Why Am I So Hard on Myself? Inner Child Healing | Dr. Karol Darsa

When you think about yourself as a child, do you feel compassion for that child? Or do you still feel that you should have been stronger, should have known better, or should have done something differently? You may understand that you were young and what happened was outside of your control, but inside you may still blame yourself. You may feel ashamed of being frightened, needing attention, or wanting someone to take care of you. And this is exactly where reconnecting with your inner child can become a very important part of your healing. It gives you an opportunity to understand the feelings you've been judging and to begin caring for the younger self who was trying to get through something difficult. Hi, I'm Dr. Karol Darsa. I'm a psychologist, author, and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment Center. In my books, The Trauma Map and The Trauma Bridge, I talk about how trauma creates disconnection. You can become disconnected from your mind, from your body, from your heart, and the people around you. And when that begins in childhood, you may grow up thinking that the disconnection is simply your personality. You are someone who doesn't need help, someone who doesn't cry, someone who takes care of things and keeps going. strongly. But underneath that way of coping, there really may be feelings that never had enough room or support. And reconnecting with your younger self means you begin to recognize these feelings and changing the way you respond to them now. In The Trauma Bridge, my book, I describe working with a client. Let's call her Maria. As we explored her sadness, she began talking about experiences from when she was about 3 or 4 years old. She remembered needing to be self-sufficient and spending hours playing alone with her dolls. Books were important to her, of course. She would imagine herself becoming a character in the story and finding comfort and escape in the books. So during our work, she showed me a photograph of herself as a child. I invited her to notice how she felt like looking at her younger self. We worked with imagining comforting that child and acknowledging the strength It took her through those early years. She began to feel care and compassion towards her younger self. There was room for some of the sadness she had been carrying, and there was also a sense of comfort in that connection. This work happened in therapy with support. We also used grounding to help her come back to the present. I mentioned that because connecting with painful childhood feelings needs to happen gently, at a pace you can tolerate. You don't want to overwhelm yourself. And what matters in this example is the relationship that really began to develop. She was able to look at her younger self with care, very different from looking back and asking why you are not stronger. So a child may find ways to manage painful experiences that make sense at that time. They may become quiet, retreat into imagination, try to make everyone happy, or disconnect from feelings that are too overwhelming. And then later as adults, we judge those ways of coping without really understanding why they developed in the first place. We see the difficulty we have today and we get angry at ourselves. So before you try to change your response, it helps to understand what your response was doing for you. If you disconnected from specific feelings to protect yourself, you definitely need compassion for that protection, even as you begin learning another way to live. I describe this example in my book Trauma Map. A client called Manuela was angry with herself because she had difficulty expressing her feelings. She judged herself as weak and inside there was really a conflict. One part of her wanted to feel, another part was afraid to open up. So we worked with this approach called empty chair technique. You place 2 chairs facing each other, one representing the part that's angry and the other part representing the part that was afraid of feelings. I guided her as she moved between the 2 chairs and gave each side a chance to speak. At first, the angry part criticized the part that would not let her feel. But as she listened to the fearful part, she began to understand how frightened it was. It was trying to actually protect her. It didn't feel ready. Then her response began to change. She could recognize the fear where she'd previously assumed there was something wrong or empty inside her. She also remembered that as a child, her mom really didn't tolerate any of her feelings. In fact, she's been punished for being angry or sad. So, with that understanding, her disconnection to herself began to make sense to her. And there have been consequences for expressing the feelings, right? The fear was connected to her experience. This is a very important part in the healing. You begin to understand the part of yourself you've been fighting. When a part of you is frightened, criticizing it for being afraid just adds more pain. But listening gives you an opportunity to respond differently. You may recognize this conflict in smaller moments in your own life. Something hurts you and almost immediately tell yourself, ugh, I'm being too sensitive. You feel lonely or criticize yourself for needing anyone. I'm so needy, right? You want comfort, but you're really embarrassed about it. So, the feeling has barely had a chance to be recognized before you even begin arguing with it. If you learned early that there was no room for your emotions, you just continue to do the same pattern inside to yourself. You become now the person who tells to yourself, stop crying, stop needing, get on, be strong. And that's the way that you really speak to yourself, right? So, it's very important how you speak to yourself. In my work, I often actually ask people to write down the negative things they say to themselves throughout the day. They really get shocked to read their own list to see, oh my God, I'm calling myself stupid, weak, worthless. It's just so familiar that they don't even realize how hurtful they are to themselves. Then I ask them whether they would speak that way to a friend, whether they would even allow another person to treat them that way. Of course, bring that same question to yourself. now to your younger self especially. Think about the age you were, what you understood, how dependent you were on the adults around you. A child cannot be expected to have a knowledge or understanding or the ability to protect themselves from an adult like an adult, right? So when you say you should have handled everything differently, you may be judging a child's experiences with an adult Mind. You can begin questioning that judgment. You can recognize you needed help. You can acknowledge you were scared, confused, or alone without treating those feelings as evidence that something was wrong with you. You don't really have to feel complete, complete love for yourself before you begin changing the way you speak to yourself. You can start by recognizing that a way of treating yourself is causing pain and deciding to respond with much more understanding and compassion. This is the first step. Sometimes what makes this difficult is that you learn to connect your worth with how well you could manage. You may have been the child who grew up too soon, took on responsibilities, and tried not to need very much. So let's talk about another client, Jorge, who took on an adult role as a 10-year-old while the family was breaking apart. So he felt that his worth completely depended on his ability to achieve. So of course, when he became an adult, he worked a lot, overworked, and that affected his health and relationships. So when you look back at a childhood like this, you could focus on how capable you were, but being capable didn't remove his need for care. It doesn't really make you an adult. Reconnecting with your younger self can help you acknowledge what was missing alongside what you managed to do. There may have been strength, there may have also been loneliness. There may have been love in your family, but there may have also been needs that were not met. So giving those needs attention right now can sometimes bring grief. You may feel sadness for the support you didn't receive, feelings you had to hide, time you spent worried when you needed someone to help you feel safe. That's why often people move away from the sadness very, very quickly, right? They can't tolerate it. They say, ah, my parents had difficult lives, or other people had worse than me, and it's It's not so bad. They really kind of feel guilty almost. But you can understand another person's circumstances and still give your own experience attention. Understanding why someone could not meet your needs doesn't make the needs disappear. It's not about blaming them, but it's about understanding. In my book, Trauma Map, I actually discuss what happened to people when they're pushed away towards— sorry, pushed for forgiveness too fast. And they have really no space to grieve, right? They didn't even have the opportunity to express how much they were hurt. So forgiveness is a choice. You don't always have to forgive the person who hurts you in order to heal. You first need the room to understand your own feelings. That's more important than actually forgiving even someone else. So this applies to the way you treat your younger self too. The child doesn't need you to rush past the sadness. You can begin by acknowledging that something was painful and that you deserve support. Acknowledging pain doesn't mean opening every memory or feeling all of it all at once. In trauma work, actually, the pace is very important, as I often talk about it in my other videos as well. So please stay connected to the present and to your body as you open that, and remembering also resources. Things that make you feel supported, a person, an activity, nature, animals, grounding, everything that makes you feel much more present to here and now. So if a photograph or a thought about childhood brings up more than what you can tolerate, please put it aside, take your time, look around the room, notice your surroundings, and reach out for support. There's no need to force yourself further. Therapists can also, of course, help you approach this much more gently and slowly. And you can begin reconnecting with yourself by noticing the relationship between your thoughts and feelings today. In the trauma map, I describe another internal dialogue. It could be a conversation between your mind and your heart, especially when you notice you have opposing feelings or are judging yourself, like you understand but you're angry at yourself, right? So let's say your mind is insisting You should already be over something, right? But your feelings are saying, I'm but I'm hurt. So writing that down can actually really help you recognize both sides of this ambivalence, and you can begin to really understand instead of repeating the same argument over and over again in your heart, in your mind. So of course, my goal is to bring compassion, right? Just accepting the feelings that you couldn't accept before. And I know that from my own healing that understanding yourself intellectually doesn't mean you stopped fighting for your feelings. I I spent a lot of time analyzing myself, reading, journaling, and, you know, as a psychologist. But until really I learned to accept my past, my feelings, and staying in my body, I couldn't really heal what I wanted to heal. So self-acceptance was very, very important to work on. The same patience matters when you begin responding to your younger self with compassion too. You could understand that you deserved care before you can even comfortably receive the care today. You may recognize that your feelings matter and still catch yourself dismissing them. It's just a habit. So these moments, you have to practice a different response. So when you feel hurt, acknowledge it. When you need help, consider if there's somebody that you can ask for help. When you hear a judgment inside, pause for a second and imagine how you would talk to a child. You can still take responsibility for your behavior and make changes in your life. Self-acceptance means just allowing yourself to be an imperfect person while you do that work. The most important relationship to honor is the one with yourself, and reconnecting with your inner child is part of learning to bring care to that place inside of you that felt frightened, judged, or really alone. And as you begin to understand your younger self with much more compassion, you begin to build a caring relationship with yourself today. And that is how healing is possible, that you take that time and the support that's necessary. So if you want to learn more about my books, Trauma Map and The Trauma Bridge, visit my website reconnectcenter.com, or you can visit karoldarsa.com. Just remember, you deserve to feel connected, supported, and to enjoy your life. Reconnecting with yourself can begin gently, one step at a time.