Walter's Inner Child Coaching: A Guide For Your Inner Journey

WALTERS INNER CHILD
COACHING
SERIES TRAINING AND CONSULTING BY PETER FRITZ WALTER
WALTERS CAREER GUIDE
WALTERS LEADERSHIP GUIDE
WALTERS INNER CHILD COACHING

WALTERS
INNER CHILD
COACHING
A GUIDE FOR YOUR INNER JOURNEY
by Peter Fritz Walter

Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC
113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA
2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.
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Author Contact Information

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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

http://peterfritzwalter.com
Pierres Blog
https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/
About the Author
Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzer-

land and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) fo-
cused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical perform-
ance, social sciences and humanities.
He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a

high school award for creative writing and editorial work for
the school magazine.
After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M.

in European Integration atSaarlandUniversity, Germany, and
with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzer-
land, in 1987.
He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Ge-

nevaand interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lau-
sanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified
through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hyp-
notherapist in Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and
healing of his inner child.
In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child

psychoanalystFranoise Dolto (1908-1988)in Paris and inter-
viewed her. A long correspondence followed up to their en-
counter which was considered by the curators of the Dolto
Trust interesting enough to be published in a book along-
side all of Doltos other letter exchanges byGallimard Pub-
lishers in Paris, in 2005.
After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal

coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher and
consultant.
His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-

cultural and interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction
works and short stories focus upon education, philosophy,
perennial wisdom, and the poetic formulation of an integra-
tive worldview.
Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and

writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and
French. He also reads source literature for his research works
in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre
has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.
All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published,

designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware
company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints
of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).
Pierres Amazon Author Page
http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Fritz-Walter/e/B00M2QN4SU
Pierres Blog
https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/
Contents
Prelude-Maternity 11
Becoming An Individual 23
Who is Who Guide 35
Chapter Two 55
Chapter Three 71
The Starting Point 71
Write About What You Like 74
Express Your Feelings 75
Jot Down Creative Ideas 76
Chapter Four 79
Introduction 79
Inner Child Recovery 83
Inner Child Types 83
The Bereaved Inner Child
The Betrayed Inner Child
The Cataleptic Inner Child
The Wounded Inner Child
The Magical Inner Child
The Playful Inner Child
Mastering Your Resistance 94

Get in Touch 104
Peter and Paul 117

Inner Child Healing 120
Act One 125
Act Two 134
Act Three 145
Scene One
Evaluation
Scene Two
Evaluation
Scene Three
Evaluation
Scene Four
Evaluation
Chapter Five 181

Introduction 181
Main Theme 187
Preparation 188
Inner Artist, Get Ready! 191
Just Do It! 205
Spontaneous Composing 211
Inner Child Essays 223

Contents
Feel Good for No Reason
Inner Child Recovered
Inner and Outer Child
Child Play
The Invisible Artist
Violence Begins Inside
Feel Good For No Reason 224
Inner Child Recovered 226
Inner and Outer Child 230
Child Play 234
CONTENTS
The Invisible Artist 247

Violence Begins Inside 264
Inner Child FAQ 269
Postface 289
Two Specialized Books 295

Jeremiah Abrams 295
Reclaiming the Inner Child
Hal and Sidra Stone 306
Embracing Our Selves
Inner Child Glossary 315
BIBLIOGRAPHY 319
Personal Notes 339

Our inner world is reality, reality even more real than
the apparent world; to call fantasy or fairy tale what
merely seems illogical means that one does not un-
derstand nature.
MARC CHAGALL
The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.
Prelude-Maternity
The Way to Your Inner Child
This guide is the fruit of twenty-four years of work

on inner child recovery and healing, creativity boost-
ing and counseling. It was a long journey, and it
taught me that one quality the inner child asks for is
patience! But the journey was a rewarding one ulti-
mately, both on the personal and the professional
level. And yet it started innocently, so to speak, as a
way of solving personal problems!
Accomplished work looks always neat but not

many of us would ever engage in anything worthwhile
if destiny did not kick us a bit along the way. Most of
our greatest accomplishments are not voluntary
choices but the result of inner and outer tensions that
led to friction and strife. The biographies of creators,
artists, healers and business people all show this pat-
tern. From the problem, the friction, heat is gener-
ated, hot creative or yang energy that frees its way

through all the obstacles faced, through all the dark-
ness, into the light, and new harmonious solutions.
The quest for recovering and healing our inner

child is identical with our quest for more aliveness,
more joy of life and more creativity. This quest is a vi-
tal issue and one of the foremost topics in modern
therapy, and yet it is a foolish thing to strive for eluci-
dating what most people consider their childish and
immature side.
Behold, the highest treasures in life are often hid-

den at places where we least expect them to be!
Unfortunately it is also true that the inner child is

the inner energy we are inclined to disregard most; it
is the inner voice that is most easily made down or
put to silence in our culture. Yet the denial of our in-
ner voices, and especially the voice of our dear inner
child has many undesired consequences. Be it a dull,
monotonous life with mediocre achievements, shallow
relationships and a lack of depth in our insights about
life, be it extreme alienation from self, schizophrenia,
robotism or alcoholism, where it all begins is where
12
THE WAY TO YOUR INNER CHILD
our creative inner guide is put to silence, sentenced

to shut up, deprived of input on our daily decisions.
The quest for the inner child is the quest for soul,
and for that matter not something actively supported
by our cultural values. It is a personal religious quest
of the purest vintage!
In the East, meditation serves the need for recon-

necting with our source, and in the West we rely on
similar techniques that are only different by their
names but that lead to the same goal: true religio. As
Jeremiah Abrams, one of the finest editors and
authors on the subject of inner child healing and
voice dialogue points it out, inner child recovery and
working on our inner shadow are the essentials of true
religion.
See Jeremiah Abrams (Ed.), Reclaiming the

Inner Child (1990).
Our modern media culture rarely ever informs

about the healthy growth of our inner landscape. It
does not officially recognize the fact that creators are
multi-dimensional personalities, beholders of heaven
and hell, angels and devils, to express it metaphori-
13
cally. Worse, moralistic education and puritanical

conditioning attempt to define the human being in a
reductionist manner that labels negatively certain
emotions, fantasies, inner processes, desires or ob-
sessions, thus telling people to repress the most pre-
cious portion of their energy resources.
This careless attitude regarding our inner world is

perhaps a relict of our past, the rigid conditioning of
our previous generations toward religious dogmatism
and the cultural blinding out of inner truth.
Real morality is not a cultural achievement but in-

nate in humans when we are connected to our inner
wisdom; while it can never be brought about by coer-
cion, religious indoctrination and intolerance because
of the simple fact that we are the beholders of our in-
ner life!
The result of this denial is human potential wasted

in the millions, virtually every day, and this in the name
of culture, while, truly, this process is closer to the dis-
solution of culture than to its progress! Culture is lan-
guage and language begins where inner and outer
processes are acknowledged and verbalized.
14
If you want to be yourself, you have to face your-

self, all of you, all the time. You have to be nonjudg-
mental for this purpose, immoral in the right sense,
and gentle, rather than persecutory and moralistic as
mainstream culture tries to dictate for smashing the
individual and promoting the false hero as the incar-
nation of structural violence and thus of resistance to
life. The authentic individual is critical, yet flexible, fo-
cused on self-actualization yet compassionate.
The true individual is the result of inner alchemy;

the rebirth of the individual requires the death of the
social mask and the integration of the shadow. The
true individual follows innate wisdom rather than
authorities. The true individual does not build growth
upon knowledge, but upon self-knowledge.
Voice dialogue and especially the involvement of

the inner child in our daily rational and emotional de-
cisions wards off dissolution of our soul in the meltpot
of postmodern consumerism. The awareness that re-
sults from it helps you to act appropriately, not by re-
ject and elitist evasion, but by making the right
choices and staying attuned to true and constructive
relationships.
15
Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and

healing, and its truth that the inner child is asking for.
To be truthful establishes the bond with our inner
source; to be aligned with our inner energies, we have
to put aside self-condemnation, moralism, judgmen-
talism, and overadaptation. Most people are unaware
of their inner trials, blindly surfing on the hot waves of
mass hysteria, the past and the present ones, imitat-
ing the general schizoid theme of splitting the world
into black and white, good and bad, heroes and of-
fenders, thus preparing the world for war and them-
selves for a schizoid crack-up!
Inner child recovery and healing cannot be done

halfway through, or it will never be done; we cannot
fool the inner child for it is bright, smart, and superior
an entity or energy, full of wisdom and generosity.
What we dissect from its life, we feed on our inner

critic. The world is a sad place because of all those
blown-up righteous fighters of eternal justice and so-
called good causes of all sorts that destroy true in-
nocence, the innocence that is innate in life, in love,
and in pleasure.
16
Let me accompany you on a part of your way to

innocence! Let me be of help in opening the channel
that leads to freeing your inner child from the vicious
attacks of your inner critic or a hyper-rational inner
adult that tries to argue away all that is outside a
mechanistic universe that comes with the presumptu-
ous label of a scientific society. And let me help your
inner child get out of the hands of a hypocrite and
hyper-tyrannical inner parent who yells that it acts al-
ways for the childs best through all the inner and
outer media of this world while subduing the vital en-
ergies of children from birth and manipulating them
emotionally in a holy war for the golden calf of con-
sumerism and for upholding the age-old myth of chil-
drens purity.
The inner child is powerful but its power is not of

this world. If you do not open your awareness to a
nonjudgmental worldview, you can hardly come to
grips with it and your quest will remain superficial.
Do not fool your inner child with sentimentality,

with all that lukewarm soup that you absorb every day
in the mass media! It is immune to this kind of care. It
is beyond the pettiness of those life haters who rec-
17
ognize as children only obedient little toddlers, but

consider criminal or delinquent those truly critical, dis-
turbing, obnoxious and intelligent adolescents who
often are big souls and great persons.
Our best children, inner and outer, are perhaps our

most unwelcome ones?! Surely, you and me will end
up with different patterns and definitions of this truth,
and do not have to share a ready-for-all solution. I do
not believe in quick fixes, and I do not offer you one
in this guide.
What I offer you is a part of my truth. I will show

you some of my way, to help you finding yours. What-
ever may stand in the way of you and me understand-
ing each other is the difference of human character;
however, the true key to yourself is your inner child!
There is extensive literature on inner child healing

and art work. There are excellent nonfiction books,
there is fiction, there is poetry, there are films. A re-
cent Google search under the key word inner child
threw me out 34,000,000 results! Yet, I dare to say that
on our daily life agenda, the topic of the inner child is
still a marginal item. It is not a subject cherished by
the mass media. It does not really fit in their black-
18
and-white design of a world split in angels and

beasts. It is a subject that leads to meditating about
the unity of all life, about our humble connectedness
with nature rather than our arrogant fight with it.
It is true when you say that you already practice

inner connectedness through caring for your pets,
through watering your flowers every day, through the
role you play in uplifting others around you, if you do
that not as a dry obligation but with the enthusiasm of
innocence. It is true when you argue that, after all, you
practice involving your inner child in the world!
What I can give you is not much more, if you have

this attitude, this talent to be natural and connected.
What I can give you is perhaps some kind of check list
to help you uncover the hidden parts of your inner
child, to help you detect where and when you act for
others not from a point of genuine care, but from a
guilt pattern or a nasty obsession of being good at all
times.
We are not supermen and superwomen and self-

development should never pretend to render us
super-human. Unfortunately, a large part of the mod-
ern selfhelp literature has a strong imprint of that
19
kind. In my view, it has misled people more than it

helped them, for it has enlarged the split that divides
people in light and shadow, angel and devil, beauty
and beast, instead of contributing to close this split
and thus establish natural harmony that is based on
accepting life as it is: an unending play of shades of
gray. This guide is based upon acceptance as the su-
perior principle of wisdom, in accordance with one of
the oldest sages, Lao-tzu who writes in the Tao Te
Ching:
EMBRACING THE WAY,
You become embraced;

Breathing gently, you become newborn;
Clearing your mind, you become clear;
Nurturing your children, you become impartial;
Opening your heart, you become accepted;
Accepting the world, you embrace the Way.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
This is harmony.
What about being truly human? Is there not

beauty in that, is there not immense joy coming from
that, the joy namely to be free of any concept, of any
obligation to represent this-or-that in the eyes of an-
20
other. What about representing yourself in the eyes of

yourself?
21
Becoming An Individual
The Journey to Self
The Tree of Life is different from the Pedigree or

Genealogical Tree. To walk into your own life basically
implies to leave home, and to make the psychological
cut with the matrix. For this to happen, we have to go
through a process of identity building that com-
mences as early as in babyhood. Building identity is
coupled with building autonomy.
Liz Greene & Juliet Sharman-Burke write in their

enlightening study The Mythic Journey (2000):
There is a mysterious impulse in all of us to be-

come ourselvesunique and defined individu-
als apart from the family bonds, partnerships
and community life which give us a feeling of
identity. But, as myth tells us, the process of be-
coming an individual is a hard and sometimes
painful one. It involves not only a willingness to
meet the inner and outer challenges that test
our strength, but also a capacity to stand alone

and endure the envy or hostility of those who
have not yet begun this journey towards self-
hood. Myth presents us with stories about how
hard it is to leave home and what kind of drag-
ons we must encounter and fight in our struggle
towards autonomy. Not least, mythic tales also
reveal the profound importance of a sense of
personal purpose and meaningperhaps the
deepest mystery imbedded in our efforts to be-
come what we truly are. We may not always
recognize the degree to which we have avoided
the challenge of individuality and the everyday
ways in which we betray our most heartfelt val-
ues in order to feel we belong. In these
spheres, myths can offer not only insight, but
also the reassurance that self-development is
not necessarily the same thing as selfishness.
We cannot really offer to others what we have
not yet developed within ourselves. (Id., 73)
Our present social and educational system makes

us believe that there are standard truths for all of us,
standard values, standard forms of behavior and a
standardized morality framework for all of us. A natu-
ral science that was deeply alienated from spiritual
truth and whose main advocate was Charles Darwin
has led many to simply compare humans to the ani-
mal race and to deduct social, political and psycho-
logical conclusions from such a haphazard premise.
24
THE JOURNEY TO SELF
The fact that we all got two arms and two legs
does not mean that we can compare human beings
with each other on a soul level. If we could, it would
be easy and practical to work out standards for self-
improvement and promote them worldwide in
schools, universities and the media.
The only wisdom you can learn is the one you have
got already, that is contained in your continuum, your
own inner space, your timeless soul, your potential.
All wisdom, all knowledge that we can find, we

knew it already before, and if we wish, we can find it
again. I think we all have gone, as humans, through
the loss of connectedness with our true source. From
this experience of loss we keep a deep-down mem-
ory, somewhere in our collective unconscious. From
this memory and the depression and loneliness that
followed, we have developed a feeling of anticipa-
tion, a deep anxiety regarding the lost knowledge.
This is why many of us today still reject what they

call esoteric knowledge or make it down as supersti-
tion or imagination.
25
Life is our creation at every infinitesimal point of

the lifeline. The lifeline itself has no beginning and no
end and therefore is more appropriately described as
the circle-of-life, or the spiral-of-life.
There is no doubt about our impact upon the in-

visible threads out of which the web of life is woven.
However, the depressed and alienated masses tend
to believe that there is, if ever, hardly any individual
control over life and that life is per se destined to be
this or that way, according to some mysterious heav-
enly plan. In reality, there simply is no such plan.
It is interesting to see to what extent this wrong

presumption contributes to the dullness of the igno-
rant masses.
Contemplating the power of nature, of creation,

how can one associate anything but freedom with the
fundamental force from which sprang all the thousand
things? This force has created unlimited freedom and
power. However, humans have limited it to the tiny
stupid thing that they have made out of life and that
they use to call their life. They talk of my life and your
life, as if we individually owned life, as if life could be
owned at all. Only things can be owned but life is not
26
THE JOURNEY TO SELF
a thing, but a dynamic, energetic processa cosmic

dance.
Only utter ignorance about the very roots of life

could bring about the present state of affairs among
us humans, this desperate dependency and passivity
of humans worldwide.
Of course, we are very busy imitating others and in

that many people find their shallow satisfaction. It is a
lack of energy, of commitment to ourselves and our
individual, very specific mission that makes us comply
with the baseline of living and transforms us into bad
copies of ourselves.
Few people live original lives, first-hand lives.
Compared with the masses of imitators and robots

that run around on this globe, these people represent
a tiny minority. And if you look closely at them you
find out quickly that they are always the contradictors,
the ones who try to do things differently, the ones
who are not easily satisfied, not easily duped into
some petty mediocre thing, be it a job or a partner or
a million in the lottery. Their value system is strangely
different from the one most people have blindly
27
adopted. When they were children, they were keen,

curious, sometimes excessively inquisitive, yet not out
of low intention but from a deep thirst for human ex-
perience and interest in the human soul. In school, or
more generally, in systems, educational, military or
otherwise, they are the big or small disturbers, the
ones who never fit in, the ones who wont comply with
most of the rules, the ones also who spontaneously
create different rules that, typically, function better
than the rules they broke.
I do not say that you have to become a rule-

breaker in order to get to know your original self,
while rule-breaking at times does trigger a personal
path of self-perfection. I do say, however, that in order
to get in touch with your own originality, you have to
become acutely aware of all the influences you are
exposed to at any moment of your life. Why? Because
there are influences that are beneficial for your growth
and there are others that are harmful for it or that for
the least are going to retard it. The art of life is all
about being able to distinguish the latter influences
from the former. Some authors and gurus require an
inner purification before they admit that our soul can
grow and develop. However, this means to put a time
28
THE JOURNEY TO SELF
element in something that is beyond or outside of

time. Matters concerning the soul or our higher self
are outside the space-time continuum. If we assume
that growth processes on this level can only take
place after going through a sort of soul graduation,
we assemble events on a timeline that have no place
there.
It seems smarter to admit that the very process of

growing implies in itself a purification of old soul con-
tent. There is probably, without our knowing of it, a
continuous process of renewal going on in the soul. In
addition, it seems more effective to think in terms of
evolution than in terms of purification. Purification fo-
cuses on the past, evolution on the future. If I want to
ride a bicycle or a car and watch the road too closely, I
am accident-prone. I ride safely if I gaze within a far-
ther distance.
The same is true for personal evolution. Directed,

voluntary progress is possible only if there is vision,
and a vision that heads farther into the future than just
tomorrow or next week. True vision is created by your
higher self, after deep relaxation, by centering within
and focusing upon your uniqueness.
29
Many people, especially from the older genera-

tion, find it against the rules of good taste to focus
upon themselves, to do self-improvement or gener-
ally to bestow attention on themselves. Many of them
carry along deep guilt feelings from childhood, often
having suffered mistreatment and neglect in their
early years. As a result, they tend to block off when
they are asked to take care of themselves. They may
indulge in a good deal of social help for others, assist
in welfare projects, or be otherwise useful to the
community. More often than not, their self-neglect
ends with a cancer or some other violent disease that
crowns the big sacrifice they wanted to offer with their
life!
We cannot be ultimately useful if we regard our-

selves as useless. We cannot bestow loving attention
upon others if we do not give it to us first. True relig-
ion, in the sense of the word, begins with taking care
of self. This is not a religion of egotism as you may
haphazardly consider it, but the only true religion. We
do never know others good enough to judge their
spiritual views, needs and belongings. We are all on
different levels of evolution and different spheres of
existence and belong to different soul groups and
30
THE JOURNEY TO SELF
energy fields; and we all have had different former

lives, incarnations and challenges, and we all carry dif-
ferent visions about our individual evolution and the
evolution of our clan or race. It is this difference about
our soul origins that makes us so helpless when we
talk about what we call spiritual matters.
Have you ever observed that people talk on differ-

ent levels of consciousness when they discuss about
what is called spirituality? The true lover of truth does
not make a distinction between spiritual and non-
spiritual matters since this distinction is artificial and
without value. For the spiritually minded being, every-
thing is spiritual. For the materialistically minded indi-
vidual, everything is material. Life is a whole process
and every attempt to divide it up, to section it, to dis-
sect it into various parts is detrimental to grasping its
perfume.
Metaphorically, we can compare symbiosis and

codependence with paradise. Adam and Eve had to
leave paradisewhy?They had to leave paradise for
developing their autonomy, as a matter of achieving
their individuation.Paradises are not different from
other things in that they, too, have a shadow: posi-
31
tively, they give us the almost complete illusion of se-

curity and satisfy all possible desires. But negatively,
they are true prisons.
The tree of knowledge was forbidden in paradise

to Adam and Eveand we must add, even in para-
dise! Or, more clearly put, it was forbidden to them
because they lived in paradise. To live with their full
potential, Adam and Eve had to follow the wisdom of
the serpent. Eating the apple, they knew each other
as man and woman: they got to know about their
sexual identity. It was also their discovery of sexuality
since the Bible uses the old expression to know an-
other for sexual intercourse. Through the fact of
knowing the other, recognizing the sexual identity of
the partner, we get information about our own sexual
identity.
This is an important truth: love leads to increased

self-knowledge and is a part of our growth process.
Without loving others, and I dare to specify, making
love with others, we will hardly get to know ourselves.
Through love we grow, we mature.
Leaving paradise is exactly this, leaving the child-

hood of dependency implying a self-sufficient, narcis-
32
THE JOURNEY TO SELF
sistic way of being, and opening up to true relation-

ship where every partner is a whole autonomous be-
ing. Hence, love means relating and taking responsi-
bility for ones love choices.
All sentient beings have to leave the nest of para-

dise. The fetus, decided he to stay in the womb to
avoid the trauma of birth, would die right there!
Adam and Eve, leaving paradise, survived! Their

leaving paradise was a birth, a birth to life on earth,
life in a body of flesh, created by desire, an incarnated
life.
The family tree and the phylogenetic tree both

symbolize the nest, the matrix. They are the symbols
for the hereditary roots of the person. But they are
also prisons and graves for the individual.
This truth is pointed out in many religious scrip-

tures and Ramana Maharshi expresses it in the for-
mula that we have to go beyond the confusion that
we are the body, that we should set aside our uncon-
scious or conscious identification with the body.Once
we have found that we are spiritual beings, sparkles of
light in a universe of light or planets or stars, as the
33
natives say, we understand that the family is only the

nest and as such a kind of springboard which should
catapult us into life, into our own life.
34
Who is Who Guide
The Who is Who of Your Inner Child
This is a guide into the Who is Who of your inner

child. Who is this child? When you see the abundance
of literature on the subject and consider that its al-
ready so many years that inner child healing is known,
well, you think everybody should know about it. But
reality is far from this; truly, it is still an esoteric sub-
ject, even for physicians and, you may not believe it,
for many psychiatrists.
In my experience, there is a deep gap between

therapists who work on the gestalt, the emotions, the
imaginal realm, and the sub-language level such as
hypnotherapists, and those who work with psycho-
analysis, let alone behavioral psychologists or most
personnel psychologists who are really on a different
track. The difference consists in the fact that the first
group tries to do away with conditioning while the lat-
ter make their living with helping maintain and rein-

force social conditioning.
Inner child healing or, generally, voice dialogue is

a technique pertaining to the first paradigm; it has
nothing to do with social conditioning, and even acts
pretty much counter to it. Inner child healing there-
fore truly is a step into personal freedom! It is impor-
tant to note that this energy is present even in cases
where the inner child is cataleptic and not responding
in any way.
A mute inner child is not a child that has the

tongue cut out. A mute inner child can be gradually
led to communicate using language as a means of
communication, once the fear blockage is removed,
and sufficient trust was built for the inner child to get
out of the protective shell.
The next question that most people ask silently or

openly is to know if this inner child is the same in all of
us or if we have all got a different inner child? The an-
swer is that we all have got our unique and individual
inner child and that your inner child carries by no
means the same energy pattern as my inner child.
36
THE WHO IS WHO OF YOUR INNER CHILD
That is one of the reasons for the fact that inner

child recovery is such a unique and important event in
the life of a person. The inner child is different in all of
us and makes the process a different one.
There are persons whose inner child would stay a

considerable time in the wounded phase without
wanting to move on to complete healing. With others,
the inner child, once communication is desired from
the inner adult and the inner parent, quickly takes its
natural power, is healed, and becomes the Little Pro-
fessor in the sense Eric Berne used this expression.
This is actually not something surprising. We have

all got different characters and a quite unique mental
and emotional setup. Why then should the inner child
be the same in all of us? This idea does not make
sense to me. One of the greatest pleasures in life
comes from recognizing and enjoying lifes incredible
variety.
As there are no two roses that are exactly the

same, there are no two inner children who have the
same character and the same kind of reaction. Your
inner child will face life differently than mine. This is
even so if both your and my inner child have been re-
37
covered with exactly the same method, using the

same therapy approach, the same kind of voice dia-
logue, the same facilitator, and so on.
This insight should warn us to standardize the

work on our inner child and expect automatic and uni-
form results. Such an attitude will not only render the
work ineffective: it can impede the recovered inner
child from expressing itself fully and joyously.
Besides that, great care and sensitivity is needed

to cope with the first responses of a formerly mute
inner child. A wrong answer, a slight lack of empathy,
a spur of arrogance can hurt and damage much, es-
pecially when the inner child was wounded and
betrayed.But after all, drawbacks have to be ac-
cepted as a normal and unavoidable fact of life.
Inner child recovery is no easy task; but that

should not shy us away from doing it. The energy in-
vested in it is never wasted. It will pay back tenfold!
It would be very unrealistic to say that because of

the mistakes one may commit when doing the recov-
ery work alone, people should imperatively be ac-
companied by a professional. Of course, such advise
38
is no bad advise, but it is impractical advice because

of the simple disproportion of masses of people with
unrecovered inner children and a tiny percentage of
mental health professionals who are specialized in in-
ner child recovery and healing, on the other.
And there is an emotional factor as well. The inner

child may indeed defy any sophisticated technique
highly trained professional and remain totally closed
up just for showing that it cant and wont be im-
pressed by any worldly knowledge or power. This is
exactly what I mean when I am talking about the
power of the child.
The inner child is often moved by true empathy, by

true commitment, by soft and repeated demands, or
a repeated and sincere quest to get in touch. Such a
quest typically comes from the heart, and it is moti-
vated by love; not the kind of love most of us engage
in every day, not passion or desire, but genuine care
and a certain prudence, a certain caution not to hurt
another who may be fragile in some way.
Yet not pitiful love either. The inner child tends to

ward off against saviors and apostles with their usually
false way of dialoging with a child. It generally is not
39
responsive to baby talk since it is watching out for

manipulation. A betrayed inner child who is faced
with a manipulative attitude during the recovery
process will never develop enough trust to open up
to real dialogue. Genuineness primes.
For those of you who write poetry or are otherwise

well connected to the non-rational side of life, also for
those of you who have defied social adaptation, the
inner child will probably play a considerable role in
your lives, and you may have more ease than others
to recover and heal it.
An important point in this guide is to understand

that your inner child is not asking you for
adapting well to your environment;
listening to what your neighbors or friends say;
doing things the way others do them or as one

should do them;
being persistent and patient, well-mannered and

nice;
obeying to a strict system of values and princi-

ples;
40
having a high standard of moral or ethical values.
If you want to sell any of these virtues to your inner

child you will get one of the following:
A long silence followed by a funny remark;
A chuckle and warning that youre going to be a

robot soon;
A serious remark that youre not connected to

your creative potential;
A hint that youre a boring, annoying nerd;
No answer at all.
A cynical hint that you should read pornography

or Shakespeare, or both, so that you get a last
chance to wake up from your millennium sleep.
The inner child is not the instance in you that

wants to avoid all, be at peace all the time, satisfy
everybody, or play the savior or a role model. In the
contrary, your inner child asks you to be daring and
bold!
41
Your inner child seeks adventure and pushes you

to do unusual and often funny things; is not always
rational, but that does not mean that it is per se fool-
ish. Your inner child is your voice of wisdom once it is
recovered and healed.
Your inner child asks you to be passionate and to

live your life to its fullest. It belittles you if you want to
hold back yourself from adventure. Your inner child
wants you to be open-minded and frank; it abhors
dishonesty and hypocrisy. Your inner child is hurt by
nothing more than your indifference. It can take the
worst of critique, the worst of admonishments, the
worst of blame. It may cry, but it will not turn away.
It will turn away only if you are indifferent to its

needs over an extended period of time. Then it might
become cataleptic.
Your inner child is proud of you when you are bril-

liant and bold with others; it respects you less if you
hide behind a social mask or run with the majority. It is
a minority lover and prefers intelligent marginality
over stupid conformity. Your inner child is strong and
powerful through the fact that it appears to be a non-
sense to most people.
42
You can win many people playing out your inner

child in the social game, and this, if you do it the right
way, can give you many advantages in your interac-
tions with others, professional or private.
Let me focus for a moment on the last point, the

question of social power. I think it is a very important
point and one that is generally largely misunderstood.
Social power has a lot to do with the tactics of

communication, the silent dialogue that we lead when
we interact with others. To be more precise, there are
basically two levels of communication, an obvious,
and a hidden level. When we communicate we are
constantly interacting on two levels. The obvious level
represents the matter we are actually talking about,
while at the hidden level, we have an exchange of
coded messages regarding things like:
Who are you?
Are you nice and friendly, or ugly and criminal?
What is your motivation for this exchange?
What is your general attitude?
43
Are you interested to build a close relationship

with me?
Let me point this out more in detail, using an ex-

ample. When you present yourself to an employer for
a job interview, during that interview a lot of interest-
ing things are going to happen. Of course, on an ob-
vious level we are talking about such common things
as the number of work hours, salary, vacation, your
qualification for the work. your references, your exper-
tise, your work experience, etc. That is rather boring
compared to what happens on the hidden level, for
on the hidden level, the things are exchanged that
later really count for your employer to hire you, or not.
Here the elements come in that are used to either

build trust, or to not building trust. Your employer
wants to see if you would be a trustworthy person as
an employee of his company, and you want to know if
this employer is somebody you can trust and who will
not cheat you on your health insurance or vacation
amounts. There are typically many imponderables
that make this silent dialogue a very interesting thing
to observe. For example, the way you sit in the chair,
the way your eyeballs move, the way you talk about
44
others, the way you talk about yourself; how what you
say relates to what is written in your CV. There are
many other points.
Let me exemplify those five points more in detail

so that you can see the complex kind of hidden dia-
logue that is going on in every verbal exchange with
somebody, provided there is at least some form of
visual contact, typically physical presence of the two
persons in one and the same room.
I will now list a small number of questions that

your employer or the person that interviews you for
the job asks and answers for themselves. Please note
that the emphasis is on answers; truly, if you want it or
not, the person will give those answers on the mere
assumptions taken from your presence, if though
those answers might be totally wrong, for the conclu-
sions the person draws from your appearances might
be completely off-track. But that is precisely the tricky
thing about it.
THE WAY YOU SIT IN THE CHAIR
This person seems very carefree or irresponsi-

ble. (You sit too relaxed, your spine is too much
curbed).
45
This person seems to be obsessed or neurotic.

(You move too much on your chair because you
are afraid).
This person is not flexible enough to adapt to

changes. (You sit too straight, too upright, too
stiff).
THE MOVEMENT OF YOUR EYEBALLS WHILST YOU ARE TALKING
This person is too idealistic, her goals are too

high. (Eyeballs are rolling up).
This person is depressive or dishonest. (Eye-

balls are rolling down).
This person is afraid of others, constantly in

fear of mistakes. (Eyeballs are rolling sideward).
THE WAY YOU TALK ABOUT OTHERS
This person slanders everybody. (You talk

negatively about previous employers or col-
leagues).
This person sullies her family, her nest. (You

talk negatively about your past, your childhood,
etc.).
This person is too indulgent. (You talk about

how people you know enjoy themselves).
This person is too critical about others. (You

talk about others mistakes).
46
THE WAY YOU TALK ABOUT YOURSELF
This person is megalomaniac. (You talk about

your self-vision, your plans for the future).
This person betrays others. (You talk about

your hidden motives in relationships with oth-
ers).
This person is morally weak. (You talk about

your pleasures in life, what you really like).
This person has no sense for the group. (You

are proud about things that you have accom-
plished alone).
HOW WHAT YOU SAY IS WRITTEN IN YOUR CV
This person lies to us. (You say that you want a

stable job, while you changed employers 25
times in the last 22 years).
This person is not trustworthy. (You tell them

professional secrets from former employers).
This person has a weak social sense. (You men-

tion interests that do not involve others, such as
reading, playing with your pets, cooking nice
meals for yourself, being around your favorite
plants, etc.).
Surprised? Well, observe yourself, then you will

see that employers or job interviewers are not espe-
cially mean people. We all do this constantly! Its what
Krishnamurti called putting up mental images about
47
others. The mind, the brain does that almost auto-

matically, and only a very few highly conscious indi-
viduals control this when it occurs. Most of us just let
it happen and later are not even aware where we base
our conclusions and decisions upon. We might say
Oh yes, this person lacked one year of the required
work experience, while truly, we dont care about this
experience, if only we liked the person on the spot.
However the person appeared to be obnoxious, rid-
ing on a high horse, too proud, too much of a single
fighter, ego-centered or too indulgent where did
we take all those conclusions from? In the rarest cases
from what was really exchanged in the obvious part of
the conversation. We take our conclusions from those
vague assumptions we make up as reactions of how
the other person appears to us on a level of subcon-
scious dialogue.
When you read through this example, you may

find some of the conclusions exaggerated or off-track,
but that is how it occurs in real life. If you like it or not,
it is not at all exaggerated. And I know part of it from
a psychologist who is a professional job interviewer
and who told me some of his secrets during a per-
48
sonal growth seminar I gave and where he partici-

pated.
Sorry to appear so hard on relationshipsthats

the way we are towards each other, and there is no
basic trust. This first kind of hidden exchange namely
drives us to deepen a relationship or abandon it.
This isas I have explained in RICCA and HIT

a question of five subsequent steps, to be precise,
from Relation to Association. We all want to move on
in relationships, we all want to have deep and mean-
ingful relations with others, but we are generally
rather careful to build trust, while going from step to
step and getting closer to one another; and if there is
anything that puts us off on the way, the relationship
is going to be put on ice, or in the garbage bin.
Now, what has all that to do with our inner child?

An interesting thing is that the more you are con-
scious of your inner entities such as your inner child,
your inner adult, and your inner parent, and the more
you experience having dialogue with them, the more
you control this hidden subconscious dialogue with
others. I even go as far as saying that the only way we
master dialogue with others is to train our inner dia-
49
logue, or that our outer dialogue with others actively

mirrors the quality of our inner dialogue with our-
selves.
This is some stuff from my communication training,

but its not just an idea or an opinion; its a fact of life
that I have myself found through trial and error. When
you read through the above example, you may find
some of the points not at all applying to you. This is
natural since we are all different. Of course, this ex-
ample is tinted by my own unique experience of life
and my way of being. I am perhaps that kind of unso-
cial, high-strung, megalomaniac, overly individual,
pathologically ambitious and obnoxious person
Thats how mainstream people tend to see me. I

have never been employed for any job; I simply see
no value in that, and in most group interactions nei-
ther. I enjoy my solitary life very much, and I do not
feel lonely at all. I love the company of myself, and
else of my cats, and my plants, and when I go out into
the street, I feel connected to all.
But sometimes I can find people truly annoying,

and I feel I am wasting my time with them. And then I
prefer working and doing something more worth-
50
while, more productive, such as playing piano. The

problem was that I did not figure why I was constantly
rejected, why I had so many problems with others?
It was only through my therapy and my work with

voice dialogue that I became gradually aware of all of
this. It has taken many years and was a beautiful thing
to happen. I am very happy and love my work. Thats
my bliss.
You may not be as extreme as I am and perhaps

much more accommodating with others, with groups,
with social life. Your problems may be others; the
principle, however, is the same for all of us: the princi-
ple of the hidden dialogue, the language that is not
verbal and that we constantly use to evaluate another
on a trust-building scale, while on a basic level, when
trust is not yet built, we consider each other as rats!
Why do I mention all of this? Because all of this

was totally hidden to me and is hidden to most of us. I
did not know why I was constantly rejected, why I felt
so terribly lonely all through my school and university
years. I did not understand it, so much the more as I
appear to be a rather gentle person in social ex-
change, that I try very hard to respect others and I
51
hide my true identity in order not to dominate the

dialogue with others.
But I could not control that pattern until I had

found voice dialogue as a means of knowing myself;
and doing that, I found that it was my inner child that
was that obnoxious part in me.
I then became aware that this inner child had in-

deed all reason to be obnoxious; it was obnoxious
because it was very angry with me, very depressed
and very upset because I had neglected it for about
two decades of my life.
After I was getting to know my inner child, sud-

denly all became clear like a mountain river, and the
fog lifted around all those mysterious events in my
life, all those missed opportunities that in hindsight
had been no opportunities at all, simply because my
way was not to be a conformist. And I would not now
be able to contribute in the way I contribute to soci-
ety with my productions, had I obeyed to social stan-
dards rather than my inner voice.
There is always a sense in all that happens; the

problem is that we often do not understand the signs,
52
the ominous events that happen, because we do not

understand ourselves and the guidance we always re-
ceive. This is simply the problem of connectedness
with all-that-is.
53
Chapter Two
Personal Diary
This is a personal diary. It is an intermezzo and you

should read it in a relaxed, detached mood. This dia-
logue, while it was personal between myself and my
inner child, should some hints and throw some light
on the point I want to make. The point is the relation-
ship of your inner child to our inner adult and our in-
ner parent.
Our inner adult represents the logical part in us,

the part that is the grown-up, that sees things on a
maturity-scale. The inner parent is the entity that tries
to guide others, that judges, that evaluates, and sees
things on a morality-scale.
The inner child, by contrast, is the entity that cre-

ates, invents and that changes things, and evaluates
life on a creativity-scale.
How do these entities relate to each other on a

daily basis? Well, this can be shown in many different
ways. I choose the work model called voice dialogue.
I named the voices:
Inner Child: Peter
Inner Adult: Pierre
Inner Parent: Walter
Let me add here for the anecdote, and with a

smile, that my inner child was right at the end with his
argument in this following dialogue, not the inner
adult in me. I have in the meantime given up all those
promotional activities that in the end did not bring in
anything but annoyance. I once again focus on pub-
lishing books.
Online presence might be of some importance,

but for me personally it has never contributed to
make any sales of my books, nor was there any feed-
back to my spontaneous musical inspirations, and my
visual inner child art.
This is an insight that came from experience, but

my inner child had anticipated itand thats quite an
56
PERSONAL DIARY
uncanny result when you think about it because

had I listened to my inner voice, I would not have
wasted so much time!
Peter
You are again caught in those routines. Its awful how

many hours you spend on the computer every day. And
what are you doing? Fixing bugs. You are a bug-fixer,
not a writer.
Pierre
But I have to get that straight. Otherwise the whole

software wont work. And people cannot use it. So all
my work will be for nothing, and your work, too. For we
may be as creative as Picasso and as smart as Einstein,
but all would be garbage if one single bug makes that
the media package is not going to work.
Peter
Strange how much you focus on the negative side of

life. Imagine if Picasso had thought every day about
the quality of the oil color he was painting with! Could
he ever have done something of value if his thought
had been obsessed with such stupid little details?
57
Pierre
Those stupid little details make out ninety percent of

life, unfortunately, and this is the same for Picassos and
for normal people.
Walter
Lets say that life bears different depth levels.
Peter
No, no, and no. Im not talking about aspects or depth

of life. I am talking about creativity, and nothing less.
Pierre is caught in routines, for sure. Yesterday he spent
two hours with changing all those meta tags in all his
web pages. Stupid, hes not looking for somebody to
help him with that or a machine or robot that can do it.
Pierre
My web editor does not allow to automate this proc-

ess. I wish it could. I do not know about any program
that can batch-process meta tags.
Walter
Perhaps, if you searched on the Internet youd find

one?
58
PERSONAL DIARY
Pierre
Perhaps.
Peter
Well, this is what is commonly called a pretext. Pierre

knows very well that he can look for it on the Web and
that he might find something. But he does not do it.
Why? Because he kinda enjoys routines. They comfort
him and keep him from feeling the challenge to be
unique and productive. This challenge, he has never
faced. Hes never done the step into total acceptance
of himself.
Pierre
Are you talking about me or with me? You are going to

be annoying again!
Peter
Why the hell do you find me annoying if only I open

your eyes to the reality of life?
Pierre
But I am myself very much aware of that reality. That

reality namely consists of routines also. I am my own
publisher and also your publisher. I publish your ideas
since they are so daring most of the time that nobody
until now wanted to publish them. So I am working for
59
both of us when I self-publish our stuff. And that in-

volves routines, I cant help. Thats life!
Peter
Okay, but you could reduce those routines to a strict

minimum. Instead you indulge in all-and-nothing. Web
design, hosting, publishing, promotion, free mail and
free home pages, there is almost nothing you are not
doing. And for what?
Pierre
There is a strategy behind all that. Perhaps you dont

get it, but its there. I have to build a whole universe
where your unique thoughts and opinions can fit in.
Because they do not fit in the existing one, as you
know very well yourself.
Walter
I think, Pierre, you want to prepare the ground for later

prosperity. Is that right?
Pierre
You can indeed put it that way. You see, if you try to see
things in a kind of rational way, its clear that to be suc-
cessful one day with publishing, we need to build our
own publishing empire. I am not a big boy on the Net
but I must become one in order to reach out to people.
60
PERSONAL DIARY
And I am sure about one thing: there are people out

there who are searching for exactly what Peter has to
say and what he produces.
Walter
It seems that mainstream culture does not want our

productions. I mean, we have abundant proof for that.
How many rejects did we get from publishers, for our
writings and our music? And this since twenty years
and with publishers from different countries and cul-
tures.
Pierre
Oh yes! True. And its truly Peters music. Its absolutely

not my music. I am unable to produce that. I am com-
pletely out of the game when he engages in that.
Thats why we cant remember anything after hes
played something. Its truly inspirational.
Peter
Well, you see, theres something unique about it. The

secret is to not control it, to not interfere with the natu-
ral flow. Its to give it over to a direction that is of a
higher origin. I believe I receive the music from a secret
galaxy
61
Pierre
Well, you may believe that or whatever. It does not

raise sales. Nobody ever sent an email or showed any
reaction to all this music published on the Web. Its so
sad. And that after all the rejects from music publishers
in Germany, Holland and England. Its so sad because
our great hope was the Web after all.
Peter
Stop it, or I am going to cry! Stop it, damned! Do you

think I understand why people are so ignorant, so in-
sensitive? I cant figure why they dont like it. I think
theyre just stupid and primitive. How can they like all
this shit on TV every day? How can they want to pay for
this stuff, for those mediocre, utterly stupid produc-
tions?
Walter
Peter, you are getting overly obnoxious again, overly

critical. You dont leave a door open to them. You make
them lose face. Thats not good taste, and not wise.
Peter
The hell with your wisdom! Are they going to reply to

your wistful articles about Feng Shui? Do you remem-
ber that bitch from Canada who said that your writings
were parental lectures for her and that she felt as if
62
PERSONAL DIARY
there was a wagging finger in her face when she was

reading your stuff?
Walter
Yes. I am very touched by this and try to see the truth in

it. Whats wrong with us? What is it that makes people
reject us constantly? I am really concerned about how
we come over to others.
Pierre
Thats again where routines come in. You see, people

are naturally attracted to what is shared by a majority.
Once something is going to be in, once there is a
group however small who are excited about it, then
more and more people will accept it. To get there, hard
work is needed, promotion, fixing all the bugs and so
on. This is not achieved with childish hit-your-head-
against-the-wall nor with parental care-about-all. Here
we are talking about getting through. We are talking
about hard work, about toughness, about persistence.
Peter
Exactly. For one time youre right. And I even tend to

agree with you regarding fixing the bugs. I see it now
more clearly. But you should not overdo it. Thats what I
want to say. You are sometimes too tough and you
suppress me, you just make me down, you push me in
a corner!
63
Pierre
When, for example?
Peter
Now, tell me what happened to the piano recently.
Pierre
You make me ashamed talking about it. Im so sorry I

sold it.
Walter
And for so cheaptoo cheap!
Pierre
Yes, I have to admit it. It was a mistake. I thought we

needed money.
Walter
But Peter has no more way to produce music. Thats

very hard for him to bear with, very hard. Are you aware
of that?
Pierre
I was a bit aware of all that, but perhaps not enough.

Its true. I feel bad about it. But on the other hand, I
64
PERSONAL DIARY
sold it with the afterthought to buy another one. I think

Peter has grown so much in his talent that he just
needs a better instrument. Were going to buy an 88-
key one, a wonderful thing. Because you can even play
piano concertos on it.
Peter
Who the hell is playing those piano concertos? You

know very well that we dont have the technique to
play this difficult stuff and I have no sense to practice
twenty more years in order to play one Rachmaninov
concerto or only the Grieg concerto which is perhaps
the easiest one of all.
Walter
I love this concerto!
Peter
But how much have we exercised that already! And

then listening to Richters recording again ; its deaf-
ening. We can never keep up with that.
Walter
True.
65
Pierre
Yes, I would like so much to play this concerto, note by

note. Its wonderful. But Im afraid youre right, Peter,
that we would simply waste our time with that. Your
productions are just as original!
Walter
Some of Peters pieces have moved me in exactly the

same way as the greatest music. I was in tears and
thought I could see the angels singing. There is some-
thing so unique in this music, something beyond-earth,
something truly innocent. Its absolutely mysterious.
Peter
I have no merit in this. It all comes to me. It goes

through me. I just receive it.
Pierre
Yes, but nobody appreciates that so far. No response,

just silence. Thats what we get. And this already for
almost ten years now. Thats why I insist so much that
we must make a kind of promotion, a kind of market-
ing, advertising. I am going to use the Internet for that.
I build the platform for it to happen. I build the ground
for it.
66
PERSONAL DIARY
Peter
Thanks, Pierre. I understand you now much better, and

kind of see the necessity of your work. It couldnt do it
alone. Its true.
Walter
Yes, it seems Pierre is doing a good job. And we

should trust him more. Hes our public relations man-
ager, isnt he?
Pierre
Well, if you dont mind my many hours on the com-

puter Sometimes I really think Im getting mad about
the horrid amount of work. But Peter pushes me; he
drives me into a frenzy at times. Hes just so productive,
new ideas every day. I dont know how to catch up with
all those exciting ideas? It seems there is only one way:
forward.
Walter
He passes a lot of ideas to me, too. I have many new

projects for the science sites, for the spiritual sites and
for my new writings.
Peter
Dont give up. Try to be more creative on a day-to-day

basis.
67
If we are talking about creativity, we are talking

about the primary domain of the inner child. Some of
us, because of early conditioning, tend to ignore this
fact. What we do, then, is to imply the inner parent or
the inner adult when we are challenged to be crea-
tive. The results are poor and dissatisfying. Most of
the time we do not figure why this is so, and is neces-
sarily so. This is because its not very common in our
culture to talk about inner energies and the subtle
process that is involved in being tuned in to our inner
selves.
This is truly a lack of culture, a lack of significance

in our social interaction. It has its roots in an educa-
tion that is primarily manipulative and compulsive in-
stead of informational and supportive. Of course,
those who are driven to be creative, our true artists,
do it instinctively. But what about those who are not
primarily artists, can they learn being more creative?
My view is that they certainly can learn it. But what

is needed for this to happen is not just the will to
learn or the capacity to store and digest information.
We are talking here about emotional self-awareness.
This awareness has to be created first, and this is a
68
PERSONAL DIARY
subtle process that involves time and constant fine-

tuning.
Our culture is absolutely hostile to this kind of

learning. It is far off the way we are trained to behave
and to function. I even go as far as saying that learn-
ing about our inner child means to turn the back to
this society with its ignorance and its brutality. It
means to open the door to a new world of sensitivity,
a poetic world that is unknown to most of our con-
temporaries. Its to open the way to innocence.
69
Chapter Three
Creativity Central
The Starting Point
To start with, you have to open a door to your un-

derstanding of life. Its not enough, to repeat it, that
you read this book. It is not enough that you know ex-
actly what has been written. What is important is what
is going to happen on your feeling level, and regard-
ing your set opinions.
As long as those set opinions are alien to the idea

that there are multiple universes and layers of con-
sciousness, youll have a hard time to get to grips with
the idea of the subtle realm of energy I am talking
about here.
In other words, sitting in a coffee shop and listen-

ing to rock music, you may get to understand even a
complex programming language or master your latest
computer application, but you wont connect to your

inner child. For this to happen, you have to move
onto another plane. Yes, its as esoteric as it sounds
and I do not make a fuss about it. If you believe you
can do this in a linear way, the way you learn math or
job knowledge, you are off-track and I cannot help
you. Life is not linear and dealing with your inner child
is dealing directly with life. Dealing with your inner
child, you have to prepare for the unknown to occur,
and you should rather implement the following:
Accept the irrational in you and others;
Accept the idea that culture should foster nei-

ther rational thinking, nor irrational thinkingbut
both;
Accept the fact that male and female are rela-

tive expressions pointing to an energetic interplay of
yin and yang;
Forget all what you learnt in school and unlearn

it as fast as possible so as to again become truly natu-
ral and integral;
Forget all moralistic concepts and black-and-

white theories.
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CREATIVITY CENTRAL
If you agree to approach these ideas and to inte-

grate them in your existing worldview you have a
good chance to succeed with enhancing your creativ-
ity level. But an action must follow, too. Its not
enough to do this in theory but to remain passive in
practice. A fine practice that could accompany those
mental or emotional processes is the following:
Prepare some paper and color crayons. Take

one crayon or several at a time and, after breathing
deeply three times, just express the first emotion that
moves through your heart. Try to jot down this energy,
as you feel it, onto that paper. You can accomplish
this through the strength and spontaneity of the
movement or through the colors or through both.
Do more and more spontaneous activities every

day.
Make a little list where you drop ideas what in

your life could be done in a more spontaneous, intui-
tive, more joyful and less brain-draining way. This will
activate your inner child and invite this energy to par-
ticipate in your daily activities.
73
Write About What You Like
Write about what you like, not what you dislike.

Once in a while, when you have a minute, sit down,
take your laptop or a notepad and write a few sen-
tences like:
Since I was a child I liked to be around paint-

ings. And there was aunty Ida who had these wonder-
ful flower paintings in her house, and every time I was
there, I loved to be around her cats and the oil color
when she was painting. I liked that smell of the paint.
It was like the anticipation of something joyful to hap-
pen. Since then I love paintings. So often I had that
idea to open a caf-gallery, a place where people en-
joy art while they sip a cup of coffee or a glass of wine
...
I once had the opportunity to drive a Rolls

Royce. It was a unique experience. I felt like the world
had changed, like I was seeing things from another
perspective that day. All was magic, not real, not
down-to-earth, but somehow transformed. I thought
there are things in life that are not commonplace, but
result from a challenge, the challenge to be daring
and bold. This car was that, I thought daring and
74
CREATIVITY CENTRAL
bold. And beautiful. And in that moment I saw why I

always wanted to have that car and yet condemned
the very wish a moment later!
I just gave you two little ideas from my own life,

but you will of course jot down your own! Doing this
once in a while, without a feeling of obligation, helps
to give your inner child a signal to be loved and ac-
cepted, and that shall be an uplifting experience for
you.
You cant recover an inner child that is not collabo-

rating, that prefers to remain the rebel because that
child was always betrayed, hurt and neglected, be-
cause it lost trust in adults.
Dont misunderstand me. Its not that you have to

do this or that. No. Just when you feel like, when you
anyway daydream and indulge in those wonderful
thoughts, take a further step and write those thoughts
down. That little step makes a huge difference! You
will see for yourself.
Express Your Feelings
Once in a while, follow your intuition to express

your feelings toward another person in a way that is
75
not calculated, but spontaneous and with the im-

pending risk that you may be rejected or regarded as
being off-track, such as
telling a woman or a man in the bus or train that

she or he has a nice haircut or a pretty face or very
beautiful hands; and see what happens;
telling your employer or your employee that you

really like him or her as a person, not just as a supe-
rior;
telling your child that she or he is a unique per-

son and that you had never thought youd get such a
gift from heaven when you once wished to have that
child;
telling your parent that despite of all the prob-

lems you had with her or him, you value the excep-
tional bond between the two of you and the signifi-
cance that this relationship has for all of you in the
family.
Jot Down Creative Ideas
Jot down your little creative thoughts, those that

come to you in moments you are not prepared to re-
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CREATIVITY CENTRAL
ceive them. It is often while you are in the restroom,

under the shower, or doing household tasks. These
ideas are often as smart as they are soft-voiced; they
do not come up boldly, being more like inner whis-
pers. And they are easily forgotten if you are not at-
tentive enough, and this so much the more as they
appear in moments when you are not prepared to re-
ceive them. Often you dont even have stationary with
you and thus must become creative in marking your
thoughts for later recovery. The best technique for
this is to summarize a thought or idea with a keyword
or a symbol.
For example if you get a new idea about how to

market the soap you are selling and it has to do with
the Internet, key it something like soap online or
soap opera online. It should be catchy or funny. Your
inner child likes a funny and unusual markup of things
and ideas, and will help you developing your creative
intuition further.
Just rely on the wisdom that inspired you in the

first place! Rely on this superior intelligence, that sub-
tle guidance. This force is connected with all of our
inner entities, but primarily with your inner child, be-
77
cause its primarily innocence that creates the open-

ness needed to receive: a beginners mind, as it is
called in Zen.
By contrast, what most effectively blocks off this

superior guidance is pride, arrogance and the feeling
that one possesses special professional knowledge
that one regards as the ultimate truth.
78
Chapter Four
Healing Workbook
Introduction
This workbook consists of1) Inner Child Recove-

ryand 2) Inner Child Healing. I have put these two
main chapters into one part as they belong tightly to-
gether. I think one should not be done without the
other; it is stopping the work halfway if you recover
your inner child, and you do not heal it. You would do
yourself a disservice. Better you dont touch the whole
thing from the start. Its a bit like building a house and
finishing it before the roof is installed. What is going
to happen when it rains? Would it not have been bet-
ter to avoid building that house in the first place? You
would have saved yourself from getting a cold.
I do not know of any systematic therapeutic ap-

proach that leads thoroughly through all the phases
of inner child recovery and healing. This sounds as-

tonishing, but after all, within our cultural paradigm,
this is not surprising. Working on our inner child still is
a quite esoteric matter, although on a superficial level,
our society fakes to embrace all and every mind-
opening and consciousness-broadening technique.
When I was searching for a therapy some ten years

ago, there were only transactional therapy and gestalt
therapy that came in a certain way close to working
with the inner child. Now, the situation seems to be
the exact contrary; virtually hundreds or even thou-
sands of healing methods abound in a grey area be-
tween official medical care and blunt charlatanism.
Within around ten minutes searching the Web, you
can easily find twenty or thirty sites, and some of them
focus on recovering and healing the inner child.
So, is there more help now? I dare to guess that

despite this outward image of abundance in health-
care, we are not much farther than ten years ago. The
mere presence of know-how or human capital in soci-
ety does not mean that this know-how is used by a
significant number of people. The healthcare statistics
in the United States show an alarming increase in
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HEALING WORKBOOK
mental illness over the last twenty years. Epilepsy, to

give only one example, a mental or emotional distur-
bance, that has been thought to be eradicated from
Western culture since about the Russian Revolution in
the 1920s, is again firmly established in American
mainstream culture. The fact that many traditional
methods have proven ineffective against diseases re-
sulting from the repression of our natural emotions is
an indication that its not with medical care or health-
care that we can do away with this kind of social ill-
ness, but only through a change in our fundamental
sociocultural mindset.
The next step, then, would be changes in educa-

tion, and the way adults relate to children. From this
perspective, it is certainly important to broaden the
care for the inner child as a matter of general public
health. The results would be very positive, not only
seen under a health or public health perspective, but
with the broader view in mind that we relate to outer
children in exactly the same way we relate to our inner
child. If we manage to recover and heal that inner
child, chances are that we improve our relating to
children also on the outward level.
81
With these few thoughts as an introduction, I

would now like to focus on elaborating a comprehen-
sive method for inner child recovery and healing.
The material offered on the website has hopefully

prepared you outlining the fundamental principles of
working with inner child recovery. Principles are im-
portant in that they have an impact on our persistence
when dealing with any matter in life. However, I con-
sider even more important the attitude that motivates
our actions.
When reading the literature of the sages, there is

Lao-tsus Tao Te Ching, Tchang-tsus Essays or
Krishnamurtis Commentaries on Living, the Gospel
or the I Ching, we can make out an amazing similarity
with regard to what would possibly be the best con-
duct or attitude toward others, and life in general.
It is overwhelmingly shared by those sages and

even our modern science sages like Einstein, Capra,
Bohm, or Grof that it is a natural, innocent, creative,
and flexible attitude that is the most likely to produce
success in all our dealings with others; to bring har-
mony to our family, friends, and business relations, to
engender prosperity through win-win, and giving suc-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
cess to others; to bring health and stability through

inner peace and harmony. Tis attitude is the typical
behavior of a recovered and healthy inner child. It is
therefore not far-fetched to see an immediate positive
result flowing from the work that I propose here, a re-
sult that irradiates into the social environment and
that brings multiple benefits for self and others.
It might then astonish us why working on the inner

child has not gained more popularity in the mean-
time? I think the reason simply is that wisdom never
was popular and that the voices that propagate the
exact contrary are overwhelming in the ears of the
masses.
Inner Child Recovery
Inner Child Types
The first task in the recovery process is to find out

what type you inner child is. This assessment serves as
a kind of diagnosis. Ask to yourself the question what
is the condition of my inner child? Then listen inside
for a subtle reply. Before doing that first activity, sim-
ply read through the various inner child types. There
83
are four pathological, dysfunctional types, and two

healthy types. You need this information even though
you are later going to use your intuition to find out
what type your own inner child is. Once you know
what type of an inner child it is, you can more appro-
priately find the right measures for inner child recov-
ery and healing. Suffices you quietly peruse the fol-
lowing classification, you will know at once, through
intuition, which condition their inner child is suffering
from.
The Bereaved Inner Child (pathological)
The Betrayed Inner Child (pathological)
The Cataleptic Inner Child (pathological)
The Wounded Inner Child (pathological)
The Magical Inner Child (healthy)
The Playful Inner Child (healthy)
The Bereaved Inner Child
The bereaved inner child is a subjective impres-

sion rather than a fact; it is the idea that your inner
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HEALING WORKBOOK
child got lost. The inner child cannot get lost. Having
lost contact with your inner child, you havent lost it. I
mention this here only because in some of the litera-
ture on inner child recovery the expression is used.
The inner child may have been declared lost by

psychiatrists who diagnosed the cataleptic inner child.
In fact, the cataleptic inner child is lost for the eye of
the beholder since it appears to be deadbut isnt. In
fact, there is a difference between somebody who is
in a state of muteness, of catalepsy, and somebody
whose inner spirit has left forever. Considering re-
search on out-of-body experiences, we know that in
states of catalepsy and coma, the life spirit is still at-
tached to the physical body and only in death it is cut
off and departs.
I believe however that the substance contained in

the inner child energy is part of the spirit or soul and
therefore transported to the after life. This assump-
tion is of course a hypothesis, although it bears some
convincing logic, for otherwise it would be unexplain-
able how the inner child can suffer from former life
hangups; and that the inner child does bear karmic
traces, wounds and remembrances which is an infor-
85
mation provided by the work of many regression

therapists.
If you positively affirm the inner child lost, you may

have difficulty to go through the process of inner child
recovery successfully. And if your inner child does not
collaborate and remains passive, there is as good as
no chance for healing. It therefore appears wiser,
whatever one tends to believe, to at least assume the
presence of the inner child. This opens a door for the
subtle changes of the inner child energy to manifest
once the process of recovery has been set in motion.
Little Briar Rose from the famous Grimm tale was

not dead but in a bewitched condition after having
being enchanted by the witch-mother. Otherwise the
kiss of the prince could not have brought her back to
life.
From cases of black magic and shamanic experi-

ence we equally know that the organism can appear
dead for days without actually being dead. Further-
more, even if you do inner child healing with a psy-
chiatrist, you as the patient have to do the essential
work in the process of recoverynot the psychiatrist
who can only be a catalyzer. That is why you as the pa-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
tient must become actively involved in the recovery

procedure and focused on a positive outcome. How-
ever, this is difficult to achieve if you believe from the
start that your inner child has been bereaved. Thus if
you see any logic in what I am saying here, never con-
sider your inner child as lost. This is in my experience
the best condition for successful inner child recovery
and healing.
The Betrayed Inner Child
The betrayed inner child is the inner child that has

completely lost trust in adults because that child was
repeatedly betrayed. Do I need to emphasize that its
not theory what I am talking about here? The inner
child is the actual child in you of the past, the actual
child you have been. It is not lost but preserved in you
as an invisible energy, but its real. So whatever that
actual child has suffered, you are dealing with in your
recovery process, and that may not always be a pleas-
ant experience! In most cases, its actually not an
agreeable experience; you may actually go through
quite a bit of mourning, crying and a sort of life re-
view, but that will ultimately be to your benefit.
87
This being said, among the various categories of

inner children that I present here, the betrayed inner
child is still the best off. This remark may sound cyni-
cal, but compared to the damage that the cataleptic
inner child and the wounded inner child have suf-
fered, the betrayed inner child is somewhat better off.
This, however, does not mean that the betrayed inner
child is easy to heal. Rather the contrary is true. Be-
trayal leads to a complex system of self-defenses that
make treatment rather difficult.
The betrayed inner child is not accessible in the

first place and may constantly fight back and hardly
accept anything beneficial. The wounded inner child
has much in common with the betrayed inner child
which is why it is so defensive. Street children and par-
ticularly those who are labeled in their society as de-
linquent youth, once they have grown up, are carrying
in their heart a betrayed inner child.
To cure the betrayed inner child, there is only one

way. Building trust.
The Cataleptic Inner Child
The cataleptic inner child is the inner child who is

mute and paralyzed, and the worst off among their
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HEALING WORKBOOK
peers. This inner child has never been given a voice,

was never listened to.
Once this child was living and moving he or she

has been entranced by what fairy tales call a witch and
what in real life is a narcissistic mother. Such a mother
is one with a broken self-image who feeds her lacking
self-esteem with a dream image that is mirrored to
her by a false environment. Instead of being a mirror
for her child, she is a mirror to nobody since her mir-
ror glass is blind and her senses are numb.
In many cases, the narcissistic mother was not

ready to conceive or did not really want the child, or
even secretly wished the fetus to be born dead, else
she attempted abortion that failed.
Yet those mothers use to override their guilt feel-

ings toward their child with jovial speeches and bal-
samic talk featuring themselves as the childs gener-
ous companion. Thus, the witch-mother tends to put
herself in the role of a benefactor to the child while in
truth she considers herself unlucky to be a mother in
the first place. She may rationalize down her relation-
ship with the child as some form of duty, an obliga-
tion, a crux to bear, a sacrifice.
89
The witch-mother will only be generous and kind if

the child complies with her emotional needs without
moving and contradicting, and thus by outright
self-denial.If the child refuses to comply, the witch-
mother will threaten and terrify the child by some-
times unbounded hatred, fury, and violence. For her
love is conditioned, not genuine. In order to punish
the child for moving and enjoying life, she entrances
and hypnotizes the child with deafening and deaden-
ing suggestions that therapists call magic spells.
Thus, narcissistic mothers raise children who will, once
an adolescent, bear in their heart a cataleptic inner
child.
The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller has perhaps

best written about this drama of the gifted child, title
of one of her most well-known books. She herself was
suffering as a child from a narcissistic mother but she
was strong enough to let her artistic creativity and
critical sense survive the ordeal. Her beautiful aquar-
elles express the pain she has suffered under the rule
of her cruel mother.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
The Wounded Inner Child
The wounded inner child is the inner child that is

hurt and that, if given speech, longs to complain,
weep and cry.
The wounded inner child is better off than the

cataleptic child, and this for an important reason: this
inner child can express feelings. The wounded inner
child may complain or even run amok, but is not para-
lyzed in its expression. The wounded inner child is the
entity in us that easily cries. Tears are this childs most
natural way of exteriorizing the hurt once suffered in
childhood.
Healing the wounded inner child is easier than

healing the cataleptic inner child. The wounded inner
child is open for consolation, for reassurance, for
emotional care.
Before, however, the wounded inner child may re-

act defensively and refuse help or support, and resist
your attempts of inner parenting. In the actual voice
dialogues, this inner child may tell you that you could
not be trusted because you were an adult or because
you most probably had bad or hidden intentions. Your
caring behavior might be misinterpreted as a one-
91
sided bargain just in the same way as it happens when

you try to take care of street kids.
The wounded inner child has in most cases been

exploited, hurt or abused. In many cases it was not a
single event that produced the wound, but repeated
hurts that have accumulated to one constantly hurting
wound. However, the very fact that the wounded inner
child is able to perceive and feel the hurt and can cry
about it, makes it easy to trigger a process of healing
and inner parenting once the child has overcome the
initial resistance.
The Magical Inner Child
The magical inner child is a recovered inner child

who is highly poetic and sees reality in interesting
ways, different from our rational, linear mindset. This
healthy inner child creator likes to make up stories
and do things that dont make sense.
When we read Alice in Wonderland, we face a pro-

totypical magical inner child as the main author of this
book. The magical inner childs reality is a world of
dreams and fairies, unlike our daily life. It is more like
our dream world. It is a world of potentiality rather
than a reality of set values and parameters. In this re-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
ality, everything can happen and miracles are nothing

special, but rather the order of the day.
In poets, painters, filmmakers and musicians the

magical inner child is usually strong, if not dominating
the inner scene. The same may be true for great sci-
entists and philosophers who question the existing
reality and help building a daring new reality. Their
magical inner child is often well developed and may
even have traits of the eternal archetype of the divine
child, as it was uniquely described by Carl Jung.
The Playful Inner Child
The playful inner child is perhaps the most natural

manifestation of our inner child. Often the playful in-
ner child is the driving force for creative expression.
As such it is very strong in artists and, generally, in
creative people, but also in science, business or enter-
tainment, and even politics. It is reported about Alex-
ander the Great that he used to play horse riding with
his children even in the presence of foreign ambassa-
dors visiting his court. Picassos playful inner child was
notoriously very strong and he could relate to his chil-
dren from this energy and then got on their level,
93
playing with them in a manner of child-like innocence

and grace.
Last not least we know from great and famous

businessmen such as Bill Gates that they like to play
with investments in a way that is not totally rational or
that they even apply chaos principles to some extent
in the search of new and profitable investment oppor-
tunities. One of the reasons why personal computers
gained such widespread recognition as useful and
creative tools is their intuitive interface that permits us
to use the energy of our playful inner child for learn-
ing and working with the computer.
Mastering Your Resistance
The fact that you found your way to this guide

shows that you are willing to go beyond that first gate
of initiation, and that I can assume your enthusiasm
and anticipation being stronger than your resistance!
Nonetheless, do not underestimate this resistance.

Resistance is a phenomenon we encounter in every
therapy and even, beyond that, as a general feature
of human behavior. There are multiple reasons for re-
sistance, here are some of them
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Our natural desire to keep going and do busi-

ness as usual and thus without change and without
having to modify our inner software;
Our emotional attachment to the past or past

experiences;
Our tendency to value peace and tranquility

higher than exciting roller coaster journeys and ups-
and-downs, adventure and sudden changes;
The psychological fact that rigid psychosomatic

structures tend to intensify and solidify in time rather
than dissolute by themselves.
Your resistance should not bother you, should not

make you afraid, but on the other hand, you should
not belittle it! When, after a few days doing the work
proposed here, you suddenly think that all this is fake
and will never lead anywhere, this is probably a first
mutter of your voice of resistance. The best in this
situation is to listen to that voice but not accommo-
date what it requests. What it requests is obviously to
drop the new and mind-opening activity as soon as
possible.
95
This retroactive or retrograde energy is actually a

negative turn or expression of your bioenergy, or the
release of bioenergy that formerly was blocked in
hate and revenge and that now got unblocked
through your inner child work. If you surrender to that
burst of negativism, you will become trapped by it
and it may later be difficult to catch up with the work
again.
You will have less enthusiasm, because you will be

less innocent. This is an important point. You may
know means and methods to overcome your fatigue
in the morning when you have to get up, and you may
know how to resist eating another plate at midnight
whilst you are already overweight. You may know how
to handle those situations. Here, we will deal with how
to handle our resistance to recovering and healing
our inner child, and I can tell you that this resistance is
more difficult to master than the others, for it is more
subtle.
The remedy is to work out a strategy that helps

you to cope with this particular voice of resistance,
once it comes up. An enemy that is known is much
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HEALING WORKBOOK
easier to combat than an enemy that we are unaware

of!
Resistance is one of the reasons why working with

the energy of the inner child is still a rather esoteric
matter in mental health care, for besides individual
resistance, there are forms of collective resistance.
Collective resistance is much stronger and much
harder to dissolve than individual resistance. Some-
times it takes decades or even centuries to dissolve
collective resistance that tries to block the evolution
of consciousness. We know this from the history of
science and from the biographies of scientists who
have come up with revolutionary changes in the col-
lective mindset or paradigm.
The voice of resistance has no power, unless we

give it power. We give it power in letting it control us,
in having us drop caring for our inner child. There are
three major ways or strategies of coping with resis-
tance:
Do not resist or fight it;
Do not belittle it;
Do not forget about it.
97
The resistance may manifest in the disguise of

well-meaning friends who say something like:
We always thought that you are slightly off-track, but

now we know for sure that you lost yourself in a jungle
of meaningless yet fashionable expressions.
Do you believe all this stuff? I tell you, get back to

normal again and you will see that you were just a bit
over-excited.
Come down from your cloud and see that we, the ma-
jority, live good and healthy lives without listening to all
those voices!
Only people with weak willpower will listen to such

nonsense. You control whats going on in you. Dont
believe those guys, psychiatrists or whatever they are
called. Go normal, go average, and go to the movies!
Do you listen to those well-dressed voices? Most

of these peoples lives are shallow, meaningless and
dull.
I saw over decades that this bunch of people live

without harmony, without beauty, without innocence,
without taste, and often their lives are full of hate,
misery and war. You may then see that these people
are attached to what they call social life, parties, clubs
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HEALING WORKBOOK
and gatherings, or the latest fashion or boom. You

should take a leave from them and you will never re-
gret it. Your solitude is bliss compared to their sullied
company! Do not contradict them. Remain silent
when they bully you. And understand in that very
moment that you never had true friends. And accept
that fact, perhaps not happily so, but nonetheless.
Then you are ready for the friendship with your

true friend and companion, your inner child. The se-
cret to effectively cope with resistance is accepting it
and acknowledging its right of existence. You may
give it a voice and personify it. Call it Mister Handi-
cap or Dr. Bold Mess or whatever, but do not belittle
it. Do not think that you are by definition the highest
boss in your inner team and that there are no other
gods beside you. Acknowledge your weakness but do
not surrender to it.
Now, lets make up an inner dialogue or inner self-

talk between your inner adult (you), your inner child
(little you) and the voice of resistance that we will call
Dr. No. Please be aware that this usually happens in
your thought; it is not a real or spoken dialogue but
part of your inner self-talk.
99
You
I have scheduled a work session with my inner child for

today. I must not forget about it.
Dr. No
I know that youre not particularly excited to go for this

trip. I wouldnt be either, in your place, honestly. After
all, its fake. I tell you, thats something for weaklings,
not for strong men or women.
Little You
Dont listen to this one. Hes a nasty guy. And not

smart. He does not know about the subtle world.
You
Probably because he does not want to know about it.
Little You
Its like with most people. They believe what they see.
And their eyes are all theyve got. Do they know that
theyve got ears, too?
You
But, can I really hear you?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Little You
Never mind if you can sense me, hear me, feel me, in-
tuit me, guess me or get my thoughts telepathically.
Thats individually quite different but the most impor-
tant is that you are willing and open to receive my mes-
sage, in whatever form it comes.
You
Yes, I feel that what you say is true.
Dr. No [laughing, acid]
Thats all fake. Theres no inner child. Where the hell

should it be? In your chest? How big is it, one foot or
two? Whats the color of its skin, and how old is that
child?
Little You
Idiot!
You
Thats probably the way most people reason. Perhaps

its only for being polite that they dont voice it?
101
Little You
Follow the Beauty or the Beast. I dont care. But if you

follow the fools, youre not smart. I dont like when
youre not smart. You waste your brain.
Dr. No
You think that youve got all the smart of the world,
dont you? If you ask me, what youve got is just a quick
tongue. When I was brought up, they would have put a
child like you for two days in a dark room without food.
Little You
Thats what you look like, exactly, a child abuser. Thats

what you are, a sadist.
You
Boy, I think this discussion is getting out of hand . . .
Writing a funny dialogue like the present one is

not just an amusement. If its amusing, so much the
better. Its main purpose however is not to produce
amusement. Its actually quite serious business. Get-
ting those voices to express themselves openly and
fixing the dialogue on paper is a good way to cope
with resistance and get conflicting energies in you
into a state of mutual acceptance and, ideally, coop-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
eration. They might not want to cooperate at first, but

it is certainly already a success if they stop throwing
each other stones. They might collaborate later on.
What counts is that you meet that resistance, that you
do something about itanything. The worst is pro-
crastination. Sun Tzu, citing the great general Pan Lo,
said in The Art of War:
If you want to maintain peace, get prepared for

war!
That means to build an inner attitude that I use to

call the attitude of the Warrior of Peace. A warrior atti-
tude is a state of preparedness. There is no sluggish-
ness in it. Its a state of readiness to act. But its not
aggressive. It defends only. When the voice of resis-
tance manifests, let it speak up. Let it question the
existence of the inner child. Let it get sour or acid.
Accord to this negative voice its right of existence

and it will bother you less in the future. The secret to
cope with negative influences is to respect them.
Fighting evil with evil will only lead to more evil. Rec-
ognize evil as a necessary part of life and you will be
in peace! And, believe me, there will be less evil.
103
Get in Touch
The third step on your way to recover your inner

child is to get in touch with that child, to open your-
self to this energy. That sounds easy to one and diffi-
cult to another. And in fact it is easy for some and dif-
ficult for others. It depends on how you previously
have dealt with your inner landscape. Was it an un-
known land for you? Or were you already familiar with
those various voices or energies of your inner mind?
Whatever your previous attitude was, you will

manage to get in touch now! Ill show you how. The
most important is that you have done your home
work. Remember? You must have done at least one
major effort in mastering your resistance. If you have
done that, your feeling about proceeding is now
something like that
You feel excited about whats going to happen

next;
You feel that there is more chance to grow than

to shrink;
You think that anyway you at least give it a try;
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HEALING WORKBOOK
You believe that this was a turn of destiny to fol-

low.
A welcoming attitude helps to get our work start-

ing in a positive and constructive way. On the other
hand, a negative, defensive attitude can block it
quickly. I once had the proof for this truth when giving
a presentation on inner child recovery for the depart-
ment heads of a resort hotel. The audience was from
the start bathed in icy silence and nobody ever took
notes. Later they made a number of negative, abra-
sive remarks that showed their utter misunderstand-
ing of what was supposed to happen.
I knew that for them to get in touch with their in-

ner child individually really depended on their level of
receptiveness. Our inner child abhors to be pushed or
dragged into something not familiar. And so, perhaps
in that seminar, I had been too pushy, too quick or
distracted. The experience taught me the importance
of preparation which is the reason why I am rather
lengthy at introducing the matter, and why we ad-
vance carefully and step-by-step in this guide.
The inner child is situated on an emotional level, a

level that can only be reached through associative
105
and holistic thinking, not through logic and reasoning.

Try to be more centered, more relaxed, more quiet
inside and more receptive than usual. It is intuition,
not thought that communicates you the messages of
your inner child. Its through sudden flashes of insight
that you get this information, not through thinking
and reasoning. The inner child responds in the inter-
vals in between your thoughts
At the start, to be frank, I was rather anxious. Con-

trary to most people, I did not doubt the effectiveness
of the work nor the possibility to get in touch with my
inner child. My problem was that the perspective
really scared me! However, in hindsight, I felt that this
fear was rather conducive to getting closer to my in-
ner child since my inner child was but a bundle of
shivering fear! The voice of the inner child, when you
get in touch with it for the first time, is very weak, al-
most imperceptible. In my experience, what most
people do is to talk to their inner child and never wait
for an answer.
Such an attitude can do much damage. Be careful

that you do not treat your inner child in the same way
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HEALING WORKBOOK
as those who brought you up and who were responsi-

ble in the first place for your loss of creative power!
Never treat your inner child as a poison container

for your misery! Do not use that inner child as a com-
modity or a tape recorder. A dialogue that is initiated
as a monologue is misguided from the start.
And yet, really, most people begin like that. Let

me give you two examples, first a bad one and then a
good one, so that you may see for yourself what I am
talking about. And then you may hopefully be strong
enough to avoid one of the major mistakes that new-
comers do when using voice dialogue.
Bad Example
Are you there, inner child? I want to talk with

you. I want to tell you a lot. Yes, I have ne-
glected you and perhaps you are dead. I dont
know. I hope that this will bring us some relief. I
must tell you that this life really was a misery
from the start. I could not care for you since I
was really too busy with just surviving.
I could not think of anything else than work, go-

ing home, cook my food, sleep, wake up and
going to work again. I was a robot. I have not
been creative since so many years. And all my
107
friends are like that. They look for money, status

and security, just like me. And I do not even tell
them that I have started this work for I am afraid
they laugh at me.
I never cared for you since I probably never

cared for myself. I was told since I was small
that it was bad to care for oneself, that it was a
selfish, egotistic attitude that one had to avoid
by all means.
And now I get to hear the exact contrary. What

am I going to think of all that, after all?
Good Example
Are you there? I would like to get in touch

with you . . .
...
I, well, I would like so much to receive a

sign of life from you
It should be possible that I can perceive your

voice, but perhaps you do not want to talk ,
right?
Yes, I want to talk. But I know you wont listen.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
What ? Well, Im glad you responded. But

what you say surprises me. You say I wont lis-
ten. Are you mad with me?
Mad? You are joking, hey? Mad is a flat ex-

pression of my feelings. You have not deserved
even my madness. You have not merited that
Im still alive. You have not merited it since you
never cared for me.
Oh, yes, I think its true. So, this is your feel-

ing?
Not only madness. I feel you are a very stupid

person.
Thanks for the compliment. What else?
You are stupid because you only listen to

others, but never to yourself. Who the hell tells
you that others possess more wisdom than
yourself? Who the hell makes you believe that
you are just too stupid to find your own way?
Do you think Im apathetic?
You are not by your own nature. You have be-

come apathetic because of frustration, of dis-
appointment.
Yes, youre right.
You have stopped thinking by yourself, mov-

ing by yourself and taking independent deci-
sions.
109
Yes, but its so difficult. You know, on my

workplace, they just ask me to follow their stu-
pid policies, their work orders, and yet I know
its not effective.
You know better. But you do not act on your

intuition, do you?
You are right again. I do not dare to. I am

afraid theyll fire me.
And if, really? Is that the end of the world?
Actually, no. But why should I risk my work?
To value yourself for what you are, to empha-

size your dignity. You know better. That means
you have deserved the place of your boss and
not the place you actually take.
Oh , that sounds awfully true. It hurts.
Never mind. Take a first step
Thats quite lively isnt it? Now, read again the first
dialogue. How does it feel like? The second dialogue
shows the progress you can make at the very onset of
your work. Thats the exciting thing about inner child
recovery. It can shoot up like fire but it can also hang
in there for months. You never know in advance. Your
inner child is unpredictable by definition.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
What is important is that you avoid long speeches

for they are leading nowhere, as they represent
movement of thought. And they are low-energy. They
are not likely to touch your inner childs subtle energy
and can even block this energy to manifest. Long
speeches most often sound like gossip when you read
them once again. Thats actually how you can identify
them.
Perhaps, already at this stage of your inner child

recovery work, you may wonder about how you relate
to children or how you now evaluate others who
preach to their children?
Take a moment and evaluate this and really try to

see the destructiveness of such kind of behavior in
adult-child interaction. Try to put yourself inside the
skin of your inner child and imagine yourself listening
to an adult who treats you like a tape recorder or a
night pillow. How does it feel like? How did it feel like
when it happened to you?
What is it that makes us afraid to get in touch with

our inner energies? Why is it a bit scary, after all?
111
I think whatever you feel about it is okay. There is

no right or wrong about it. It may be the most normal
thing for you in the world or it may scare you to death.
For every of these alternatives there are reasons.
Its not just by chance that you feel this way or that
way. After I had done the work I saw the logic of my
fear. My fear was what my inner childs foremost emo-
tion had been. My fear thus gave me a very important
hint from the start regarding my inner child. It showed
me the way to meet my inner child on that same level.
Had I avoided the fear, had I run away from it, it could
not have led me to where I wanted to get.
Thats a good example to see how logical emo-

tions are, contrary to what most people believe who
hold that emotions were irrational. If you are scared,
consider your fear as a natural part of the game and
accept it as such! Do not defend it, do not try to get
away from it. Be a passive observer who notices what
is going on. Now you sit in your chosen position that
is comfortable and that feels good and warm.
You are ready to write what comes to mind. Put a

starting phrase. Any kind of opening. If you are short
of ideas, just write the following little sentence:
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Inner child, are you here? Id like to get in touch

with you
Then listen. Of course, it may seem ridiculous to

say it but I say it nonetheless: the voice you are going
to hear is not a human voice, not a voice coming from
outside. Its an inner voice that you perceive like a
thought or an intuition, or like a flash of insight that
you try to put into words.
Thats rather complex, isnt it. Nonetheless the

thing is commonly called voice dialogue, despite the
fact that it really has little to do with voices. So be at-
tentive if you can intuit anything after having asked
that question!
You may perceive an itching somewhere. You may

suddenly want to go to the restroom. Accept it with a
smile. It could be a resistance. But you never know. It
could be your inner child playing hide-and-seek with
you. It could also be a hidden answer. The secret is to
not reject anything that is going to happen and not
even to seek keen explanations for it. Its a rather si-
lent process in which you try to get closer, to under-
stand things that till now you never understood.
113
Believe me, not many people really understand

whats going on in them. Not many people have a
lively inner child, because if they did, the world would
look very different from what it looks like right now.
There would not be masses, millions of consumers
around the globe eating what others think they
should eat, both regarding physical food and mind
food, in matters of spirit and intellect, and we would
probably design and paint our clothes by hand in-
stead of buying industrial wear.
Now, your first dialogue may end right there, with

that question that you asked. But that is by no means
a defeat! It could as well end in the way of the above-
mentioned second dialogue. Do not condemn the
first and do not react overly enthusiastic when the
second happens.
You are not going to conquer your inner child with

a Trojan horse, like a new sex partner, trying to pull it
into some kind of magic love! The story of your love
is going to be much more subtle, much more refined
than our usual passions are. The best results are
achieved when your attitude toward your inner child
is
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HEALING WORKBOOK
empathetic and welcoming;
patient and peaceful;
humble and innocent;
curious and joyful.
The inner child tends to respond to these attitudes

and it tends to defy all others. This is really something
I did not know when I started and that I only found
through experience. It can well be that if you are get-
ting attuned to one of those pairs of characteristics,
your inner child may respond spontaneously and al-
most without cynicism. In fact, the ironical tone that
may manifest is often meant as a provocation rather
than criticism. The inner child is really not an instance
that likes to criticize you. That role is typical for your
inner parent or your inner controller. When the inner
child appears criticizing you, it has well-founded rea-
sons to do so and it does it because it is deeply hurt
yet does not want to admit that it is hurt.
The ritual or method for the second dialogue with

your inner child is not essentially different. You may
have a better feeling about it, especially if the first
experience had been a bit scary. You are getting used
115
to it. You are perhaps more sensitive to perceive the

subtle voice of your inner child. You may also begin to
understand that your inner child does not like to be
pushed and that, if you do push ahead, youre going
to be blocked in your endeavors. You will get a feel-
ing of how powerful that inner child iscontrary to
what most people believe.
Some people may learn it the hard way in being

overly arrogant or pushy. Theyll learn their lesson
from an inner child that will play the capricious nerd
for months without end.
It is quite important what your attitude is right

from the start since it determines in some way how
your inner child is going to respond to you for the
next six months or so. This is a factor of effectiveness.
I have seen that people who are very slow in getting
on with the work have generally begun with a wrong
attitude, an attitude that is not characterized by a
proactive attitude, or that they have preached their
inner child to death.
Try to do it the wrong way, just to test out what I

am saying. You are going to see how hard your inner
child can become on you.
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Peter and Paul
Peter and Paul are the names I gave to my positive

and my negative inner child. First, I had no idea about
this, and it was not written in any guide or manual at
the time I started my work. It happened after a while
of doing the work that I strongly felt that there were
two inner children in me, or rather that my inner child,
like a coin, had two sides, a positive, bright one, and a
negative, dark one.
When I began to dialogue with my inner child, I

could not know in advance which side was going to
respond, Peter the positive, strong, wistful voice, or
Paulthe negative, weak and complaining one. But
after the first words uttered by my inner child, I knew
which one was going to reply. Let me give two exam-
ples. I let you guess who is who
Pierre
Today I want to discuss a rather important issue with

you. When father left, you were just one year old. How-
ever, mother said you had been so conscious about
their divorce that you went into the bedroom, struck
with the fist on the bed and said Daddy, why have you
left us?
117
Because I thought it was my mistake that he left. I

thought I had not been good enough for him. Perhaps
he had expected to get another boy, a stronger one, a
better one. I dont know.
[I feel that was Paul talking ]
Pierre
But it cannot be your fault if a man and a woman are

going to dislike each other, I mean
You think I was too small to know that? No. But you
never know what peoples real motives are. I just felt
guilty. Thats it.
[I feel that was Peter talking ]
Pierre
Okay, I accept it that you felt that way. I was never

aware of that. It really strikes me that you say that.
See, you have to understand that children tend to feel

involved when something goes wrong between their
parents. They tend to take a part of the blame. I knew
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HEALING WORKBOOK
that father was going for other women but that alone
did not explain the true motivation of his behavior. Af-
ter all, behind his dissatisfaction with mother, there
could have been another motive, for example, a lack of
self-worth. Or, really, that he had expected another
kind of child. Can we ever know? Talking with him, what
you got were excuses. And he was always like that,
even many years later
[I feel that was Peter talking ]
If you observe the subtle change in this dialogue

from the start to the end, you will see that at first Paul
was responding and in the last two answers it was Pe-
ter.
Paul is the incarnation of guilt, shame and fear

while Peter is the guy that is uplifting and comes up
with solutions and original ideas. Peter is sometimes
funny and sometimes rather dry. I like him more than
Paul with his complaints and his weak attitude. But I
am glad that I can meet Paul, too, for if not, I would
be out of touch with that weakness, that guilt and that
shame that is, if I like that or not, part of myself.
119
Inner Child Healing
Some people regard inner child recovery and in-

ner child healing as one and the same process or
even use the expressions as synonyms. While it is true
that the two parts are logically the first and second act
of one drama, I would not say that they are synony-
mous, simply because you cannot heal an inner child
that you have not previously recovered. How can you
heal an entity or energy that you have not so far de-
tected? On the other hand, it is of course true that in-
ner child recovery without inner child healing does
not make sense. But let me be more precise and ask:
What, then, is needed in addition to inner child re-
covery that we can bring about inner child healing?
To be honest, I never asked that question when I

did the work. I completely ignored that. I learned the
theory after I had done the practice. That may appear
kind of upside-down to you, but to evaluate it in hind-
sight I must admit that it was rather favorable; for I
had not been blocked by those intellectual categories
and this theoretical knowledge. I was really innocent
when I engaged in that work, really deprived of a
scheme, a map for the landscape I was going to ex-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
plore. I just went into it with a childish sense of adven-

ture and wonder. Perhaps that starting point was not
bad. You may have another perspective, a more in-
formed one, after having read this guide.
This being said, I would like to focus on healing

the inner child. For healing to take place, we must first
make a diagnosis. Who is going to make the diagno-
sis? Your psychiatrist? Could be, but I start from the
point that you, like me at the time, are going to do
the work by yourself, and not accompanied by a psy-
chiatrist, and not in the group.
Now, your inner child is going to make this diag-

nosis! You find that funny? Well, its quite unusual but
its like that. Your inner child, in the recovery process,
will gradually become conscious of its particular afflic-
tion. It will find out in which of those five pathological
categories it fits or fitted.
From that moment, the dialogues are going to

change fundamentally. There is a shift in the way the
inner child responds. And even more so, there is a
shift in the way you, or your inner controller, ego or
observer, is going to respond to the inner child.
121
Generally speaking, the healed inner childs atti-

tude is much more flexible, playful and humorous
than the afflicted inner childs behavior. Furthermore,
it is typical that you consider the opinions of your in-
ner child on a daily basis and for daily problems. It is
then a matter of habit for you to consult your inner
child for important decisions that concern matters in-
volving creativity, major changes in life, emotional af-
fairs and even business affairs.
If your Little Professor is well developed, it can be-

come a wonderful business venture guide, for exam-
ple for investment. While flexibility and harmony are
typical once the inner child is healed, the situation un-
til that moment may be one of
inner tension and strife;
sudden and often unexplainable changes of temper;
obsessions of various kinds, or neurotic habits;
a sometimes obnoxious or obtrusive attitude;
a rebellious or revolted attitude;
a depressive and defeating attitude;
a non-cooperative and haughty attitude;
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HEALING WORKBOOK
sometimes, in extreme cases, a schizophrenic split;
paranoid fears or persistent anxiety;
over-excitation, sexual dissatisfaction;
persistent conflicts in relationships or drop-outs;
being dominated by others or desiring to dominate;
general dullness and lack of creativity;
a fear-ridden or principle-ridden attitude toward life;
a dominance of any of the inner entities or energies;
a compulsive attitude of the inner controller;
controller constantly silences the inner child.
This list could go on and on since the ramifications

of pathological misbalance in our energetic setup are
countless. To understand the healing process, I must
refer back to the beginning, when I was talking about
the fundamental energetic life principles that explain
the functioning of our psyche. There is general
agreement among health professionals that mental
health is primarily a state of flexible harmony in the
setup of our psychic energies. It is namely not a static
or rigid condition.
123
Our organism can cope with energetic misbalance,

but only up to a certain level and for a certain time. If
the misbalance is too strong or lasts too long, or
both, the disturbance manifests first in the psyche and
later, if no action is taken to remedy the condition, in
the soma. In this sense, every illness is psychosomatic.
The body, since it is never disconnected from the
mind, cannot produce an illness by itself. This is pretty
much contrary to mechanistic medicine but it is none-
theless true.
Starting from this paradigm, it becomes clear that

it is not enough to recover the inner child and heal it.
The art is to place the inner child in its role as an inner
energy in a harmonious relationship with the other
inner energies, such as inner parent and inner adult.
Even a healed inner child, as long as it is a nerd or a
tyrant, is of no help. Therefore, inner child recovery
really is something very delicate.
However, do not be scared, there is in our psyche

a force that tends to establish this balance I am talk-
ing about. Thus, nature helps to get it all done once
we seriously engage in recovering and healing our
inner child. Let me now outline further in detail the
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HEALING WORKBOOK
healing process. Ill compose that as three acts of a

drama:
Act One : The Inner Child Enters the Scene
Act Two : The Inner Child Interacts
Act Three : The Inner Child Builds Trust
Act One
The Inner Child Enters the Scene
The healing process, in my approach, is focused

upon interaction. For the recovery process, I prefer to
work with dialogues between inner controller and in-
ner child. This results in one-to-one dialogues. The
healing process adds an additional element. The in-
ner child is going to interact with those inner entities
that before the work were either too dominant or too
weak. Regularly, before the work, the inner entities
lead some kind of messed-up existence. It is therefore
very important to get them into a balanced, harmoni-
ous relationship if healing is to take place.
125
Please note that healing cannot take place if we

focus only on the inner child. We must be careful not
to over-stimulate one inner entity to the detriment of
the others.
For example, an inner child that has become an

obtrusive nerd cannot be said to act its role in a
healthy psychic environment. There must be some-
thing wrong with the ensemble, the group interaction
inside the psyche, our inner team, if the inner child
behaves that way. Therefore, in our healing work, we
must try to see the whole, the totality of our inner
landscape, and not only take a single shot on our in-
ner child. Sometimes, when reading inner child heal-
ing guides from other authors, I get the impression
that the world is turning around the inner child. Care-
ful. Do not replace one pathology by another! To
have a blown-up inner child with disabled or handi-
capped inner adult and inner parent is not a healthy
condition. You may end up as an eternal student, a
clochard, a gambler or a terrorist
This is the part of the work that is the most diffi-

cult, for it takes a subtle understanding of group in-
teraction.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
We have an inner team in our psyche once these

entities work proactively with each other, achieving
synergistic solutions. I believe that highly effective
people, especially if their success is based on their
talent to be brilliant communicators, have worked this
out in one or the other way on their psychic level. This
is not as surprising as it may seem. Many of us actually
engage in some form of inner dialogue without how-
ever naming it that way, without giving it importance.
We do it naturally if we have that talent to be in touch
with inside.
I entitled Act One with The Inner Child Enters the

Scene. That may sound a bit commonplace but it is
really an event to happen! The inner child that is still
unrecovered will never enter any scene, private or
public. It will hide or cry in silence. Or escape. It takes
lots of courage to enter a scene. If you have ever
acted on a stage you know what I am talking about.
The good actor is not the one who has absolutely no
fear but the one who masters his fear.
When you interview actors about stage fright they

all reply that the fear is actually something productive
127
and that they have their best performances when they

experience the greatest stage fright.
Fear that is mastered transforms into courage. By

the same token it is true that depression that is mas-
tered transforms into self-confidence.
Now, how will you prepare the inner child for en-
tering the interactive level? You do this by gradually
involving your inner parent and your inner adult in
your dialogues. You can and should wait with this until
you feel safe working with the inner child on the one-
to-one level. When you feel the moment has come to
enter the healing phase, you do at least two sessions
in which you ask the inner parent and the inner adult
to show up and to present themselves.
Then, sense the inner childs reaction and take this

reaction as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of the
readiness of your inner child for the next level.
Only when you feel the inner child is ready and will
not have a major drawback when entering the stage
for full interaction with inner parent, inner adult, and
all other entities that may come up, you can begin
with inner child healing.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
How, in practice, is this going to happen? I often

received questions that focus on very down-to-earth
problems. How is this going to happen in my dia-
logue? What must I do now? And I reply, simply and
humbly Sorry, I dont know. It is of paramount impor-
tance that you develop autonomy in the work. This is
so because we are very different. Everybody has a dif-
ferent psychic pattern and reacts differently in identi-
cal situations. When you have a sound feeling of
autonomy, you do automatically what is right and
what is best for you, for your inner child and the rest
of your inner landscape.
What I can lay out here are only the general prin-
ciples. How they are applied in practice depends on
so many factors that it would be awkward to fill pages
and pages with examples that, after all, do not apply
to yousince for you all may work differently.
I do not know how it is going to happen, but I

know that it is going to happen. There will be a mo-
ment during your work when you know that it is going
to happen, when you feel that your inner child has
built the consistency, the smart, to get into a wider
field of interaction, and to enjoy that interaction.
129
Here is a little sample dialogue that indicates that

the inner child is mature enough to enter the stage.
Walter
Peter, its now quite some time that we are talking, and
I have learned a lot from you. When I think back at the
time before we started our work, I cant believe it be-
cause it feels so unreal. I am so happy to be in touch.
Peter
You have never been out of touch, but you were so

busy with other things. And, if you ask me, those things
were not the things you should care about. Its things
for others, but not for you.
Walter
What are the things for me?
Peter
Ill tell you.
Walter
For example, piano playing, is that for me?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Peter
Are you kidding? You know it very well. Thats the pro-
totypical activity for you yet you rarely engage in it.
You have sold your piano.
Walter
Yes, but that was only temporary. I am going to get a

new and much better piano very soon!
Peter
Eventually, you make good decisions.
Walter
Yes, but let me take the occasion to get you ac-

quainted with some other voices in me that sometimes
want to contradict me or you since they have a some-
what different way to see the world
Peter
I am scared to meet them. They are perhaps not very

understanding.
Walter
They are perhaps not very understanding, true. But

perhaps we both can learn from them. I mean in a way
that is two-sided. You see, my vision is that they have
131
also their right of existence, but of course, they will not

be allowed to abuse of their influence. On the other
hand, it would not be okay either if you had total con-
trol over me what do you think?
Peter
Well, sometimes I have a bit foolish ideas, I know. I do

not want to dominate you; thats not what I want. I may
become a bit pushy at times, but thats because you
dont listen to my request to get in touch. Then I try to
get your attention by getting hold of you.
Walter
I guess, the other two do the same if Im not watchful.

So thats where the mess is coming from. I see it now.
Peter
Okay then, lets meet them
Walter
Are you ready?
Peter
As for me, I am ready, provided they respect me. If not,

Ill escape or dont say a word. Okay?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Walter
Okay.
Some people, and among them even therapists,

think that the inner child needed a lot of pet care. I do
not subscribe to their worldview that is based upon
sentimentality and not upon love, upon hypocrisy and
not upon truth. In my experience, the inner child
needs truth in the first place, and it reacts very posi-
tively to frankness and straightforwardness. It does
not need a lot of crying. That will make it only more
depressive.
The hurt inner child tends to weep, of course, but

that is only at the beginning. And then, if it happens,
truly it should not be blocked off.
Through empathy and the amount of attention

that is needed, the wounded inner child will rather
quickly stop crying and look for more constructive
opportunities to express itself.
Crying is a way to communicate, but not a very ef-

fective way. Crying says only one thing, I feel hurt and
want you to take care of me ! While in verbal
133
communication many more and much more subtle

messages can be communicated.
Thus, I think it is mistaken to pity the wounded in-

ner child. The right method is based upon an optimis-
tic approach that tries to move onto healing as soon
as possible.
Act Two
The Inner Child Interacts
Let me open this second stage of inner child heal-

ing with a sample dialogue. I call my inner critic Acid
in this dialogue.
As in former dialogue,s my last name Walter

equals my inner parent and my French first name Pi-
erre my inner adult, while Peter, my German first
name, stands for my inner child.
Walter
Peter, lets continue with our previous session in which

you told me you are ready to meet the other actors of
my inner stage. I would like to open this dialogue now
and present you to each other.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Acid
You do not need to present us to each other. I do care

and never forgot about Peter. However, he was always
hiding, because he was so scared. I dont know why.
Pierre
Its not very smart to be scared, indeed.
Walter
Your comments are very valuable, but I cant see how

Peter could respond to you other than being scared
again. Your attitude does not show much empathy.
Acid
I said I do care.
Peter
Yes, you said it but perhaps you dont mean it.
Acid
I always mean what I say.
Peter
I know, you are always right. So we can just stop here

and say Bless You!
135
Walter
I think we are not on a very constructive track
Pierre
Never mind. I find we have to respect rational behavior

first of all.
Walter
I think we have to respect each other, and not some

kind of behavior that we individually subscribe to, be it
rational or irrational or whatever. Everybody reacts dif-
ferently and has a different mental and emotional
setup. You try to put yours on top and implicitly tell Pe-
ter that he is off-track.
Peter
Yes, there its where its not constructive. Because they

both have no respect for me. They are icy and haughty.
As for me, I am constructive!
Walter
You say it. Implicitly, in this stage of our work, I also fo-
cus on giving Pierre and Acid a voice to utter, and I
have to. I cannot just focus only on you, Peter.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Peter
But then, please, do your job well. Otherwise, Im not

going to meet those icy idiots again. I just wont reply
anymore if they are going to continue that way. Do you
understand me?
Walter
Yes, you are clear enough, indeed.
Acid
I said that I do care, and I mean it.
Pierre
Its necessary that we remain rational in our overall be-

havior.
Walter
It sounds as if you were tapes, repeating a recorded

message over and over. That does not come over as
very lively, to be frank! And it upsets Peter.
Acid
Well, as long as it does not upset you, Walter, I dont

care.
137
Walter
I dont care if you care or not. I think for you caring is

some kind of dogma, but not a felt sense, not a way to
empathetically relate to others.
Pierre
May I add something to this discussion?
Walter
If its not again the same tape, yes.
Pierre
I would like to be more explicit here. From a rational

point of view, the discussion is not non-constructive. It
is rather mind-opening. There is also some reason in
Peters arguments. I cant deny that. There is logic in it
when I see it along his lines. So, as for me, I dont want
to appear too far off. I can see some basis for coopera-
tion.
Peter
Hey, great! Thats a great statement! I appreciate it. I

feel valued for the first time. Oh, that feels good!
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Walter
I am very glad we have got to this point. Thats indeed

a progress. Let us see what our friend Acid has to say
about it
Acid
Well, I do honor Pierres intervention. It does not very

well match my own way of seeing things, but it has
merit. I would like to make sure to not being misunder-
stood myself. Its not that I tend to disregard Peters
way of being, I only want to make sure that he does not
become over-indulgent.
Walter
There we have a point to talk about.
Peter
Please tell me what you mean by over-indulgent
Acid
I mean your enthusiasm sometimes blows off all limits

and drives us to act in a rather unrealistic way, or even a
bluntly foolish manner.
139
Pierre
I think its because of lack of information that this hap-

pens. Walter lacks necessary information and at times
just follows blindly Peters suggestions.
Walter
I am glad you added that its only at times. I feel there

is some truth in this, and thats actually one of the rea-
sons I felt that this work is necessary. I was rather oscil-
lating in my relationship to Peter. One time I listened to
his voice, another time I blocked it off entirely. I was
totally inconsistent and that was certainly not very con-
structive for my overall attitude, my way to appear to
others.
At first, when doing inner child recovery, it often

appears nonsensical to continue once the inner child
responds and things develop well. Why should there
be a larger range of inner dialogue than just between
the inner parent and the inner child? As I already
mentioned, if you want your work with the inner child
to impact upon your outward relationships, you can-
not remain, and limit yourself to a harmonious one-to-
one with your inner child. For the way you are going
to interact with your outward audience is not deter-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
mined by your one-to-one with the inner child, but by

your inner childs interacting with the other inner enti-
ties.
While interacting with others, we unconsciously

project our inner landscape into the outside world.
What then happens, is the following:
Inner ChildInner Adult inside of you develops

into:
1. Inner Child in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;
2. Inner Child in you relates to Inner Child in the other person;
3. Inner Child in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;
4. Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Child in the other person;
5. Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;
6. Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;
7. Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;
8. Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;
9. Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Child in the other person.
141
Thus weve got nine possible constellations when

we communicate with others. And this is only a reduc-
tionist kind of picture, for I dont consider psychic en-
tities other than the traditional set of three already
acknowledged by the founder of Transactional Analy-
sis (TA), Eric Berne, in the 1950s. In fact, there are
many others. In my own work with voice dialogue,
there were as many as five. There was an entity that
incarnated my inner shadow and that I named Sad
King and there was an entity named Lux that was rep-
resenting my higher self or supreme wisdom. Those
entities were less apparent at first and they actually
interacted much less compared to the others but
when they acted and said something, it was always
something important.
Many people think that it was enough to just focus

on the inner child energy, by recovering and healing
the inner child, be it for enhancing their creativity or
being liberated from inner tension or the pathological
results of trauma. But that would be a very restrictive
view.
There are many more benefits, primarily through

giving another dimension to your communication
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HEALING WORKBOOK
skills. Interestingly, this is achieved without you ever

joining a class about communication, without you
ever knowing about it. It is in most cases others who
will tell you, mirroring your inner changes, your inner
growth process and your enhanced maturity. It is your
soul that draws the main benefit of this work. It is your
entire being that is enriched on the way. It is that you
are deeper than before, that you have gained self-
knowledge.
The important step you take in Act Two is to con-

front your inner child with the other inner actors, and
to lead this dialogue in a way that all benefit from it.
The task is not an easy one. Your role as an intermedi-
ate is particularly required in this part of the game.
When I say you I mean your conscious ego, the one
that sets up and leads the dialogue, and that you
could compare with the stage director of a film or
theater play.
You have much responsibility in this role as a stage

director. If you commit major mistakes, for example by
arrogantly silencing one of the inner voices, you could
create an inner misbalance that only after much time
could be remedied again. The smart way is to listen
143
attentively to all the input that comes up, to all what is

said, and to respond in a manner that is not judg-
mental or moralistic.
The best way to direct the inner theater is to be

humble and to value, in one or the other, all the inner
actors, whatever they say, however bullish, blunt, stu-
pid, pushy or aloof they may seem. Behind an aloof
voice, lots of wisdom can be covered that only will
appear if enough trust is built in the interaction.
And there you see the parallel to your communica-

tion with others. The principles of inner and outer dia-
logue are exactly the same. All is based upon trust
and trustworthiness, and all interaction serves but one
goal: to build more and more trust so as to achieve
some kind of synergistic interaction and cooperation,
or even association.
Those of you who consider it enough to recover

their inner child are too bottomline in their work. They
do not see the dimension that voice dialogue, when
led consciously, is going to be the starting log for
your entire success as a human being.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Act Two is so important in that if you fail at this

stage, Act Three is never going to happen. For Act
Three is the logical and consequent continuation of
Act Twoon a higher trust level. So lets assume that
you made it through to Act Two and see what hap-
pens next.
Act Three
The Inner Child Builds Trust
Synergistic interaction requires communication

plus a level of trust that makes people not only talk
but act. Now, in your inner theater you may not quite
see how to apply this principle. For it seems quite a
fantasy thing to ask your inner actors to collaborate
on acting out for a project. True?
Yes and no. No, as far as the inner communication

process is concerned. How are they going to act in-
side of you? Thats a bit far-fetched, isnt it? Yes, if we
talk about a project in real life that is wholly carried
out by your inner actors. Let me give an example.
145
As a trial project for Act Three, you set up the fol-

lowing task: You are going to live three whole days
during which you use every possible occasion to let
your inner actors collaborate on every single thing
you are going to do. Sounds funny? Let me be more
precise and first put up a sample agenda:
1. Scheduled meeting with your boss about setting up a program
in your company that is focused upon enhancing the employ-
ees creativity level;
2. Taking your husband/wife out for dinner in a nice restaurant for
the purpose to tell him/her that you know s/he is cheating you
with another and that you want to talk things over, while s/he
thinks that you totally ignore the whole matter;
3. Writing a letter to a friend who broke off relations with you in
order to seek a renewal of your relationship;
4. A single parent, preparing for joining a birthday party with cos-
tumes, you are talking with your little daughter who insists that
you have to buy her a costume and take her with you to that
party while you want to go alone in order to use this opportu-
nity for finding a suitable new partner.
Let us take these examples as moot court events

to see what possible kind of interactions your inner
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HEALING WORKBOOK
team is going to develop. In practice, you are dealing

of course with your own daily events, but demonstrat-
ing the principle, I will use these situations to exem-
plify the general principle.
I will proceed in the following way. I first give you a

sample dialogue that you may consider only as one
possible way of dealing with the problem, knowing
that there are millions of others. I will then evaluate
what happened during that dialogue or interaction
and hereby give you some guideline how you later
should evaluate your own results in matters of syner-
gistic interaction of your inner team when carrying out
specific tasks in daily life.
Scene One
Scheduled meeting with your boss about setting

up a program in your company that is focused upon
enhancing the employees creativity level. Let me give
the actors the following names:
B: Your Boss
Y: You (your conscious ego)
C: Your Inner Parent
147
R: Your Inner Adult
LY: Your Inner Child (Little You)
Have you prepared our meeting ? By the way, I to-

tally forgot about it. I find all of this silly and nonsensi-
cal. Weve always achieved our goals in this company
without this modern stuff. Creativity big words ,
and at the end the employees think they are the boss
and end up to become totally off-track. But okay,
maybe Im too old-fashioned , what do you think?
Perhaps we should consider it as what it is: a mere pro-

posal from our consultants. Its up to us, after all, to im-
plement it, or not. And we can do it in our way, no?
Sounds smart. Have you got more ideas about it? Or,
to ask more precisely: how do you think our staff will
react to such a program? Will they welcome it, and will
it not be just another gimmick ending up in distracting
them from their work?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
I think creativity is not just something that distracts

people, or only in the case they have not got any
chance to become creative in what they are doing.
You mean in the case the work is something like repeti-

tive or boring or does not give the employee any em-
powerment, the person will escape into something
else?
LY
Yes, I think playing is a very natural and important part

of human behavior. Creativity manifests by playing, by
a consciously non-focused activity that is based on
mere trial and error and that has no specific pur-
poseother than playing.
But, you wont seriously consider our staff playing

games here while they work, do you? That would really
be kind of crazy, wouldnt it?
I was talking metaphorically, of course. Playing, in a

larger sense, is a space for impacting on the work with
ones own being, and not just as a piece of staff, as a
149
robot. Its to be empowered to change something in

the setup or come up with something new.
But
R (hurriedly)
I am not talking about total freedom. I was thinking of

rewarding those who do more than just the usual rou-
tines
Yes, definitely, thats a good idea. I find that idea has

merit. What else?
Those who care about the company are generally

those who think about improving what they do. The
only viable strategy to have their input validated and
turned into the profit of the company is to give them
the necessary space for doing so. (Switching to R) What
we are currently doing is pretty much the contrary, to
say the least
Really? Are we that tough? Is it such a bore to work

here? I mean, yes, this has always been a bit of a stiff
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HEALING WORKBOOK
company. I dont know, I think youre right in a way, but

I havent got any idea how we can possibly get out of
our old habits without losing control. You see my
point?
LY
Its by changing the work processes in a way to give

that space for personal impact, for creative impact. At
the present moment, we are rather punishing people
once they get clues to changing the established stan-
dards. Its just not democratic!
Okay, then, lets consider that more in detail. What can

we possibly change, or, how can we change work proc-
esses so that personal impact is validated and not pun-
ished? And how can we punish those who abuse the
system, for there is a danger here that you cannot deny
?
There are always those who try to abuse the system.

But can we rely on that if we want to modernize things?
Parasitic people in every democratic society heavily
abuse democracy and the social insurance system. And
yet, neither democracy nor social insurance have been
abandoned for that reason until now.
151
Youre right. Thats a good point. Im getting into it

now. So, lets see that point later and what security fea-
tures we are going to build into our new system so that
we can prevent it from being abusedat least cum
grano salis. Right?
LY
Yes. I think we should focus on how we can validate

personal impact and remunerate that part of gifted-
ness that smart people bring into their work. (Switching
to R) Let me give an example. The Note-It, these little
yellow sticking papers, was invented, some decades
ago, by a simple employee of 3Ms packaging depart-
ment. But 3M, already at that time (!) had a policy for
rewarding creative input of their employees. Every Fri-
day, they got one hour, before they went off for the
weekend, to discuss their creative ideas over a cup of
coffee and, if they liked to do so, could submit them to
the company direction. They were promised not only
serious consideration of their ideas but also, if 3M de-
cided to realize their inventions, a percentage of the
profit share.
Yes. But we are not 3M. They could afford that, we

cant.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
At that time, they were not yet a multinational corpora-

tion. But its through empowering their employees to
that point that they got fantastic ideas that made them
much stronger than their competition. I think part of
their tremendous success is due to this attitude, an atti-
tude that, if I dare to use that word, calls on the inner
child in every person.
Are you talking psychology now? I dont quite run on

that spur. Its a bit far off, isnt it?
LY
Not at all. Everybody has got that inner child, that part
that wants to play. You too
B (laughing, playing with the pen, then drawing absentmindedly

some circles in his agenda)
Hm
LY
Its first of all not a factor of investment, but a way to

validate the person in her integrity to give more crea-
tive freedom. That it also pays shows the 3M example.
(Switching to R). And if you calculate it, it seems theyve
drawn a much greater profit out of it in terms of inno-
153
vation capacity than this one hour per week free time
granted to their employees has cost them.
Well after all, thats not a bad idea. Not bad, really.
Im getting into it, Im getting into it now You know
what, Im getting hot for it. Lets schedule a meeting
with our financial controller and the guys from the con-
cept department. Let them come up with detailed
suggestions. And please write a report about our
meeting, very short, and forward it to them.
Okay. Ill do that. Thanks.
No, Im the one who has to say thank you. You have
given me very valuable input. In a way, all that responds
to something I felt in myself but never dared to express

LY (smiling)
Yes, it corresponds to the voice of your inner child
Evaluation
This dialogue shows how in real life things are

acted out on the stage of interpersonal communica-
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HEALING WORKBOOK
tion. You have no more those clear-cut role plays as in

Act One or Act Two and things get much more
messed up in a way. But thats real life!
I have tried to show it when I pointed you to the

role changes. This is the usual way we interact, at least
when we have our inner entities fully developed and
functional.
This example was such a successful meeting be-

cause you, in this example, were playing out your in-
ner team with great strategy and tact. The inner child
was namely played out very carefully in the beginning
because the boss reacted only with his inner parent
and later his inner adult. His inner child was totally si-
lent until the moment he began to draw the circles in
his agenda.
That was the turning point of the whole conversa-

tion and that led to the final victory of convincing the
boss to act on the proposal. The boss was convinced
at the end not because he had been told this and
that, not because he had rationally understood and
seen the necessity to implement a policy change for
creative input. No, it was because you were smart
enough to have his inner child getting involved in the
155
game. That way the boss was driven from his own in-
ner energy to take action for that necessary change,
and not because he had been told so or was advised
to do so.
And you can count on his steady collaboration on

this project because you have not only informed him,
but you have done to him exactly what he is sup-
posed to do with his employees: you have validated
in him his inner child, by activating it in a very careful
yet conscious way. You see the power?
Scene Two
[The roles in this scenario can of course be re-

versed as in real life its not always the female that
cheats her partner once in a while but perhaps even
more so, the male, taking a mistress]
Taking your wife out for dinner in a nice restaurant

for the purpose to tell her that you know she is cheat-
ing you with another and that you want to talk things
over, while she thinks that you totally ignore the whole
matter. Your intention is to win her back. These are
the actors:
P: Your Partner
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HEALING WORKBOOK
R: Your Inner Adult
Its really a nice restaurant, such a warm and welcoming

place. You made a good choice!
Yes, I thought youd like it. I know you like tasteful set-
tings, and thats one of the things that we share, no?
Yes, I guess so. Ill never forget the day after we met;
you sent me such a wonderful bunch of roses. Others
would find that old-fashioned, sure. But I found it won-
derful. These roses were so fresh, so lively, really apart

LY
And now, theyve perished. They grew stuffy, like paper

roses. With lots of dust on top
157
What are you telling me, darling? Theyre as fresh as

they were the first day I got them
Are you kidding? Were no more in our twenties. And

there is a difference between real roses and paper
roses
Oh yes, a large difference! I am so glad you see that. I

would have been deadly disappointed if you had sent
me paper roses
Yes, I do care about such little details in life. After all,

what we do to others, we do to ourselves; thats the
saying. Isnt that so?
P (nervous)
Yeah Im getting a bit tired. Perhaps you could ask

for the bill
But weve barely finished our meal! Dont you like a

dessert? Youve been more requiring in younger years.
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HEALING WORKBOOK
[Switching to LY] But maybe , your tiredness is more

general than that? Maybe its kind of metaphorical?
Youre talking in riddles. Can you not be more open

with me? What do you mean?
I care about discretion. And you seem to care about it,

too.
P (very nervous)
Do you really want me to be more open?
P (pale)
LY
I can say that everybody likes to play around once in a

while. The world is shades of gray, so as to say. There
are no angels and no devils. Everybodys got a little sin.
Right?
159
Hm
LY
However, sometimes our little sins hurt others, because

after all, weve got that part in us that is fragile, like a
child you know ? [Suddenly in tears].
P (concerned, pale)
Would you mind ordering me a glass of cognac? I need

something strong. I think I have to tell you something

Waiter, please one cognac! [Switching to LY, changing

the voice to very soft] You dont need to if you dont
like to. I know anyway. I dont want you to lose face. But
it would be nice to know that you see what you are do-
ing to me
Okay. You know it. Well, Im afraid I cant figure how

you could find out about it
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Thats not important. Let me assure you that I never

spied you out. Thats not my style. It was a chance
event that revealed it to me. Ill tell you later. First, let
me know what moved you to find me boring, or lets
say to seek some kind of adventure
You know, I was really not seeking it.
So much the worse! You have been drawn into it?
No!! Thats not what I wanted to say. I mean I was and

am in control. But I have not thought something like
Lets go out and seek some other friend or playmate.
It just happened.
As it happened to us some twenty years ago
Yes. I think, and please dont mind me to say that, I

think its human
161
LY
I agree. But I feel so bad, so betrayed , you know? Its

really on that inner level, that feeling level, that it kind
of knocks me out of the game. Its really painful. Thats
what it is. And I wanted to tell you that only. What can I
possibly do more? Love cannot be forced, after all.
P (relieved)
I am very thankful that you react that way. I did not

think you would take it so , so humbly. Your reaction
is kind of surprising me. Seems that I did not see that
part of you before. I really appreciate your openness. It
kind of re-bonds me with you.
Really? I cant believe thatafter all.
You seem so aloof, sometimes. It made me think or feel

that you dont care, you know. I thought it did not really
matter if I had another lover or not. I thought you care
more for your work, your computer, your piano
LY
Thats my way to seek adventure, to play, to grow.

[Switching to R] That does not mean that I do not relate
to you on an adult level as well. It does not mean that I
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HEALING WORKBOOK
am so immersed in my inner world that there is no

space for you in it. It does not mean that I want to let
you go off with somebody else!
Really not?
I care for you. And I care for you to stay with me and to
let go the other. But, of course, thats only my part of
the game, my view of the story or how I would like to
see it ending.
So you really care that much about me?
I care for you and for both of us. After all, we had a
beautiful relationship during all those years, no?
Yes, I have to admit it.
LY
You may act as you wish, since we are free and look for
the exciting things in life. Its after all what makes us
163
grow. But for the sake of my heart, please be open to

me and tell me whats going on. To feel betrayed
means to feel unworthy. Do you see that?
Yes , please, I see it. I am truly sorry. I should have

been open with you. But I was afraid
Of what? Should I play the tyrant or knock the other

out? We are not living in the Middle-Ages and I do not
own you. But please play open cards with me. Thats
only fairness. Just that.
Okay then. I find your attitude very good and you do

not make me feel bad about myself. Thats really very
different of how I saw you before. It kind of enamors
me again for you.
Lets see that again tomorrow morning. Just to make

sure its not the effect of the cognac
P (laughing)
No, its real, its real
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HEALING WORKBOOK
Evaluation
This dialogue is kind of revealing. It says more

than all I can possibly say in this book. He who has
won the game here is without doubt LY, the inner
child. Its the child that met the adult in your wife who
reconnected with her own inner child and then con-
nected on a child-child level with your inner child.
Once the two had met, the rational and caring parts
of both partners, their inner adult and inner parent
had no more problems to meet and to re-bond. It was
through getting the two inner children in touch that
this was possible.
Or, to put it this way: it was because the inner chil-

dren of these two partners had become out of touch
that it was possible in the first place that P sought out
another partner.
Strategically speaking, it was through your playing

out your inner child that you could touch the vulner-
able point in your partner and thus re-bond with her
on an emotional level. Thats perhaps an uncanny way
of diagnosing and healing an extra-marital affair, but
its a very effective one.
165
Scene Three
Writing a letter to a friend who broke off relations

with you. You seek a renewal of your relationship.
These are the actors:
R: Your Inner Adult
Dear X,
(R) You may wonder why I write to youafter all.

You may not expect it. (LY) Yes, it would be better to
talk, but I do not dare to phone. Im afraid. You might
just hang up and Id feel hurt and rejected. (C) But I
care about our relationship. It has been a time and it
went up and down as, perhaps, in every friendship. Its
not that I need you for feeling good about myself, or
that I am so much attached to you that I couldnt
make up my mind by myself. Its just that we have
shared so much, and that was, I suppose, an enrich-
ment for both of us. I cant know for you, though, and
you must decide for yourself how much you value our
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HEALING WORKBOOK
relationship. (LY) When you turned me the back re-

cently during the meeting, that hurt me. You were
kind of icy and I couldnt figure why. (R) True, we dont
have all our interests in common and there are worlds,
if I may say so, that you inhabit and that are alien to
me and equally I inhabit worlds that are alien to you,
perhaps. You have said you cannot bridge over the
gap in our different worldviews. But I guess thats
what friendship is about, to be able to build those
bridges that link us to worlds alien to us so as to en-
large our lives and our experiences. (C) I care too
much about our relationship to just let it go for this
difference in opinions. It could also be that you acted
from a sudden emotion that you may presently no
more foster. (LY) Before, if you may want to remember,
our discussions or debates always ended in a feeling
that we had learned somethingboth of us. There
was a sense of innocence, of wonder, in all we did to-
gether. And that for itself was more than a bridge.
What do you think? (R) Anyway, I would like to close
now and leave it up to you to respond or not. (C) As
for me, I have no reason to carry spite or similar emo-
tions in my heart, and I beware of them since they un-
dermine our positive power and self-esteem. (LY) I
167
prefer looking back with that sense of wonder and say

However it was, it was good!
Your friend, Y.
Evaluation
This sample letter shows how a smart change of

the inner entities operating, even in a one-way ex-
change, can vivify a message and add a note of em-
pathy to it.
What will the reaction of the other person be, do

you think? Is there a chance the addressee will be
positively touched?
I think there is a greater chance that the addressee

will be positively touched than that he or she will be
negatively touched or not touched at all. The dimen-
sion that the inner child (LY) added to this letter is one
of honesty, truthfulness, innocence and outspoken-
ness. If the other person has a minimum left of his or
her previous interest in the relationship with the writer
of the letter, they will respond and at least give it a try
to renew the relation.
A central point of the letter is where the writer re-

minds the addressee of their previous debates and
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HEALING WORKBOOK
says that they had learnt from those exchanges. LY

was saying that and added that there had been a
sense of innocence and wonder in their relationship.
What happened, I guess, was that previously LY

could bond with the addressees inner child so that
despite their intellectual differences, they could feel
attached to each other on an emotional level. We do
not now why presently the addressee kind of deacti-
vated his or her inner child so that this bonding was
no more possible.
In fact, the voice of the inner child can easily be

silenced by rationalizations, by a hypertrophied inner
adult who wants to control all by reason, or a hyper-
trophied inner parent who wants to control all by care,
or, worse, a hypertrophied inner controller that
smashes down all intuitive wisdom and wants to con-
trol all by willpower.
We can only guess what the outcome will be, but

one thing is sure. If the addressee responds favorably
to that one line in the letter, if they let their inner child
respond to that call of the writers inner child, the re-
sult will be positive without doubt and the relation-
ship will be healed.
169
That sentence was the key in the letter and the key
giver was of course nobody else than, again, the inner
child.
Scene Four
A single parent preparing for a birthday costume

party, you are talking with your little daughter who in-
sists that you have to buy her a costume and take her
with you to that party, while you want to go alone in
order to use this opportunity for possibly finding a
new partner. These are the actors:
D: Your daughter
R: Your Inner Adult
Right, you take me to that party and buy me a costume

?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
I said I want to think about it.
You have already thought about it for three days.
LY
But you have reminded me one thousand times in

these three days and Im getting kind of fed up, you
know
So, what do you want?
Its good that you ask so straightforward, after all. I

should perhaps be more open with you. I dont know.
What do you not know?
I do not know you enough to know all about you

something like that.
171
You know me already for seven years.
Yes, but a situation like this one is new for both of us.
What situation?
So, let me be cool and say it the cool way
Yes, thats great, to be cool!
Well, you see me alone, already for two years. And you
know that before I was not alone
Yes, before there was Daddy. But then he went away.

So what? Do you want to have another Daddy?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
LY
I do not want to have a Daddy, I mean for me.

[Switching to R] I mean I want a new man, or just a
friend. You never know
Again, you dont know. What do you know ?
I know that you need another Daddy. And I need some-

thing else, too.
You want to sleep with somebody again?
How do you know?
You seem to know a little only. But I know much. You

always say that you dont know. But I know that I know.
You know that you know Very smart, indeed.
173
I cannot buy another friend for you, but perhaps you

can meet one at aunty Idas birthday party?
Why the hell at aunty Idas birthday party? There is

nothing more boring than aunty Idas birthday parties

Not for me. Last time, there was a nice little chap. And
we had a good time together.
Did you? But I dont like little chaps, I want a big chap,
you know?
Yes, I know.
LY
What about the idea that you go to aunty Idas birthday

party to find another little chap and I go on another
birthday party to find a big chap?
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HEALING WORKBOOK
You mean, you dont want to take me with you? Oh,

thats not fair [crying]
C (angry)
I knew that this would happen, I knew it.
D (sniffing)
Suddenly you know all. Before you didnt know any-

thing.
LY
Let me tell you something. I want you to have fun. But

at the same time I ask you to give me a little freedom
to have fun, okay?
You dont have fun when Im around?
Look, yes, but only once the guy accepts that I have
a child from a former relationship ...
Oh, first you dont want to tell him?
175
No. Sometimes, that puts them off.
Do you want to hide me in the cellar?
C (laughing)
No! I just want to sense what the guy is up to before I

bring him here and present you to each other.
D (capricious)
You think, hell like me ?
LY
I dont know. He is not supposed to like you in the first

place. Hes supposed to like meget it? [Switching to
C] But of course, he should like you later on so that you
and him can become friends. Thats important.
D (suddenly apathetic)
Well, I dont care. If you ask me, I dont care. Go out

and get your chap but I do not guarantee you that later
Ill be friends with him. After all, hes not going to be
Daddy, because there is no second Daddy
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HEALING WORKBOOK
I did not say that hes going to be Daddy, but perhaps,

you never know, hes going to be Daddy Second Vin-
tage
Again, you dont know or you never know. When do

you know? I guess you should go to this party and get
this chap first and later youll know. And Ill know. But I
dont careanyway
Evaluation
This kind of fun dialogue between mother and

daughter reveals how tricky it can be to talk with chil-
dren when its about emotional matters. Children tend
to react in often surprising ways, and so much the
more as we try to hide things from them.
Without ever criticizing us for our hypocrisy, they

have their own weapons to win their battles. In this
case, D did not win hers. Thats probably why at the
end she insisted that she doesnt care. She tried to
hide her disappointment that her mother wouldnt
take her to the party and, more generally put, that her
mother would not initiate her in the intimacy with her
chap. This is a recurring theme in parent-child interac-
177
tions and, as we see it here, the mother used her in-

ner child to ask for her daughters understanding and
collaboration in this somewhat delicate situation. It
was by letting her inner child say that first she ap-
proves of her child to have fun, but that second she
asks her daughter also to respect her mothers desire
to have fun and to seek intimacy outside the mother-
child relationship.
This was a smart move because, if she had said

this from the point of her inner parent, as many par-
ents use to do in similar situations, she would have
made her daughter feel inadequate and immature.
For example, she would have possibly said

Daughter, you are still too small for those matters and
you should better keep silent or she would have be-
trayed her child by telling a lieas so many lesser
honest parents do.
It was by acknowledging innocently her need and

desire for love and sex that she could win her daugh-
ters collaboration. Her daughters dont care attitude
at the end of the dialogue shows a whole bunch of
things: a silent will to collaborate; a silent will to not
wanting to interfere in a potential relationship of her
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HEALING WORKBOOK
mother with the chap; a silent will to be less demand-

ing in matters of closeness, at least not when her
mothers intimate relationship is in the way; a clear
voice that says
Im frustrated about the fact that I have to grow

up, get less exclusive attention and have a less sym-
biotic relation with my mother from now on.
And another voice that says
Okay, right, its hard to choke, but thats life. And

after all, I can also have my little chap
With these four examples, I would like to close the

Healing Workbook and hope it has given you enough
model stuff for your own practice.
Please keep in mind that its by far not enough to

just read this book, but that the most important is
your own practice. Theory can never replace practice,
and this is especially valid for relationships, inner or
outer.
179
Chapter Five
Art Guide
Introduction
This is a guide to the inner child art work. In the

previous two chapters we have seen how to recover
and heal the inner child. This present guide is a little
work manual about how to activate the healed inner
child for creative work.
You should begin working with the present art

guide only after having completed the recovery and
healing of your inner child. The reason for this precau-
tion is simple. You cannot work with a cataleptic or
wounded inner child that is not yet recovered or not
yet healed. If you attempt to do so, what happens is
that you will try to force creativity and end up saying I
always knew that I have no talent for art or I always
knew that I am too rational a person to do something
like that. Your efforts would be wasted and on top of

it, you would block yourself against any further at-
tempts. That would be a real damage! So, please take
my advice serious and do the recovery and healing
work first!
There is another reason for that; its because of the

general introduction to voice dialogue contained in it.
The same applies for inner child art work. Without
knowing how to get in touch, you cannot possibly do
any work with your inner child. Here, too, you have to
get in touch first with your inner child energy, so as to
run on that spurand not on another.
The inner childs creative energy can carry you

really far. In all other matters of life, when you carry
out your daily routines, for example, your inner child is
of little help. Then your inner adult and your inner
parent may be very good in the ring. So, please do
not expect to get really far in art or any artistic, crea-
tive endeavor, private or professional, if you only rely
on your inner parent or your inner adult. If you do
that, nobody will deny it to you, but frankly, you would
be foolish!
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ART GUIDE
And in fact, many people do it, all those namely

who have unlearned to play with concepts, rules,
ideas, things and even people. To stop playing is to
kill your inner child. To relearn playing is therefore a
natural part of inner child recovery.
Now, in this part of this guide, I will not repeat all

that stuff again. It would give the book a wrong turn
because here, we have to focus on the art activities
right away. We wont do any kind of formal dialogue
work.
Of course, when you work with your inner child do-

ing spontaneous art, you always silently communicate
with inside, but you wont do it consciously or verbally.
Its a subtle, intuitive kind of dialogue, something
really special.
Once you have learned that, you wont want to

miss that in your life because it is one of the most
beautiful experiences you can make here on earth. It
is something truly religious.
The work we are going to do together in this

guide is both visual and audio. Our inner child is go-
ing to draw or paint, and to compose music. If you
183
like your spontaneous creations, you may keep them.

If you dont like them, you may destroy them. But
please, before you do the latter, answer for yourself
the following questions:
Who is the liker?
Who is the authority in me that likes or dislikes?
Who says this has value or that has no value?
This instance is your inner controller or inner critic.

Before you tear your inner child productions to
pieces, you are well advised to check who asks you to
do that. Just to make sure you are not acting under a
dominant influence of a mean or hypertrophied inner
energy that is the manifestation of your self-hate.
Also see that even in case you have worked

through the healing guide, you have not done much
work yet on your inner parent or inner adult. In most
cases, but not in all, the healed inner child will take its
natural place and counterbalance a pre-dominant in-
fluence of the other inner entities. I guess that in
about eighty percent of all cases this is going to take
place.
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ART GUIDE
What about the rest? The remaining twenty per-

cent of people who have healed their inner child have
to do some additional work with the inner parent, in-
ner adult or inner critic. Thus, in the present guide I
suppose you are among the majority who is working
with a healed inner child that is respected and valued
by all the other inner entities. In this case, your feeling
which productions of your inner child really have value
and which not, is based on a sound intuition, not a
malevolent inner tyrant. In cases of doubt, I recom-
mend you the following:
Keep all your inner child productions in a safe

place;
If auto-destructivity occurs, keep them in a

friends house;
Do not look at your productions for some days;
Do not show them to anybody during the first

month;
Do not destroy your productions just for feeling

uneasy;
Do not challenge your inner child for producing;
185
Be yielding to anything that comes spontane-

ously;
Do not push your inner child in any way;
Do not punish your inner child in any way;
Do not ask anybody to evaluate what you are do-

ing.
Some of these points need to be discussed more

in detail. I have not known all that when starting my
own work with my inner child and Ive done terrible
destruction. Ive actually done all wrong and its from
my mistakes that I learned all that. I can tell you how
dangerous all that is. It is nothing less but explosive!
Andyou are going to be on an island to do this
work, to walk this path, and to walk your talk. You are
going to be in a desert. But I can promise you one
thing: this is going to be your island and your desert.
And you are going to love it to such a point that you
never anymore want to miss it in your lifeeven
though you may be utterly alone there and without
one single friend, except your inner child.
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ART GUIDE
Main Theme
The essential in inner child art is that it is not pre-

dictable and that there is no techniqueat least not
for the production. Later, there can beif you wisha
post-production that works out the inner childs pro-
ductions in order to professionalize their appearance
or refine the essence that has been created sponta-
neously. This post-production is not a process where
the inner child is involved; or at least it is less in-
volved. Typically, this process is guided by the inner
adult and evaluated by the inner adult.
In this guide, I concentrate on the creation in the

strict sense. While in the post-production stage we
apply intellectual and systematic techniques, in the
creation phase we apply strictly no technique, and we
certainly have to get rid of any intellectual involve-
ment.
Inner child creation is spontaneous, intuitive and

not intellectual. You can also say that the creation
process is right-brain and the production process left-
brain, but that would be an undue simplification. Its
not that clear-cut.
187
As there is always a small portion of yin in a big

accumulation of yang, there is a small portion of intui-
tion in every intellectual process. And as there is a
small portion of yang in all accumulation of yin, there
is always an element of reason in every non-
intellectual and spontaneous creation. The reason-
element may be hidden or we may not be aware of it.
But its nonetheless there.
I think if it was not there, there would be misbal-

ance and we would simply be mad.
Salvador Dali said that the only difference be-

tween him and a madman was that he was not a
madman. Thats the point.
Preparation
What is to be done to get ready? You may think

that with your inner child right in place, you can just
start and do not need a preparation. You are almost
right. Yet there is a little thing to do. You may want to
skip it and just go ahead. You may do so but if you
dont get a result, do not blame me.
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ART GUIDE
If you ask me, I find it necessary to begin with re-

laxing and focusing before we begin with the art
work. You may argue that a painter will usually not
pray before he sets out to paint. I answer that you will
not have to pray, but to get in touch with inside, you
should perhaps focus inside for ten minutes. For,
please dont forget that the painter paints with a
painting technique that he may have had to learn for
a decade while you are going to paint with no tech-
nique, purely relying on your inspiration. Impossible?
If you expect to paint the Mona Lisa a second

time, perhaps. But you are not supposed to imitate
Leonardo while doing inner child art work. If you feel
restricted in any way, please get to the source of
those restrictions. You will then find that there are
mental restrictions, and emotional restrictions. Both
have to be dealt with if you are out to produce results.
These restrictions are not lack of talent or lack of
technique. They are exclusively resulting from a lack
of faith!
It is for this reason, and only for this reason, that

the preparation is necessary. For in our culture virtu-
ally everybody lacks faith in miraclesand inner child
189
art work truly is miraculous. If you come along with a

proud, skeptical and willful attitude, I would first put
you in the corner for two hours, as it is done in old-
fashioned kindergarten with naughty children. I
would let you there, and let you roast on your rage
until you are red and boiling.
Then I would simply ask you who in the world had

told you that you are still alive tomorrow? Youd an-
swer: Nobody. Because you just believe it. And Id re-
ply to you that this, too, is a miracle, which we call the
miracle of life. Just to let you feel that we cant live
without miracles, that they are part of our lives. Thus,
you have faith that tomorrow you are still making
plans, getting a budget together to work them out
and collecting helpers and collaborators to delegate
some of your work, right?
You naturally think that youre going to wake up

tomorrow morning. But who has told you that? No-
body. Of course. You have faith in it. So please dont
tell me that you live totally without faith, based only
upon your pretendedly rational and logical premises. I
laugh at you if you say it again, and throw you out of
the class. And you wont enter it again!
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ART GUIDE
Inner Artist, Get Ready!
We have two main elements for preparation,

namely a positive expectation and relaxation. The
technique that we are going to try out for relaxing is
very simple.
You listen to four tracks of a special brain-

coordinating music that I composed for this purpose,
preferably by using high-quality headphones:
https://soundcloud.com/peterfritzwalter/
complete-combirel-relaxation-session
While you hear the music, you focus inside a mo-

ment and then quite spontaneously throw yourself in
the work.
You sit relaxed in an armchair and begin to

breathe into your abdominal diaphragm a few times,
not too often in order to avoid hyperventilation and
dizziness. Just about three to five times. Then you
close your eyes and focus inside, directing your inner
attention to your navel region and you breathe con-
sciously into that region of your body. You imagine to
charge your belly with vital energy.
191
Breathing should not be too strong, but as regular

as possible and it should be diaphragmatic breathing,
not chest breathing. After about five to ten minutes,
you feel warmth in your lower belly, a sensation that is
very agreeable.
At the same time, it could well be that you feel

suddenly either sleepy or sexually aroused, or both.
Let it go naturally and do not do anything about it.
Only make sure you dont fall asleep. These sensa-
tions only show you that your body has been charged
with a surplus of vital energy. How does that feel like?
Thats not something nebulous or imaginary. Its

very real and it can be described accuratelyas fol-
lows:
Your eye pupils are enlarged;
Your skin tonus is reduced;
Your muscle tonus is greatly reduced;
You hardly keep sitting on the chair so sleepy you

get;
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ART GUIDE
You feel a warm stream from your head to your

feet;
You feel you are fully conscious yet rather apa-

thetic.
This is how it should. Naturally, if you are afflicted

with an anxiety neurosis or a compulsion neurosis, the
outcome will be quite to the contrary. The boost in
vital energy will in such a case inflate your defenses so
that your anxiety will increase instead of diminish,
which will in turn make you feel rather uncomfortable.
I know this from experience since I practiced this

technique before I went into therapy, and later was
diagnosed with an anxiety neurosis that still later ex-
panded into a compulsion neurosis. Only years after
that, once both neuroses were healed could I experi-
ence these wonderful sensations in my then healthy
mindbody.
You may wonder who this inner artist is? If I tell you
that its your inner child, you may believe that or not.
You may take it as a statement and say Well, he

must know it. He has done it, so he knows. Or you
may say He can tell me nuts. Is it important for me
193
what this author says? I want to see for myself. Who

knows, perhaps this inner artist is an entity different
from my inner child? All this is valid.
There is no absolute truth when we talk about the

subtle realm. There is truth, yes, but we all perceive
that truth differently and then hold what we see for
different kinds of truth. We may rightly do that, and
theres nobody to contradict us. So feel free to think
whatever you please about who this inner artist is.
Find out for yourself.
You may evaluate this experience differently, ac-

cording to your different mindset. But that experience
there will be, thats a fact. When you consider this
truth, you see that the question is of little importance
who this inner artist really is. The question is kind of a
luxury I may say. Your investigation into that has no
meaning for the work itselfplease keep this in mind.
This investigation is a purely intellectual exercise that
you may indulge in if you like. But for doing the work
it is strictly unnecessary.
Some of you may end up saying that, after all, this

inner artist is no lesser than the higher self. Others will
say that its the inner child and others will name it in-
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ART GUIDE
ner artist and suggest its another of our inner entities

and has to be validated as such.
I do not speculate. Speculation leads nowhere.

However, the work leads to a well defined goal.
Therefore I stick to the work, and I frankly do not

like speculation. I leave that to philosophers. The
danger is namely that if you indulge too much in such
intellectual luxury, youll end up doing no inner child
work at all! Youll end up being dominated by your
inner controller, the eternal skeptic, your repetitive
thought patterns and your past. And as a result the
door of creation will be closed for you. For its not
your intellect that opens that door; its your intuition
and your faith.
Its your innocence, not your knowledge or

pseudo-knowledge. I know that some of you, and of-
ten the ones who are not the great brilliant successes,
have that innocence. I have seen it. Its those of you
who, without talking much, without giving me much
feedback, just sit down and do ita smile on their
face. Most of you have to do more than that, espe-
cially those of you with a hypertrophied inner parent.
They dance like monkeys around the banana. They
195
dance. They dont eat. They talk about the banana,

they discuss it, they dissect it in their mind without
ever touching and trying it.
For those of you who have lost their spontaneous

innocence I have inserted a special note in this guide.
Its only for you, not for the first group, the innocent
ones. They may safely skip this section. So what we
are going to do is to insert a section that deals with a
kind of S.O.S. dialogue with our inner critic. The situa-
tion is that this inner critic may hold you back from
addressing vital issues in your life. If this is so, you
really have to enter into a constructive dialogue with
this inner entity.
The sample dialogue that follows is only one of

many ways to tackle this important problem. You may
do it differently, but you must do it if you want to
open the doorway to real creation and genuine crea-
tivity. The actors:
IC: Inner Critic (IC sounds like icy )
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ART GUIDE
Inner critic, I would like to talk with you are you

there?
IC
Yes, Im always there, always watchful. Thats part of my

care for you.
I want to tell you that I am furious about you. You have

messed up my life by interfering in all my endeavors,
with your horrible cynicism, your negativity, your utter
lack of humor, of creativity, of youth. Thats why people
now find me stiff and boring and tell me I was giving
parental lectures to others.
That hurt me so much! You are responsible that I had

repeatedly no success, for years and years, that I am
caught in a net of guilt, of anxiety, of self-reject that
makes me feel inadequate most of the time. You are
the one responsible for my illness and lack of energy. I
feel very clearly that my energy went down considera-
bly over the last years and I had many bad dreams
about sickness.
You took over my whole personality when I abandoned

that exciting project some time ago and now I feel that
I missed a great opportunity. Where is my spontaneity,
197
my enthusiasm? It all dried out, like dried pepper, and

became too strong in taste. And you have always been
like that, since I was a child.
You have been blown up in me and I will now take

every step to knock you down, to annihilate you, and
get you out of the gamebelieve me! I will take care
that you lose your arrogant superiority and instead, in
my social interactions, will play out my inner child. I
value that child and I do not value you with your silly
infantile attempts to play the big boss in my life. I am
fed up with you and thats what I want to tell you.
IC
I want you to understand that you have to learn proper

conduct. If you want to be successful in a hypocrite
world, you must become a hypocrite. Dont show who
you are! You want others respect you? If you want that,
you have to lead your life in a way that is aligned with
what is considered proper conduct. If you let your inner
child dominate your life, you will lead the life of an
eternal adolescent; you will be jumpy, light and irre-
sponsible. I try to influence you to learn about the val-
ues commonly shared in this society.
But what about my individuality, then? What about my

original and sometimes daring ideas? Forget about all
that?
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ART GUIDE
IC
You have to evaluate it on the scale of proper conduct

or the principles this culture is based upon.
What the hell are those principles good for?
IC
When there are no principles, there is confusion, and

chaos. How do you want to find a red line in your life if
you do not have principles?
What is such a red line good for?
IC
It serves the purpose of trustworthiness. You are much

more trusted if there is a red line in your life. But okay,
if you want to jump amok, here and there, like a mad
monkey, because you like that, thats not my business,
then. You may follow every fancy, if you want, but not
under my influence. You may override my voice, thats
up to you. I only give you recommendations.
199
But what can I do about the way I am? This society is

utterly false, hypocrite and violent. It disregards soul
values and tries to streamline all and everybody. It pre-
tends to give freedom but it conditions the promise of
freedom in such a sordid way that at the end of the day
there is no freedom at all.
IC
Society is as it is. There are times when its more liberal

and times when its more repressive. Now its getting
more repressive again. But there is more freedom, too,
in other respects. The art of living is to see where the
break is coming from and to follow that spur. But you
are often detached from this reality and live in your
own one, disregarding the rules and perhaps breaking
them. And then you wonder why people dont like you.
I am a nonconformist.
IC
Yes, and you mean it. You almost hit it on everybodys

head.
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ART GUIDE
I thought that this attitude comes from you, inner

critic?
IC
Not at all! I always want us to be respectable. Its com-

ing from your inner child, of course.
Really, I want to be very honest with you and very clear.

This striving for respectability is utterly ridiculous. It
undermines our true intentions and it pushes away
those who sympathize with us on a deeper level, on a
soul level, so to say. So there really is conflict between
our true being and this false being created by the
quest for being respectable. Its the eternal fight of the
true and the false.
IC
It needs much more courage to be true to yourself.

Thats for sure.
But why do you not give me support on that way? The

inner child gives me support but often it is not strong
enough either. You could help me much more by not
sabotaging my natural outgoing attitude, but to help
201
foster the development of a red lineas you call itin

this very endeavor. One can be reliable and trusted as
an alternative element of the culture, as a critic, as a
respected contradictor. What about that?
IC
Yes. Thats true. I have not yet thought about that. Its
really a new idea for me and Ill ponder it.
Thanks for your collaboration. I feel we have made a

big step forward today.
You guessed ityes, I had that problem; thats why

I wrote the above dialogue. After having done that,
there was a tremendous change in my life, and my
awareness about the subtle messages I was sending
out was much higher.
I had that problem despite the fact that I had

worked for many years on my inner child. This tre-
mendous change distilled in me the insight that it is
simply not enough to recover and heal our inner child.
What we have to do is actually recover all our inner
entities and lead them in a way to build a harmonious
inner team. We have to orchestrate this inner land-
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ART GUIDE
scape and conduct it so that it produces the music we

would like to play in the world.
You do not need to be as aggressive and angry as

I was in the above dialogue when you approach your
inner critic! Naturally, if you do the work timely, you
wont be fed up to that point. In my case, I had com-
mitted the mistake to wait too long which makes that
things pent up inside. Much depends also on your
general attitude, your work and your environment. If,
for example, you have a creative and rather inde-
pendent job, its much easier for you to cope with a
pushy inner critic than if you work as a clerk or admin-
istrative jerk. But please believe me that it all depends
only on your intensity, your desire to really get in
touch with that creative potential in you, that original-
ity, that wonderful uniqueness, that carefreeness, too.
Some of you need to do a hard step in that direction
before they can enjoy the fruits of that work. It is a
matter of commitment!
The S.O.S. dialogue should have adjusted your

inner critics attitude toward your daring new en-
deavor. Please do not belittle the sometimes nagging
conservatism of that inner entity. In some cases it bor-
203
ders fascism, in some others it just runs on pure arro-

gance. In many people it runs on fear and wants to
hold you back from virtually every new, daring and
unconventional plan or enterprise. If you do not get
this energy under control, you are never going to
make it in the arts or in any endeavor that requires
your wit, your uniqueness and your original ideas.
When I talk about art, I mean that not in the re-

stricted sense like an interest for going to a museum. I
mean that in the sense that art is the art of freedom,
the art of being truly humane, the art of living, the art
of mastering yourself.
This is the reason this inner child art guide is writ-

ten for, not just for having you sit down and do a
drawing once in a while. I have trodden this path be-
cause of an inner conviction that most of us are ro-
botsas I myself was one twenty years agoand that
I feel I have a mission to support others to develop
their original true self. Thus, when I talk about art I ac-
tually talk about allabout living in general. Its that
vast, and its that important!
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ART GUIDE
Just Do It!
Once you are ready, its easy. You just do it. You sit
there, in a relaxed position, perhaps on your bed,
perhaps on the floor, and there are several sheets of
drawing paper.
There is in front of you a box with pastel crayons or

wax crayons, preferably a large one that contains at
least twelve different colors. Your mind is relaxed and
there is no thought. You are a bit apathetic, very re-
laxed. You take one or several of the crayons and just
dance with them over the sheet. And you see what
happens
I know that this is extremely difficult for most of

you. Its difficult because you never do and have never
done anything like that before. Why? Because you are
very reluctant doing things for no purpose, and that is
your greatest problem!
Doing things always with a purpose in mind de-

stroys every spark of creativity in you in the long run. It
has been told to you again and again, when you were
a child, that you have to have purpose in life, that life
is not worth living if you have no purpose. You have
205
been fed with these hypnotic spells, you have repeat-

edly ingested these dried formulas that may be good
for dead people, but that are disastrous for those who
are alive. Therefore, now you are at a point to experi-
ence an atrocious fear doing something without a
purpose.
You may reply that, of course, you have a purpose

behind your doing. Its that you want to be or become
creative, that you want to have your inner child do
some art work. But thats not the purpose I am talking
about. I am talking of the act of drawing itself which is
done for no purpose since you are not going to draw
anything that
has a value;
is going to be seen by others;
is supposed to be artistic;
can be recognized as something real.
What you are going to do with this paper and

those crayons is what it is: play! It is the very charac-
teristic of play that it bears its purpose in itself and
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ART GUIDE
has no other or higher purpose. What you learn by

doing this is to play. Most of you have unlearnt that in
school.
You sit there and do it for no purpose, okay? Thats

what healing is about. Healing comes about through
re-aligning the mindbody with its own pur-
posewhich is pure living. Once you have no other
purposes than this single purpose, this main purpose
of living, you are aligned with the primordial life pur-
pose.
Many spiritual practices go for the same. Zen and

Yoga are no different from spontaneous art in that
they re-align you with your true lifes purpose, pure
living, purposeless living.
This very special state of mind is comfortable. You

will hardly be satisfied after having done one drawing.
If you are relaxed, you will enjoy this dance and the
vivacity of those colors, and you will begin to medi-
tate about certain forms, without however attaching
yourself too much to them. You just flip over the page
when it gets too intense. Do a next one, and a next
one.
207
Usually, in my experience, a kind of satiation

comes up after around five, sometimes ten drawings.
It will be different each time. But definitely there will
be a point where you know for sure you want to stop.
Its not that you want to do something else. Imagine,
only ten to fifteen minutes have passed because typi-
cally, you spend no more than a few minutes on every
drawing. Its not that you are bored. It has another,
more mysterious, reason. This satiation is real! It is like
having eaten food and become satiated with it to a
point to stop eating. Its really like that.
Some of you will inquire what all this is good for, or

when and how the benefits will show up? Let me an-
swer this question in detail, but before doing that, Ill
give you some more instructions for the next sessions.
There is work that needs to be done regularly,

such as most body-mind exercises. And there is work
that does not need a fixed schedule. Inner child art is
of the latter sort. It is rather allergic to scheduled or
planned ruling.
You should trust your intuition and do it only when

you feel like. What happens if you do it when youre
not in the mood is that it feels boring or off-track, and
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ART GUIDE
if that special excitement which is triggered by your

inner child is lacking, you will quickly lose any interest
to continue. It would be foolish to endanger your ex-
citement through putting an obligation or restriction
that could be taken as a boring duty by your inner
child. You do not need to worry since there is nothing
you could lose if you dont do the work for a certain
while. It will be so much the more exciting to take it
up when you are in the right mood again!
The other thing to take care of is your privacy! I

remember how shocked I was when I was disturbed in
those precious moments. Better to skip a work ses-
sion when youre not sure you will be alone and undis-
turbed than to go on and be surprised, or even ques-
tioned by some of those well-meaning friends who
care so much about you that they try to interfere in all
and everything you do.
Keep away from those while you do inner child art

and never let them know about it! To inform them
could result in a sudden end of your new endeavor,
because those people have this astonishing ability to
make down everything they dont get in their narrow
209
mindset of predefined values. Keeping aloof is the

best defense in these cases!
The next step in your practice of spontaneous art

is to use freedom creatively. You may never have en-
joyed real freedom and an activity in which you are
not restricted in any way in your expression may at
first be strange for you. You may for example stand on
your head or shout while you draw, or you may finish
sessions once in a while with a spontaneous dance, as
it was my practice.
You will see that once you are used to it, your con-
sciousness will be more subtle and you will begin to
perceive certain patterns, motives, original ways of
expression that come from deep inside of you and
that you are going to identify in your repeated pro-
ductions.
These patterns can serve two functions. They can

serve to develop a certain artistic style which you may
develop further, if you like. And they may give you
psychological hints that may come with word or
thought associations for revealing you the inner truth
of certain fixations of yours, certain obsessions, trau-
mata or fears. However, be careful with those conclu-
210
ART GUIDE
sions. They can be misleading if derived from superfi-

cial evidence and insufficient observation.
It needs long practice for developing an intuitive

psychological sense that serves you to know yourself.
It really needs a deep commitment. Jumping directly
to conclusions by interpreting your productions could
be not only counterproductive, it could be the end of
your creative flow.
Your inner child will harshly contradict those ra-

tionalizations since they come from the inner adult
and are not produced by the inner child itself.
Unfortunately, in our culture we find we have to

interpret all and everything so that we dont have to
deal with the fog that is and will remain there. To wipe
out the gray areas in life means to wipe out life itself!
Self-knowledge is, as life itself, not black-and-white,
but millions of shades of gray!
Spontaneous Composing
We are a visual culture. Research has shown that

visual stimulation and visual pleasures in our culture
by far outweigh the joys derived from sound. Youll
find that almost everybody likes photos, enjoys colors
211
or likes sightseeing. While there are not many people

who really enjoy and appreciate music. They may like
sound, or certain noises that they use to call music.
But people who really like music to the point to have
an interest to read musical scores or to compose mu-
sic, or to play a musical instrument are a minority.
Why? It seems that this is merely a cultural phe-

nomenon. Sociologists say we are a visual society, a
visually obsessed one. What is it that we are so much
focused upon the visual, to a point to neglect the
conscious perception of sound, of music? How many
of you are aware of the music that plays in the mall
while you go there for shopping, and that penetrates
you unheardin the truest sense of this word.
Now, if you, like me, belong to the minority of

people who appreciate both visual and auditive stim-
uli, you may want to try spontaneous composing as
your next step in inner child art work. You may never
have touched an instrument. Never mind. That is bet-
ter than to have touched it wrongly! The worst antipa-
thies against playing musical instruments are created
by forced musical lessons. It can have devastating
psychological consequences.
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ART GUIDE
Spontaneous composing or instrument play is the

only form of instrument handling that has truly de-
served the term play. Everyone who has ever tried to
really learn to master a musical instrument knows that
serious study of an instrument has nothing, but noth-
ing to do with playing. It is hard work, and often not
even gratifying. But it does not have to be like that.
Spontaneous playing is the key. It was the key for my
own musical production. Without that fundamental
insight, I would still sit there in my sweat and hack my
fingers wound on some exercises in order to produce
some decent classical. And, besides, this guide
would never have seen the day.
After stopping all decent lessons, I preferred to

engage in indecent improvisations. And that was far
more rewarding in every, respect. Every jazz musician
will confirm this to you. Every stiff classical player will
contradict it. Im on the side of the jazz and against
the musical catalepsy that today is called classical
music. Life is soft and flexible, and not hard and stiff.
I am pro-jazz, because I am pro-life. What most

people forget is that so-called classical music, at the
time it was composed, was not classical at all, but dar-
213
ing, modern and, for the most part, rejected as too

extravagant. All those distinctions and categories are
truly debilitating exercises of a confused mind. The
truth is that inspired music is inspirational music,
spontaneously composed or improvised music. If you
cant follow me until here, you better give up right
away and remain with drawing. If you can get this in
your mental drawers and do not feel bashed, then by
all means continue!
And you may have a listen to some of my music.

You can find it here:
http://ipublica.wordpress.com/music/
The digital culture has done lots of benefits for

musical inspirational art! When I started out as a boy
to spontaneously improvise on the piano in the
boarding, I risked to be beaten either by the cook, a
fat angry lady, or other boys.
It is unavoidable to play an acoustic instrument

without being heard, except you exercise in a bunker.
What can you do if people are so insensitive that they
perceive music as mere noise?
214
ART GUIDE
Now, by using a digital piano and connecting a

pair of headphones, I can improvise undisturbed and
without filling the ears of others with unwanted
sounds.
You may still object that there is a greater obstacle

for getting people involved in spontaneous compos-
ing than it is for having them do spontaneous art
since generally musical instruments, and especially
pianos, are expensive.
That is true in general, but that argument is not

really relevant since anyway only people who have al-
ready a natural affinity to music will be attracted to
this idea. The others will just skip that part of the
guide! And if you have a soul connection with some-
thing, you will attract it into your life, do what you will.
The universe will do miracles that you can get what
you need in terms of hardware. It did for me, and it
has done for people more needy than I was at the
time.
Many of you who possess this affinity have already

thought many times of buying a piano or a keyboard,
but you did not dare to do so because you thought
you will have to take expensive lessons in order to
215
learn the basics. You will also have imagined of how

awkward it would feel when others, friends, would ask
you to play something for them while you think that
you cant play anything, and if so, you would not play
it right.
Please be aware that as long as you feed on the

approval of others, you are never fed well; worse, in
decisive moments of your life, you will suffer from
malnutrition or even starve of hunger! You have all the
seeds inside of you that you can use for growing the
virtual plants you need for healthy nutrition of your
soul. Thats the safe wayrelying only on your own
inner self, and not on others.
When you now sit down, for the first time, in front
of your instrument, try to empty yourself of all this ac-
cumulated sense of failure, of all this friendly or un-
friendly gossip that blocks your creative expression.
As long as you value others more than yourself in a
particular field you cannot develop a sense of high
self-worth in that field. If you think you have never
been an artist and will never be one, you are kicking
yourself instead of treating your other me with gen-
tleness, patience and understanding.
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ART GUIDE
Inner child art has nothing to do with playing right

or wrong. It has solely to do with playing. As soon as
you learn to forget what the difference is between
playing right and playing wrong, you begin to play.
And only then.
Playing does not know right or wrong. Only a mind

conditioned by mechanistic education can come up
with the idea that there is right or wrong in playing, in
any kind of playing. The truth is that real playing is
carefree and non-judgmental and that an attitude that
puts up two battlefields, one for the right warriors and
one for the wrong ones is alienated. And yes, the
player is a warrior, in the old meaning of this term.
Playing means doing ones best which is exactly the
definition of the warrior.
The problem is namely one of misjudging the hu-

man potential. When you do your best and you fail,
you are a hero in as much as you do your best and
win!
But of course when you listen to all this false hero-

ism that is marketing propaganda of a deeply alienat-
ing manipulative consumer system, you are dead be-
fore you are born!
217
For most of you, the difficulty to open up your

creative potential is exactly this judgmental, critical,
skeptical and deeply ignorant attitude that you de-
veloped under a life-denying and debilitating educa-
tion. To do away with this cannot be done by insight
or intellectual maturity alone. It needs to grow in the
body, in the veins, and this requires you to play, to
play, and to play again.
When you see children, you wonder why they like

to play the same game over and over again. Well, this
is exactly what I am talking about. Children do not
have that problem, generally, because their original,
natural sense for the carefreeness of play is still intact.
Their inner observer or judge is not yet overbearing
and hypertrophied as it is in most adults in our cul-
ture.
The moment you decide to rent or buy a musical

instrument, you have done the first decisive step to-
ward a new form of spontaneous creation.
Let me add a note why I prefer a piano. Its not

only because I myself use the piano. It is because of
the unique features only the piano offers. The piano is
unique in that it incorporates a whole orchestra. It is
218
ART GUIDE
not a solo instrument such as a flute or a trumpet but

has many registers, sonorities and it is truly poly-
phonic. The organ is polyphonic and the keyboard,
too, and yet there are huge differences.
The piano is a percussion instrument and can be

used to imitate percussions. The organ is a pipe in-
strument and not able to render a percussion-like kind
of music accurately.
Moreover, the organ keyboard is much smaller. It

encompasses only sixty-six keys while the piano con-
tains eighty-eight, thus providing deeper bass and
higher treble levels.
Those of you who have heard great pianists play-

ing know that the piano really is an orchestra in itself.
Now, after you made the choice, took the decision

and got your instrumentwhat comes next? What
comes then is the beginning. Lets do away with the
preliminaries, and start! Here again, as in all inner
child work, you need a preparation. This is so impor-
tant because once a drawback occurs because of your
resistance, it is essential that you are prepared to deal
219
with it. If not, chances are that you give up prema-

turely.
The preparation that I suggest here is similar to

the one used for inner child work in general. It is tun-
ing in and turning inside, so that you connect to the
inner child energy before you sit down to play.
Later, when you have done the work many times,

you will no more need this preparation, but in the be-
ginning it is important to do it. It will help you focus
and do away with disturbing daily thought patterns
that distract you from getting in touch with inside. Let
me quote here what Laurence G. Boldt, one of Amer-
icas most successful career trainers writes in his book
Zen and the Art of Making a Living (1999), p. 87:
LAURENCE G. BOLDT
Societys propaganda will tell you that you are

inadequate, that its your fate to live in fear and
beg for the approval of others, that things are
just the way they are, and theres nothing you
can do about it. You must resign yourself to a
gray existence; you must go along to get along.
Creativity really begins with a No, a decisive No to

listening to what the group says or those called the
achieved ones, those who have made it. Working with
220
ART GUIDE
your inner child, you get rid of that point of self-

delusion to consider, or not, yourself being achieved.
Then you may well find that there is a truth-

distance between your truth and others half-truth. If
you want to listen to others, listen to those who are
self-thinkers. They will let you go on your own without
making you down for being original, daring, bold, cu-
rious or adventurous.
If you do not know any of those and are sur-

rounded by the road-runners, then its definitely bet-
ter to shut off all contacts for a while, at least for the
period of your inner child art work.
That was how I did it. I am a rather soft and gentle

person, and I tend to get along with everybody; and it
was therefore very hard for me to develop a sense of
identity, just because I wanted to keep up with every-
bodysomething that is impossible actually.
By the way, I never had that sense of identity ear-

lier in life and could develop it only under the condi-
tion of cutting off all bonds with others for a certain
time, and do a hypnotherapy. This retreat yielded
221
enormous benefits that only later I was able to reap

and to fully appreciate.
When you sit at your instrument, try to get in love

with it. Touch it, feel it, listen to its voice. Fall in love
with it! That is the surest way to get into that special
state and that is the beginning of all, of your letting
go, your creativity, your happiness. Its a state of
awareness where there is no ordinary thought, but a
feeling of general wellness, a heightened receptivity
and sensitivity. I guess its the state a child is in when
they are at play. This is our single most valuable treas-
ure, a treasure however that most of us have lost.
222
Inner Child Essays
Contents
Feel Good for No Reason
Child Play

Feel Good For No Reason

Essay
Do we need a reason for feeling happy, for feeling

good about ourselves? Many people do because they
have lost the perfume of innocence, so essential for a
life of joy and beauty.
The good news is that we can relearn to feel good

for no reason. It is more of a process of unlearning, to
be true. What to unlearn?
We must unlearn to expect something. We expect

good or bad events, success or failure, depending on
our inner program. We can change this program, yet
there is one step further which is truly revolutionary.
That's to get at the point where the inner program
has no more importance at all, because we quit ex-
pecting and are centered in what is.
This is not an idealistic quest or obligation. It is

what Zen is all about. Living without expectation but
with high input, high energy, high commitment.
224
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
If you are really and completely centered, com-

pletely attentive, there is no more space in you for
expectation.
225

Essay
All our child dreams have to be taken up again so

that they will take on their full poetic flight.
GASTON BACHELARD, GASTON BACHELARD, REVERIES

TOWARD CHILDHOOD, IN: RECLAIMING THE INNER CHILD,
ED. BY JEREMIAH ABRAMS, NYC: TARCHER & PUTNAM,
1990, 40 FF., 48.
There is a way from the outer adult to the inner

child. For some, this way is longer than the universe.
They have closed the well that is the joyful source of
creativity; they try and try harder, they achieve results,
but nothing outstanding, nothing worthwhile, and
nothing really satisfying. They are bored, tired of life,
weary. They have abandoned their inner child, and
with it, they have abandoned themselves.
I was one of them. I was lonely depressed, and

sad. There was no joy in my life, nothing exciting.
I could see no reason why I was living that life that

was like an empty shell. Instead I graded and up-
graded myself, I scored and improved constantly. I
exercised, I imitated, I felt it was worth the effort for a
226
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
moment, it seemed to give me value and I could feel

good, until the next depression. Because it did not
last, I fell back in my fragmentation after a short while.
Where was the poetic side of life, where was this

magic the poets were talking about? It was in the
books, well, yes, it was there in the stories of E.T.A.
Hoffmann, or of Gogol, in the novels of Dostojevski or
the poems of William Blakeand I loved it. But in my
life it was absent, there was no poetry and no love,
there were only obligations, things one had to do.
If it had only been for the money I could have un-

derstood: at least for that! But despite all my efforts,
money did not flow in either. So for what? For what,
after all this whole process of living?
The change came with a hypnotherapy and the

discovery of my inner child. Suddenly I thought that I
was right in what I essentially was standing for, that I
had been right all through those years, while feeling
miserable, small, and powerless.
So I setup regular dialogue sessions with my inner

child, and later on also with the other entities or ener-
gies. But the inner child opened the door, and without
227
having embraced and recovered my inner child en-

ergy, I am sure the other entities would not have
shown up.
Recovering my inner child gave me what I have

never felt before: a sense of completeness. Suddenly I
discovered that I could pass again an afternoon with-
out really doing something in a compulsive manner,
without spending my time with worthwhile occupa-
tion which had been a must-do for me, and that I
could just bebe with myself. That was a wonderful
new state of existence, just being with myself and my
inner child.
And then I discovered with surprise that the symp-

toms had disappeared along the way; I did not feel
nervous anymore. I did not feel I had to defend my-
self. My body felt warm and whole, whereas before it
seemed to consist of ten different parts that did not
belong together, cold and stiff as it was from my
childhood days.
It was as if with recovering my inner child I had re-

covered by body. Then, an explosion of creativity oc-
curred; it just happened. I wrote extensively, books,
poems, novels, stories, essays, films, a play, an auto-
228
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
biography, travel reports. I kept a diary and began

working with my dreams that I noted every night.
Sometimes I had up to seven dreams in one night.

The dreams were like films, full of color, and I met
many new people. I gave conferences, talked about
psychology, conducted seminars; my dream life was
much more vivid than my real life at that time. And
many times, my inner child would meet me in my
dreams and say words of wisdom.
I made spontaneous drawings, hundreds, and later

began with oil painting.
Today I am not perfect, not more and not less than

anybody else; but perhaps I am a little more myself, a
little more integrated, a little more content with what I
have and what I do than the masses who seem to
have borrowed their lives in a second-hand store.
I am not more and not less successful than others

either; others are richer, others are more at ease in
playing the big bosses; others are more surrounded
by great society.
229

Essay
Grown-ups write childrens stories too easily. Thus

they make childish fables. To enter into the fabulous
times, it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming
child.
GASTON BACHELARD, REVERIES TOWARD CHILDHOOD,

IN: RECLAIMING THE INNER CHILD, ED. BY JEREMIAH
ABRAMS, NYC: TARCHER & PUTNAM, 1990, 40 FF., 47.
The way we relate to children depends on our rela-

tionship to our inner child of the past. Many peoples
inner child is in a cataleptic state, wounded, autistic,
mute. If this is so, how can people then healthily re-
late to children?
Before I give an answer, let me ask a second ques-

tion: who in school was not under the pressure to
draw something recognizable, something the educa-
tor could fit in his or her barely imaginative mind?
And how imaginative we surely have been as chil-

dren! However, we were blocked in our artistic ex-
pression, not to say that we were denied to be artistic
at all.
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INNER CHILD ESSAYS
It was child play, they said, and with their typical

ignorant assuredness they added that child play is not
art! Not art?
Art, that was for the grown-ups, for the artists,

some very special people, situated far remote from
the normal human being!
Or did you have a teacher who considered the

production of the children in the art classes as art ?
If yes, you belong to the few who are lucky. In my

school, for example, not only the art and music
classes, but also the art and music teachers were de-
spised, ridiculed and belittled by the respectable sci-
ence teachers, the mathematicians, the philologists
and, of course, the sports teacher who was the most
important in school because he had the strongest
legs for kicking all the others. The school director had
always been either a mathematician or a philologist.
Never an art teacher.
And later, grown-up myself, and working as a

teacher, I was considered a heretic since I said that
children who express themselves with art are artists.
They laughed at me, at first, and then they grew jeal-
231
ous since they saw the successes that I had with what
they called my method.
Then they aggressed me, and at the end they

pushed me out. That was my history of teacherhood.
It was hardly different from my history of childhood
since the same reductionistnot to say fascistspirit
reigned there, and as you were different, child or
adult did not make much of a difference: you had to
suffer and eventually to leave. Open your own
school!, the more sympathetic ones said, then you
can implement your own method.
They did not understand that I had no method

and that it was just the fact that I had no method that
I was successful. This insight could not fit their world-
view of child dressage.
When we recover our inner child from the past, we

are facing again all those vicissitudes, but not in order
to get mad eternally with people or circumstances of
the pastwhile this might last a short time, and might
also be healthy in the process of inner child recovery
process.
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INNER CHILD ESSAYS
What happens is that we are beginning to parent

our neglected inner child, that we are taking over a
role our former educators could not assume, because
their own inner child was blocked. Maturity begins
with the care of what is most vulnerable, a new life or
a life within us that had been denied living.
When we do this, we are beginning to see children

in a different way. We will be much less influenced by
societal standard opinions regarding education and
we will be less affected by factors that condition our
relationships along the lines of a majoritarian world-
view or cultural mainstream paradigm. We will be
more open to display our full range of natural feelings
about togetherness; we then will rather spontane-
ously share warmth and affection with children we are
relating to and who relate to us.
Art is a wonderful means of sharing wonder; and it

is an experience that is healing at the same time. Do-
ing art work with children helps us to recover and heal
our own inner child.
I have rarely had this affectionate exchange within

school or day care settings where I have worked with
children for years. Most educators I was working with
233
have disturbed the innocent togetherness I had care-

fully built with the children and that is so essential for
sharing and expressing emotions. These educators,
women without exception, were regulating, com-
manding, supervising, inspecting, demanding, criticiz-
ing or vomiting pathetical praise that was as false and
as artificial as their whole being was.
Sharing with children on a heart level is an experi-

ence that nurtures the soul and contributes to the
growth not only of the children - but also of the edu-
cators.
Child Play
Essay
Opinions about inspirational art vary greatly. After

eight years of exposing this concept on the Internet, I
can say that the overwhelming part of humans totally
ignore it.
The low interest that the common web user has for
intellectual and artistic concepts and productions is a
sad fact in the virtual world.
234
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
And when things become even more esoteric and

a concept is presented that even in the non-virtual
world is known only to a tiny range of people, there is
but dead silence on your server. That is my web pub-
lishing reality, despite my efforts and the setup of my
inspirational art sites; thus this article is written for the
few interested in one of the most important topics of
creation.
There are two main definitions of inspirational art:

one is called spontaneous art, the other is what
nowadays is called channeled art and what in former
times was called inspired art or spirited art. I believe
that as in some many cases where our intellectual
mind splits life off in different parts that are only ap-
parently distinct, we are actually dealing with one and
the same thing. It is a mere fight about words to de-
fine inspirational art as either the product of a self-
hypnotic trance, or the infusion of a spirits wisdom, or
both.
Whatever theory we subscribe to for explaining

the fact, the way we have to bring about this connect-
edness is clear: it is through a special state of con-
sciousness that allows us to tap into our subconscious
235
potential or to open the door to another dimension of

existence.
And in both cases, there is something we receive,

something that was not there in our conscious mind
before we induced the trancewherever this some-
thing comes from. It is merely a matter of dialectic to
argue that either this something comes from our own
subconscious mind or that we tap into the collective
subconscious while being in trance, or else if another
consciousness, for example that of a spirit or ghost
reaches us.
Therefore I will not open this futile kind of discus-

sion here, but focus upon the matter in an empirical
way. The question thus is how to induce the trance
that enables us to open our consciousness to deeper
levels.
There are indeed people who pretend spontane-

ous art was a mere form of child play or childish be-
havior for adults. These ignorant people should be
advised with the old saying of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe that there are more things between heaven
and earth than school wisdom admits.
236
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
Inspirational art, then, is not for therapy purposes

only. Actually, all art inspired by genius is inspirational,
but on the other hand, there is inspirational art that
serves therapy purposes only and that does not need
to be of genius or even important.
Under therapy purposes I understand every pur-

pose that uses art with a specific practical purpose in
mind. Besides trauma treatment, liberation from ad-
diction or dependencies, sexual problems, perver-
sions, or depression, where spontaneous art success-
fully contributes to healing, spontaneous art is also a
great and powerful tool to enhance creativity. It there-
fore has got a strong position within personal growth
workshops all over the world.
In this essay I would like to deepen the other as-

pect of inspirational art, the side that is not concerned
about healing but that cares about art as such. Inspi-
rational art is art, there is no doubt about that. What
most people find disturbing in this form of art is that it
does not require any particular technique.
Let me give a personal example. I have seriously

studied piano playing at several conservatories in
Germany and the United States and with renowned
237
pianists and professors. However, all these studies led

only to very mediocre results. As long as I was practic-
ing piano, as long as I was putting effort in achieving
a brilliant technique, as long as I was playing etudes
and breaking my fingers off, I was not creative, not
productive, not original.
It all changed from the moment I left all that, after

some kind of heroic decision I had taken, a decision
that was extremely difficult to take since it sounded
utterly crazy, utterly childish, utterly unrealistic.
Already before that moment I had improvised, and

to my continuous surprise, people listened to my in-
nocent little productions wherever I was. Even when I
played in supermarkets, restaurants, hotel lobbies or
public places, I always got an applauding audience,
and I did not understand why?
When I then played some or the other classical

piece I had studied for years, I felt how quickly the at-
tention of my audience dropped, and I became nerv-
ous, which of course in turn negatively affected my
play. So this decision had been prepared in a way, in a
subtle way, and by little steps, steps that a small child
would take for learning to walk.
238
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
I had been careful indeed and therefore it has

taken me not only years but decades to realize my
own productions. I have learnt in the meantime that
this world, this mankind, in its current state of igno-
rance and brutality is not suggestible to this kind of
voices, and this is truly logical since more than 90% of
all people are not suggestible to their own inner
voices, their own inner intelligence and original po-
tential; since
this mankind is fixated on imitation, blindly follow-

ing heroes and authorities instead of everyone tap-
ping into their own individual uniqueness and fertility.
I have got over all the hurt and the frustration to

be utterly alone and to have no audience at all. I
know I have an audience among beings that are living
in other, more subtle dimensions and who have the
sensitivity and the taste to appreciate the highly ex-
pressive music that I have created. It is possible that
these beings have worked with me when I created, it
is even highly probable.
There are pieces that strongly remind Tchaikovsky,

others that remind Chopin, others again that remind
Rachmaninov. And yet, the whole is not at all an imita-
239
tion of existing music, but something entirely and dar-

ingly new and original. Although as I have stated
above, it was not child play to create this spontaneous
music nor the visual art I have created. But it would
not have been born if I had not adopted, at that time,
a childlike attitude, a playful attitude toward the
whole of my art production.
What I want to convey is that at that moment in my

life, I simply let go all I knew about technique in both
musical composing and drawing, and just created,
almost furiously and with a ferocious energy that was
partly fed by the pent-up frustration, anger and hate
that was the result of being rejected and ridiculed for
years by a highly stupid and insensitive environment.
Yes, I have suffered for my art, and it is perhaps for

this reason that I so strongly identify with it and so
dearly love it.
For the few of you who find an interest to read this

and who want to give it a try, I shall provide some ba-
sic guidelines how to setup an inspirational art ses-
sion, be it for the creation of visual art or spontaneous
composing.
240
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
First, please bear in mind that you need a prepara-

tion. You cannot just jump from a worldview that pre-
scribes watching the news every day, go to a physician
when you are sick, and otherwise absorb what others
think and say, to a mindset that recognizes that you
yourself and nobody else is the creator of the universe
you are living in. As long as you stay with the mass
mind, you remain a member of the mass, and you will
not be able to tap into more subtle forms of exis-
tence; for the treasure is not outside of you, but within
yourself. This source is hidden to you and remains
firmly locked as long as you do not change your
mindset and become more flexible.
Inducing self-hypnosis is now very commonplace

and there are lots of resources on the Internet that
prove its popularity. But self-hypnosis alone cannot
help you to become an inspirational artist, namely as
long as you stick to the wrong opinions and limita-
tions of the mass spirit.
Therefore, and for this reason only you need to

take an Ultimate Decision before you even think of
learning auto-hypnosis.
241
This decision cannot be a light-hearted one and it

needs to be a truly informed decision. That means
you have to get information about other resources of
knowledge first, about other forms of existence,
about more subtle energies than the one that has
created the physical world.
Without this knowledge indeed your endeavor will

be and remain child play; the lack of this basic infor-
mation which is only to get through the study and
practice of holistic truth, all your playing around with
hypnosis, self-suggestion, trance, or dream walking
will remain a mere distraction, another element in
your useless life, your senseless search for pleasure
and entertainment.
This being said and assuming that you belong to

an even smaller minority, here are the basic steps to
take after you have got this information and have
taken your Ultimate Decision:
1) Prepare for change in all matters of your life and

do understand that attachment to past forms of exis-
tence hinders your progress;
242
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
2) Setup in your mind a dream world of your liking,

or at least a favorite place you like to come home to
in secret moments;
3) Induce self-hypnosis using a technique that I

have developed and that combines creative writing
with music;
4) Take a seat at a desk that you like, put either

paper or your computer, choose a silent moment,
plug out the phone, light some incense and a candle;
listen to classical or chamber music, preferably Ba-
roque or early Classics like Bach, Telemann, Mozart or
Vivaldi, or else, if you prefer, Debussy, Franck, or
Rachmaninov, piano trios, string quartets or quintets.
Listen to this music using high-quality headphones or
speakers. If you are nervous, prepare a glass of wine
that you put next to your paper, typewriter or com-
puter, but only one glass, and no strong alcohol.
Sit down and take three deep breaths, then taste

your wine or else let the music fill your entire being
with enchantment, close your eyes and get to your
favorite please and then, when you are ready and not
before, write as quickly as you can and without ever
correcting anything: one page. Write a story, either
243
invented or something that has happened to you or

that you lived through, or else a story featuring some-
body else but that has once greatly moved you. Only
one page, but in a style you may have never practiced
before, fast, fast, so that one thought directly links to
another, associates to another while your inner ob-
server has no time, not even a fraction of a second, to
interrupt this daring flow of thought. Do not fight the
upcoming emotions, even though they maybe dis-
turbing you, maybe violent, negative or of an obscene
kind. Do not fight the rage or depression, the feelings
of humiliation or hurt that you may invoke in your
story. Fight nothing and accept all! Usually, when your
page is full and your glass empty, you will sit there in
your sweat, feeling hot and heavy: that is the moment
you are in trance. Now you may stop the experience,
or move to a piano or a set of drawing equipment you
have prepared, depending on which kind of inspira-
tional art you would like to engage in, or else you may
continue writing if before all, you have an interest in
writing. Please do not be confused that negative feel-
ings, that rage, anger or hate are the emotions that
have come up or now come up after your writing. You
may not have expected this to happen, but please let
244
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
me assure you that a high percentage of my musical

and visual art creations were born out of feelings of
extreme anger and rage, when my head was glowing
and I was sweating out of all my pores. This tempes-
tuous rage is the expression of our inner revolt
against humiliation that we have suffered, and surely
this rage is among the greatest and most powerful
energies for our inspirational creations. Therefore it
takes some courage to engage in this experience,
and it will certainly be the first step in a tremendous
inner growth process. Our pent-up negative emotions
are mountains of unused energy; to mobilize them for
creative and constructive purposes is among the best
we can do during our lifetime. I even believe that this
is a way to resolve past-life karma. What keeps us at-
tached to past lives is unresolved anger and hate and
feelings of revenge for the humiliations we have suf-
fered that we cannot forget or pardon. To prepare the
process of forgiveness, we had to reactivate the emo-
tion that is blocked within our subconscious mind.
That is the only way to solve past conflicts once for all.
Without combining a process of inner healing with art
creation, art will always remain cold and artificial,
something I call MuseFun or Museum Fun, but not
245
the cathartic experience that has given birth to all our

great art creations that incarnate human genius. You
too are a genius since you share the immense poten-
tial that we are all part of.
This potential is at your disposition once you dare

to reject the manipulative and palliative spell that
mass culture throws upon all of us and that hinders
our way to truly be and become ourselves.
Without crawling through your deepest trauma,

you will not be able to levitate into your highest
heaven. That is what we were: frogs; that is what we
are going to be: princes, as in the fairy tale, because
all fairy tales express truth, inner truth, and its up to
us to incarnate that inner truth in the living flesh of our
life so that it becomes tangible reality.
246
INNER CHILD ESSAYS

Essay
This essay introduces into a higher form of creativ-

ity in order to gain access to a world of expression
that is outside of the personal ego and all conscious
memory.
For those who wish to enhance their inspirational

powers, I will give some guidelines.
The first step in this process is to be able to re-

ceive inspired messages from the quantum field or
invisible realm. The second step, then, is to learn to
incarnate those messages through the means of art
and literary expression into the time-bound dimen-
sion.
Artists are mediums. Yet most of us do not con-

sider them as such. We have split off from our daily
reality most of the once united realms of existence.
We imprison them into tiny categories, and thus cas-
trate their power, belittling their existence and reduc-
ing them to what we call para-sciences. We talk of
parapsychology, paranormal or supernatural powers,
247
on one hand, and of art, of science, of knowledge, on

the other; while truly all these powers are simply natu-
ral powers.
This was very different in Antiquity where the

sages and hierophants knew and practiced science
and art as a whole that encompassed what dualistic
thought concepts have later split off from it. The
whole, unified, body of knowledge was called phi-
losophy.
Life was considered a mystery, composed, like a

secret mosaic, of a multitude of elements, all inter-
woven on a macrocosmic as well as a microcosmic
level.
The sage could read the signs of the body, of na-

ture; he was in subtle and synchronistic communica-
tion with all surrounding forces, nature, animals, the
four elements: water, fire, wind and earth, as well as
the ether. He was scientist, astrologer, artist, poet,
healer, and clown, but first of all medium, channel for
the messages coming from the invisible world. Ratio
and emotions were not separate experiences for him,
but different expressions of one and the same human
nature.
248
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
I am deeply convinced that human beings are

genius without difference, that we all have the poten-
tial of sages, and that we can develop our innate gen-
ius, our completeness, by opening our mind, enrich-
ing it and training it.
What is essential at the outset is that we have the

will and integrity to burst our nutshell of mediocrity
and grow out of the herd, the securing groups that
are the graves of the complete human.
We are living in times of turmoil and fundamental

change in all areas of life. And there is more interest
than ever before to rediscover the true wisdom of the
mystery school as they existed in the Antique world
wisdom that brings happiness!
Nietzsche said that mankind lost its happiness

when the moralistic era of human history began. (Ni-
etzsche meant platonic idealism and the trend since
early Christianity to restrict or even deny the pleasures
of the body). This tendency went together with a striv-
ing for perfection, first of all technological perfection.
Technical skills became highly valued and appreci-

ated whereas spontaneous forms of expression and
249
creation were more and more belittled. The truth is

however that what is genius never is merely technical!
When we admire today the highly complex music

of Johann Sebastian Bach, we often forget that most
of this music has been created when Bach was impro-
vising on the organ. Bachs mastership is first of all a
mastership of spontaneous improvisation. The same
we know about Mozart and Beethoven.
Spontaneous art has no pretension to be com-

pared to classical artworks. It is devoid of pretension
at all since it does not indulge in comparisons and
does not intend to be honored or awarded. Its pri-
mary root, its motor is not a longing for recognition or
applause but deriving pleasure from the simplicity of
living expression. Spontaneous art is a manifestation
of the joy of life!
The interesting fact is that once freed from the

prison of planned activity, and indulging in spontane-
ous art, we can attain mastership in it! This sounds
paradoxical! Yet it is the truth. The spontaneous crea-
tor within, our inner child, is unlimited in its potential.
250
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
During spontaneous creating our brain is not

switched off. In the contrary, it works at a higher and
more integrated level as usually (when we use it for
mere thinking). Therefore it is possible and even the
rule that after a while of truly thoughtless and enjoy-
able artistic activity, certain repetitive patterns estab-
lish in our way of doing.
These patterns can have two different origins.

They can represent fixed behavior patterns or obses-
sions that we express in a symbolic metaphorical way.
They can also be the manifestation of the continuous
tendency of our brain to establish behavior patterns
that lead to perfection.
Routines are such patterns. While they often im-

pede us from finding new creative solutions, they en-
hance our perfection in the accomplishment of certain
tasks. We need them in order to work out our initial
(spontaneous) creations or ideas.
Basically we have the choice of two alternatives

when we practice spontaneous art:
Leave our artworks as they are, sketch-like, in

raw form and often unfinished, or
251
Work them out until perfection.
When I do spontaneous art, I generally leave my

drawings as they are after the few minutes of sponta-
neous creation. Yet with music this is sometimes dif-
ferent. In some cases, after having spontaneously
played and computer-recorded new music, I post-
produced it, arrange it, joined effects, and finally pro-
duced it in the form of an audio CD.
The post-production of my initial musical ideas

takes an incomparably longer time than the time of
their invention, and there is effort linked to this post-
production while the spontaneous creation is without
any effort.
This is an interesting fact since it reflects typically

the relationship between creation and perfection, be-
tween idea and realization or, as Bach put it, between
composition and transcription. Every composition is a
transcription, said Bach. He meant that the composi-
tion never is completely identical with the original
idea because ideas or inspirations are holistic and by
far surpass our human understanding.
252
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
Our ideas belong to a realm different than this

earth plane and its limitations, and to melt them into
the time-bound form of this dimension lets them
loose a greater or lesser amount of their original
grandeur and originality. Therefore it can be said that
every artist is a medium, a transformer of ideas and
concepts into the material visible world.
Art is not defined by a particular technique and its

value is certainly not dependent on the mastership of
a technique. Many people, however, confuse art and
technique. They think art was only something which is
produced by a master, a master of a technique, a
painting technique, the mastership of some musical
instrument, the mastership in photography, and so on.
Yet this is definitely not so. Otherwise children could
never be artists. And there would certainly not be any
naive art, and probably a great part of the abstract
painting neither.
In general, in the international art world, art is de-

fined as any human expression that was done with an
artistic intention. One of the more recent art forms,
the happening, is undoubtedly recognized as serious
art, if one personally appreciates it or not. Enveloping
253
the Reichstag in Berlin with aluminum paper and sub-

sequently taking the envelope off so that people may
see that building with new eyes, is art.
What is more specific for the spontaneous artist is

his conscious choice not to be bound by a technique
in order to enjoy the utmost freedom of expression.
This rule or premise may sound strange for those who
adhere to the concept of mastership. Yet art is not per
se related to mastership.
Some people find it very unusual to conceive the

idea of producing art in a rather spontaneous way,
without a kind of planned long-term work on a par-
ticular art project, and without applying complex skills
or a specific technique, which has to be learned over
many years. Yet spontaneous art is since about the
1960s recognized as a serious form of art. It has
mainly been developed by the so-called DADA-
movement, a group of avant-garde artists who ex-
perimented with new forms of art.
The outcome of those experiments was some-

times a bit extreme. However, this does not mean that
we are extremists if we enjoy spontaneous creation!
254
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
Many of us today want to discover our original

creativity and break out, for moments at least, of our
daily routines and stresses. We wish to rediscover the
lost innocence of childhood and play. Playing is very
important for everyone, not only for children. In the
United States and in Japan the method of learning by
playing is now well established and taught in private
schools and institutes. Some years ago, if you had
talked about it to business people, they would have
taken it for a joke! And now seminars for managers in
Learning by playing are maintained in many private
institutions.
Spontaneous painting and composing is a form of

playing. It is not learning by playing in the strict sense,
since we do not indulge in it for learning purposes
(except learning about ourselves). If you want to know
yourself better, you are very well advised to practice
spontaneous art. You do not need to share it with
others, if you think you expressed, in your spontane-
ous creations, something too private, it is completely
up to you if you consider this activity as an intimate
dialog with your inner self, or if you like to make a lit-
tle game out of it, or an amusement party. Some of us
really need to learn playing again. Simply because
255
they are out of touch with their inner child; however,

the inner child is not dead, while it may be mute or
cataleptic. It may sleep only, like the princess of the
German fairy tale Sleeping Beauty (Dornrschen) who
slept some years until the kiss of a young prince woke
her up to life. After her long sleep, she got a better
life, not a lonely one that she had lived before when
she was enchanted by the witch, but a happy life, a
life that she shared with her prince and probably with
children.
No method or technique is necessary to learn

playing, except relaxing and letting go! Simply give it
a try and relax, and let everything happen. And this is
what we now want to do together: Please get a quite
spacious block with white drawing paper and a set of
color pencils. I invite you to play with these colors and
this paper, to forget all what you might have learned
in school about drawing and all this questioning
What is that, what does it represent...?
No painting or drawing has per se to represent

something. There is no obligation, no rule and no law
that drawing means drawing the visible reality. We can
draw invisible things, dreams, or just impressions of
256
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
our inner life, feelings, emotions We can use colors

to symbolize these emotions. And we do not need to
think about this process at all. We can just do it intui-
tively, spontaneously, with a peaceful and joyful mind,
and not for any goal or achievement, but for the sake
of pure joy!
Another exciting application of spontaneous art is

spontaneous composing. I invite all of you to com-
pose spontaneously a little piece of music, for exam-
ple on your sound card synthesizer or your keyboard
or any other acoustic or electronic instrument you
have at your disposition. Just enjoy yourself doing this
and recording, or not, your music. If you are familiar
with MIDI, do not try to compose difficult pieces with
many tracks at once. Multi-track work is quite a tech-
nical thing and needs lots of practice and experience.
You do not need to work out your initial ideas, but

if you wish to, you can learn doing this and acquire
the necessary skills. Then you can work out your spon-
taneous inspirations to various musical pieces.
This is called post-production work or arrange-

ment. Many musicians proceed nowadays in this two-
257
step process in creative musical production. I have

composed all my music in this way.
The invisible artist is in all of us. Every single hu-

man being has creative impulses. Yet often these im-
pulses, these creative intuitions remain unperceived,
and therefore undeveloped.
Our subconscious mind has a unique faculty of

adaptation. If it knows that we do not want those in-
tuitions, those creative impulses, that we are bothered
with them (because we are too lazy or to busy with
our daily routines and obligations), it will stop sending
them. On the other hand, if we listen to our inner
voice and follow once up to such intuitive insight or
impulse, once or twice, then our subconscious mind
will send us many more of those impulses.
Let us reflect a moment about the question why

we humans produce art. This has many reasons. One
main reason why we produce art certainly is the natu-
ral feeling of happiness that goes along with the reali-
zation of our creative impulses and desires.
Please try it out for yourself and do not spoil this

natural happiness (which is similar to the spontaneous
258
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
happiness of children). The best way to destroy this

innocence is to worry about how others would appre-
ciate your creations or if your work will have an artistic
future or not. All this kind of worries and doubts suf-
focates our artistic flame. This flame is in most of us
very small and almost put down with smoke. It lacks
oxygen in order to really burn highly and brightly. This
oxygen is our natural happiness and freedom of wor-
ries, freedom of intellectual skepticism, freedom also
of inferiority feelings and self-criticism.
We never, and I repeat it, never have any reason to

belittle ourselves or put our Inner Artist in a secret
corner. The fact that this Inner Artist is invisible does
not mean that this creative force should be hidden or
disguised. Art can only make us happy if we accept it
to be a natural enrichment of our lives, without pre-
tension, but also without inferiority complexes.
Art is a mirror for us, since it shows us many facets

of our personalities, many hidden corners of our
mind. It shows us truth about ourselves, a truth which
is steadily moving and changing, since we are chang-
ing, ever-changing beings. There are not two days in
our lives where we are the same persons!
259
This mirror function of art can raise our creativity

potential in an unforeseen way. If we are engaged in
business, in a university career, in a technical profes-
sion, if we are doctors or dentists, or artists, we need
to know ourselves in order to know others. And this
knowledge is an often-underestimated part of our
professional and social success! It is not so much our
particular professional knowledge, which makes us
winners, superior in relation to our competitors. It is
this particular knowledge about life, which is self-
knowledge. Our creativity is induced by art, but it is
not forcibly artistic creativity.
To give an example: If you are a sales manager,

lets say for cars, you will probably not be interested
to follow a workshop on spontaneous art in order to
indulge the next six weeks in spontaneous painting
and composing, putting aside all your professional
activity in selling cars. You will want to get new inspi-
rations through art activity, through the workshop, not
for art itself, but for car selling. Or you may be a bank
director and yet engage once in a while in painting.
Why? Because you may feel comfortable in this leisure
time activity, and you do not bother if your paintings
are not put in museums or renowned art exhibitions.
260
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
You may just feel good and relaxed composing lines

and colors on a canvas. Of course, in your daily life as
a bank director, in your work, you will most probably
not have to deal with painting but rather with the
movements of financial markets and credit rates, but
the creative impulses you get during painting will con-
tinue coming while he is doing banking!
Why is that so? Because once we are united with

our creative source, our true potential, this source,
this potential is available in whatever we undertake,
and at any time. This is very important to know: the
door we once open will remain open. Once we are
connected to our creative potential, we will remain
connected to it in all fields of our life, in all what we
do and what we want to achieve.
This means that if you engage in spontaneous art,

your higher creativity potential will sooner or later
positively affect all your professional or private activi-
ties. You will observe that in your business, your re-
search, your daily work, you are more inventive, more
original, more daring and more productive than your
competitors or your colleagues. And this even though
you may not have the professional perfection than
261
one or the other of your competitors has got; because

you will compensate for this lack of perfection by be-
ing more creative, more original, more productive,
more effective and, last not least, more happy!
True happiness is the strongest force that exists.

For truly happy people there are no obstacles to
achievement, for the happy person receives help and
support from everybody. Simply because we all like to
have happy people around us! That is why people
who irradiate happiness and positive energy find
many friends and have much support in life. They do
not have many a problem that negative people are
struggling with simply because their path of life is so
totally different, so much smoother and focused than
that of ordinary people!
Spontaneous art has made me happy, also be-

cause it was for me the mirror of my true self. Before, I
tried, just like so many other, to imitate great musi-
cians, to achieve high perfection levels by exercising,
with all the inherent frustrations. These frustrations are
obstacles to happiness.
Some of us become very proud that they master

this or that technique, be it in art, in sport or in busi-
262
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
ness. They are proud as a compensation for all the

frustrations they went through until being a master.
Their pride is a defense and keeps them still more

away from true happiness, which is pure joy and inno-
cence.
Spontaneous art has the precious effect to de-

velop our innocence, so that we can let go and accept
life and ourselves as what we are when we put all our
titles, our status and our achievements away for a
moment.
Giving up voluntarily our defenses and becoming

like the children for some moments of spontaneous
creation makes us very strong and very healthy. Be-
cause these defenses are detrimental to our wellbe-
ing and our development into wholeness.
263

Essay
All violence we see in the world is but our inner

violence projected outside. Violence begins inside. It
is a way to escape from facing life, from facing con-
flicts, contradictions, oppositions and all we do not
really understand. It is the result of a denial, the denial
to look inside and explore who we really are and what
our inner landscape looks like.
Religions and ideologies of whatever kind have

gradually but decidedly got us on the wrong path.
They have alienated us from our own inner wisdom
which is understanding life in its complexity.
Understanding life and ourselves is based upon

holistic perception, a form of knowledge gathering
that is characterized by our two brain hemispheres
working in sync. Instead, mankind has hypertrophied
the left brain hemisphere, yang qualities, logical
thought, reasoning and deductive processes, to the
detriment of the qualities of the right brain, or yin
qualities, associative thought, fantasy and inductive
processes.
264
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
More and more alienated from his inner self, man

has searched for outside sense-givers in the form of
organized religion and ideologies. These organiza-
tions have in common that they have erected author-
ity to judge what is right and wrong. They have re-
placed natural self-regulation by moralistic behavior
norms. They feared and oppressed the individual and
minorities, divided true collectiveness into the in-
group and the out-group, and empowered the in-
group by systematically breeding dominator group
pressure. Individual wisdom became marginalized and
even persecuted. They established schools, engaged
in mass alphabetization and missionarism, gradually
undermined parental authority and came to more and
more disregard the individual creative continuum of
each and every child.
They slaughtered those who knew better, the na-

tive populations and ethnic minorities who, through
their historic struggle have gained more wisdom than
most majorities.
They created the hero cult, a single male god they

called Yahweh, patriarchy, male dominance and all the
rest of it. This happened long before the division of
265
the three religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It is

part of our cultural heritage.
This culture cannot help us to find peace because

it has never practiced peace. In the contrary, it has
systematically bred violence through an obsession for
control that is the result of its disregard for pleasure
and permissiveness and its insane rejection of the fe-
male principle.
Peace comes along with dialogue and under-

standing, not with practicing persecution and control,
with respecting nature and not through violating na-
ture, through accepting differences and not through
holy wars that are out to bring more standards, more
uniformity and more stupidity for all.
What we really need cannot be brought about

through any outside action or revolution, but only, as
Krishnamurti has so clearly shown us, through a psy-
chological revolution from inside.
All violence begins inside and is first of all a lack of

inner communication, of inner dialogue. Self-
knowledge comes with seeing the truth that all out-
side sense-givers, authorities and powers cannot re-
266
INNER CHILD ESSAYS
veal us our inner nature and cannot change our inner

landscape. It comes through abandoning all attach-
ment to those outside authorities, through establish-
ing trust in the self-regulating wisdom of nature, the
wisdom in all-that-is.
As all violence is first of all inner violence, all peace

is created by inner peace that is gradually projected
outward, in the form of wistful action, fruitful coopera-
tion, healing and respectful dialogue.
This, in turn, brings about solutions, true solutions,

not the fake solutions that are brought about through
so-called political action that is cunning and deceitful.
Once we see that evolution comes from inside, we

might open up to relearning the vocabulary of love
instead of engaging in the next holy state war against
drugs, pedophiles, terrorists or other poison contain-
ers. It is through seeing and acknowledging our own
self-delusions, our own antisocial desires and han-
gups and our own inner violence that we gradually
begin to clean up the mess inside and begin to un-
derstand life through understanding our own oppo-
sites. This understanding might be painful once we
abandon our inner drug addictions which are our
267
thousand beliefs in technological progress, ma-

chismo, physical prowess, racial superiority and all the
other forms of I-am-better-than-you.
This painful awakening is the beginning of wis-

dom, and the journey into a new and peaceful life-
style. It is what brings about humility.
This attitude listens to our opponents instead of

shooting or shouting them down, knowing that we
have got a part of their worldview in us and that, thus,
we can empathetically bond with their inner and outer
tragedies.
And then, change can come about, also outside,

peacefully and totally uncontrolled.
268
Inner Child FAQ
Inner Child Recovery and Healing FAQ
Q. What is the inner child? I have to bring up six

children and never heard of such a thing.
A. The inner child is a psychic entity, not some-

thing you can see or hear. It is a part of your mind or
your emotions, your inner self. You can access it
through a specific kind of dialogue with your inner
voices called voice dialogue or inner dialogue.
____________
Q. Why should I engage in this kind of work? I do

not see the use of it. I find it could rather disturb me
or even drive me crazy. I heard about people who
hear voices and I think theyre off-track.
A. There is not much information let alone educa-

tion in our society about accessing and using our in-
ner potential. The general setup of mainstream cul-

ture is obsessed with what is at the periphery of our
being, i.e. distraction, pleasure, routines, securing
habits, consumption, striving for outward recognition,
status or material wealth. Therefore, it is after all not
astonishing that all this sounds rather strange to you.
The only information most of you got about mental
health is information about mental sickness. From the
pathological you attempt to derive conclusions for
the healthy. That this can never lead to true under-
standing is kind of logical, no? You cant find the
pearls if you look for them in pig stalls because usu-
ally in pig stalls there are no pearls. If you are enough
motivated to look for pearls you will find the places
where to get them or the people who want to share
them with you.
____________
Q. What advantage does it bring to recover my

inner child?
A. It brings you the only unique true advantage

you can have in your life: to become yourself. It brings
you an explosion of creativeness, an ongoing creative
270
INNER CHILD FAQ
drive and a passion for living that you have never

known before.
____________
Q. If it is something so extraordinary, why is there

nothing about it on TV or in the common news?
A. About all true and valuable things there is al-

most nothing in the mass media or the news. Have
you never observed that? If youd live up to yourself,
youd live a life totally different from the kind of life
you are living now. And you would surely not need so
much of the stuff you are now addicted to. For the
least, you would be much more discriminative in your
consumption. For most of you, the limits are set by
your budget only. If you were not so poor and so shal-
low for the most part, youd live very destructive lives,
full of danger, and you would not live long. Its your
lacking budget that keeps you from living the life you
wish to and to engage in all the sins you are dreaming
of. Surely, if youd do it youd be better off because
from the indulgence you would develop more wisdom
to turn back to what is true, than from your present
restrictions. So, instead of going this long way for
learning (as many rich people have to go in fact), you
271
can take a shortcut and acquire wisdom through con-

necting with your inner child. You will then see how
much of all what you think you need you dont need
at all. And how much from what you think you dont
need you truly need. And from this insight a kind of
freedom and joy will arise that you never thought
were possible in this life!
____________
Q. This sounds like some kind of religious quest,

and not just something related to psychology!
A. Religionthe word comes from the Latin re-

ligio which means something like back-link. Yes, in
this true and original sense of the word, the quest to
recover and heal your inner child is a truly religious
quest.
____________
Q. What do I have to do to heal my inner child?

Does it mean I have to listen to my inner voices? I
have intuitions every day but mostly disregard them.
How does the inner child manifest?
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INNER CHILD FAQ
A. This is an intriguing question, and a very impor-

tant one. Most of us, perhaps all of us, have creative
intuitions every day. In fact, what we get are glimpses
from our Higher Self that always tries to help us and
to lead us to higher achievements and a more com-
plete life. However, most of us, under the spell of a
life-denying and totally ignorant education, disregard
those godly voices and therefore lead dull and un-
creative lives. The inner child manifests through those
voices, at least in some of them. However, to accept
this input in your life, you must free yourself from all
prejudice, from all this idiotic toughness that this hero
culture blows you up with every day. This very tough-
ness, this stupid aggressiveness, this lack of gentle-
ness and sensitivity makes you judge your inner child
as an intruder, when it tries to manifest. The work,
then, is first one of emptying you of all the garbage
that this no-culture has filled you up with. This is part
of my work, of our work if you commit to it.
____________
Q. What kind of garbage are you talking about?
A. The thoughts that are not yours; the sullied

opinions about life, about sex, about love that haunt
273
your mind; the reject of those whom you call offend-

ers but who are humans like you and me; the stupid-
ity that consists in splitting the world off in good and
bad ones, virtuous and unvirtuous ones, lovers and
rapists, citizens and terrorists, good ones and bad
ones, while in reality we are always both good and
bad, virtuous and not virtuous. You are garbage as
long as you think garbage thoughts. You are insensi-
tive as long as you dont ward off against the subtle
messages you are absorbing all day long while watch-
ing TV, shopping in your malls, talking to your physi-
cian and accepting his advice without the slightest
hint of an idea that you yourself could possibly be
your best doctor! This garbage is real and its in you.
Your inner child is suffocated with it and as long as
you dont do something about that, you will never
succeed in recovering it and being united with its sub-
tle truth.
____________
Q. It seems that your work asks your clients to be

critical with regard to our culture. Is that right?
A. I only give examples. I do not blame anything

or anybody. Critical is not the right word. I would say
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INNER CHILD FAQ
alert, watchful. And the garbage is not just in our cul-

ture. Its everywhere. Its what results when we lie to
each other, when truth is some kind of luxurious ta-
boo, when honesty becomes a sin because it dam-
ages business. But can you imagine the business you
can do if you are bold and truthful with your custom-
ers...? Perhaps you would like to, but if you are not
bold and truthful with yourself, you cant be with oth-
ers. Thats so simple yet who lives up to it? This cul-
ture asks you to first think of others before you think
of yourself. This is the first and most destructive of all
lies about life. You cant do that because its not hu-
man, because its simply fake. As long as you do not
recognize fake as fake, pseudo-religion as pseudo-
religion and make-belief as make-belief, you cannot
realize true life, true religion, and true belief in your
life. Thats what I mean when I say that you have to
empty your inner garbage first.
____________
Q. What is the best approach when engaging in

voice dialogue? Is it to do some kind of creative writ-
ing or spontaneous drawing, or perhaps improvising
275
on the piano first? Is it to do some kind of relaxation

or meditation?
A. We are very different in our ways to connect to

our source. Some of us only need to focus a moment
and theyre connected (geniuses do it that way), oth-
ers need a kind of ritual or even some kind of relaxa-
tion technique in order to open up to our subtle
voices. I try to keep a distance to my own method
which I will nonetheless present here as one possible
wayand do my best to offer you alternative choices
so that you can see for yourself what works best for
you. I think it is of paramount importance that you see
your options before you begin because much dam-
age can be done and is actually done when people
use consciousness-enhancing techniques that are
contrary to their inner setup. Again, we are all very dif-
ferent and you should use your discretion and your
smart to take what you feel is good for you, and to
reject what you feel is strange to you. Whatever gets
you to connect, use it! But to repeat: you can only feel
whats right for you if youre free of the garbage. Oth-
erwise you feel nothing because youre numb.
____________
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INNER CHILD FAQ
Q. Do I have to do this work on my inner child for

a long time, or can a short therapy or auto-therapy
do?
A. I have done the work during around two years,

but very thoroughly. After that, I did not do it again. I
mean I did not do the recovery or healing work or the
dialogues again. Its as if from that timethat was fif-
teen years agoI was connected. I just create, create,
create. I cant catch up with my inner drive, my crea-
tive ideas. Its too much and I just cant follow. My lists
of things to do grows longer and longer and Im ex-
cited every morning about the new day and new in-
spirations I get. I can only realize a tiny part of it.
Thats a creative life, I guess. I have not one minute
free. I have never expected that when I first engaged
in that work. Never. And until now there is nobody, no
friend, no parent, no reader of any of my writings who
has ever grasped the greatness of that revolution in
my life. It is pure beauty, pure joy and pure excite-
ment every day. What I want to say is that I have no
reward for this work, no recognition socially, financially
or as an author. But I do not need this reward to see
the gigantic fruit of this work. I can offer only support
for those who can help themselves, not those who
277
want to continue leading fake lives and buying into

ideas instead of realizing their own truth. I cannot and
will not give you truth. I tell you a story. Thats all. It
depends on you what you make out of itcall it ther-
apy, inner awakening, truth, or whatever.
____________
Q. Do you think that children have already an inner

child?
A. Psychologists say that the inner child is created

between our 7th and 14th year of life. I guess a small
child is all-around one and not divided yet in inner en-
tities. It lives in the bliss of unity which, later on, be-
comes a quest because, strangely, it gets lost. Only
true geniuses never lose it. I see no break in the lives
of, for example, Leonardo, Picasso, or Einstein. There
was this continuity from the start. For most of us, and
perhaps because we have been abused, there is a
split occurring somewhere around the years of our
puberty or adolescence. This split causes a wound
that needs healing. Some never survive it. When I left
high school, three of my school friends committed
suicide when they just had entered university. For ex-
actly that reason. They could not bear the hurt any
278
INNER CHILD FAQ
longer and they did not want to wait until they were
ripe to begin the self-healing. I lived through that
misery, and it was the worst I have experienced in my
life.
____________
Q. You are using the expression bliss which re-

minds me of what Joseph Campbell wrote about it.
Are you familiar with his writings or did they have an
impact on your work?
A. Yes, definitely. I feel very close to Joseph

Campbell and find him one of the most extraordinary
and outstanding scholars of our time. I have learned
so much from him! And his writings have fully con-
firmed my own work with inner child recovery and the
conclusions I derived from it. Sometimes I found my
view too daring, too aggressive, but after reading
Campbell I found I was much too conservative still.
For what I say, Campbell said fifty years agoand in
public.
____________
Q. Do you think its a matter of IQ to do inner child

recovery or voice dialogue? I remember that Freud
279
wrote about his work that he could not engage in

psychoanalytic treatment with patients of very low IQ.
A. Thats a good question. Its funny enough, but

this attitude of psychoanalytic doctors is exactly what
has driven so many people away from this technique.
Many say its a mental exercise or some kind of intel-
lectual checkers with the soul. You see, typically, the
therapists who engage in inner child recovery are
hypnotherapists, transactional therapists or gestalt
therapists, and they stress the importance of a non-
intellectual, emotional approach. They also say its not
a matter of IQ, but of commitment. That is exactly my
view. I usually found that therapists who take this ap-
proach are not very much fond of classical psycho-
analysis. That is all I can say about this subject. But
that does not mean that I am against psychoanalysis. I
think a smart therapist is flexible as to the approaches
he uses and primarily orients the therapy according to
the individual setup of the patient. Not everything fits
for everyone. But, of course, this needs very high
qualification. I stress to inform my readers in all my
publications that I am not a mental health profes-
sional and not going to be one. To repeat it, I tell you
a story, thats all.
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INNER CHILD FAQ
____________
Q. Are there professional publications you spe-

cially recommend?
A. Yes, of course there are. Brilliant works have

been published that I can highly recommend, and
that you find in the Bibliography. But please behold:
its two pairs of shoes to intellectually grasp and enjoy
the knowledge or to really do the work. The knowl-
edge may prepare the work, it may do away with
wrong opinions and even help to empty you of some
of the garbage. But it can never replace the getting-
in-touch and the actual dialogue with your inner child.
____________
Q. Do you have a kind of program or, lets say, a

method that works for most people and that helps to
get them connected in a most effective way?
A. I am sorry I do not have that kind of trick and I

am not going to develop it. I already said above that I
do not offer quick fixes. There are certainly gurus who
are going to sell you that, for a few thousand bucks,
and they have big names and beautiful name cards. I
know that many of you will run after them.
281
____________
Q. Is it so tricky, then, to get this work done?
A. Its not tricky. Its genuine. Your inner child is not

a fool although you, in your capacity as a consumer,
may be one. Your inner child will see the trick and
hide even more, or you can really get it to remain
mute. To come with a quick fix means you will lose
your inner childs potential trust right from the start.
But please, you run your life, and I do not hold you
back running after those gurus who promise you eve-
rything provided you have enough cash.
____________
Q. What is the best approach, then?
A. Its to be receptive and innocent. Its to forget

what you have done in your life before and to come
with what in Zen is called a beginners mind. Thats
promising for the work and it leads to results. The in-
ner child is responsive to this attitude. It is deeply
moved by humility.
____________
Q. Are you humble?
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INNER CHILD FAQ
A. I dont know. I observed that people who did

not understand me called me arrogant. But through
connecting to my inner child and through the experi-
ence to see it so responsive when I was honest and
down-to-earth, I learnt that humility is not just a word,
but actually a way of facing the world. I am still quite
ambitious but I guess I am more humble than before
the work. And I feel a lot better. I can say that humility
is something that really feels good. It makes you so
much more receptive for yourself and others. Its not
very exciting to be in war all the time, you know! Its
not fun to always strive to be superior. It consumes a
lot of energy, too. I found that humility and simplicity
are true secrets. I learned them from my inner child
after I had read the Dao De Ching. I could understand
Lao-tzu only after I had done the work. He cannot be
understood intellectually.
____________
Q. Do you think that people that appear as truly

happy, creative and successful and a bit carefree are
well connected to their inner child?
A. Yes. I think all truly creative people act first of all

with their inner child energy. They give priority to this
283
voice before they listen to the other voices such as

the inner parent or the inner adult. That does not
mean that they do not listen to the other voices at all.
That would be foolish! But they would not just reject
an idea from their inner child because their inner par-
ent is against it. They would ponder the idea further
and, to be sure, fix it on paper so that it does not get
lost. Its not always appropriate to act out the ideas of
the inner child; the wisdom is to take this voice seri-
ous enough as to consider the ideas and creative in-
tuitions that it provides. Later, it is a good thing to
double-check those ideas with the inner parent and
the inner adult. Thats the best way of doing it, and
those creative and successful people, be they film-
makers, actors, singers or famous business people do
all of that intuitively. They do it naturally. Genius be-
gins there, and nowhere else. On the dollar note is
written In God we Trust. In reality it says In the Inner
Child We Trust. Its synonymous. And its the key for
success. The dollar note says the truth. Thats perhaps
why its such a successful currency...?
____________
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INNER CHILD FAQ
Q. Can there be negative reactions to inner child

recovery? I think of depressions or a shock-like situa-
tion when trauma is remembered that was formerly
repressed?
A. This is a major issue that must be addressed.

Yes, to be true, this danger is real. All can happen, in
fact. Depressions are frequent and there can be
shock. But I would not call these reactions negative.
In the contrary, they are genuinely positive. They are
necessary in most cases. As long as a wound is in-
fected, it wont heal. What happens? The wound
breaks off again and blood comes out and with the
blood the infectious sperms leave the body and true
healing can take place. Some people have broken
members in their psyche that have assembled
wrongly. In order to heal, the broken arm must be
broken again so that the limbs can be made fit to
each other as they should. You get what I mean?
____________
Q. If this is so, is it not a good thing to ensure that

one is not alone when doing this kind of work, or ma-
jor parts of it?
285
A. Yes and no. Inner child work is most intimate

and most people really want to be alone when doing
it. But I agree that a person who knows that she is
prone to depressions should take some securing
measures before she takes important steps in the
work. In some cases, the person should even be ac-
companied by a hypnotherapist or gestalt therapist. It
is in the discretion of every person to know where her
limits are and when things are getting out of hands.
Thats a general rule for all what we do in life, not only
for voice dialogue. I have repeatedly said that I ad-
dress my work to mentally healthy individuals. I am
not a mental health professional so if you have a
problem of this order, please consult your mental
health practitioner before you begin any work of this
kind or any other work on your self.
____________
Q. Have you yourself experienced similar trouble

when doing voice dialogue?
A. Yes. Actually I have not listened to the advice of

my psychiatrist and other people. At that time, I went
through a hypnotherapy and voice dialogue was an
add-on to the therapy that I myself engaged in
286
INNER CHILD FAQ
without any professional support. I had been suicidal

some years before that time and still went through
strong and paralyzing depressions and auto-
destructive trips. To make it worse, I also engaged in
spontaneous drawing which deepened the self-
hypnosis. I often combined the two techniques and
found that they enhance each other very profitably.
But sometimes I could not handle the emotions that
were freed, that came up spontaneously. The rage,
well, I could face it, the depression was more difficult
to handle, but the paranoid fears were the worst of
all. They drove me to the border of madness. I think I
was very lucky that I escaped a major breakdown. I do
not recommend this combination to anyone unpre-
pared for this to go through. On the other hand, I
think this combination is ideal, but the person should
by no means be alone. Therefore, what I propose
when I deal with individuals, and not groups, is just
the voice dialogue itself, and not any combination of
it with other powerful methods of self-liberation.
____________
287
Q. Can you summarize the benefits of working

with voice dialogue in general, and dialogues with our
inner child, in particular?
A. Yes. Let me summarize it in six major points:
Establishing connection with all our energies;
Finding our identity as a multi-dimensional be-

ing;
Aligning with our inner guide to achieve inner

harmony;
True compassion with suffering and ignorance;
Becoming able to see the truth of self and

other;
Accepting life as unending change and growth.
288
Postface
The True Religio
In this book, I have given a roadmap for what I call

the inner journey. This inner journey is one that links
you back with your true self, and thus its the true re-
ligio.
This was affirmed also by Jeremiah Abrams, an

American psychologist and specialist on inner child
recovery and healing, who has published one of the
best readers on the subject, a book I highly recom-
mend and which I have reviewed. (You find it in the
Bibliography).
I know that the inner journey is not a very popular

way to link back to our true self; many prefer some or
the other esoteric way to enlightenment, and seek out
a guru. I say, there is no enlightenment and there is no
guru. Humans are perfect as they are, but they are
sidetracked since generations, if not millennia. So

what we need is not enlightenment, but simply a way
back to the light. The light was always there. And
dont need a guru for we have the guru in our bosom.
The guru is our inner child.
Of course, its much easier und requires less com-

mitment to comfort oneself with visiting gurus and
saints, and feel good about oneself. I have tried that,
too, for a while, and I clearly saw that it doesnt work. I
saw that it brings about confusion and guilt, and even
disgust in some cases.
Its about the same as it is with marriage. Many

marry because they think they cannot live alone, can-
not prepare their food, and cannot bear the tension
without a partner with whom they can have sex every
day.
Then, they procreate some children, which is often

just some more household items to possess. I am
married with a wife and three children. No Sir, you are
not married with your children, are you? But in the
sense you are saying it, I guess you are married also
with your house, your car, your computer and your
new luxury fridge. In that sense, you are married with
290
POSTFACE
your job, your employer, your football club and even

your whole nation.
In that sense, you are married with your beer and

all the prostitutes you need to embrace and frequent
just to feel that you are a man, right? I know that all of
this is an illusion, are illusions. I went through all of it
and while I dont say I have wasted many years of my
life, I say, well, it was a learning experience. And it was
my inner child that triggered the change, two dec-
ades ago.
And I still needed those twenty more years to get

to understand that not only was it true what my inner
child said, but also that I can do it, really do it, and live
a life of contemplation, without a partner, without
what is called a social life, without rewards and med-
als, honors and special powersand still feel good
about life and myself.
I know that one can live alone, that one can care
for oneself, and that one doesnt need a dummy for
sex. I also know that one doesnt need children, dogs
and cats, and other yes-sayers in the home, to feel
that one has something to say in the world.
291
The inner child has a streak of truth to it that lets it

come over as a freak, at times, not the tender obedi-
ent little toddler that everybody loves. If the world
consisted only of tender obedient toddlers, we would
still live in the stone age, for nothing would have hap-
pened of all those great revolutions that brought us
forward. For these revolutions, inventions, discoveries
and advancement in consciousness were all brought
about by individuals, who, including my own little self,
were not tender little toddlers as children, and had
never any even slight tenderness with their par-
entsand they did neither need it nor ask for it. They
were fully conscious of themselves, as I was, at age
two, and even earlier, they were fully aware of what
was going on, and why their parents did things the
way they did, and why they did a whole lot of things
that were absolutely not nice things to do.
The inner child is a queer creature somehow, not a

nice little fellow with whom you can chat for hours and
feel good about yourself. Its a creature that questions
you, to a point you may get angry and defensive, to a
point you want to cut off the dialogue, to a point you
want to close your ears. But its also a creature that
can express the most daring spontaneous love for
292
POSTFACE
you, in a way you may tremble in awe about such in-

tense feelings! But the most important is this, the in-
ner child is the creative motor in you, its the energy
that affirms life and love, and that drives you to enter
new ways of living, new ways of doing thingsor do-
ing things differently.
The inner child is the energy that is fully pro-life,

that has no scruples, actually no morality. In our inner
world, things are not quite as in real life. Characteris-
tics are not equally distributed, so to speak. Morality
is not one of the character traits of the inner child, but
the main character trait of the inner parent. This is one
of the reasons why I am saying in this book and other
publications that inner child work is not enough and
just a starting point of the inner journey. If you want to
do it right, you need to deal with the other inner en-
ergies as well, the inner parent and the inner adult, for
the least.
What happens if you focus only on your inner

child, and neglect the other two entities? You become
a Peter Pan, you are developing what psychologists
call the puer personality, which may help you to get
a job in the arts, but may at the same time drive you
293
out of all your relationships with adults. Perhaps you

may seek out the company of youngsters. Some men
find that nice and good and thats their choice, but
there is a reason for it that they may ignore. The rea-
son is that they feed only their child self and disregard
the other inner selves to a point to become misbal-
anced. This, when you drive it to the extreme, will end
you up as a marginal freak, and you may be put aside
by the good citizens as a Charlie, a tramp, or a
clown. When you are an artist, you may accept that,
but not many people can live in such a state of isola-
tion for long without becoming depressive.
I wasnt really able to show you what inner child art

work is all about and how it works. Its difficult to de-
scribe that in verbal language, it needs to be shown
and shared, in a workshop setting, for example. But
so far I think there is is stuff enough in this book that
can keep you busy for quite a long time, if only you
take serious the inner journey as a way to building a
high awareness level, and for integrating your inner
energies so as to become whole againholy!
294
Two Specialized Books
Books Reviewed
Jeremiah Abrams

New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1990
No Cover Scan Available
Steeped in the mythopoetic tradition of Jungian psychology, Jeremiah

Abrams, psychotherapist and author, has worked for almost 30 years in
the helping professions. His books include the best-selling Meeting the
Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature; The
Shadow in America: Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation, Reclaiming the
Inner Child, and Living from the Inside Out. He is director of Mt. Vision
Institute, in Marin County, California.
I found Reclaiming the Inner Child when I was my-

self working with Inner Child Recovery and Healing.
Next to Stone & Stones Embracing Our Selves, the
present book was an important inspiration for drafting
my own approach on healing the inner child.
This reader is well edited and presented; each

contribution is essential and brings a new insight and
perspective for awakening the inner child. Jeremiah
Abrams wrote once in a presentation of the book that
inner child recovery is a religious quest.
I can fully subscribe to this statement, as its in ac-

cordance with the oldest of traditions. In fact, the
Hermetic Tradition was teaching the dialogue with our
inner selves as a path to self-knowledge, and unfortu-
nately this is today forgotten in our rushy and out-
wardly prosperous culture. Inwardly, most of us are
impoverished on the level of soul which is why we
have such a high level of depression and resulting
emotional disorders in our modern international cul-
ture.
Let me tell you upfront that this book is not about

psychiatry. You do not need any psychological knowl-
edge for reading it, and applying its wisdom in your
296
TWO SPECIALIZED BOOKS
own life. Most contributions, and to mention here es-

pecially those of Jeremiah Abrams, Gaston Bachelard,
Joseph Campbell and John Loudon expand on the
poetic and mythological dimension of a healed and
functional inner child. But even those other contribu-
tions, written from the pulpit of psychiatric profes-
sionals, to mention only John Bradshaw, Nathaniel
Branden, James Hillman, Robert M. Stein or Hal and
Sidra Stone, do not present inner child healing as a
discipline that is strictly speaking to be placed within
the closed space of psychiatric hospitals or the coach
of the psychoanalyst. Also these contributions are
very well readable for the novice and non-professional
reader, and they emphasize the poetic, creative and
artistic role of the inner child, while they also show
what good a functional inner child can do within a
healthy and well-composed psyche. To make this
book review not too extensive, I have chosen to pub-
lish a few quotes from the contribution of each author
to the reader.
JEREMIAH ABRAMS
If we are to stop abusive family patterns and not

transmit them to the next generation, then the
internalized parental image also must be rec-
ognized as wounded. Such compassionate
297
awareness is a developing phenomenon in the

lives of those courageous adults who are over-
coming their shame and pain in order to ac-
knowledge and heal the wounded child within.
/168
GASTON BACHELARD
He is stuffed with sociability. He is prepared for

his life as a man along the lines of the ideal of
stabilized men. He is also instructed in the his-
tory of his family. He is taught most of the
memories of early childhood, a whole history
which the child will always be able to recount.
Childhoodthat dough!is pushed into the
die so that the child will follow closely in the
path of the lives of others. /45
The child dreamer is alone, very much alone.

He lives in the world of his reverie. His solitude
is less social, less pitted against society, than
the solitude of men. The child knows a natural
reverie of solitude, a reverie which must not be
confused with that of the sulking child. In his
happy solitudes, the dreaming child knows the
cosmic reverie which unites us to the world. /45
JOHN BRADSHAW
Our source relationships were bathed in poor

modeling and abandonment. This created our
shame-based identity. Because we had no
authentic self, we clung to our caregivers in a
fantasy bond or built walls around us where no
298
one could hurt us. These earliest imprints col-

ored all our subsequent relationships. /225
The emotionally shut-down person literally is

filled with will, i.e., becomes will-full. Willfulness
is characterized by grandiosity and unbridled
attempts to control, and is the ultimate disaster
caused by toxic shame. /227
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
In effect, the child we once were can be experi-

enced as a source of pain, rage, fear, embar-
rassment, or humiliation, to be repressed, dis-
owned, repudiated, forgotten. We reject that
child just as, perhaps, others once didand our
cruelty to that child can continue daily and in-
definitely through our lifetime, in the theater of
our own psyche where the child continues to
exist as a subpersonality, a child-self. /243
When related to unconsciously and/or nega-

tively, a child-self is left in a kind of alienated
oblivion. In the latter case, when the child-self is
left unconscious, or is disowned and repudi-
ated, we are fragmented; we do not feel whole;
in some measure we feel self-alienated; and
self-esteem is wounded. /244
Left unrecognized, not understood, or rejected

and abandoned, a child-self can turn into a
troublemaker that obstructs our evolution as
well as our enjoyment of existence. The exter-
nal expression of this phenomenon is that we
will at times exhibit harmfully childish behavior,
299
or fall into patterns of inappropriate depend-

ency, or become narcissistic, or experience the
world as belonging to the grown-ups. /244
On the other hand, recognized, accepted, em-

braced, and thereby integrated, a child-self can
be a magnificent resource that enriches our
lives, with its potential for spontaneity, playful-
ness, and imaginativeness. /244
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
How might we as individuals get in touch with

the child that lives within us? By killing the
dragon Thou shalt. By choosing not to live by
other peoples rules? Right. Respecting them,
but not living by them./260
JAMES HILLMAN
Jungian therapy, at least how I practice it,

brings about an awareness that fantasy is a
creative activity which is continually telling a
person into now this story, now that one.
Soulmaking goes hand in hand with deliteraliz-
ing consciousness and restoring its connection
to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns.
Rather than interpret the stories into concepts
and rational explanations, we prefer to see con-
ceptual explanations as secondary elaborations
upon basic stories which are containers and
givers of vitality./278
Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a lit-

eral belief, a literal statement, we have lost the
300
imaginative metaphorical perspective to our-

selves and our world. /278
The main body of biblical and classical tales di-

rects fantasy into organized, deeply life-giving
psychological patterns; these stories present
the archetypal modes of experiencing. /279
JOHN LOUDON
There is a sense then in which the self is a life-

long project, as long as we remember that it is a
project that requires as much passivity as activ-
ity (to use Teilhards terms)both receptivity
and taking hold, yin and yang. /237
The child has the glory of simply being, like a

flower or an animal, without the necessity of
doing anything, becoming anything in order to
be fully what it is. /238
In later childhood, one is socialized into con-

ventional values and meanings. While this is
necessary for an adequate sense of self-worth
and basic orientation and for social order, all
too many of us can become arrested at this
stage of development and lead what Paul Til-
lich calls heteronymous lives, in which some-
thing external sets our priorities, establishes
what is meaningful and worthwhile. /239
But if we give ourselves to the process of

growth, if we take up the search for wholeness,
the quest for understanding (rather than the
vain longing for certainty), we are set on a path
301
that leads not back to the childhood we may

nostalgically idealize but forward toward an
authentic fullness and integration. /239
Maturity, then, is an achievement of synthesis. It

is not simply a chronological stage of life. /240
ALICE MILLER
The true self has been in a state of noncom-

munication as Winnicott said, because it had to
be protected. The patient never needs to hide
anything else so thoroughly, so deeply, and for
so long a time as he has hidden this true self.
/136
Where there had only been fearful emptiness or

equally frightening grandiose fantasies, there
now is unfolding an unexpected wealth of vital-
ity. /137
JEFFREY SATINOVER
I would say that the puer may result from a pa-

rental milieu which, in a roughly eighteen-
month to a two-year-old child, habitually dis-
rupts any sign of assertiveness, of action or fan-
tasies that carry not the hallmark of masculinity,
but of specialness and grandeur. /146
Thus, an internal vicious circle is established;

each constellation of the Self, bringing with it a
tide of grandiose fantasies, is followed by a tide
of self-criticism and re-fragmentation. /147
302
By reflecting back to the child his specialness

and grandeur, the parent helps to sustain a kind
of necessary inflation. This inflation will moti-
vate the child to move into an ever-expanding
world where, by suffering tolerable defeats, the
inflation will be modified and personal identity
sustained more and more by the capacities of
the ego. /153
ROBERT M. STEIN
Creative psychological development, individua-

tion, is dependent on spiritual freedom. When
we say, for example, a man has a free spirit, do
we mean that he freely or necessarily trans-
gresses the imposed manners, mores and ta-
boos of his culture? I think not. But it does
mean the freedom to do anything or go any
place he desires in the imaginal realm. He is a
man who has clearly distinguished the sacral,
timeless world from the secular, historical world.
He knows he can move with unashamed dignity
among the gods and demons which belong to
the mundane world. Such freedom cannot oc-
cur with a primitive form of consciousness in
which inner and outer reality are governed by
the same laws and values. In this sense, our
Judeo-Christian tradition is primitive in that our
thoughts and desires are subject to the same
dogma, the same regulation, as our deeds.
Spiritual freedom requires a break with biblical
tradition and the development of a new form of
consciousnessa consciousness which pro-
motes the cultivation of imaginal freedom. /265
303
If one has experienced an authentic rebirth, one

is ready to enter into a new life where kinship of
spirit becomes a stronger bond than kinship of
blood. /269
The lack of firmly rooted kinship connections is

perhaps more responsible for our sense of iso-
lation and alienation today than any other sin-
gle factor. Frequent renewal through kinship
connection is basic nourishment for our spiritual
and physical well-being. /270
There is a great need nowadays for new forms

in marriage, friendship and community which
will promote the development of ers and feel-
ings of kinship connection. /270
The exchange of soul-substance which occurs

when two souls meet and touch is essential for
the life and health of the body and spirit. Inner
wholeness soon becomes cold, rigid and life-
killing if the soul is not continually re-humanized
and renewed through the human connection.
Still, it is just because soul-connections are so
rare and difficult to have in our culture that the
internal healing of the mind/body split and in-
ternal wholeness is so essential. This is another
paradox which we cannot avoid. /270
The need to keep ones soul carefully hidden

and protected disappears when one is no
longer dependent on the connection to an-
other for completion. There is no longer the
fear of experiencing and expressing ones feel-
304
ings, ones reactions to another, simply because

the integrity and wholeness of ones being are
not dependent on a particular relationship. This
increases the possibility of having close human
connections, and it decreases the demands and
expectations which we are all prone to make
upon those we care for. In addition, the re-
vealed soul generally evokes the emotion of
love, especially when it demands nothing from
the other. Thus, inner wholeness opens the
door to many more possibilities for soul-
connection, in spite of the lack of ers promot-
ing vessels in our culture. /271
HAL AND SIDRA STONE
What is this child like? The most striking quality

is its ability to be deeply intimate with another
person. The facilitator can feel a physical
warmth and a fullness radiating from this child.
It is as though the space between the two peo-
ple is alive and vibrating. /177
The vulnerable child is tuned in energetical-

lyit is aware of everything that is happening.
Words will not fool it for a moment. As you
speak, the child will know if there is any change
whatsoever in your energetic connection to it.
/177
Caring for this inner child through an aware ego

gives a feeling of real strength. It represents
real empowerment. /184
305
Hal and Sidra Stone

The Voice Dialogue Manual
Novato, CA: New World Library, 1989
The Voice Dialogue Manual was my companion in the two years I prac-
ticed dialoguing with my inner selves. Let us first clarify what voice dia-
logue actually is all about? Its a synonym for the inner dialogue with all
our inner selves.
The Voice Dialogue Manual accompanied me with

valuable advice over these years; I highly appreciated
its clarity and depth that gives immediate credit to
the authors immense expertise with facilitating per-
sonal change and transformation. This is not just a
boring technical manual that teaches a method. Its
that also, but much more. Here is how the authors in-
troduce the book:
306
Voice Dialogue is not a school of psychother-

apy, it is not a substitute for psychotherapy, and
it is not a profession in and of itself. It is a tech-
nique for psychological exploration and for the
expansion of awareness. Although it can be a
highly effective tool for any psychotherapist it
should be clearly understood that it is not a
complete and autonomous therapeutic system.
/78
The authors appear to be way beyond the mecha-

nistic paradigm, radiating a true and living spirituality.
One of the objectives of their unique and empathic
approach to personal development and transforma-
tional change is to help people develop their unique
vulnerability, their openness to the whole of life.
In my own inner child work, I have indeed become

aware that vulnerability is a sort of key word, and can
be set as a destination in therapy. Vulnerability is our
highest virtue, its the daringness, the courage, the
boldness to really embrace our destiny, to live fully
and without anxiety or fear of life.
Coping with this fear is a process, it cannot be

brought about through an instant, sudden insight but
is the result of dissolving, one by one, our shields, de-
fenses, and projections.
307
Now, there is one pattern that is stronger than the

others and which builds most of our character armor:
its our inner controller. The authors write:
The protector/controller is the primary energy

pattern behind many other selves. For example,
it will utilize the energies of the rational self and
the responsible parent as a way of maintaining
control over our environment. When most peo-
ple use the word I, they are in fact referring to
their protector/controller. For the vast majority
of us, protector/controller energy is the direct-
ing agent of personality. It is what many people
think of as an ego./15
The authors express some things better than any

of the famed psychologists I have been reading,
Freud and Jung. They speak of our psychic finger-
print, which is an expression that beautifully wraps
around our inner clarity, and cosmic identity, when we
are in the state of total awareness, when there are no
defenses, when there is peace, when our inner lake is
reflecting life without ripples.
And beyond the scope of this book, I believe that

this cosmic identity is related not to our mind, but to
our emotional identity. Its coded as a vibrational
308
code, and its related to the flow nature of our emo-

tional body, the human aura. The authors write:
The problem is, of course, that we gradually

begin to lose track of our psychic fingerprint.
This is a sad state of affairs, for our whole sys-
tem of relationships is affected by this loss. If we
are no longer in touch with those qualities that
make up our unique psychic fingerprint, then it
is not our deepest and most vulnerable self that
is involved in relationships. Instead, it is a group
if subpersonalities, watched over by the
protector/controller, that determines our feel-
ings and behavior./15
Another expression I find helpful for understand-

ing our inner life is the notion of disowned selves. The
authors write:
We can be helpless victims to the multitude of

relationships in our lives that reflect our dis-
owned selves, or we can accept the challenge
of these relationships and ask: How is this per-
son, or this situation, my teacher? Asking this
question in itself represents a major shift in con-
sciousness. A great deal of the stress in our lives
results from our tendency to attract reflections
of our disowned selves in our relationships, and
we continue to suffer as the same patterns are
repeated in our lives. Unfortunately, for most of
us there is no support to learn this lesson inher-
ent in this process. Without this support the en-
309
ergy of our disowned selves grows stronger and

more twisted./32
Sigmund Freud was among the first psychologists

who found that the etiology of neurosis is primarily
sexual, or with other words, that when we repress
sexual desire, we risk to become seriously ill. Later,
Wilhelm Reich found that not only neurosis, but also
psychosis, and especially schizophrenia are distur-
bances of the vital energy flow that are the result of a
distortion of body perception. The same is true for
the repression of negative emotions such as anger,
hate or revengeful desires. What happens when we
are conditioned to repress our hot emotions is that
they will be replaced by depression. Thus, every time
you would be angry at somebody, you will make a
depression. The depression will lead you back,
through dreams and intuition, to the original wound,
which was inflicted upon you when you were pun-
ished, as a child, for being angry.
When you go deep enough down the rabbit hole

into your depression, you can trigger the therapeutic
effect of remembrance! But what most of us do most
of the time when we are depressed is to seek distrac-
tion, else we take anti-depressants, thus avoiding the
310
catharsis that the depression would naturally trigger.

And on it goes.
Every time you get angry because somebody in-

terferes with your boundaries or lacks respect toward
you, instead of using your anger positively as it should
to put that person straight, you escape into your
next depression.
Hal and Sidra Stone speak in such a case about

disowning the anger energy, which is a good termi-
nology that vividly describes the effect of the un-
healthy repression of desire, which is unfortunately an
integral part of our patriarchal tradition.
When natural instinctual energies such as the

need for survival, sexuality, and aggression are
disowned over time, they cycle back into the
unconscious and go through a significant
change. Energy cannot be destroyed; thus,
these disowned energies begin to operate un-
consciously and attract additional energy to
themselves. They soon lose their natural quali-
ties and become malevolent./32
Emotional flow is the natural positive flow of the

bioenergy. Demonic and destructive energies are the
result of a negative polarization, which in turn is the
311
consequence of the repression of the original desire

and its biogenic expression as emotion:
The disowning of the seven deadly sins results

in a particular blend-up of instinctual energies
in the unconscious that we call demonic ener-
gies. They are among the major disowned en-
ergy patterns, and as a society we pay a particu-
larly heavy price for their negation./33
The subpersonalities also protect themselves by

revealing themselves only to a facilitator who
has access to a similar energy. Thus, the facilita-
tor must be aware of and able to locate the en-
ergy pattern within himself or herself that reso-
nates with the subjects energy pattern./76
As an evaluation, this book clearly has merited the

attribute excellent, both in its addressing the intelli-
gent lay reader and the psychic health care profes-
sional. For both audiences, there is ample informa-
tion, which is not just theory, but practical and directly
applicable when actually doing the work of voice dia-
logue, with oneself or in a team, or else with a group,
as a voice dialogue facilitator.
I may point you here to a more specific book by

these authors which is more specifically about han-
312
dling the inner controllerwhich they call the Inner

Critic. You can find the book on Amazon.
Hal & Sidra Stone, Embracing Your Inner

Critic: Turning Self-Criticism into a Creative As-
set, New York: HarperOne, 1993
313
Inner Child Glossary
INNER CHILD
Inner child is an inside entity, part-personality,

or psychic energy, created between our 7th and
14th year of life, and that is part of our inner
triangle. Positively, the inner child energy is
primarily emotional and wistful, predominantly
creative. It is the motor of every human beings
creativity. Negatively, the inner child can be ei-
ther mute or cataleptic so that its energy cannot
manifest, or else its energy is turned upside-
down which makes an inner child that is rebel-
lious, capricious, willful or overbearing.
POSITIVE INNER CHILD
Positive inner child is the inner child energy that

is directed forward and well used, positively
charged and healthy. It is the typical energy of
the recovered and healed inner child. It is
sometimes called Little Professor since its voice
is wistful and witty.
NEGATIVE INNER CHILD
Negative inner child is the inner child energy

that is retrograde, blocked or negatively
charged. It is typically the energy of the patho-
COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD
logical inner child, but it also occurs as the

shadow side of a healthy inner child. Its voice
typically is complaining and sometimes rebel-
lious.
NECESSARY INFLATION
Necessary inflation means the process of infla-

tion of the childs self-awareness. The inflation
itself is not equal to true self-esteem but it pre-
pares healthy self-esteem in that it inflates tem-
porarily the egosuch as a balloon in-
flatesand leads to a kind of childish selfish-
ness that is often misunderstood by moralistic
education. What actually happens is that the
childs psyche kind of beta-tests its future ro-
bustness and survival-ability in a competitive or
even hostile environment. It therefore tempo-
rarily blows up the ego and makes the child feel
like a hero or a winner or else a conqueror or a
smart nerd. Only adults who have achieved true
maturity in their own psychic growth can deal
with this very important phase in every childs
psychic development. Traditional education,
with its sadistic, authoritarian and moralistic
setup is unable to tolerate inflation and reacts
with a great deal of open or hidden hostility or
even retaliation against the inflated childa
fact that leads to millions of depressive and
crushed adults who are blocked in their healthy
expansion and their growth into true individual-
ity, as well as blocked on the creativity level.
316
INNER CHILD GLOSSARY
INNER PARENT
Inner parent is an inside entity, part-personality

or psychic energy that represents our inner
value standards, our moral attitudes, our caring
for self and others, but negatively also our judg-
ing others, our I-know-better attitude or blunt
interference into the lives of others without re-
gard for their privacy. The hypertrophied inner
parent energy plays a dominant role in tyranni-
cal and persecutory societal, religious and po-
litical systems.
INNER ADULT
Inner adult is an inside entity, part-personality

or psychic energy that represents our logical
thinking, our reason, our maturity. Positively, it
makes for our balanced decisions, our down-to-
earth attitude and sense for responsibilities.
Negatively, the inner adult manifests as the in-
tellectual nerd or through emotional frigidity,
cynicism, skepticism or an obsession to meas-
ure human relations purely on a scale of rea-
sonableness or straightness without considering
the emotional dimension and without sensitiv-
ity. The hypertrophied inner adult energy plays
a major role in modern education where it re-
sults in devastating damage on the next gen-
erations emotional integrity.
INNER TRIANGLE
The term inner triangle has a double signifi-

cance. It signifies either the oedipal triangle
that impacts on the formation of the inner child
317
or the constellation of inner child, inner parent

and inner adult within the psyche.
VOICE DIALOGUE
Voice dialogue is a technique for getting in

touch with inside not only on a feeling level but,
beyond that, on a verbal level that condenses
inner expression into outer expression and thus
renders a communication with inside possible.
Voice dialogue is applied in many different
forms of therapy and self-therapy. It is also
called inner dialogue or intuitive dialogue.
PART-PERSONALITY OR SPLIT-PERSONALITY
Part-personality or split-personality is not to

confuse with the phenomenon that the psyche
is naturally composed of various energies that
represent different parts of the person. Contrary
to folk wisdom and popular psychology, this is
not per se a pathological phenomenon, but ex-
ists also in the healthy psyche. The difference
between a healthy multi-dimensional psyche
and a pathological split psyche is to be seen at
the flexibility with which the various voices or
part-selves are interacting under an integrating
ego and to which extent they collaborate with
each other for the best of the whole of the psy-
che.
318
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Personal Notes

Walter's Inner Child Coaching: A Guide For Your Inner Journey

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WALTERS INNER CHILD

WALTERS CAREER GUIDE

WALTERS LEADERSHIP GUIDE

WALTERS INNER CHILD COACHING

by Peter Fritz Walter

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Set in Avenir Light and Trajan Pro

Designed by Peter Fritz Walter

Publisher Contact Information

Author Contact Information

About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzer-

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M.

He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Ge-

In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child

After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal

His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and

All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published,

Pierres Amazon Author Page

Who is Who Guide 35

Mastering Your Resistance 94

Peter and Paul 117

Chapter Five 181

Inner Child Essays 223

The Invisible Artist 247

Inner Child FAQ 269

Two Specialized Books 295

Inner Child Glossary 315

Personal Notes 339

The Way to Your Inner Child

This guide is the fruit of twenty-four years of work

Accomplished work looks always neat but not

ated, hot creative or yang energy that frees its way

The quest for recovering and healing our inner

Behold, the highest treasures in life are often hid-

Unfortunately it is also true that the inner child is

our creative inner guide is put to silence, sentenced

In the East, meditation serves the need for recon-

See Jeremiah Abrams (Ed.), Reclaiming the

Our modern media culture rarely ever informs

cally. Worse, moralistic education and puritanical

This careless attitude regarding our inner world is

Real morality is not a cultural achievement but in-

The result of this denial is human potential wasted

If you want to be yourself, you have to face your-

The true individual is the result of inner alchemy;

Voice dialogue and especially the involvement of

Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and

Inner child recovery and healing cannot be done

What we dissect from its life, we feed on our inner

Let me accompany you on a part of your way to

The inner child is powerful but its power is not of

Do not fool your inner child with sentimentality,

ognize as children only obedient little toddlers, but

Our best children, inner and outer, are perhaps our

What I offer you is a part of my truth. I will show

There is extensive literature on inner child healing