Growing up, a frightened child is met by an empathic adult who provides comfort- or not. Likewise, the sad child seems to engender a caring response-or not. Growing up, the mad or rebellious child might evoke an angry adult response in even the best of parents- or not. These patterns repeat inside as we tend to do ourselves what was done to us- for better or worse.


Let’s focus on what’s needed. The scared child within needs a calm adult compassion to hold them and their real or imagined fears. The despondent inner child needs empathy and love. Trickier, the mad or rebellious child inside might at first evoke an angry response (as when our parents responded to our anger with their own). Bringing patience and love to the angry child within is a worthwhile practice. With unconditional acceptance and love we meet that child inside in whatever state of mind and heart they present. From there we reassure and guide in a process sometimes called re-parenting. With re-parenting, the ego adaptations of the adapted child become less necessary and habitual. They are artifacts of a past that no longer exists. The natural child is experienced more fully and remains our closest connection to the divine and the eternal.


But what if we meet inner fears and frustrations, not with acceptance, but with more of the same? What if we beat ourselves up (adult beating up inner child)? Then the adapted child within is at risk for solidifying through our adult years into a kind of false self far from our divine origins. Adult and rational sensibilities fade and we are age-regressed- children in the adult body. Disagreements become playground fights. Genuine hopes become unrealistic fantasies and bitter disappointments. The rigid egocentricity of “me” seems fixed and we struggle with life, and with the inevitability of death.


And what dies? Surely not the divine. Our spiritual reality is that the universe and earth that birthed us is naturally and divinely alive within our whole lives. Perhaps the natural child was born with this knowledge of eternity- specifically, that a part of each of us existed before birth and will exist after our deaths. The natural child and wise adult identify with the divine and engage dying and death with a tender acceptance. But for the adult with a lifelong identification with the adapted child, those habitual defenses and ruminations are misunderstood as the one and only “me”-separate from all else. And that self dreads death and rightly so because “me” will certainly end as the body passes.


What to make of these ramblings?


Maybe that the “adapted” part of us that struggles with death is to be accepted and comforted-for that part will indeed die and deserves our compassion. And, to remember everyday that the “natural” part of us, the divine, existed before we were born, exists within us now, and exists for all eternity after our death.