Since doing my own Inner Child work in 1990 I have been devoted to this beautifully transformational work. I first tried to write a book on the process with an analysis of the work transcribed from the videotapes we each - 8 of us - made to record our work over the long six months of our weekly sessions. But it was too soon. It had to seep down gradually to a level of understanding to which the years since and the hundreds of people I have led through their own work have finally brought me. Then, just as I was ready to try again to capture it, the spirit of it, on paper, it again metamorphosized when I stumbled on the Enneagram. I remember my first response to identifying my type, “ My God, so that’s what’s been going on!” Then the release - muscles that were holding tight, gone soft, like the release of trance, total, beyond the rest of sleep. Without any hesitation I knew that the nagging feeling of “something’s missing” at the end of the work would finally be resolved. A journey through the dark woods, with only the light of the moon would finally identify a path that would emerge into bright sunlight. It is wonderful to put down a burden but quite another to accept a yoke that is ever so much lighter than you dared dream - to embrace the freedom in it.
Well, it may be awhile yet before it comes together for the book. As of now the work is going forward in an exploratory way, as it must. Only last spring it came together for the first combined group and then again in a workshop – the “long” and “short” work, I like to call them.
The Inner Child work, itself, unfolds in the same way: As in a fairy tale: The child awakes finding herself in the midst of a family that is unknown to her. The dream like state of the child is interrupted by a play in progress. There is the mother, there the father, there the other children. The boy is new, perhaps wanted, perhaps not. The girl is just like the mother or very different. She is easy, or difficult. The father is depressed, he touches the daughter wrongly, the mother vain, aloof. The house beautiful, or cold, or shabby. There is peace or war, want or plenty. There is alcohol or drugs or divorce. The child comes awake fearfully, or loudly, laughingly. The boy shows his penis off and is told rudely to put it away. The girl is told her face is dirty or she has torn her good dress. She is struck. She tries to hide, he tries to please. This is an average family, or a dysfunctional family. They love their children and raise them with care.
Each one of these imperfect interactions causes a wound to form deep beneath the surface. Often we believe that out childhood was fine and deny our wounds or say that everything was our fault. It is disloyal to complain, especially to outsiders. Perhaps there is some innate flaw that made us rejectable: we were not pretty, smart, cooperative, quick, well mannered… we were a boy just like a man we shouldn’t have been like, or a girl when we should have been a boy. Fat not thin. Tall not short. It was all our fault.
So we grew. We did our best. We became a clown and made them laugh. Became a star and made them look good. Became a hooligan and kept them from noticing there own faults. Became invisible so no one had to bother with us, so that no one could find us. But somewhere, hidden deep inside was the little child who came to be loved and to love himself. She is quiet now or crying, or screaming, or pleasing, or pretending. Or doing, doing, doing, or just numb.
This inner child work is about finding the lost child and taking away her false face so that he and she can be just as beautiful as the day they were born.
Once, at a long retreat in Japan, I had assigned a collage to everyone to make of his or her family. A beautiful young woman with a “Japanese smile” – one know to the Japanese to shine like the sun at all times - made a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end. This she said represented her family that was so perfect that they could achieve anything they wanted. I asked her to think of the most terrible family secret and then to turn over the collage and make a new collage with that secret at the center. Immediately she began to cry: but went away in a corner to reconstruct her story. When she returned there in the center was a picture of a lovely young woman, her father’s mistress, whom no one in the family ever mentioned though everyone knew about her. After that the real story began to unfold. The smile was gone. In the memory book she wrote; “ My smile that hurt so much is gone, but now I can smile when I want and be sad when I want. I love my new smile, it never hurts me.”
A man in a raincoat pulled up to his chin like a blanket told his father seated in the empty chair that he had broken his heart, then he began to cry out beating the pillow, the cry rose, louder and longer, a wail filling the room as he held the pillow fast. The cry was twenty years long; all our cries were in it too. We were all washed clean like babies. Afterward he removed his raincoat.
A girl left alone waiting for her mother night after night as her mother called on the phone saying that she would be home soon suddenly began to weep after having said that she didn’t know why she had come because her mother and father were better than most.
Just last week a man left a message on the phone saying that he had finally gone to see his mother after 3 years and had made it up realizing that she really loved him. In the group he had been unable to forgive her and nursed his anger as a badge of honor.
A woman who had achieved many professional honors had always received extra income from her wealthy family that she felt made her seem different from her less wealthy colleagues. In the dialogue, she spoke out to her mother for allowing her alcoholic father to continuously frighten her so that they could maintain an opulent life style. She flashed an anger that had been smoldering for many years and finished with a promise not to take any more extra money from her mother and to believe in herself and her own accomplishments.
So many stories, so many triumphs! The bodies loose, the eyes shining with the new energy of an awakening that seemed just a few months ago to be impossible. These stories are better than any fiction of life’s possibilities. They are real. They are told and received with tears, and love and laughter.
Some say, “But I had a good childhood so I don’t need to do this level of work.” I wonder if there is anyone for whom that is the truth. We all have stories, wounds, the need to lay down a burden, to be free, to love ourselves and believe in our power to be fully alive.
A man who moved here from Florida who was in the workshop with the man in the raincoat decided that he didn’t need to continue the work because his father was simply cold and unloving. Nothing had happened. Yet he remained with the feeling of not really connecting with people, a sense of permanent “otherness”. How sad. Maybe later. There is still time.
All of this is possible in the bosom of this good family, the group. The child comes slowly to believe in his own truth. She is welcomed home at last. Even in a weekend workshop the group bonds with the very first telling of the histories. Deepens with the collages and is rock solid by the time the dramas have been enacted. Without this bonding the work would never be so deep, so amazingly healing. It is clear that we cannot believe our own stories without witnesses. The embarrassment of telling is nothing next to this great need to be heard.
Yet without a Higher Power, presiding over the group work the trust and faith in our transformation would be too weak. There is a Higher Power chair set for each dialogue and we sit in that place and ask for a leading, a word of wisdom. The most devout atheists find all the wisdom and love they need there. The opening and closing circles define a sanctuary that holds us safe and binds us to one another so that we can all speak and hear the truth, which indeed does set us free.
Why does this all work so lastingly? I believe that it is because of the burden that we put down. We do pick it up again if we do no further work, but even then we know on a cellular level that it is not properly ours. By the end of the work we are able to reassign the responsibility for our woundedness, properly, to our parents, though, with understanding, acceptance, and most often with forgiveness. Only then are we ready to begin to create a new life. To grow into our dream children.
Over the years this work has had nothing short of miraculous results. Now with the Enneagram it is as if it was awaiting a closing chapter. How were we to continue? Who were these new creatures left to fend for themselves?
There has been some resistance of my clients to accepting the validity of the Enneagram and I have not been able to convince all of them to work with it. I am frankly very glad that more research is being done on the typing and intend to do my own on its use in therapy. I now use the typing after the work is well under way as the group is engaged in a non-rational approach that is antithetical to the analytical work of typing. Toward the end of the long work there is a segment on multigenerational processes that lead to the work on the present day reenactments of past dramas. This is the time for the Enneagram to be introduced to the group so that they can understand their fixations and begin to work toward the ultimate discovery of their “essence”.
However, in weekend workshops the Enneagram is introduced first so that the childhood messages of the types are used from the start. This is an evolving work that will take time to sort out but has already given a much needed resolution to my latest groups. It is important to note that the types do not come from the childhood experiences but rather the level of functioning is greatly influenced by them. The types of wounds are from an interaction between the basic temperament and the particular situation in the nuclear family. This analysis must be done after the basic work is complete.
For example, a two in an alcoholic family might have become a caretaker to get her needs met but an eight, in the same family might have become a delinquent to battle against the anger or violence in the family. Though most descriptions are of different family situations they can occur within the same family. In either case the wounds are first identified and healed experientially. The inner child needs to lay down a heavy burden of self-blame in order to be free to accept the possibility for the change and spiritual renewal that the Enneagram offers.
These two very different approaches are joined by a link from the “there-and –then” work of the inner child to the “here-and-now” work of the Enneagram. The link is the deep spiritual belief, shared by both, that we are meant to be our true selves and can heal from our past wounds so that our defenses are unnecessary and counter productive in discovering and living out our beautiful essences that are our birth right.
Lila Caffery, MA, CCHT
Enneagram Monthly
Dec. 2004