fuck "the inner child", hug yourself right now

why are we obsessed with healing our past selves?

When I started therapy almost two years ago I remember telling my therapist I want to focus on healing from a toxic relationship with my mother. We worked on that for three months and I stopped worrying that my mother would try to find her way back to me. We unpacked a lot of the past because my toxic relationship with my mother didn’t begin when I was an adult, but just as a kid. My therapist made me look into my past so many times, and back then I was willing to do anything to start feeling more stable. But when I first heard “Imagine yourself as a little girl. What does she look like? What do you want to tell her? Do you want to hug your inner kid?”, I said “Fuck my inner kid, I want to hug my current self not the one that is just a memory”.

Two weeks later I emailed my therapist thanking for sessions but her work was done for me. Weeks later I was scrolling through social media late at night and saw multiple videos saying to take care of your young self, the inner kid. It wasn’t just my therapist, but strangers telling me to look through my past for this little girl I was.

I believe in therapy and I believe in help. When I was 18, about to start college I made a journal where I would answer honestly everyday for a few months about my past. Surrounded by my memories in my old house, with my mother in the living room I felt like that was my type of therapy. Writing everything down, while the “little girl” from pictures would look at me. I started waiting until I was healed enough to fully live. As if life was something that would begin after I fixed myself. But life wasn’t waiting. It was happening while I was trying to become a version of myself that finally deserved it. But when I left that house, I didn’t want to look through my past everyday again. In a place with no trace of “little girl”.

A few years ago Kendall Jenner went viral for a video where she says that she keeps a picture of her from childhood to remind her who she’s being mean to when she’s hating on herself. I tried to do the same thing thinking that would solve all my insecurities. It didn’t make me kinder to myself. It only reminded me that I wasn’t six anymore. But then I realised - what if we don’t want to look back? What if my childhood wasn’t a sweet colorful memory? The internet talks about childhood as if everyone left it reluctantly. Some of us were simply relieved when it ended.

I’ve read multiple articles on Substack and were part of conversation about fear of passing time. That we’re constantly worried about not being enough for a 20 year old. That we won’t get back our childhood. That we won’t succeed in anything in the next 5 years. I’m worried about it as well, and thinking about my childhood, passing time and how my body ages makes me think about death and that always paralises me for the next few minutes. I can’t look into my past without fear about the future, and yet I cannot change anything about my past.

We stopped living in the present and started focusing on fixing our past. We think more about our future than the present by saying “I’ll start tomorrow” or “Today was not the day”. The same is happening with our past, we go to therapy to solve problems, to make peace with childhood that’s gone but in reality there will always be an unresolved thread from those 18 years of childhood that we will want to resolve. Healing from the past is like counting stars. You’ll always miss one. If you spend your whole life trying to count every single one, you’ll become an observer not a discoverer of who you are.

Somewhere along the way, healing became another productivity project. We optimise routines, trauma, self-love, inner child into some slogans when in reality it’s a process. It’s not linear, it’s not a habit. It’s also not an accomplishment to love your inner child, even though the internet says that. Social media presents wellness as a set of exercises to practice in both the body and mind. In reality, it means living in harmony with the past, present, and future, but no one has a single set of practices. Each of us is different, and using one therapeutic practice based on the inner child won’t always work. If you feel chaotic or strange thinking about the past, see a psychologist, because looking at a childhood photo isn’t always enough. But if you feel like your childhood is closed to you and your life is independent of it, I wouldn’t advise looking back. I’ve come to the point where I understand how my childhood influenced me, what it shaped me, and my current goal is to focus on how this manifests in my present life.

The internet keeps telling us to revisit childhood memories. I think we should start creating memories we’ll want to revisit twenty years from now. But healing isn’t just constantly returning to one of the versions of ourselves - the child, the teenager, the confused 20 year old. It’s about paying attention to the person who is actually living your life. The child inside me isn’t the one waking up anxious before an interview or laughing with friends over dinner. I am. If I spend all my energy protecting the person I used to be, who is protecting the person I am becoming?

Part of recovery is putting labels on things that I want to remember and things that I don’t want to. The past is a place to visit, not a place to build your home. I don’t owe my younger self my entire future. I owe her the chance to become someone she always wished to become.

collage of my childhood picture inspired by cutout collages on pinterest

When I moved out I took only one picture of myself from my childhood. And if I want to protect her, I want her to stay in the past, where she belongs.