Chapter 6: Meeting The Boy and Inner Child

Your inner child is comprised of all of the parts of you that remember your childhood.

All of the challenges, all of the emotionally painful moments, all of the fun – these all shape your inner child and how he relates to the world.

When present moment experiences remind him of unresolved past hurt, he feels unsafe and gets triggered. If you feel unsafe enough, you may experience an emotional hijacking.

When we’re emotionally hijacked, we feel unsafe – as if there were a physical threat in front of us. These perceived threats or senses of overwhelm can take us outside of our window of tolerance and put us into attack/defence mode.

We often do this via one of 4 actions, which we call the 4 F’s:

1. Fight - getting angry, raising your voice, being mean, vindictive, or having “fight energy” in your body
2. Flight - the sense that you need to run away and escape the situation, whether physically or mentally, such as by changing the conversation
3. Freeze - feeling shut down, going numb, not having any words to say, or feeling like you don’t have any access to your emotions
4. Fawn - being overly-nice, seeking validation, people-pleasing, or doing things to appease the other person, often at our own expense or unnecessarily
5. We sometimes consider feeding and fucking in this list as well, meaning turning to food, other substances, or sex to help us feel safe - these can all be considered as forms of “flight”

We may also get stuck in a combination of these states (such as a freeze-fawn combo, or flight-fawn combo). Any defence mechanism we develop is typically a form of one of these 4 categories

To process and heal triggered and hurt younger parts of ourselves that feel unsafe and take us outside of our window of tolerance, we need to practice meeting them with safety. This helps you to feel and process his emotions.

We do this by giving him the sense of support, attunement, and emotional safety that he never received. We show him it’s safe by grounding the nervous system with breathing, feeling into past experiences he had, and helping him feel his pain and be met with love and safety.

By doing this, you can write a new story in your unconscious mind – one that results in you feeling more safe with your emotions. You are helping him meet his unmet needs. By doing this, he can come back into the window of tolerance and not get so triggered in the future.

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Questions to reflect on:

• When do you get blended or triggered in your relationship?
• List 3 recent examples of when you went out of your window of tolerance and what happened.
• When you get triggered, do you go into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or a combination of them? What does that feel like in your body?