During a session with my therapist, while processing my childhood trauma, she asked me a question: “If you could talk to your inner child, what would you say to her?”

I didn’t have an answer for my therapist, only tears. A year or so ago, I underwent guided hypnosis/meditation, and during that I was asked to visualize being face to face with my inner child. I immediately began sobbing. He said he has only seen that reaction from me and one other person.

I have faced many terrifying things in my life and made it to the other side, but facing my inner child is one I can’t seem to push through. She was locked away at a young age because I needed to survive. I could not think or act as a child, and so she could not exist. I always picture her during a particular moment when I was 6 years old; wearing a lavender t-shirt with a dark purple butterfly embroidered on the front, matching lavender shorts, olive skin tanned, long, nearly black hair with a reddish hue, done up in an intricate braid crowning her head. Her green eyes sparkle, her face scrunched in a way that indicates she was just laughing, a big smile still on her face.

I probably remember this moment because it was one of the last times she was still innocent, before the really bad stuff started to happen. I just now noticed I refer to her as “she,” rather than “me,” as if we are not the same. Is it a strange disconnect? Does everyone do the same? I really don’t know, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, because this is my experience.

I want to be able to face her, to tell her I’m sorry she wasn’t kept safe, sorry she wasn’t properly shown love and caring from her caregivers, sorry she didn’t learn healthy coping skills, sorry that she had to grow up too fast, sorry she learned really young not to trust others, sorry that she was always scared, sad, anxious, didn’t want to exist, prayed for death. I want to hug her and tell her everything will be okay, that she’s not broken. I want to give her childhood back and set her free.

But I can’t. Of all the pain I’ve endured over the years, facing her may be the most painful.

I am her. She is me.

To be continued…..