The Fear of Finding ‘Your Self’
Inner Child Wounds
I remember a conversation with my children, sometime just after my 50th birthday.
They mentioned that they had never seen me cry.
A strange thing to note I thought, but was it true?
I thought about it, and I guess it was true. They had never seen me cry.
I thought maybe I had felt like crying before but didn’t.
And then I remembered something. I did all my crying ‘inside’. Not outwardly.
I had learned to do this at a very young age, and it had served me well.
In my childhood home it had not been okay for boys to cry, so I had trained myself not to.
I was taught, ‘Big boys don’t cry.’ ‘Real men don’t cry.’ Right?
But for me it was something more.
After a time, my ability to cry seemed to just disappear.
I didn’t seem to have the urge anymore.
And even when I felt like crying, I didn’t seem to know how.
I simply absorbed the pain and buried it all deep inside. Deep inside my inner child.
Man-Child
As a man, I had always considered myself to be steadfast, strong, and courageous.
