Inner-Child Work: Some Evolutionary and Neuroscientific Reflections

Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Fall 2005 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Inner-Child Work: Some Evolutionary and Neuroscientific Reflections

By John Bradshaw, MA

For the last 27 years, I’ve reflected on the power and efficacy of inner-child work. Recently I found two areas of knowledge quite interesting and enlightening: the evolutionary theory of neoteny and the neuroscientific study of the brain.

Neoteny

In 1988, I was presenting my inner-child workshop to a group of holistically oriented dentists. I arrived the day before I was to begin and discovered that one of my most revered mentors, Dr. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist at Princeton, was giving the keynote address.

When I began my workshop the next day, Dr. Montagu, 84 years young, was in the audience. He participated in the entire two-day workshop, doing all the experiential exercises. At the end of the workshop, he gave me a manuscript copy of a book he had written that was to be published later that year. The book was called Growing Young. It presented an extremely complex argument for the theory of neoteny, an evolutionary theory that many biologists, ethnologists and anthropologists believe is a necessary complement to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Montagu told me that what he had experienced in the workshop mirrored what his book outlined as a major focus for psychotherapy.

Neoteny is defined in biology as “the retention of fetal or juvenile traits by the retardation of developmental processes.” The prolonged childhood of humans is unique among all life forms. Since humans are the apex of evolution, there must be some evolutionary reason for our prolonged childhood.

Montagu cites a number of renowned scientists who believe that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not fully sufficient to account for human evolution. There is, they believe, another mechanism at work in evolution, first noted by Edwin Drinker Cope in 1870. Cope discovered what he called the law of acceleration and retardation.

While I’m not qualified to present the scientific argument for the theory of neoteny, I’ll tell you what excites me about it in terms of inner-child work.

Retardation of development allows us humans to avoid limiting our brain development to the specialized focus of survival.

The juvenile chimpanzee is quite humanlike compared to the adult chimpanzee. The adult’s head and jaws are elongated and no longer round. The elongation is due to the fact that chimps must focus all their attention on survival. The early need for specialization forces the ape’s brain into an elongated pattern. The vast number of neurons in the chimp’s brain are pruned to a relative few concerned only with survival.

For us humans, our prolonged childhood (from birth to 14 years) opens the door to many experiences that allow our brains to expand. This non-specialized use of our brain offers us enormous possibilities for creativity and freedom.

Montagu quotes from the Journal of Auroville, which recounts communication from a flying saucer. The alien says, “The trouble with earthlings is their early adulthood. As long as they are young, they are loveable, openhearted, tolerant, eager to learn and eager to cooperate with others. By the time of adulthood, most human adults are mortal enemies.” I’m not prone to believe this statement came from an alien. However, the human race says it wants peace more than anything, yet we keep having wars.

For Montagu and his biological colleagues, the goal of human maturity is not adulthood as we now conceive it, but adulthood as actualizing our childlike traits, such as openness, tolerance, docility, spontaneity, love for others and willingness to cooperate.

To sum up neoteny, Montagu asserts that “we are designed to grow in ways that emphasize rather than minimize childhood traits.” Montague asserts that the understanding of neoteny is urgent in terms of human survival. History teaches us “that only the races with the longest childhood were able to stay in the cultural mainstream.”

A century of clinical psychology and psychotherapy has helped us understand that we are by nature open, curious, tolerant, loving, playful and joyful. Life is not an ongoing warfare, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes and others have believed. All humans have a deep and persistent desire for wholeness and, when we are emotionally dis-eased, we deeply desire recovery. We intuitively know that being violent to ourselves and/or others and hating ourselves and/or others are not what our nature intended and will not bring us happiness.

Psychotherapy helps us clearly see that violence and hatred of ourselves and others are primarily reactions to childhood, trauma, abandonment, neglect and chronic abuse of one kind or another.

The inner child is a symbolic metaphor for the natural child’s preciousness, as well as the natural child’s adaptation to trauma, abuse, abandonment, neglect and enmeshment (the wounded child).

Inner-child work aims at helping us re-own the natural child within us (the precious child). In order to reconnect with the primal energy of our natural child, we need to grieve the wounds resulting from our abandonment, neglect and abuse. Once we’ve grieved our early losses, we can learn the things we needed to learn at each of our developmental dependency stages. These learnings create the self-esteem and the safe boundaries that we need in order to be open, tolerant, non-judgmental, spontaneous (rather than forever on guard), loving and cooperative. It seems clear that our neotenous nature demands that we do “inner-child” work when we have been traumatically abused, abandoned, neglected or enmeshed.

When I was actively addicted, I used my addiction to feel my childlike aliveness. Without my addiction, I felt dead. Addictions are abortive ways we choose in order to be restored to the natural childlike traits of our beginnings. Ultimately, addictions result in irresponsible childish behaviors. Healing the wounded inner child is necessitated by the theory of neoteny.

Recent Development in Neuroscience

Recently, Thomas Hedlund, the supervising clinician in more than 35 of my recent inner-child workshops, excitedly told me that he had just finished a workshop with Dr. Allan N. Schore, a clinical faculty member of the U.C.L.A. David Geften School of Medicine and an internationally recognized expert in the neuroscience of the brain. In the workshop, Dr. Schore had presented a complete neuroscientific explanation for the effectiveness of inner-child work in general and my inner-child workshops in particular.

Dr. Schore is one of the major pioneers of a paradigm shift in understanding psychopathogensis and therapeutic change. This paradigm shift that directly affects clinical practice focuses on the centrality of emotional processes and the role of the self in human function and dysfunction.

What Dr. Schore has made clear is that childhood abuse, abandonment, neglect and enmeshment damage a child’s need for healthy attachment, i.e. secure bonding. Attachment disorders damage the functionality of the right (or non-dominant hemisphere) of the brain.

With a “good enough” early attachment, a person can learn to handle stress without overreacting. Because they have been loved, touched and given appropriate space, they feel loveable and can be loveable to others. The empathic mutuality of “good enough” bonding is the foundation of a unified sense of self.

Dysfunctional Attachment and the Non-dominant Hemisphere

Dysfunctional attachment impacts the nondominant hemisphere in any or all of the following ways:

• Loss of ability to cope with stress
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), which reflects a severe dysfunction of the right hemisphere system
• Since early trauma is usually cumulative and chronic, there is evidence that longterm autonomic reactivity can lead to “neuronal” structural changes, involving atrophy, shrinkage and permanent damage
• Since the right hemisphere has an adaptive capacity to regulate affect – the most significant consequence of the stressor of early relational trauma is the loss of the ability to regulate the intensity and duration of affect – (REACTIVITY)
• Loss of the capacity to assimilate new experiences – the personality cannot enlarge
• Tendency to disengage socially
• Dissociation and defensive projective identification.

I invite the reader to explore Dr. Schore’s work in his two volumes, Affect, Dysregulation and the Disorders of the Self and Affect, Regulation and the Repair of the Self. In my ”inner-child” workshop, I work on the first three childhood developmental stages. I place great emphasis on the attachment bond and our early  developmental dependency needs (the needs that can be met only by depending on another person). Codependency is the major outcome of attachment disorder because its primary symptomology is the result of a failure to get our developmental dependency needs met.

Most inner-child work is aimed at the nondominant hemisphere of the brain. I use a lot of imagery  meditations and age regressive techniques (so that a person can grieve his wounds at the age-appropriate stage at which his attachment rupture took place). I use music to stimulate the ”felt thought” intelligence of the right brain. I divide participants into groups of six or eight, and let the group members become non-shaming “benevolent witness.” They serve as mirroring faces who offer validating feedback, which legitimizes the pain of the person sharing a story or scene of shameful abuse. The group work helps the sharing person reduce his dissociation and own his prospective identifications. Being reconnected with his own feelings, a person can begin his grief process.

“Inner-child” work is thus conceived as grieving and redoing each developmental stage of early and middle childhood.

The new relationship that emerges is the relationship with one’s functional adult and inner child (the reconnection of the self with the self). The inner child is understood as a metaphor for our natural child of the past, whose feelings, needs and wants were bound in toxic shame.

Dr. Allan Schore expresses his conception of the paradigm shift in treating attachment disorder as follows: “The treatment of attachment pathologies is currently conceptualized to be directed toward the mobilization of fundamental modes of development and the completion of interrupted developmental processes.”

Happily, many of us have been using this model for quite some time.

I could write a lot more about the neuroscientific basis of inner-child work as a paradigm shift in understanding psychopatho-gensis and therapeutic change, but the limits of this short article do not allow it.

I hope this modest presentation has been stimulating for the reader. I invite those interested to read the work of Joseph Le Deux, Diane Foshe and Antonio Damasio, along with the work of Ashley Montague and Dr. Allan S. Schore.

About the Author
John Bradshaw, Fellow of The Meadows, has combined his exceptional skills as counselor, author, theologian and public speaker for the past four decades to become a world renowned figure in the fields of addictions, recovery, family systems and the concept of toxic shame. John has written three New York Times best-selling books: Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child; Creating Love; and Healing the Shame That Binds You.

The Meadows Now Offering Treatment in Texas

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | News & Announcements | No Comments

The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center is well established in Arizona, having provided inpatient treatment  and workshops at its facility in Wickenburg for more than two decades. Now, The Meadows is pleased to announce its new Texas treatment facility, The Meadows Texas. Mental Health Weekly Digest announced on May 4:

“While The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center draws patients from all over the country and overseas, about 30 percent of patients are from the state of Texas. Therefore, it made sense to bring continuing-care services and workshops to the Lone Star State.”

Bob Fulton, CEO of The Meadows, realized his vision of transforming a Montgomery residential home into a extended-care facility with a safe, supportive environment dedicated to embracing clients and their personal journeys in recovery. The Meadows Texas is now an eight-bed facility with two group rooms, where patients can receive “cutting-edge clinical care, as well as ancillary services including yoga, nutritional counselling, and recreational services.”

The Meadows Texas is located on 55 pristine and secluded acres in the Sam Houston National Forest, Montgomery Township.

For more information see the press release or visit The Meadows Texas.

New Edition of The Cutting Edge Now Available

Monday, May 11th, 2009 | News & Announcements | No Comments

The Spring/Summer 2009 edition of The Cutting Edge, The Meadows’ official newsletter, has just been published. Highlights of the issue include three feature articles and information on upcoming events offered by The Meadows.

• Claudia Black, a Clinical Consultant for The Meadows, is the author of Deceived: Facing Sexual Betrayal, Lies, and Secrets. Says Claudia, “Nearly a decade ago, I began to work with women confronting sexual betrayal. It was this professional experience that inspired me to write Deceived: Facing Sexual Betrayal, Lies and Secrets, a book for female partners of sex addicts. Much of this article is excerpted from that book, published by Hazelden in April 2009.”
• Another Meadows author, John Bradshaw, discusses his new book, Reclaiming Virtue, in Author to Reader. According to John, “Reclaiming Virtue is a very ambitious book. I originally conceived of it as part of my own Stage Four recovery work, but I later came to the realization that the book is more like a record of my own struggle over the past 50 years.”
• In Twisters & Roller Coasters: Living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Arizona licensed therapist Debra L. Kaplan discusses her work with CPTSD patients, its history, treatment options and prognosis.

You’ll also find information on The Meadows’ new Integrated Evaluation program; a list of upcoming workshops and seminars and symposiums; and details on The Meadows’ free lecture series. The Cutting Edge is available in both HTML and PDF formats.

Straight Talk: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids About Drugs and Alcohol

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article is an excerpt from Claudia Black’s book “Straight Talk”. It was originally published in the Fall 2003 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Straight Talk from Claudia Black: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids About Drugs and Alcohol

Whether you sobered up last year or 15 years ago, you may be wondering what to tell your kids about your past addiction. Dr. Black shows readers five very different families and how these parents have talked to their kids about recovery, relapse, and the children’s own vulnerability to using drugs and alcohol in an addictive manner.

Discussion tips and easy-to-understand facts are shared in boxed sections to help parents focus on key issues. Topics include:

• The basic healing messages that young children need to hear if parents who have recently become sober are raising them.

• How to talk to adolescents, teens and grown children about the basic characteristics of addiction, including denial, preoccupation, loss of control, change in tolerance and withdrawal.

• How to discuss genetic and environmental influences that can contribute to becoming chemically dependent, including the latest brain chemistry research.

• How parents in early recovery can begin making amends and building sober relationships with their children, whether the children are young or grown.

• Age-appropriate strategies to reduce a child’s risks for experimenting with drugs and alcohol.

This book is aimed at parents who are recovering from drug and alcohol addiction but is also relevant to non-addicted parents who grew up in addicted families.

The following is an excerpt from chapter one:

On December 31, 1986, the day after I got sober, the last thing I wanted to face was what I had done to my kids. Prior to sobriety, as a father, what I had going for me was the law, the Ten Commandments, and the tradition that adult men protect their kids. So when I became sober, the first thing I wanted to do was quickly reassert their respect for me based upon everything I had going for me. This might have worked when they were small and I had drank only a short period, but, by the time I got sober, nobody could say that I deserved all the respect that the law and the Ten Commandments provided for. I realized I was going to have to get to know the kids and vice versa. For me it meant being friends first. The kids really wanted me to be a parent, and I wanted to regain their respect. Today I have been in recovery for several years and have regained that respect, but not by asserting what I had in the first place but by “letting go” of the outcome of my relationships after I had done all I could to change, trusting that God would then do His thing.

– Wally

It has always been my belief that parents truly love their children and genuinely want what is best for them, yet that message often becomes convoluted, inconsistent and sometimes nearly non-existent when addiction begins to pervade the family system. As much as parents want to correct this, the focus of early recovery is often on recovery practices, the marriage or partnership, and job or career. This is coupled with parents frequently just not knowing what to say to their children, or how best to interact with them. This confusion can be as true for the adult child as for the adolescent or younger child. In many cases it is easy to ignore the issue of what to say or how to interact with your children if someone else, such as an ex-spouse or grandparents, predominantly raises them, or they are adults living on their own. Children can also impede the process by pretending all is just fine between you and them because you are now clean and sober. And, in fact, for many it is better already. Or they distance themselves from you with aloofness or anger.

The inability to be intimate, to share yourself with your children, to be there for them, is one of the most tragic losses in life. Having worked with thousands of addicted parents, I’ve seen their eyes shimmer with tears and glow with love when they talk about their children. As I wrote this book, I interviewed a host of parents, and I was inspired by the depth of love and vulnerability shared as they talked about how addiction impacted children, and the hope their recovery would provide them the positive influence and connection that they would like to have with their children.

What Do You Say To Your Children?

In recovery there is a lot of wreckage of the past that needs to be addressed, and there is a lot of moving forward that will happen as well. What your children want most is to know you love them.They want you to be there for them and with them. That can be hard to recognize if your children are angry or distant. It can be hard to do, given the priority needed to learning how to live clean and sober. Creating new relationships or mending old relationships doesn’t happen overnight. The most important thing you can do for your children is to stay clean and sober. Yet while you are doing that, there are so many little steps you can take with your children to begin to be the parent they need and the parent you want to be. It is my hope this book will help you in this journey. Thomas, a recovering parent, shared this story with me.

My daughter was grown by the time I got sober. More than anything I loved her and wanted her to know that. I wanted her to know that the parent she saw all of her growing up years wasn’t the real me—that there was this whole other me, this place of love that I had for her that I had lost control of due to my drinking and drugging lifestyle. The hardest part was being honest. Then I had to be willing to listen and not argue with her about how she saw me. I know what she saw. She saw the addict. She couldn’t see my place of love; it was too well hidden. So I listened and I didn’t need to argue, I was now in my place of love. But I really wanted her to know that the things I had said or done was not the real me. Yet it could sound like a cop out. I wasn’t trying to cop out. She had her experiences because of how I acted in my disease.

I talked; she listened. She talked; I listened. Together we have healed.

Addiction is a devastating disease. It ravages one’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being. The greatest pain is that it impacts those we love the most–our children. In recovery we learn that addiction is a disease, that it is not a matter of will power or self-control. We surrender to our powerlessness over alcohol and other mind-altering chemicals. We put one step in front of the other, often following the direction of other recovering alcoholics and addicts before us. We rejoice and celebrate recovery. For the first time in a long time, we begin to like ourselves. We begin to let go of our insecurities, our fears, and our angers. We begin to look beyond ourselves, and when we do, many of us are confronted with the reality that this disease is not just ours alone. Addiction belongs to the family. Confronted with that stark realization, how do we empower ourselves to make a difference in our children’s lives so that they do not repeat our history?

Most children raised with addiction vow to themselves and often to others, “It will never happen to me. I will not drink like my father, or use drugs like my mother.” They believe they have the will power, the self-control, to do it differently than their parents. After all, they have seen the horrors of addiction, and shouldn’t that be enough to ensure that they don’t become like their parents?If I were to meet with a group of children under the age of nine who were raised with addiction, and ask them if they were going to drink or use drugs when they were older, it is very likely that nearly 100 percent of them would vehemently shake their heads no. If I were to come back six years later when these children are teenagers, half of them would already be drinking, using drugs or both. The majority of others would begin to drink or use within the next few years.

These children will begin drinking or using out of peer pressure, to be a part of a social group, to have a sense of belonging. Kids often start to experiment just to see what it is like, and many simply like the feeling. Some will find that alcohol and drugs are a wonderful way to anesthetize or medicate the pain of life. Alcohol and drugs momentarily allow their fears, angers, and disappointments to disappear. For some it produces a temporary sense of courage, confidence, and maybe even power. Aside from the emotional attraction that alcohol or drugs may provide, the genetic influence may be such that these children’s brain chemistry is triggered within their early drinking or using episodes, and they quickly demonstrate addictive behavior.

As a recovering parent or spouse/partner, what can you do to stop the chain of addiction? What do you say to your children about your addiction? What you say and do depends on your own story.

About the author

Claudia Black, Clinical Consultant for The Meadows, is a world-renowned lecturer, author and trainer internationally recognized for both her pioneering and contemporary work with family systems and addictive disorders. She is also past Chairperson of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics and presently serves on its Advisory Board. Dr. Black has been featured in numerous publications, appeared on many national television shows, and written several well-known books, including It Will Never Happen to Me, Depression Strategies: Practical Tools for Professionals Treating Depression and her latest book, Straight Talk.

Meadows Fellow John Bradshaw Interviewed by Self-Discovery Expert Bradley Quick

Monday, May 4th, 2009 | News & Announcements | No Comments

John Bradshaw, MA, a best-selling author and senior fellow of The Meadows, was recently interviewed on Bradley Quick’s self discovery radio talk show, Quick Fix.  

In the segment, John and Bradley discuss John’s new book, Reclaiming Virtue: How We Can Develop the Moral Intelligence to Do the Right Thing at the Right Time for the Right Reason,  and the idea of being virtuous and good in modern times. Reclaiming Virtue was written “for the millions of decent, caring people who are struggling every day with painful choices, who are appalled, as he is, by the greed and shamelessness that plague our society, and who long for guidance for themselves and their children in this increasingly complex world.”

You can listen to an audio recording of this interview, as well as previous interviews with John Bradshaw,  at the Bradley Quick website.