Finding More Parts of Myself

  I was certain that after all these years of doing inner-child work—and teaching it—I knew myself pretty well.

But apparently, I don’t.

Today I discovered another very young part of me.

A part who likes to create negative stories.

She expects the worst.

She looks for what could go wrong.

She imagines the bad things that might happen before they ever do.

I think I’m going to call her the Sabotager.

I remember knowing she was there early in my recovery. I worked with her. I thought I understood her.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that she was gone.

She’s not. She lives in my nervous system.

She still expects bad things to happen because that was her experience as a child.

Bad things did happen.

And when you’re a little girl, you don’t have the ability to understand why.

You just learn to expect them.

So she learned to watch.

To anticipate.

To imagine the worst.

Maybe what I’ve called sabotage was actually her attempt to protect me.

If she could warn me first, maybe I wouldn’t be caught off guard.

But there was a cost.

Those experiences crushed her little spirit.

They stole some of her joy.

And perhaps she has been carrying that expectation of danger all these years.

I’m not angry with her.

I’m beginning to understand her.

She isn’t my enemy.

She’s a very young part of me who learned that the world could hurt her.

And now that I’ve found her again, maybe I can teach her something new:

We don’t have to expect the worst anymore.

We can make room for something else.

Maybe even joy.