Where, Why, and How I Found My Inner Family
The Backstory
Are you a first-time reader? These posts make the most sense when you start here.
Western Massachusetts, a small, winterized summer cabin close to both a Vermont and New Hampshire border. The unpaved road so narrow I have to pull way off to one grassy side for another car to go by.
Once inside, I’m sitting at one end of a super comfortable couch on top of a stunning, Middle Eastern rug in quiet shades of blues, greens, yellows, with touches of pale peach weaving around a sky-full of birds. On all sides, walls of glass windows make me feel as if the surrounding woods hold me inside a varied, green cocoon of safety. A teapot with a cozy, and two cups of steaming peppermint tea sit on the low, glass and wood coffee table in front of me. I breathe in the reviving, sharp smell of fresh peppermint.
At the other end of the couch sits my friend, legs crossed, leaning back, comfortable in his home. We’ll call him EG. He’s a student getting his Masters in Psychological Counseling. I’m getting my Doctorate in Creative Behavior in Human Development—only the second, graduate-level discipline in Creativity in the world. He travels to New Hampshire for class; I head in the opposite direction, south to Amherst, MA.
Together, we have been experimenting with ways to expand our self-awareness, a subject—or you might even think of it as we did, a discipline—that stirs our intellectual juices and infinity curiosity about what makes people tick.
What makes us tick.
We start off talking about the idea of an inner child; very clinical, mental. But slowly I begin to feel anxious, unsettled.
I tell EG, I’m going to close my eyes and see if I can feel where my body is holding this unsettled, anxious feeling. The deep silence inside and outside his small home gives me the freedom to drop myself, internally, like a polished stone into deep waters.
Within seconds I land in my solar plexus, which is registering a brick-like weight and slight nausea. I give myself permission to sink into the discomfort.
In a matter of seconds, a scene unfolds behind my eyes: a corner of a room, except there is no room, only the corner.
I sense a presence; faintly at first, then gathering both substance and speed. I sense/see a young girl, three, or maybe younger, spinning in the corner. She, like the two walls on either side of her corner, appears in a pale, dusty-rusty, peach-colored dress that stops at her bare knees and bare feet. The entire scene is as monochrome monotonous as is her spinning.
She feels autistic. She feels consumed by an inner turmoil, a package of terror and pain that she can’t unwrap, but that wraps tighter and tighter around her with each spin.
One part of me wants to reach out and comfort her because the spinning feels as if it has a mind of its own, as if someone toggled on a switch, then removed the off option.
Another part of me senses/feels that I need to stay present, willing to receive what the image is telling me, and give my younger self the time and space to become aware of my adult presence.
I deeply understand this is a rare moment of personal honestly that neither asks, nor wants, my interference, interpretation, or emotional baggage.
Instead of reaching out to hold her, I reach in and hold my adult self. I open up to trust. In this moment, allowing myself to trust that this younger version of me needs the adult me, not to fix anything, but to simply be a willing witness to her pain and panic.
That the act of being an open, non-judgmental, loving witness means I can give her the emotional and spiritual safety net she needs to return to her Original OneSelf.
I begin to realize that even though her spinning has underpinnings of historical trauma, the panic she feels comes from being abandoned. Not by any figure from her past, but by me, her adult who has not, until now, been able to even see her, much less hold her.
And with this realization comes another: that I have stayed away from her because I fear that she is the very personification of the pain and panic that an ongoing family trauma is causing me right now, today.
To open my arms to her would be to open my adult self to the pain and panic in my current life.
And what are the chances that I, or any of us, would willingly open ourselves to pain and panic?
Isn’t this the essence of “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater!”
This younger me is not the pain and panic; she is experiencing pain and panic. And wrapped in my own adult, emotional pain, I forgot that she is a hurt child in need of care and comfort.
At this point, my body may still be sitting cross-legged on the couch, leaning forward, my cheeks a rivulet of tears, my eyes shut tight while EG listens to me monologue, but the psyche and personality inhabiting my body stays quiet, alert, waiting.
Slowly, slowly, slowly my younger self quiets her spinning until she collapses in a heap, curled over herself, her back against the corner. As I wait, she uncurls and sits up, crossing her legs like me, on a pillow of a skirt beneath her, worn out, but present.
What felt like the closed door of an autistic child, becomes an aware presence whose open eyes are studying me.
As I relate what I’m experiencing, when the tears and tight chest allow me, EG makes a suggestion: Ask her, What’s your name?
Internally, I turn back to my younger self, composed and weary, and ask her What’s your name?
Little Sparrow, she says. And just like that our conversation begins.
Little Sparrow, I repeat back to her. Thank you. Is there anything you’d like me to know?
Can I sit on your lap? She asks. Will you take me home with you? Can I stay with you?
Our internal dialogue feels utterly organic, as if meeting a new friend for the first time.
I’m feeling shy; that it’s important to introduce myself so she will accept me. I feel like I’m sitting in a meadow on the edge of the woods and I have to be very quiet, very still so Little Sparrow doesn’t skitter off into the underbrush of neglect behind her.
I feel a robin-blue-eggshell part of me cracking open. Inside, a deep longing is waking up, stretching its arms high, rubbing its sleepy eyes. I feel Little Sparrow climb into my lap and we watch this ancient longing of our Original OneSelf streaming all the planets and stars and suns of the natural universe within us and without.
My adult life has not changed.
There are still drops of cold peppermint tea clinging to the porcelain cup on the coffee table in front of me. EG has gone into the kitchen. My family drama/trauma continues to ask more of me than I think I can bear. I still have three part-time jobs, two teenage daughters to take care of, a workshop for local artists to complete, a doctorate degree to finish, food to put on the table, electric lights to keep on.
But holding this first member of my Internal Family on my lap; taking her hand as we walk to the car; letting her sit in the passenger seat beside me with her seatbelt on…this profound, simple act of allowing my inner sight to lead me through troubled waters makes me feel deeply hopeful, and crucially, not alone.
What’s Next?
I’ll continue with my Inner Family backstory so you have a complete example of how an Inner Family might organically unfold.
Because everyone’s Inner Family unfolds as uniquely as their fingerprint, and because the Inner Family approach includes different ways to lean into your Inner Family, but not a blueprint, all we can offer each other is our story.
As we continue on this journey, I’m working on a way for anyone—who feels comfortable sharing what they are experiencing as their Inner Family unfolds—to do so within this Substack framework.
Now that you’ve read this 6th post in the series.
You can read the 7th installment/post here: When Your Inner Child Comes To Tea
Remember, these posts will make the most sense if you read them in order, like chapters in a book.
Meanwhile, please…
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P.S. To continue this series, scroll down an hit “Next.”
SIDEBAR:
When I tell EG, I’m going to close my eyes and see if I can feel where my body is holding this unsettled, anxious feeling, many of us will recognize this body-awareness approach to therapy as somatics.
And even though somatics has been around since the 1970s, at the time I first met Little Sparrow, I had come to my own conclusion that self-awareness embraced the whole of a person: mind, body and spirit. I was not working with a reference or label to somatics per se.
If you want to know more: somatics is having a renaissance in the various self-awareness fields of movement, body work, psychology and here on SubStack.
P.S. To continue this series, scroll down and hit “next.”
To reacquaint yourself with My Premise / My Promise, click here.
