In our psyche, there lives our Child self, our Parent self and our Adult self. The Child holds our emotions. The Parent holds the parenting rules we have learned from our own parents. The Adult is the link to our God, our Higher Power.
THE CHILD
For some of us, the mere mention of the 'child' in us can make us cringe and run for cover. We are frightened by the thought of uncovering this part of us. We are ashamed of this part of us because it is where we store our secrets, the things we would never tell anyone else, the habits we carry out which, if anyone else were to see, we would die of embarrassment. But the Child in us also carries our pain, stores our anger and obeys the rules which say they are too shameful or too painful to be let out.
Children are naturally joyful. If we look around at children at play, they are laughing, shouting, exploring and screaming with delight. For those of us who are depressed, joy can mean an absence of depression, an absence of pain or no feelings at all. But true joy is what children express when they're happy. Their behavior is a good indicator of where we want to be.
The Child in us holds our emotions. The Child obeys the rules, and if the rules are 'don't talk, don't trust, don't feel', then the Child will do what the rules say and stay blocked and depressed. However, we have the potential to feel as joyful as those children we see playing with their friends.
THE ADULT
The Adult is our wisdom. Knowledge can be taught but wisdom cannot. We are born with this wisdom. This wisdom has no grievance, nor ignorance. Our wisdom knows the proper limits for ourselves. Our wisdom can distinguish between good and evil. It can weigh up all significant factors, get a sense of pro-portion, and attach importance to a problem. Our wisdom has no fear, grief, malice or arrogance. Our wisdom is our clean self. Our wisdom is the part of us that knows the truth even if we don't want to hear it.
The Adult is the part of us that is linked to our Higher Power. This part of us can access our true path and holds the information we need to be loyal to ourselves. We can start to listen to this part of us and trust what we hear. We can call on our Adult at any time for the right answer.
It may take some time to get the hang of this technique but it will come. It took me several years to hear my Adult voice, and that was because I constantly dismissed it as nonsense. I didn't trust myself enough, but meditation helped me - as well as doing the exercise to meet my Higher Power. I now find the answers come quickly.
THE PARENT
The Parent is the part of ourselves that governs us. It has absorbed rules and regulations and has passed these on to the Child. The messages we hear from the Parent can be loving, gentle and affirming or harsh, critical and judgmental. Our Parental messages will have been put in place by how we were parented as children. It's not often we get a chance to challenge these rules but this is a good time to begin.
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If we are depressed, it will have a lot to do with feeling under pressure to live by someone else's values. If we had challenged the authority of others, we might not be depressed now. We would also have a Parent who is present to take care of the Child in a way that engendered self-responsibility, joy, fun and satisfaction. But we don't, so this is the time to have a look at how the Parent treats us and make changes that will help us beat depression and reclaim our life.The Negative Parent
To start to hear the Parent in us, we can make this statement: 'I want to put everything down and go out to play.' Listen hard to the voice that follows the statement. For those of us who are depressed, the voice will usually sound critical and put up a barrier. For example, 'There is too much to do,' 'This is no time to play,' or 'You've no right to start demanding pleasure at a time like this.' We might find that the voice sounds exactly like that used by our parents when we were children. The more we delve into the parental voices, the clearer it becomes. In time we find that we can spot this voice in an instant. It doesn't take long to develop this skill. Within three days of consistently listening to the internal criticism, we will have good clues to which voice is negatively parenting us.
The Loving Parent
There is a loving Parent inside us as well as a negative Parent. We want to mobilize the loving Parent for our good. We can identify this loving Parent when we hear the soothing voice or the 'pat on the back' voice. It may seem hard to grasp this to begin with and if we struggle with this part of ourselves, we can actually 'borrow' someone else's loving Parent for a moment.
To do this, we do something for someone else and wait for their response. If we help a short person by reaching for an item off the top shelf, let a harassed parent go first in the queue, or help an older person along the road, we will get a positive response. Then we can feel what it's like to experience a warm glow in our stomach - the Child part of us.
With persistence we can start to separate the loving Parent away from the negative Parent and use the loving influence to put pressure on the nagging, critical voice that can dominate us.
For example, what we want to hear in response to, "I want to put everything down and go out to play" is something like, "We have work to do for the next two hours but after that we shall go out for a walk; we can fit it in before we have to make dinner." The Child in us wants fairness and support. We have to acknowledge that we need to have some nurturing time in order to feel whole and loved.
If you've been depressed for a long time, you may have lost the gist of what you need to feel un-depressed. Write out a list of five things you would like to do when time is free. Remember - the Child in us doesn't need money to have a good time. Like a child, we want and crave love and attention; that's what will get us feeling good - not the money substitute. And now we can give ourselves love and attention because we have the tools and the know-how.
The loving Parent will also manage the Child by setting limits, being fair and firm, listening and explaining, talking the Child through fear, and making decisions for the best. For those of us who find these parameters difficult to grasp, we can get help in order that we learn how to do this. We can watch people speaking to their children and learn from this. We can enroll on parenting courses. We can seek counseling.
Most profound, however, is to ask our own seat of wisdom -our Adult self. This is how the three parts of us work together. The depressed Child turns to the Parent for reassurance, guidance and love, and the Parent turns to the Adult for the correct information to assist the Child to grow up.
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The problem is that one doesn't trust the other. The Child doesn't trust the Parent to take care of him, and often with good reason. The Parent doesn't trust the Child not to behave in an appropriate manner. If we believed we were truly adult, we wouldn't feel depressed because the Adult's intellect, reason and logic would take care of our lives and teach us how to parent ourselves in order that the Child part of us can trust the Adult. Our Child needs a stable and reasoned Parent to trust.This is a central hub of reclaiming our life. So, we need to identify each part of us and help ourselves to function to our potential. How do we do this?
There are many ways we can approach this question. However, one concise method of separating the child from the parent is to look at how we talk negatively to ourselves.
To begin with, we identify how we negatively parent ourselves in a way that renders us crumpled and depressed. This would include things we say to ourselves:
• You're hopeless
• You can do nothing right
• Why don't you get off your backside and do something
• I hate you when you slump like this
• You should have got over this by now
• Why bother, nobody cares anyway
• You never get it right
Sometimes these phrases are so ingrained in us that we can't even hear them. Remember that nothing keeps us 'pressed down' and blocked like verbal abuse.
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