The Inner Child and Pain

6/28/2021
    My inner child has been resistant to the healing process I have been in engaged in lately. She views my current beliefs as lies that I am leaning on to comfort myself. For her, pain has been her eternal truth and oddly, also a comfort. It had seemed that anguish was the only constant and therefore the only thing she could rely upon. Pain was her whole world and she embraced it as some sort of token. I know this because when I broke my ankle last year, the agony of that injury was NOT by primary source of distress. Indeed, later, I would use my physical therapy stretches to purposely induce pain when I felt emotionally distressed. It had become a desirable companion for my inner child and thus for me. Physical and emotional agony became a way for me to feel alive and I still seek out pain. My insatiable desire to test my physical limits stems, in part, from my willingness to experience extreme discomfort.
    And yet, as crazy as my inner child sounds, I have come to understand this absurd obsession. The truth of the matter is that the only way for her to survive in her environment was to find a way to embrace the pain, to find a way to love the world she found herself in. But unfortunately, when she did this, it was the ego self that embraced it, claiming she deserved every moment of suffering. So while my inner child continued to believe this, I continued to have the world mirror that belief back to me, over and over and over again.
    This does not mean that I never experienced moments of pure, unadulterated bliss and joy, it just means that when I did experience anguish, I would think "It's ok. Let me have it. I can handle this. I can accept the punishment I deserve."