True Recovery comes through our child within.

True Recovery comes through our child within. The perfect conduit for recovery is an honest person—pure of heart, healed of trauma. For recovery to come through us without distortion, we must not be barricaded by defences or poisoned by wounds from our past. We must be the clear vessel, the child within.

If we are living not from our child within but from a defended, distorted reality we will fail to recover truly. If, in childhood, we have hidden our true selves from the crippling clutches of our parents and a world that would crush us and we have not healed this, our adult expressions of recovering will be distorted. Until our child within is redeemed, our recovery will be filtered through our child’s murky memories of terror and betrayal and will always have a hidden agenda: a secret, unconscious need for rescue, and when that fails—revenge. We will be incapable of affirming the fullness of life in those we claim to love and we will even doubt our own child within—and withhold affection from ourselves.

The source of our compromised ability to recover is rooted in the necessary defences that we built in childhood. We built these emotional defences to protect our child within from the violations we received from our parents and others. Until we carefully dismantle our defences through the painful grieving process, they will cloud and distort our recovery. If we refuse to heal, our attempts to recover will never be true.

But if we do heal, if we do grieve our traumas, we will be able to love, deeply and truly our child within.