PTSD Recovery: Try Using Inner Child Exercises

I have received enormous benefit to my PTSD recovery from the use of inner child exercises. Inner child exercises help heal the wounded child who lived for so many years within my body.  It was that damaged child who suffered the abuse that led to my posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

When I was first presented the concept of inner child work, I thought it sounded silly. But in a time of great desperation, I tried it, with the most remarkable results. My PTSD recovery is greatly benefitted by using inner child exercises. Here’s how they work.

PTSD Recovery By Accessing The Inner Child

In the late 1980s, I exhibited the symptoms of PTSD, but I couldn’t remember a traumatic event that might have happened to me. I was attending the Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) Twelve Step program, trying to figure out the effects of growing up with alcoholism. One of the great blessings of that time was to be working with a sponsor (mentor) who was also a therapist.

When I told him there were blank spaces in my memories of my childhood, he suggested what he called Gestalt therapy, or empty chair exercises. He said it would be a way to access the wounded young inner child. He told me that when abuse happens, the ego gets frozen at a certain age, and that the child would be able to access those abuse memories. It sounded super psychological, and I smiled politely and dismissed the concept.

Not long after that, I began to remember traumatic incidents with my Dad, escalating in violence, which started when I was a teenager. At the same time, my world was falling apart, and I grew increasingly desperate. I sensed there was something else, even more damaging, deeply buried within my soul, but I couldn’t access it. One night I had a dream about someone chasing me with a gun, and when I turned to look, it was my Dad (PTSD And Nightmares: Dream Revision Technique.  http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/traumaptsdblog/2015/10/19/the-use-of-inner-child-exercises-in-ptsd-recovery/