This is how we come into empowerment and self-validation at the highest level.

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