Loving Our Inner Kids: Tools for Healing Our Wounded Selves

By Alan Berman

Your body is the vehicle that moves you around, but how many drivers does it have? Is there:

1. A five-year-old, intimidated by all the new people to meet in the first weeks of school?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Jun 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889261155

Book preview

Title

Manuscripts

Press

Copyright © 2024 Alan Berman

All rights reserved.

Loving Our Inner Kids:

Tools for Healing Our Wounded Selves

ISBN

979-8-88926-116-2 Paperback

ISBN

979-8-88926-117-9 Hardcover

ISBN

979-8-88926-115-5 Digital Ebook

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the many teachers and mentors who took the time to share their hard-won skills and discoveries, so that I could adopt them, adapt them, and use them to share healing and education with others.

My parents Simon and Janet Berman, my sister Barbara Berman, my many friends and teachers: Richard Bach, Dr. Arthur Janov, Dr John E Upledger, Dr Gerald Gruman, Lansing Gresham, June D’Estelle, Adam Rapa, Siena McCarthy, Dale Alexander, Fred Stahlman, Charles Gillam, Becky Albert, Susan LeClair, Sylvie Lizotte, Bill Meredith, David Jay Brown, Ellen Whyte, David Boyce, Nathan Olin, Shondeya Betari, Sarah Elizabeth Anderson, Cynthia Matty-Huber, EJ Belliveau, Patty Silber Lazerri, Bob Fireman, Jeff Hyman, Ron Eskin, Ellie Skinner, Amy Lampert, Dennis Kraez, Mary-Lynn DeLange, Michelle Smith, Tim Geracoulis, Coral Lisa Woods, John Turner, Robert DePaulo, National Guild of Hypnotists, and most especially my amazing son: Devon Berman.

Special thanks to my dear friend and colleague Uri Yeszerski.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Part One

Chapter One: Beginnings

Chapter Two: Who Are We?

Chapter Three: The Inner Child Realm

Chapter Four: Education

Chapter Five: What Is Consciousness?

Chapter Six: Perceiving Our Universe

Part Two

Chapter Seven: Acknowledgment

Chapter Eight: Acceptance Part One

Chapter Nine: Acceptance Part Two

Chapter Ten: Appreciation

Chapter Eleven: Love

Chapter Twelve: Release

Chapter Thirteen: Reintegrate

Epilogue

The End

Acknowledgments

Notes

Introduction

Smiling is the universal greeting. It communicates an invitation to come closer and a welcoming. It crosses all genders, cultures, ideologies, religions, philosophies and belief systems. This book is a big smile to all inner kids!

—Alan Berman

I was taught unconditional love by my first dog, a golden retriever named Sundance. I was in my early twenties, an arrogant know it all, cynical and bitter, and blaming the entire world for its ignorance and stupidity. Sundance just loved me and never judged me for forgetting to let him out or for not feeding or petting him. He always came when I called him, tail wagging like a golden flag, ready to smear my face with wet kisses or roll over to have his belly rubbed—an authentic, constant model of unconditional love. More than even his displays of love, he gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life, permission to love him.

Up until the time he came into my life, I’d treated relationships as transactional. I gave in order to receive. I perceived degrees of loyalty, displays of affection, and words of love like negotiated commodities. I gave certain amounts of my time, attention, and kindness, assuming I was entitled to equal amounts in return.

When Sundance passed, I grieved deeply and loudly. I cried, got angry, and took it personally that Sundance had abandoned me. In my grieving I came to recognize, with some surprise, that my reactions were those of a child, actually several different children I’d been. I found that acknowledging the child part of me who was expressing emotionally—allowing it to happen and even encouraging it to happen—made the process feel both more authentic and respectful of the child persona expressing it.

This was revelatory and my first exposure to the idea that maybe I had been ignoring parts of me. Not too much later, I found more than a little validation of my intuitions when I started visiting a therapist.

Perhaps you can relate to this and recall how freeing it was to feel permitted and encouraged to open your heart and let some unconditional love in while also discovering that you had a reservoir of similar feelings inside you. Those perceptions will give you a richer appreciation and a context for much of what’s to follow here. My heart is wide open as I write, and I hope some of that feeling communicates through the symbolic squiggles that make up the words you’re reading here.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you…and for me.

The good news is that we’ve all survived everything so far, and most of the time we seem able to get from point A to point B without any major incidents or accidents, so we have at least some cause for optimism and celebration. The bad news is that most of us have almost no clear idea who or what we are or what we’re capable of, and we have even less of an idea of what we came to Earth to do or accomplish.

If I’m even one or two steps ahead of you in figuring out some of these things, I can make taking those few steps a lot easier and more comfortable for you.

This book is about healing emotional wounds left from childhood traumas and overwhelms as well as the magical powers of breathing with clear intention. How a wound heals—whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional—is intimately connected to the physical, mental, and emotional conditions present at the time of the injury or trauma.

In early childhood we have neither the tools nor the ability to move ourselves out of harm’s way, and the bar is set very low for what feels traumatic and overwhelming. Sustained fears and discomforts can terrify us to the core and alter the directions we’re willing to move, the degree of intimacy we can tolerate, and the experiences we’re willing to permit ourselves to feel. Some traumas and overwhelms can haunt us for an entire lifetime, but now is your time and your moment to change that.

Carpe diem. Seize the day!

Who Am I?

You might wonder what qualifies me to offer these suggestions. I have some professional letters I can use to gird up my credibility and accomplishments, but they’re only relevant to those who get what they stand for. My teachers were brilliant, highly skilled, and inspiring. If this book speaks to you, I’m grateful to share some of the lessons they taught me.

My life, like yours, has been a journey. I have made mistakes, including some whoppers! I’ve been confused and struggled to regain balance when I started to tip over. I’ve been overwhelmed and sad and struggled with depression. When life’s problems got too hard to deal with, some angel, guide, or helper miraculously appeared to support me. In difficult times some voice, from within or without, encouraged me to not give up and to not give in to the challenges. Without their help, very little of what’s offered here would have gotten here. My most difficult challenges often yielded wonderful and inspiring lessons that led me to places where the view was a bit clearer and some solution could emerge from the confusion.

I’m just like you in all but a few really insignificant ways, and none of us are immortal or strangers to pain. We can, however, create magical, extraordinary experiences for and with one another through a cooperative willingness to share our various challenges and successes.

Sharing

I think anything worth having is multiplied tenfold by sharing it with others. Why would I want to have anything unless having it leads to some increased sense of love or camaraderie in the joy we experience by sharing it? We often stop ourselves from sharing out of fear that our appreciation for a thing might make others uncomfortable in some way. If you’ve ever proudly shown your parents the beautiful mud pie you took forever to fashion, you’ll understand how children might come to be a bit shy about what they choose to share with others.

Sharing, in the most basic sense, is how we connect with one another, in a variety of forms and formats. Making eye contact with another is our first foray into sharing once we are able to focus in early infancy. The first tender glances a newborn baby shares with their mother bonds them to one another as the first step toward becoming a member of our human, Homo sapiens family. And we are a family, whether we’re comfortable accepting that or not. We’re here on earth, in physical form, to live, learn, and grow. As long as our senses function, our hearts pump blood, and our lungs process air, our journey continues to expand and evolve, as do our shared connections.

Those connections and the joy of sharing them are the main upsides available to us to balance the constant and often overwhelming aspects of living at the bottom of a five-thousand-mile-deep gravity well. Gravity is a harsh companion on a good day and a constant reminder that we can all use a hand from one another to lighten the load. Once we learn to share the load, life starts to dramatically improve.

Real magic is in the air all around you. You have but to learn to refocus a lens or two and see with fresh eyes to perceive it. Know that you are not alone on your journey. Living, learning, and growing beings are all around you to keep you company and to help light the way. Choose to make this journey the greatest one you’ve ever had.

Be bold and adventurous, and the universe will rise up to help you meet your challenges. When you do, you will come to know that your real power lies in discovering opportunities to pay forward your successes as well! Try my suggestions if you like, but don’t do it because you’ve decided to trust me. Please, just trust yourself.

Lama Govinda, a Tibetan monk, wrote:

The meaning of life—like the meaning of a journey—lies not in the arrival at a certain place but in the progress toward it; in the movement itself and in the gradual unfoldment of events, conditions, and experiences. Omniscience, in the literal meaning of the word, would be utter dullness and boredom, worse than ignorance….Knowledge can have meaning only in relationship to something or someone; to the knower.¹

So, there you have it. The meaning of life explained in the introduction of a book. If your goal in reading this was to discover the meaning of life, I’d suggest you stop here and go find someone to hug and connect with. Actually, I do suggest you go find someone to hug, connect with them, and then come back and read a little more of the book.

Life is short. Grab all the hugs you can!

Our brains and bodies comprise a vehicle that carries and moves our consciousness through space and time…just like cars move our bodies from place to place. Unfortunately, no one seems to have included a user’s manual for us, and we really don’t know what this baby will do. Wouldn’t you love to know how to increase your mileage, avoid grinding the gears, and turn what often feels like a jalopy into a smooth-riding luxury car?

We humans have places to go, things to do, and people to see, and we seemingly never have enough time to accomplish as much of it as we’d like. Our dreams and intentions get stimulated by watching TV and movie stars do all the exciting things that inspire us while we laze around on our chairs and couches, living our dreams vicariously through them. This is our time—the time for us to be the heroes and heroines of our own lives, our own stories, and our own adventures.

As a youth I sometimes felt like I was dragging my body around like a car with two flat tires. I could visualize the places I wanted to get to, but it often felt like the road was too steep, the destination too distant, or I just didn’t have enough time to get there. Do you ever feel this way?

Is there a better way to be? Is there an easier, quicker, more graceful way to get where we want to go or at least feel more confident that we’re facing in the right direction? How can we go forward when we’re not sure which way we’re facing?

We’ve mostly given up conscious control of our movements to a bio-mechanical thinking machine (our conscious minds) that tells us it knows where we’re going and how to safely get us there. We know someone or something is driving the car, and we’re willing to relax and let it just happen until something jars us, like an accident or a loud noise, or we notice the bright lights and sirens bearing down on us in the rearview mirror.

I want you to know there is an easier way—a quicker and more graceful way to move—that’s hidden in plain sight. We’ve been convinced this place is too dangerous to visit. I’ve been to this place, in my own mind, many times. I’ve also assisted many others to journey there with me, safely, comfortably and with very little drama. I’m inviting you to venture down that road with me.

The first step involves acknowledging that we’ve actually made it this far and that we are still mostly intact. Fear is contagious, and we live in a world where lots of people thrive financially by scaring others into thinking a disaster is waiting around every bend in the road. It’s true that actual disasters do occasionally happen, but they rarely happen to us. We’ve been conditioned to worry about so many things at this point in our evolution that it’s become easier to believe that the sky really is falling rather than that it hasn’t fallen on us yet… and most likely never will.

We learn in early childhood that we are less than the big, adult-sized people. They can do things we’d like to do but don’t yet have the skills or experience to achieve. We get stuck in a place called less than and are there for a very long time. We grow and mature slowly and spend the majority of our time trying to do things we just can’t do, but we are not quitters.

Every time we fall down, we figure out some way to get back up. We are resilient and strong, part of a human family that can choose to help each other. This makes it almost impossible for us, as a human family, to fail. Circumstances and challenges that are familiar and common to all of us have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and become part of a shared reality. That set of challenges and our learned responses to them helped us to become the dominant species on our planet. If some experience or condition is shared by all of us, it’s very likely that there are good reasons for them.

When we’re mostly tiny and helpless, our caregivers enjoy living vicariously through our successes. They nudge us ahead whether we’re ready for our next steps or not. Those first steps are a giant milestone for our folks. They see our every early, unsteady attempts to walk as both a joy and a terror—a joy when we are progressing and healthy and also a possible foreboding when our awkwardness suggests something might be wrong with us. Each new skill we acquire is a process of trials and errors, and they are perceived as reflections of how good a job of parenting our folks are doing.

In the cells and DNA of every parent are the records of their own successes and failures. They too were once clumsy, ungraceful, and unsteady. Buried in their unconscious minds are the memories of how scary it was to feel so vulnerable and see the worried looks and body language of their folks.

You’re reading this right now. That’s all the proof you need to know that you’ve succeeded, survived, and even thrived. The fact of reading assumes that everything you need to feel safe and secure is in its place, and you’re okay. It seems like such a simple concept, but having leisure moments to relax and reflect requires a symphony of conditions to make one feel safe.

You are a survivor, and it’s important that you see that, feel the truth of it in your bones, and start acting like the powerful being you have become.

—Alan Berman

Congratulations! You’ve made it! It all gets easier from here. Let’s have some fun and see what our amazing luxury vehicles can do.

Part One

Chapter One:

Beginnings

Our family is larger than you think.

—from my postcard from Richard Bach

From birth, through childhood and onward, to whenever I arrived at some personal critical choice point, virtually every decision I made was channeled through the filter of What will someone think and how painfully will I be judged for this? Judgments came from just about everybody I’d ever known as well