How do we parent our inner child around big decisions?

T

he exhausting cycle of decision paralysis

At various times in my recovery, I’ve had the experience of knowing that I needed to move house, move city, leave a partner, change job, or in one case, stop smoking, and have found myself in a spiral of uncertainty around how to do what I needed to do.

It could get to the point where I felt so mentally exhausted that I postponed what I needed to do and instead went into a freeze state around the decision for an extended period of time.

Only when the pain of the situation became unbearable again could I rally to make another attempt at making the change I needed. That was a harrowing and discouraging cycle to be in! I’d often wish I felt more grown up around these types of decisions – why couldn’t I just be grown up about it like other people and do what I needed to do?

The struggle between inner adult and inner child

Big life decisions can involve a lot of uncertainty and can be nerve-wracking regardless of whether or not we’re dealing with recovery from childhood trauma – this also is important to acknowledge.

However, the inner turmoil and back-and-forth that we experience about major decisions can be a sign that our inner child is struggling with our inner adult for control over the present. This can feel overwhelming when we are trying to do some very adult things that require our mental presence and action.

What this can feel like as we’re trying to take action around a decision could be:

• Ruminating on worst-case scenarios: Ruminating about possible negative outcomes from the decision (our inner kid says: it’s better to play it safe; change is dangerous!), or times in the past when a decision didn’t go the way we had hoped.

• Dissociation and mental fog: We may feel dissociated, unable to gather our thoughts, or unable to think straight about the steps involved in making the change.

• Overwhelm from adult tasks: It may feel impossible to take a step in the direction of change, even though the steps are simple enough. This is an example of an inner child trying to take on adult actions – it will certainly feel overwhelming for a child to try to do adult things!

• Paralyzing sadness and fear: Feeling deep sadness or fear that becomes paralyzing. It can feel like being cast out to sea without support or help.

• Black-and-white doubt: We may experience attacks of black-and-white doubt, like what we’re doing is completely wrong, even though we may have thought about it carefully, weighed the pros and cons, and reached our decision in a sober way many times already.

• Escaping into coping mechanisms: Having a strong desire to escape into coping behaviors like emotional eating, scrolling, managing others, watching the news, or engaging in other addictive patterns.

• Impulsive jumping: Jumping into a decision without thinking about it too much, when it really needs to be considered. You can end up changing a lot without thinking about the consequences and then struggle to follow through. This might be a pattern around decisions as a whole.

Unpacking the flashback response

These feelings are all symptoms of an inner child who is flashing back to situations of being overwhelmed in childhood.

It makes so much sense for a kid who was used to not getting help and who was maybe used to the grown-ups in the room making disastrous, impulsive, selfish, or irresponsible decisions to decide that it’s better always to play safe – which can often mean just changing as little as possible and not trusting change.

What’s unfair about this is that it traps us in fear and a life much smaller than what we are capable of and deserve. The child who you were didn’t get to see adults making good decisions and following through with practical action. If a child has to clean up after the bad decisions of grown-ups or parents themselves when they needed a grown-up to be doing it for them, they are going to have deep wounds around change.

Reclaiming your adult power and repairing trust

Helping your inner child to heal around the actions of the adults we grew up around is such a significant part of recovery because we have to take action on behalf of our child in order to parent them. It was not fair that we had to parent ourselves or our own parents growing up, and it takes a considerable toll on our sense of trust in others and the world at large.

Establishing some connection and trust with our inner kids takes repeated and reliable interactions through dialogue, and addressing the truth of how things were growing up and how we’re different now. It also involves curiosity from our inner adults around who our inner children are, and what they really want and need.

It also involves clarifying the steps for change in a given situation and following through.

Practical steps towards change

To begin practicing this, choose a smaller decision you are facing (you can build up to a bigger one afterward if you like) and set out the steps of practical action that need to be taken. Commit to taking the first action as soon as possible.

Often, the first action is reaching out for something, making a phone call, sending an email, or booking a consultation. It might look like reaching out to a quit-smoking coach you’ve found online or phoning the moving company for a quote about getting that couch delivered to your house. You can adjust the actions you need to take at any time, ask for help or advice, and take breaks to gather energy for the next step.

We didn’t get help with things as kids, so this step of reaching out for support is essential. Sometimes, it can just mean calling a trusted friend and saying, ‘I’m really having trouble taking action around something I need to do, and I wanted to tell someone.’ That friend might even be willing to hold you accountable by asking you how it went the next day.

The inner child's feelings around big decisions can feel so powerful that we can forget that they are, for the most part, inner child's feelings (about the past), and we can lose our adult sense of self along the way. Working with our inner kids around this (including dialoguing with them) is a significant way of parenting them, and remembering our adult power.

It’s so unfair that childhood trauma survivors often have their sense of personal power taken from them, but there is a process to start claiming it back. You can do complex things in measured, manageable steps, day by day. And your inner kid will feel so much trust and safety in you as their new, good-enough parent as you do this consistently (even if it’s imperfectly!) over time.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.