People are driven by their inner child

This is literally an endless loop because it is a black hole of never-ending demands that, even when met, will continuously lead to yet another and another demand, just as a child might want candy, then want to go to an amusement park, then want to have a friend for a sleepover, then want to drive the car, and then want to go out for ice cream. There’s never any end to these demands.

This huge mistake has caused people to believe that having fun is the same thing as giving a gift to the inner child, which is an entirely different issue. If, for example, you were to see a tree blossoming flowers, as flowers celebrate the air and sunlight and reach toward the sky, the tree is absolutely having fun, and yet the tree has no inner child. It would be silly to think that the tree has an inner child because a tree doesn’t have an ego—the inner child and the ego are literally the same thing.

This identity pandemic is what causes people to make absurdly disempowering choices and come to the conclusion that those disempowering choices are somehow good for them, or empowering, or youthful in some way, because the distortions of the inner child are so deeply ingrained and validated by our culture. Even in popular psychotherapy, it’s often all about validating the inner child. In some cases, the popular trope of a psychotherapist or friend saying “That sounds hard” or “That sounds really difficult” seems like a friendly and perhaps useful approach to someone who is upset. In reality, this is only for building trust so they can recognize that the friend or therapist is not out to get them and actually has the capacity for empathy. However, empathy doesn’t create transformation, and most of the time, empathy actually prevents transformation.

Once the inner child is empathized with, that is when the deeper work can begin to happen, because trust is built. The courage it takes to move our focus beyond the space of empathy, validation, or even sympathy requires us to take responsibility for our experience in a way that our identity doesn’t necessarily agree with. One of the main skills in creating real personal transformation is simply the ability to do hard things—but not just any hard things—the very specific hard things that are helpful.

In spite of the tantrums and resistance the inner child creates, life is full of conflict, and that conflict is never going to go away. As long as the entitlement of the inner child cannot accept the ever-increasing nature of conflict and the ongoing possibility of not getting what we want, the more we fight against it, the more friction we create, and the less we are actually capable of getting what we want. This is a very nuanced issue, especially for someone who has not experienced this disidentification with the inner child, and so it requires massive trust and the ability to trust someone and receive assistance in navigating the false identity versus the true identity of one’s essence.