Raising My Inner Child From The Dread

While I resurrect him in ink

Recently, I’ve come face to face with my inner child in a way that I never quite have before. Coincidentally (or not?), around the same time I started a new webcomic.

Through recent work with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experience therapy, I’ve been slowly making contact with sensations inside me that originated in my childhood.

As I come to know these all-too-familiar feelings and sensations, I can see how they have been relentlessly haranguing me and my subconscious for as long as I can remember.

But now they have stepped into the light.

For decades, these old feelings have covertly spawned disparaging narratives about my worth which I have spent the same decades anxiously trying to disprove, mostly through hard work and success.

Now, something new is happening.

Overwhelmed with fear and grief, my inner children are done hiding and I am both forced, and graced with the opportunity, to confront them and their stories directly.

I know the standard model is that I should now offer them the love and comfort that I wish my parents had, but it’s more complicated than that.

I’ve never been able to make a convincing case to myself that I am worthwhile. I now realize that these sensations were deftly and quickly sabotaging any fleeting moments of self-worth that might have otherwise suggested that I was actually okay.

The reality is that my old sensations need more than loving, comforting affirmations. They need to be confronted…