Hugging my inner child – while painting a toddler

Do you believe that the Universe or Higher Self or God or whatever you want to call it puts us in situations where we learn more about ourselves?

I kept thinking about that while I was painting and finishing my most recent portrait of a toddler girl.

At first, I was just glad that I got a break from the depth of philosophical thinking while painting the 12 Kalis, which, don’t get me wrong, is something I still find fascinating for many years now. The 12 Kalis are the energies of the mother of the universe as she creates, maintains/protects and then destroys.

So why do the mothers and toddlers keep coming into my life?

Years ago I was inspired to paint “Fragile” after reading about a mother smothering her child. Why would anybody but even more so a mother who gives birth to a child kill it? The image haunted me. A few years later I painted a portrait of our friend’s son after I saw his mother feeding him so lovingly. It stayed with me until I painted the image. A few years after that I painted their beautiful and fierce tantrum-prone daughter. Now while painting another portrait of toddler girl it had me reflect on the love of her mother to care as much as to have her painted.

I think what fascinates me is the love (or absence of love) of a mother and the innocence and unconditional love of a child.

[Hugging the Inner Child, acrylic and collage on canvas, H 24 x W 20 inch (61 x 51cm) Painting from a while back when she wasn’t yet ready to be seen]

I have often tried to put myself into my mother’s shoes as she had to manage two young children, only a year apart, on her own, without friends or family nearby and how abandoned, lonely, and overwhelmed she must have been.

But I had never really been able to put myself into the little girl’s shoes as she grew up believing that there was something wrong with her.

(Even when I painted her a few years ago (see the painting to the right) she was not yet ready to be seen.)

Painting somebody else’s little girl led me closer to my own.

Meanwhile, a dear friend of mine, Debbie Happy Cohen, who is a coach and the founder of the “Joy Based Living” community that I am part of, suggested to read Pete Walker‘s book about “Complex PTSD*: From Surviving To Thriving resulting from childhood neglect and emotional abuse“. This and another book of his called “The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame” makes a big point of self-compassion and allowing ourselves to feel the grief over the lost love, the love we never had. As he re-captured his own childhood I was finally able to also feel my inner child’s pain too and release her from it. Both books contain a great many practical tools and techniques for recovering from CPTSD* and so does his website.

Some of the tools for managing emotional flashbacks**, which are a symptom of Complex PTSD, have been adapted by Richard Grannon, and I found them very helpful. One of the most important suggestions he makes is to get in touch with our emotions (emotional literacy), which I had already started before, see this post. This has also been advocated heavily by Brene Brown in her famous TED talk about vulnerability.

Recently Richard Grannon published an “Easy Emotional Literacy Instagram Thing“, which adds another dimension to it.

One early morning I woke up and had the idea for an “Emotional (Literacy) Survival Kit“, which I thought might be helpful.

Another practice I found very helpful is iRest, an ancient yoga practice adapted by Richard Miller, to help veterans and trauma victims***.

I hope these might be helpful for you too. How has your inner child been affecting you? Is she/her playing happily inside you? Or have you never had much need to think about all this.

So here I am again in the deep, hahaha, but in a good way, and it is all connected. Being able to feel the depth of our emotions without being swept away on one side and experiencing the incredible power of love and feminine energy on the other side is amazing. Perhaps I had to go this way to come back to the 12 Kalis to understand, or rather feel them in a much deeper sense. Literally.

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* (PTSD – post-traumatic stress (disorder -has been replaced by-) response): Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel the full range of emotions and experiences.

** emotional flashbacks can best be understood as the key symptom of Complex PTSD, a syndrome afflicting many adults who experienced ongoing abuse or neglect in childhood. https://www.psychotherapy.net/article/complex-ptsd#section-emotional-neglect:-a-primary-cause-of-complex-ptsd?

*** https://www.irest.org/research/2014/exploring-experiences-women-complex-trauma-practice-irest-yoga-nidra