Treatment for ME: Healing The Past With Inner Child Healing

This week I thought I would write about something dear to my heart, and core to the way I work with people recovering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - inner child healing.

Inner child healing is one of the key modalities of the Integrated Healing work I do, as well as being fundamental to the work with the Emotional Freedom Technique. It is based on the idea that when we are children, we are unable to "screen out" the things we find difficult in the world around us. So, when an adult is anything other than completely loving, we are unable to accept that, unable to fully feel the pain. So, we hold the unresolved, unfelt energy in our energy field.

An example can be helpful here. If we are criticised by our father as a child, we don't feel the anger and the upset at the time. Then, as time goes on and our father criticises us more and more, the anger and the upset build up in our energy field, causing knots and blockages which in time may lead to physical illness.

Additionally, it's very likely that if a male colleague or a male lover or partner criticises us, we will feel those blocked feelings of upset and anger - which are often disproportionate to the current event. Actually, that's a key to know whether something from the past is "haunting" you - if the hurt or upset is out of proportion to the event, it is a good indication that an event of this type has more "charge" for you, and that it would be useful to work on it with an energetic technique such as the Emotional Freedom technique or energy healing. A further factor is that experiments have shown that when we were criticised as a child, we actually respond to the current situation with the resources of that child. So, to the extent that we have not worked on clearing trauma from the past, we will be responding to current events from a disadvantaged place.

And how does energy healing help release that trauma and upset? Well, in the casetaking stage of the healing, the client gets a chance to talk about the event from her past that she would like to work on. Talking about it prepares the energy field for release - it may be that she feels a gut wrenching feeling in her stomach, a pain in her heart, or a block in her throat. In the hands on healing part of the session, I invite her to go back in time to the first time she can remember being criticised. She is then given the opportunity to say to her father what she couldn't say at the time, including how his behaviour made her feel. Typically, there is anger, and when this has been expressed, there is deep sadness at not being loved and appreciated.

Expressing the anger and the sadness is extremely healing - it literally releases the energy that has been blocked all those years. The healing is completed by the client identifying what she would have liked from her father all those years ago - typically that is love, attention, recognition, and being led, within the healing space, to give that love to her younger self.

I see big shifts in my clients, and myself as a result of this healing technique. It affects our lives directly. In the case of the woman who was criticised by her father, she would no longer respond to her husband and male colleagues / bosses from a place of anger or fear if she felt criticised. And how does that relate to health and illness? Well, releasing these patterns means we let go of blockages in our energy field which were lliterally draining us of our life force. So, as we let go of these blocks, our natural free flowing energy returns.

I am aware as I write this that this is very much about how I work with people in the same room as me. I am increasingly working with people all round the world by skype and by phone - so in my next blog post, I will write about how energy healing and the Emotional Freedom technique work at a distance.