It can take a lifetime to catch up with the lost child within and sometimes this search can be in vain. Watching the life story of the French icon Johnny Hallyday in a documentary entitled ’Un jour un destin’ eloquently produced by Laurent Delahousse, not only was he honouring Johnny Hallyday the Legend, but brought to light the wounded child hiding inside his giant public persona.
Days after his death on December 6, I watched this documentary (initially published in 2014) that lead me to reflect on the inner child dimension that exists within us all but sometimes does not get integrated, healed or even recognized. Picture this, here you have a celebrity, Johnny Hallyday, who reached stellar heights with his success, but not one inch closer to the heart of the one person he loved the most…His father who abandoned him as a child.
French music icon Johnny Hallyday passed away leaving behind a great legacy in French music history as well as a constant yearning for his father’s acceptance that affected his happiness and the integrity of his personality throughout his life. Even at times when he was so close to death, his father was present in his heart and his unconscious. Despite his proverbial artistic joie de vivre, Johnny was forever connected to his biggest pain. Delahousse’s film describes how when critically ill after a coma, in 2009, Johnny was repeating the name of one person he missed the most: his dad. This episode shows how alive this wounded child exists within, how powerfully it reaches out for attention and for healing and how important is to pay attention to that. Otherwise, the inner child will continue to play up in some dysfunctional way throughout one’s life…until the last breath.
In each one of us hides a child. Most often we have lost contact with him/her, ignoring its presence. Yet that unmet part of ourselves will persist in ‘throwing tantrums’, trying to seek our attention so that we claim him/her back as Dr John Bradshaw explains extensively in his famous book Homecoming.
Our parents/caregivers are the most important persons in our childhood. They are our idols and the way they parented us will affect our lives forever. Every time they failed to love us properly, they abandoned us emotionally or physically, they shamed us, neglected us and humiliated us – even unwittingly – they created an open wound in the little child we once were. The pain and the weight from that wound we will carry forever within as adults. Until those emotional lesions are acknowledged and mended, it’s impossible to feel fully whole, happy and free. This inner recalibration requires us to revisit the past, feel the pain of those past experiences to unblock the frozen flow of energy within. Only this ‘moving within’ in order to ‘move through’ can allow us to live in the now.
We all came to this life perfect, in perfect grace, even if somehow while growing up life pushed us to question this truth about ourselves. The journey of self-actualization leads us to rediscover feelings of unconditional self-love and inner wholeness. I have experienced how reconnecting with my own Inner Child has helped me lead a more fulfilling life. And I have witnessed how this process of learning how to parent, talk, listen, accept and trust the Inner Child has propelled the men and women that I have facilitated to meet the balanced adult seeking to emerge from the shadows of the unmet self. Only then we become free to walk the rest of our life hand in hand with our Inner Child, so we become fully present and capable of steadily moving into a brighter future.
Inner Child 3-Step Journey PrograMme
- Intuitive Painting sessions around the ‘inner child’ theme (2 to 3 sessions on average)
- One Iceberg coaching session related to a major reactive behavior driven by the inner child
- Personal journaling (letters to be written addressed to one or both parents)