The Sacred Story Big Enough to Live In

As a teenager, I once imagined growing up to be either a psychiatrist or a pilot. I can now see the relationship between those two desires, as I eventually created a life combining the longing for healing with the longing for spiritual vision and connection. Having grown up with alcoholic parents, my life was a very painful place to be, and I struggled emotionally far into my adulthood. I don't exaggerate when I say that I had neither self-esteem nor self-love, and no clear understanding of why this was so. Eventually, I moved intentionally into the childhood pain so that I could heal it. This led me to embrace the pilot's long view of Life that being above the earth can provide. I am now an ordained minister with a spiritual counseling practice focused in integrative healing.

The greatest beauty of my childhood is that it led me to a "bigger story" - of Life and MY life - and provided me with what I call the "sacred gift of healing." My purpose in this article is to acquaint you with one modality I used in my own journey and now utilize with many of my clients. While not everyone I see needs the depth and time commitment that Inner-Child/Re-parenting work requires, nearly everyone can make use of some of its aspects. Let me first provide a bit of background.

"Adult Children," a term coined to identify children of alcoholics, now is widely used to mean adults whose family systems were significantly dysfunctional and who bear the scars of that dysfunction in day-to-day living. We adult children, hampered in our ability to lead full, authentic lives, exhibit some common traits, such as not knowing what normal behavior is; being loyal past the point where loyalty is deserved; judging oneself mercilessly; looking to others for our self worth; lying when it should have been easier to tell the truth... Without specific, developmental needs-meeting from our caregivers, we become adults who function from the place of those unmet childhood needs. We look to substances and processes, partners and institutions to provide what was not sufficiently present for us growing up - an intimate relationship. We make the object of our "affection" (read "addiction") into a substitute for what we needed - emotionally healthy parents who truly loved and valued themselves, and thus were able to instill in us that same sort of life-giving connection to self and others.

Without healthy emotional modeling, we are limited by the beliefs we hold and the "stories" we tell about ourselves. Reacting instead of responding to life and its challenges, with our reactivity cloaked in childhood pain, we project our wounds outward onto others, unconsciously perpetuating a system of wound-based actions and reactions. Our too-small stories about who we believe ourselves to be harm not only us, but those around us. Learning to respond instead of react will happen when we become uncomfortable enough (addicted to drugs or alcohol, for example, or once again unable to make a valued relationship last) to look deeply at our lives and begin the emotional work that leads us to that sacred gift of healing I mentioned earlier.

Many of my clients live with some Adult Child belief along a continuum that includes "not good enough" and "not lovable." This big, too-small story tells me that they don't yet love themselves, and without self-love, the emotion we call love and give to others is always conditionally based. A necessary part of healing is to claim in our own hearts that person we came into this world as - the bright and shining child who believes all things are possible. To me, Inner Child/Re-parenting work is spiritual work, as it gives back to the world what John Bradshaw calls our "wonder child." The process itself can involve many elements, including listening with compassion instead of criticism to what the younger parts of us have to say, via journaling, drawing, talking, and meditation; learning to give unconditional love to what we've believed was unlovable in ourselves (aided by realizing that our behavior patterns developed in response to messages received from adults living with old, patterned responses to their unhealed hurts); setting limits as the adult on the acting-out behavior of our younger selves/aspects; learning to practice appropriate self-care in response to pain, injury, injustice, etc. Through full engagement in this work, we no longer "need" to visit our pain on those around us; we can now own it, attend to it, and love ourselves through it.

At some point during the process we'll likely go through a blame phase, one in which we move intentionally - and privately (i.e., not directed outward) - through our held, often hidden anger at our caregivers. Supporting this stage will be an evolving truth: These people did the best they could, no matter how much we believe otherwise. For some of us, the blame stage is difficult to enter, precisely because we already know that truth. Others of us have no trouble going there, as we've been actively blaming everyone and everything around us for our problems as long as we can remember. Our willingness to intentionally enter and go through this temporary phase has the potential to yield a greater compassion for self and others, always an outgrowth of genuine healing. The process also gives birth to a larger story - somewhere along the way we realize that the caregivers who raised us deserve our consideration and understanding, even our love. The healing, then, has led us into true "response-ability." Able at last to respond to life rather than react, to be present to ourselves and others rather than project outward from fear and pain, we model more life-giving behaviors and ways of being.

Beyond the great sufficiency of these gains lies yet a bigger story, for what makes the healing sacred is that it has the potential for restoring to us our deepest and truest nature, the Authentic Self. It is this greater Self that simply knows we are not unconnected, as we believed, but deeply interconnected - to each other, and to That Which Moves All Things. Nearly all the world's wisdom and religions teachings are rooted in this unity, this concept of oneness. It's my belief that we are literally One Being, manifesting Itself in and as the individuated world of form, what the ancient Chinese called the Ten Thousand Things. This Oneness means that the personal healing we've been responsible to cannot have taken place in a vacuum, impacting only the individual. In fact, as the ancient teachings tell us, there IS no vacuum, no place where God, or Source, is not. Though the great Teachers certainly needed no confirmation, quantum physics has now found this to be true, and this certainty has profound implications for a heart-hungry world.

If all this is so, and I believe it is, the effects of awakening so deeply to our spirits, our Authenticity, must mean more than we know. The intimate relationship that we have been crying out for is our very birthright, comprising what only appears to us as separate, and can never be separate: our Selves, our Creator, and all Creation. As one of my professors was fond of saying, "Healing may be personal, but it's never private." In other words, each healing action I undertake is uniquely mine to carry out and holds within itself the promise to change me as an individual; AND, each effort ultimately extends far beyond me: When I am lifted by my healing, my healing literally lifts the world. What a profound act of service this healing is! For me, that's the largest story I can tell; that's the sacred story "big enough to live in."