The Inner Child

As a child, our gratification system is so simple that happiness seems like it’s right around the corner. Happiness is a feeling which is destined, not craved. It is abundantly available from several resources and very few things or people have the power of taking it away from you. The 5 year old thinks there is good in everyone and even when they see the bad, they still live in the good. Getting over things and feeling good is easy and the best way to live is in the now.

According to recent studies, once survival, safety and basic comforts are assured, external circumstances don’t affect our happiness level much. The largest determinant of our happiness turns out to be our own mental, emotional, and physical habits, which create the body chemistry that determines our happiness level. If these very habits are formed as a child, then how do we grow up to be less happier than our child selves?

Some answers would include maturity, learning about the atrocities in the world, traumatic experiences and various social encounters. But ultimately that foundation has a huge part to play in order to lead into our adult lives with that same exhilaration and challenges. Unfortunately, many of us grow up thinking that our child self was the embarrassing one, the naive one, when in fact the adult version is often more of a disappointment in terms of the way we face obstacles.

As we age, we don’t just grow up and mature into overgrown children wearing pants and talking about smart things. We become more and more distant from the things that make us feel alive in the now and focus predominantly on the things that we do for our future goals and what we aspire to become. As children, we live vicariously through the small things that make us happy momentarily without care for the consequence, fear of losing this happiness or wanting more of it. 

Growing up is part of life and there’s no escaping it. Often when we face trauma or experience difficult situations, we find ourselves captivated by thoughts and anxieties that make us wonder what it is that life is essentially taking away from us in all the growth and positive accolades we achieve. It is precisely that our inner child is becoming overshadowed further & further away. The inner child’s voice is being silenced with all the overbearing noise of the others, the adults, the intellects and other social constructs that help us become rational beings. The key to finding what makes us happy is essentially tapping into that inner child and reminding ourselves that no matter how old we get and what experiences take place, that child remains and exists within us as an anchor to our true purpose and unconditional self-love.