It’s Never Too Late To Have a Happy Childhood

My childhood was a mix of idyllic summer days, lounging on the dock, sailing, and eating watermelon, juxtaposed with chronic pain and the many ramifications of fear and anxiety that persisted in my family’s lineage. The persecution that my great-grandparents endured created a lasting sense that danger was lurking at any moment.

It was four generations ago that my family members took turns guarding the village all night because people were being murdered in their sleep, but the echo of that fear haunted my sleep for decades.

It’s said that it takes seven generations to release severe trauma from a family system. I wasn’t willing to wait that long.

Learning to feel safe has been my life’s work for 30 years. By and large, I’ve succeeded, and I’ve raised three children who feel safe, which feels nothing less than miraculous. However, it’s been an arduous journey with many twists and turns.

In my twenties, I went on many healing quests. The most intense was a six-month stay in India, where I studied at several ashrams and sought the wisdom of the East. Back in Canada, I continued to explore and study many kinds of yoga, meditation and self-growth.

I remember one moment at a workshop when the leader said something that had a profound impact on me. I thought about it again and again for years afterwards. She stood naked, that’s a story for another day, and declared, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

It seemed like such a bold and strange statement. I didn’t understand what she meant.

She seemed to be inviting us to liberate the playful, magical child within. It sounded beautiful, but I didn’t see how to actually do that.

I wondered, “How can I undo things that happened in the past? How can I heal my past trauma? How can I reach that magical child who’s under all the defences, adaptations, fear, anxiety, and pain?”

It took years for me to truly understand her declaration and find the healing modalities that made it possible.

I used to believe that to heal, I had to release the fear and wounding from my body. Every time I uncovered a new layer, I thought I was getting closer to healing it. So I kept working harder at it, thinking that then I’d heal it faster.

I was conceiving of my pain as finite layers of a wound that could be extricated, like you might squeeze puss out of a physical cut.

Every layer of pain that I uncovered felt like a slightly new discovery, and with it, I had great epiphanies that seemed life-changing, only they weren’t.

I was running on the hamster wheel of healing, believing I was getting somewhere better. I thought I was growing, gaining insight, and healing my trauma. In some ways, I was growing but I brought my overachieving, cerebral, analytical tendencies into my healing pursuits.

But, there’s no such thing as a straight-A healee, and emotional wounds don’t need to be banished; they need to be nurtured.

My experience changed when I stopped thinking of fear or anxiety as a problem or a sign that I wasn’t healed enough.

Instead, I began to see my anxious thoughts and fearful dreams as a cry for help from my wounded child-self. When I understood that it was my job to embody a level of presence that allowed me to meet her with compassion and resonance, my life changed dramatically.

Every time I showed up for my child-self as the adult that could support her, her trust in me grew. She stopped looking in all the wrong places for a diversion for her fear. Her/my nervous system began to balance and become more resilient. She/we came out of alarmed aloneness and began discovering inner safety.

My safety has been cultivated, like a garden that I’ve planted and tended to in my inner world. The more I tend to this inner garden, the more the adaptive armour softens and the freer I feel in my life.

There’s more bounce in my step, I giggle often, I dance like nobody’s watching, I sing spontaneously, and I find awe in small, beautiful things. My adult daughter says that I ‘scamper all about’ and am much more playful.

I now understand what the workshop leader said. By accessing our magical child, we can reclaim the parts of us that we lost in childhood. We can create a happy childhood, even if it was strained in the past, by loving our child-selves into wholeness.

Healing Philosophy

The path to the magical child is through the wounded child, which for most people is quite counterintuitive. When we’re suffering, we want the fear or pain to go away.

Often, the wounded self’s fear is so pervasive that it takes up all of our internal real estate, and we don’t even realize that there’s a possibility for a strong, healthy adult self to emerge.

I’ve heard many clients say that they just want to get rid of their anxiety, as though it’s a disease entity that can be purged from the body¹. I remind the clients that the anxiety is ‘calling you to you’.

The wounding itself is the doorway.

Our magical child doesn’t come by banishing the wounded parts and branding the fear/anxiety/pain as the problem. It comes by tending to the wounds with so much tenderness that they soften. And in that softening, space opens for the magical child to emerge, but it takes time and a commitment to keep showing up for your wounded self.

The wounded one becomes quieter because she’s been heard. Her pain hasn’t been removed, but she softens when she feels seen and met in her struggles rather than judged.

The more she’s met, the less alarmed she’ll be, and the less often triggers will happen, but they can still occur if stress is high or situations are intense. That doesn’t mean that your healing has failed. It doesn’t mean you have to work harder to dig up another layer.

It simply means that as human beings, we will sometimes feel tender and need to slow down to care for ourselves, just as you would care for a scared child, sitting with them with patience and soothing tenderness.

The key question is how to do it. How do we access a level of compassion and tenderness that most people didn’t receive as children?

How do we offer ourselves that tenderness when we feel anxious or scared?

Specific Steps

1. Commit to a ten-minute meditation practice, oriented to self-sensing and self-soothing.

2. Start recognizing anxious thoughts and acknowledge that your wounded self is calling for your help, rather than addressing them based solely on the content of the story.

3. Learn the 101 of resonant self-talk so you can meet your wounded self with compassion.

When we’re not met with gentle compassion and understanding as children, particularly when we’re scared, parts of us can become frozen in states of alarmed aloneness. This unresolved fear can then project into our experience of adult life, shaping how we react to stress, relationships, and our self-worth.

However, when we can stop looking for resolution through the content of the anxious thoughts and instead tune into a deeper aspect of ourselves with warmth, resonance and compassion, our experience begins to shift.

Parting Thoughts

The workshop leader was telling us that we don’t have to be weighed down by what we didn’t receive as a child. We can give it to ourselves. And in that giving, we open a path to the freedom we always longed for.

I’ve seen many people go through this process, and I trust the technique implicitly. It may sound obscure, but with openness and commitment to practice, anyone can learn.

In my practice, I focus on teaching people.

1. How to use meditation and somatic practices to strengthen their healthy adult selves.

2. How to become the safe adult who tunes to the wounded parts and offers them resonance, compassion and safety.

3. How to discern ‘who’ within needs the care and how to reach them.

4. How to integrate this work with our parts and raise the frequency of the entire person.

Feel free to message us if you’d like more personal support or guidance on integrating these practices into your life.

Wishing you playful moments, laughs and joy.

With faith in your wholeness,

Alyssa

Note 1: I’m a proponent of many types of physical care for anxiety, which can work in tandem with the process described in this article. I’ve found that our relationship with our child-self is often the most significant lever in healing anxiety and reclaiming inner freedom.

Practice Resources for Going Deeper

For those who would like to deepen this exploration, I’ve added a 10-minute self-compassion meditation and three instructional videos to help you get started with inner resonance today.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll have full access to these tools, and I hope they support you as you continue the work we’ve started here. If you resonate with this article and want to continue learning, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber.

These tools are designed to be simple and easy to integrate into your busy life. I hope you’ll be as excited as I am about changing your inner self-talk. I’d love to hear what happens for you.