psychology forces us to consider  is that of an ‘inner child.’ All  

of us have along the years made  such efforts to become adults,  

it can be at once grating and dispiriting to be  told that there might, nevertheless, be an ‘inner  

child’ still lodged somewhere within us. But in truth, we contain within ourselves  

a version of all the people we have  ever been. There is, in recessive form,  

somewhere in the folds of our natures, a confused  teenager, a sad child, a jealous or hungry infant.  

No version of us entirely disappears,  it is merely added to and buttressed,  

just like an oak tree that still contains, in its  rings, the marks of all its former circumferences. 

Furthermore, if we follow the psychological  thesis, some of our inner children are likely not  

to be especially well. They might be dealing with  a hurt that they have no idea how to cope with,  

they might have suffered a loss without any  chance to understand who and what is to blame,  

they might be lonely, distressed or ashamed.  No one might have taken proper care of them  

during a crisis or bothered to sympathise  with their unusual difficulties at school. 

Despite their pain, it isn’t that the inner  child’s cries are in any danger of breaking  

through into the public realm. That is precisely  the problem. Inner children cause psychic distress  

not because they are too present, but because  they are not present enough. They have been too  

effectively locked away. Their cries have been  seamlessly forgotten and ignored. They have been  

pushed into a sound-proof chamber from which  no murmur emerges. And yet still they exist. 

We are dealing with unwanted restless ghosts  who have not been appeased or understood - but  

whose ongoing ignored unhappiness  threatens the course of our lives. 

The task ahead requires a perhaps even  more grating and obtuse word: reparenting.  

The inner child needs to be identified, their  distinctive troubles understood and their pains  

soothed and becalmed. In a perfect world, it is  parents themselves who would carry out this work  

at the time the difficulties arose. But in the  real world, some of the work gets left behind  

and lingers, which requires a bizarre-sounding  manoeuvre to correct. We - as adults - need to  

become parents to the children we once were.  We need to gather together our adult capacities  

for kindness, reassurance, empathy, generosity  and warmth and direct these towards the three  

or five or fifteen year olds who still exist  in our minds. We need to take stock of these  

young people’s sorrows and help them in a way they  were not helped at the time in the name of helping  

ourselves right now; for we are standing on their  shoulders - and can only be as stable as they are. 

It’s when we can directly imagine what a  good and kind person might have said to us,  

and yet when we are simultaneously aware of  how little anyone did actually say, that we  

might be suffused with compassionate tears for our  former selves; we may register a trapped sadness  

that at last has an opportunity to be seen, worked  through and expunged. We might feel a lot lighter  

afterwards and we might then regularly - perhaps  late at night - repeat the exercise: revisiting  

the inner child and bringing them an extra dose of  comfort and tenderness so that they (and we, for  

we rest as a collective) might sleep more easily. We probably know well enough how to treat real  

children around us: true liberation  awaits us when we finally learn to  

treat the children inside us with as much  tolerance, patience and warm encouragement.