We prefer to dissociate from the sufferings of childhood, so we bury our memories and hide from them.

Abuse during childhood creates within us a lost, fearful and frozen child. If we are unable to reach this child within then we may never recover our true selves. We prefer to dissociate from the sufferings of childhood, so we bury our memories and hide from them. We dissociate from seeing deeply into the causes of our early suffering. Whenever the memories arise, however fleetingly, we think we cannot handle them and we deflect them into the deepest realms of our unconscious mind.We DISSOCIATE We are frightened of further suffering. As a result, the child hidden within may not be seen for a long time. Yet we have to find a way to reach our child within and make it into a safe reality. We have to regress the fear and address the dissociation, because that is the way to awakening into our true reality.

No matter what kind of happy pretend face we present as an adult, there is also a dissociated little boy or girl inside us. This child within colours everything we do, generating our fears, insecurities and self-loathing, damaging our relationships and our life. That child within is you, is me, and we must extend a hand to that child so we can understand, defuse and transform the energy of our suffering. Kindfulness and the ten stages are the way through to the child within. We have to make contact exactly where we are caught by the past events, fearful, and angry at being neglected for so long.

We must touch the seeds of childhood suffering from an adult state of Kindfulness and awareness, making it safe for that child to come out from behind closed basement doors. As adults, we can no longer run away, dissociation has ceased to be an adequate coping strategy. We must have the courage to bring healing to our soporific child within and thereby transform ourselves. And the stages we take are not only to heal ourselves we somehow connect to all children within, those of our ancestors and descendants and everyone else in the world. Because once we cultivate the seeds of Kindful healing in ourselves, the energy of these seeds extends into all that we connect with, in a quantum leap through time and space from our cellular memories to everyone else’s. With awareness, we take our child within into our daily life: we go on picnics, take walks, sit at the dining-room table, do the dishes together. We’re patient, realising that we’re on a splendid adventure to end a cycle of suffering that may have persisted over generations. Thus we are healing and transforming ingrained patterns transmitted to us from our ancestors and through us to our descendants, patterns that built up over time like corrosive rust and amplified the fears and suffering of our child within.