The First Step to Freedom: Breaking the Invisible Chains of the Inner Child

Find the roots that keep you stuck

It All Comes Back To Childhood

In the modern era, the child is brought into a world of confusion. In the first stage of life, the child’s curiosity and discovery of their immediate environment allow them to play and experience the joy of being themselves.

Unhindered by societal influences, the child begins to develop an understanding of their relationship to the natural world.

But as the child’s world expands, they are introduced to greater forces—society and the larger family. They realize their dependence on others for survival. While this new environment (society, parents, and social influencers) is a natural part of the developmental process, many of the so-called “acceptable behaviors” instilled by parents and society often become perpetual errors, doing more harm than good, ignoring the child’s internal needs in favor of societal demands.

In turn, it becomes a pattern of the blind leading the blind.

As a result, a deformation process begins, which the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montague described as “upbringing.” The awfulness of this process, he said,

“is no less than a crippling of the child’s potentialities for the realization of its uniqueness and its basic behavioral needs: the need for love, friendship, imagination, curiosity, song, dance, explorativeness, experimental-mindedness, open-mindedness, the need to learn, to work, to play, to speak, and many others.”
(Montague, 1988, as cited in Gruen, 1988, p. 7)

Consequently, as Montague noted, a distorted development begins, in which the child’s potentialities are strangled and not fully realized through the encouragement of love.

Sadly, more often than not, these personal needs are replaced by the needs of outside influencers, and the struggle for autonomy begins. The child becomes further confused, and their view of love becomes attached to their need to comply and obey. Arno Gruen, the existentialist psychologist, summarized this issue in his book Betrayal of the Self. Gruen (1988) explains how destructive parental influence can be in a child’s development, and how the child mistakes compliance for love:

“If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring them the loss of genuine feelings. … For autonomy can go underground and hide beneath subjection and submissiveness, beneath a surrender to the will of others.”

And thus, the labyrinth begins. The child develops adaptive responses to meet the demands of this new environment, and in turn becomes a reflection of other people’s needs rather than their own authentic self, surrendering to external controlling forces. What I’ve come to see is that the survival conditioning we installed from a young age into our personality from childhood trauma imprisons us in adulthood — keeping us repeating old patterns long after the danger has passed.

As the psychologist Harold W. Percival noted, “Personality… is only as a whimsical child compared with the serene self-knowing individuality; and the personality must be treated as a child… constantly restraining its faults, improving its faculties, and aspiring to conscious knowledge of its divine self.” In essence, our outer adaptations and the masked personality may serve us in survival. Still, the lack of integration of our trauma and suffering prevents us from the divine knowledge of ourselves to become whole.

Over time, these unconscious survival mechanisms crystallize as part of our behavioral development. As we grow older, they can further diminish the value we place on ourselves and others.

Despite this, however, developing self-knowledge and understanding why we created these masks can help us begin the healing process. In this way, we can start to forgive and love ourselves for who we truly are. In my view, the act of truly reclaiming the self is not about ignoring our helplessness from trauma, but about seeing it clearly, and having an understanding relationship with it.

Stay tuned for Part Two, where we will explore in greater detail how these masks are formed and how we can begin healing our trauma.