About The Inner Child

Interesting history and definitions of the "Inner Child" as a healing concept.

"The Twelve-step program recovery movement considers healing the inner child to be one of the essential stages in recovery from addiction, abuse, trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorder."

More here: Inner Child Enterprises: About the Inner Child

Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

All Self Hate Is A Toxic Lie!

Self hate is something many ACAs struggle with. After being victimized by others when we were young, we often carry our own persecution forward. If you believed you were ACTUALLY bad, THAT gave you your only sense of control in an otherwise out of control, painful upbringing.

Believing the LIE that you are bad allows you to distance yourself from the pain and live with the illusion that you can somehow CHANGE things. Now you can spend the rest of your life in a futile attempt to either change THEM (not gonna happen) or your own "badness" (which is impossible because it doesn't exist).

From Donna Torbico's awesome blog on adult children of alcoholics:

"Being loved cannot be earned!"

TRUTH:

• ALL self-hate is a LIE
✶ it’s a defense mechanism to deny our feelings of abandonment. This a crucial point: S-H is a cover-up for all our abandonment pain.
• it’s a form of narcissism - making everything about US, when it rarely is. We make other people’s bad behavior our responsibility
• it’s an attempt at feeling powerful, to cover our intense sense of powerlessness & vulnerability

Read more here: HEAL and GROW for ACoAs: SELF-HATE & ACoAs (Part 1): "I’M NO GOOD & EVERYONE KNOWS IT so I have to be perfect to make up for it Self-Hate is the #1 deterrent to growth for all ACoAs. It undermi..."

Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children