What do you fear most from your well of pain?

Touching the inner well of pain

When we do childhood trauma recovery work, ultimately, we are going to touch our inner well of pain. This is the place in us where all the deepest, most frightening feelings from our childhoods reside. All the things that were overwhelming for us as kids and thus couldn’t be fully felt are still inside us, waiting for a good-enough inner adult to help us process them.

All the thought patterns and beliefs that those events and the feelings they caused gave rise to are also waiting to be held and looked at with compassion and understanding, but they are buried in pain and fear that can feel like boiling-hot lava or razor-sharp knives.

We buried this well of pain for very good reasons; however, underneath it lies a great deal of our capacity to feel and much of our inner resources.

The hidden cost of numbing our wounds

Imagine if, when you were a child, a part of your body was deeply wounded, and there was no help to take care of that wound. On top of that, imagine being wounded there again and again by the people around you on a regular basis. Now imagine that you eventually, after many years, found ways to dissociate from the pain of this wounding, to no longer identify the part of you that was being hurt (say your leg or one of your arms) with yourself. You found, in a sense, a way to make it numb.

This would be a kind of solution, at least to the worst excesses of the pain. However, a part of your body that is numbed is also no longer as usable as it was – you lose the abilities it gave you. Now you find yourself without an arm, and still sustaining damage that you cannot avoid, because you’re a child who doesn’t have power over the adults around you or the environments you are put in.

You carry the weight of that part of you, but you don’t have the strength or abilities available to you that it should provide. Now imagine this numb part of you isn’t just a body part, it’s also a part of your mental and emotional capacity. Perhaps it’s your sense of safety that has been numbed, maybe it’s your sensitivity to stress, or your access to healthy anger, or disgust.

Frustration at the unfeeling self

Without these senses and abilities, it’s impossible to navigate healthy relationships with others or with ourselves. And we may learn to live in a relatively safe way, but eventually we will start to feel the yearning for the part of ourselves that we are missing, and all the nourishment and fulfillment it’s meant to help us access.

For many childhood trauma survivors, as we grow up, we learn to put ourselves in somewhat healthier environments, perhaps where we aren’t being harmed as much as we were when we were children; however, we can forget that a part of us has been numbed. It can become very frustrating to feel different from others, or less than others, knowing that something about us isn’t functioning as it should, but being numb to what exactly that is.

What can be more challenging is that as we progress in our healing work, these numb places (sometimes called ‘stuck places’) within us become more and more frustrating.

How the fears present themselves

Many survivors will know about that deep place inside where there is numbness, reluctance, and/or confusion. And when approaching it, there can be a lot of fear around not knowing how to deal with the feeling, and also experiencing a sense of not even knowing what might happen if we do approach it. We can find ourselves deep in a sense of inner-child helplessness. This is often the sign that we are there, and it can take some time, approaching these feelings tentatively, to start to get an inner adult in place enough around them to feel them in more detail.

Some of the fears we might experience when approaching our well of pain can make us feel like:

• Explosive anger: If we stay there, we will explode with violent anger. We may even recall times in the past when we did explode in that way, and we don’t want to experience the shame of losing control again.

• Endless descent: That descent into those feelings will be endless, and we’ll never escape. This may be accompanied by a deep sense of dread, especially if we’ve experienced seemingly endless periods of dysregulation or depression in the past after a major trigger.

• Disgust and abandonment: We may believe that if we go into those feelings, everyone else will be disgusted with us and abandon us.

• Unbearable internal truths: There can also be a fear that deep in those feelings, we will face a dark truth about ourselves that we can’t handle. We might fear this will cause us to want to die, or to be obliterated by shame.

  
  

The feelings associated with approaching our well of pain can be truly overwhelming, and what’s important to bear in mind is that the sense of overwhelm is exactly how unsafe it felt to be in situations in childhood that caused us to feel this way to begin with.

Step-by-step guidelines for inner adult work

So, how can we begin to get an inner adult in place enough to start to process our deep well of pain? Here are a few things that will be helpful to keep in mind:

• Validate the vulnerability: The big feelings we experience as we approach our well of pain are exactly how our inner child felt about being vulnerable in childhood – it was unsafe in that way.

• Process in manageable chunks: Understanding the nature of dealing with a huge amount of grief – we can only do it bit by bit, in manageable chunks, but we should commit to our inner child to always come back to it until it loses its charge.

• Seek genuinely safe people: We can only process sensitive inner child material with safe people who understand the nature of our experiences and of inner child healing. If we’re trying to get someone who doesn’t get it to get us, that is our inner child trying to get an unsafe person to be good to us. Not all people who are unsafe to process childhood trauma with are ‘toxic’ people, but that doesn’t mean they are the right people to be vulnerable with in this way.

• Invest in the right support: Our inner adult work may be around developing the willingness to get the right kind of help. This may involve searching for a good-enough individual therapist or group, or getting other types of help that may be indirect: somatic work, working on other psychological, self-care or social skills, finding supportive practices that work for us.

• Nurture rather than solve: Treating our inner child like a case to be cracked or a problem to be solved can make them feel even more afraid to open up. We need to treat our inner child like a child and be willing to become the parent for them, cultivating a safe and nurturing inner and outer environment for healing. This includes looking at how we speak to our inner child about ourselves, the world, other people, and them.

Facing the border of reality

We can spend a lot of time in our recovery addressing everything but our deep well of pain. It may feel like the unapproachable border of our reality, the place where our ability to stay in control ends. And often it is.

As time progresses, though, it becomes clear that our work inevitably leads us there, to the borders of what our traumatic childhood experiences told us we could be. To push against those borders brings up that pain, and it may take quite some time until we feel frustrated enough to do what it takes to dive into it and begin to deal with it in earnest.

It occurred to me some years ago, although it’s a truth I struggle to keep in mind when things are at their toughest, that what my inner child had been waiting his whole life for was an inner adult who would do anything necessary to free him from that well of pain. The thought of ‘anything necessary’ scared me, but it needn’t have in retrospect, because the truth is that what was necessary only seemed like a big deal because my parents made me believe it was.

Offering humanity to the inner child

In the end, ‘anything necessary’ meant seeking healing, nourishment, and joy as if I were the one responsible for my own care and happiness. It seemed outlandish to me only because once upon a time, my parents were the ones responsible for my care and happiness, and they treated me like I was a burden, an afterthought, and a pain.

I had felt that way about myself ever since, and facing my well of pain meant facing the feeling of being a burden, an afterthought, and a pain. I wasn’t any of those things. I was a beautiful, precious, sovereign human being, and the contrast between who I was and how I was treated was excruciating to comprehend.

Facing the fears around our monumental work is possible, especially if we give ourselves time, and remember that our inner child actually just needs humanity from us. The ‘anything necessary’ they need is simply to be treated as somebody worth taking time for, taking risks for, and facing fears for. Things our parents were never willing to do.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.