How the child self still shapes us.
The Child as Compass
The wounded child is not an error in the system. She is the compass.
Her ache points us to where love was interrupted, where belonging was denied, where safety was broken.
So many of us spend years trying to silence her. We bury her beneath achievements, relationships, spiritual practices, addictions, busyness. But she waits. She waits in our triggers, in our need for approval, in the moments we suddenly feel small again.
The soul uses the language of the child to call us back. Every longing, every ache, every pattern that repeats is not a punishment it is a signal. The soul is asking us to return to the place where we first left ourselves behind.The Systemic Lens
In systemic therapy, we know that the child does not live in isolation. She lives inside a field — a web of belonging that stretches back through generations.
When love was interrupted in childhood, it is rarely because our parents were “bad.” More often, they too were children once, carrying their own unmet needs, their own silences and wounds. The child self carries not only personal pain, but ancestral echoes: the mother who was never nurtured, the father who was never protected, the grandmother who carried grief in silence, the grandfather who lost his voice in war.
The systemic truth is this: the child never stops reaching. She reaches for the mother, for the father, for love itself. Even if they are absent, she continues to call to them, sometimes for a lifetime. This reaching becomes the template for our adult relationships we look for mother in a lover, for father in a boss, for belonging in places it cannot be given.
Healing does not mean severing this longing. It means recognising it, bowing to it, and then slowly turning the child back toward life. In systemic work, we might imagine the adult self kneeling beside the child and saying: “I see what you long for. I honour it. And now, you can rest. I will carry this forward.”Walking With the Child
To walk the path of healing is not to banish the child, but to kneel beside her. To listen when she trembles. To hold her when she rages. To let her show us the places where we froze, where we left our bodies, where silence became survival.
The child does not need us to rewrite the past. She needs us to stand with her in truth. She needs us to feel what she could not, to weep the tears she swallowed, to rage the words she dared not speak. Only then can she trust that the adult self has arrived.
This is not sentimental work. It is fierce and raw. But when the child feels met, she no longer has to run the show. She no longer needs to sabotage relationships or whisper shame. She can rest. And in that resting, our soul’s true call begins to rise.The Soul’s Call
The child carries the seed of the soul’s call.
When we listen to her, we discover not only the places of pain but also the places of genius. For the child is also the dreamer, the artist, the seer. She remembers the wild imagination, the wonder, the trust in life that was never truly lost only buried.
When we turn toward her, we don’t just heal a past. We remember a future waiting to be live.
