Coaching Your Inner Child: A Complete Road Map For Your Inner Journey

COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD
BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER
Sovereign Immunity Litigation
Coaching Your Inner Child
The Leadership I Ching
Leadership & Career in the 21st Century
Creative-C Learning
COACHING
YOUR INNER
CHILD
A Complete Road Map
for Your Inner Journey
by Peter Fritz Walter
Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC
113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA
2014 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for deriva-

tive works, also for commercial purposes, as long as the rights of the author
are attributed. The attribution must be given to the best of the users ability
with the information available. Third party licenses or copyright of quoted
resources are untouched by this license and remain under their own license.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Set in Palatino
Designed by Peter Fritz Walter
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Body, Mind & Spirit / Inspiration & Personal Growth
Publisher Contact Information

publisher@sirius-c-publishing.com
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Author Contact Information

pfw@peterfritzwalter.com
About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

http://peterfritzwalter.com
About the Author
Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Swit-

zerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pi-
erre) focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical
performance, 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.
Upon finalizing his international law doctorate, he pri-

vately studied psychology and psychoanalysis and started
writing both fiction and nonfiction works.
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 inte-
grative 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.
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 im-
prints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).
To Juan
The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.
Contents
Prelude-Maternity! 11
The Way to Your Inner Child
Chapter One! 19
Who is Who Guide
Chapter Two! 25
Personal Diary
Chapter Three! 37
Creativity Central
Write About What You Like
Express Your Feelings
Jot Down Creative Ideas
Chapter Four! 43
Inner Child Recovery
Inner Child Types

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
Get in Touch
Bad Example
Good Example
Peter and Paul

Chapter Five! 73
Inner Child Healing
Act One
The Inner Child Enters the Scene
Act Two
The Inner Child Interacts
Act Three
The Inner Child Builds Trust
Scene One
Evaluation
Scene Two
Evaluation
Scene Three
Evaluation
Scene Four
Evaluation
Chapter Six! 121

Inner Child Art Guide
Introduction
Main Theme
Preparation
Inner Artist, Get Ready!
Just Do It!
Spontaneous Composing
Postface! 153
The True Religio
Glossary! 159
Inner Child Glossary
Book Reviews! 163

Books on Voice Dialogue
Jeremiah Abrams
Reclaiming the Inner Child
Hal and Sidra Stone
Embracing Our Selves
8
CONTENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY! 181
Contextual Bibliography
Personal Notes! 199
9
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 boosting 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 ultimately, 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 busi-

ness people all show this pattern. From the problem, the
friction, heat is generated, hot creative or yang energy that
frees its way through all the obstacles faced, through all
the darkness, into 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 vital issue and one of
the foremost topics in modern therapy, and yet it is a fool-
ish thing to strive for elucidating what most people con-
sider their childish and immature side.
Behold, the highest treasures in life are often hidden 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 inner voices, and especially the voice of our
dear inner child has many undesired consequences. Be it a
dull, monotonous life with mediocre achievements, shal-
low relationships and a lack of depth in our insights about
life, be it extreme alienation from self, schizophrenia, ro-
botism or alcoholism, where it all begins is where our crea-
tive inner guide is put to silence, sentenced to shut up, de-
prived 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 cul-
tural values. It is a personal religious quest of the purest
vintage!
12
PRELUDE-MATERNITY
In the East, meditation serves the need for reconnecting

with our source, and in the West we rely on similar tech-
niques 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 recov-
ery 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 offi-
cially recognize the fact that creators are multi-dimensional
personalities, beholders of heaven and hell, angels and dev-
ils, to express it metaphorically. Worse, moralistic education
and puritanical conditioning attempt to define the human
being in a reductionist manner that labels negatively cer-
tain emotions, fantasies, inner processes, desires or obses-
sions, thus telling people to repress the most precious por-
tion of their energy resources. This careless attitude regard-
ing 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 innate
in humans when we are connected to our inner wisdom;
while it can never be brought about by coercion, religious
indoctrination and intolerance because of the simple fact
that we are the beholders of our inner life!
13
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 dissolution
of culture than to its progress! Culture is language and lan-
guage begins where inner and outer processes are ac-
knowledged and verbalized.
If you want to be yourself, you have to face yourself, all
of you, all the time. You have to be non-judgmental 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 incarnation of structural violence and thus of
resistance to life. The authentic individual is critical, yet
flexible, focused on self-actualization yet compassionate.
The true individual is the result of an inner alchemy;
the rebirth of the individual requires the death of the social
mask and the integration of the shadow. The true individ-
ual 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 decisions
wards off dissolution of our soul in the meltpot of post-
modern consumerism. The awareness that results from it
helps you to act appropriately, not by reject and elitist eva-
sion, but by making the right choices and staying attuned to
true and constructive relationships.
14
PRELUDE-MATERNITY
Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and heal-

ing, 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 mor-
alism, judgmentalism, self-condemnation, and overadapta-
tion. Most people are unaware of their inner trials, blindly
surfing on the hot waves of mass hysteria, the past and the
present ones, imitating the general schizoid theme of split-
ting the world into black and white, good and bad, heroes
and offenders, thus preparing the world for war and them-
selves for a schizoid crack-up!
Inner child recovery and healing cannot be done half-
way 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 innocence, the innocence that is innate in life, in
love, and in pleasure.
Let me accompany you on a part of your way to inno-
cence! 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 presumptuous 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
15
that it acts always 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 emo-
tionally in a holy war for the golden calf of consumerism and
for upholding the age-old myth of childrens purity.
The inner child is powerful but its power is not of this
world. If you do not open your awareness to a nonjudgmen-
tal 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 hat-
ers who recognize 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 understanding 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 fic-
16
PRELUDE-MATERNITY
tion, there is poetry, there are films. A recent Google search

under the key word inner child threw me out more than
45,200.000 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-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 wa-
tering your flowers every day, through the role you play in
uplifting others around you, if you do that not as a dry ob-
ligation 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 con-
nected. 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 oth-
ers not from a point of genuine care, but from a guilt pat-
tern 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 modern selfhelp literature has a strong
imprint of that kind. In my view, it has misled people more
than it helped them, for it has enlarged the split that di-
vides people in light and shadow, angel and devil, beauty
17
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 superior principle of wis-
dom, 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 rep-
resent this-or-that in the eyes of another. What about rep-
resenting yourself in the eyes of yourself?
18
Chapter One
Who is Who Guide
This is a guide into the Who is Who of your inner child.

Who is this child? When you see the abundance of litera-
ture on the subject and consider that its already so many
years that inner child healing is known, well, you should
think everybody knows about it. Yet it is still an esoteric
subject, even for physicians and, you may not believe it,
for many psychiatrists. There is a deep gap between thera-
pists who work on the imaginal realm, the gestalt, the
emotions, and the sub-language level such as hypnothera-
pists, and psychoanalysts, on one hand, and behavioral
psychologists or psychologists who function as corporate
consultants. The difference consists in the fact that the first
group tries to do away with conditioning while the latter
make their living with helping maintain and reinforce so-

cial conditioning.
Inner child healing or, generally, voice dialogue is a tech-
nique pertaining to the first paradigm; it has nothing to do
with social conditioning; it acts pretty much counter to it.
Inner child healing therefore truly is a step into personal
freedom! It is important to note that this energy is present
even in cases where the inner child is not responding in
any way. A mute inner child can be gradually led to com-
municate, once the fear blockage is removed, and sufficient
trust has been built for the inner child to get out of the pro-
tective shell.
The next question that most people ask 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 answer 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.
That is one of the reasons for the fact that inner child
recovery is a unique and important process in the life of a
person. The inner child is different in all of us and makes
the process a different one. For example, 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
20
CHAPTER ONE
Professor in the sense Eric Berne used this expression. This

is actually not something surprising. We 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?
One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from recogniz-
ing and enjoying lifes incredible unity in diversity.
As there are no two roses that are exactly the same,
there are no two inner children who have the same charac-
ter and the same kind of reaction. Your inner child will face
life differently than mine. This is even so when both your
and my inner child were recovered with exactly the same
method, using the same therapy approach, the same kind
of voice dialogue, the same facilitator, and so on.
This insight should actually prevent us from standard-

izing inner child recovery and expecting automatic and
uniform results. Such an attitude will not only render the
work ineffective, but it may withhold 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, especially when the
inner child was wounded and betrayed.However, draw-
backs during the recovery phase must be accepted 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 invested in it is
never wasted. It will pay back tenfold! It would be very
21
unrealistic to say that because of the mistakes one may

commit when doing the recovery work, people should
imperatively be accompanied by a professional. Of course,
such advise is no bad advise, but it is impractical advice
because of the simple disproportion of masses of people
with an unrecovered inner child, on one hand, and a tiny
percentage of mental health professionals who are special-
ized in inner 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 professionals may want to use, and remain totally
closed up just for showing that it cant and wont be im-
pressed by any worldly knowledge or power. This is ex-
actly 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 and a sincere
quest to get in touch. Such a quest typically comes from
the heart, and it is motivated by love in the sense of genu-
ine care and a certain prudence, a certain caution not to
hurt another who may be fragile in some way.
Yet not pitiful love either, for the inner child tends to
ward off against saviors and apostles with their usually
false way of dialoging with a child. The inner child gener-
ally is not 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.
22
CHAPTER ONE
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 adapta-
tion, the inner child will probably play a considerable role
in your lives, and you may have more ease than others to
recover and heal him or her. 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 as one should do them;
Being persistent and patient, well-mannered and nice;
Obeying to a strict system of values and principles;
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 warning that youre going to be a robot soon;
A serious remark that youre not connected;
A hint that youre a boring, annoying nerd;
No answer at all.
Your inner child is not the instance in you that wants

you to avoid confrontation, be at peace all the time, satisfy
23
everybody, or play the savior or a role model. Quite to the

contrary, your inner child asks you to be daring and bold,
and first of allauthentic!
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 foolish. 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, even to seek adventure. It wants you
to be open-minded and frank and is hurt by indifference
and hypocrisy. It is proud of you when you are brilliant
and bold with others, but respects you less if you hide be-
hind a social mask. It prefers intelligent marginality over
dull conformity. Your inner child is strong and powerful
through the fact that it appears to be a nonsense to most
people.
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 considerable advantages in your interactions with
others, professional or private.
24
Chapter Two
Personal Diary
This is an inner child personal diary. It is an intermezzo

and you should read it in a relaxed, detached mood. This
was a personal dialogue with my inner child; it may give
you some hints as to the relationship of your inner child
with your other inner entities or psychic energies, namely
your inner adult and your inner parent. Let me explain.
The 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, that sees things on a morality-
scale.
The inner child, by contrast, is the entity that creates,

invents and changes things, evaluating 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
chose 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 publishing 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 feedback to my spontane-
ous 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 uncanny
result when you think about it because had I listened to
my inner voice, I would not have wasted so much time!
26
CHAPTER TWO
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 crea-
tive 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?
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. Stu-
27
pid, 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 process. 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?
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
28
CHAPTER TWO
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 both of us when I self-
publish our stuff. And that involves routines, I cant help.
Thats life!
Peter
Okay, but you could reduce those routines to a strict mini-
mum. 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 success-
ful one day with publishing, we need to build our own pub-
lishing empire. I am not a big boy on the Net but I must be-
come one in order to reach out to people. And I am sure
about one thing: there are people out there who are search-
ing for exactly what Peter has to say and what he produces.
Walter
It seems that mainstream culture does not want our produc-
tions. I mean, we have abundant proof for that. How many
29
rejects did we get from publishers, for our writings and our
music? And this since twenty years and with publishers
from different countries and cultures.
Pierre
Oh yes! True. And its truly Peters music. Its absolutely not
my music. I am unable to produce that. I am completely 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 natural flow. Its
to give it over to a direction that is of a higher origin. I be-
lieve I receive the music from a secret galaxy
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, Hol-
land 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 insensitive? 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 me-
diocre, utterly stupid productions?
30
CHAPTER TWO
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 remember that bitch
from Canada who said that your writings were parental lec-
tures for her and that she felt as if 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 child-
ish 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 persis-
tence.
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
31
are sometimes too tough and you suppress me, you just
make me down, you push me in a corner!
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 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. Be-
cause 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 diffi-
32
CHAPTER TWO
cult 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 deafening. We
can never keep up with that.
Walter
True.
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 something 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.
33
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 marketing, advertising. I am
going to use the Internet for that. I build the platform for it
to happen. I build the ground for it.
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 manager, isnt he?
Pierre
Well, if you dont mind my many hours on the computer
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.
34
CHAPTER TWO
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 creative. The results are poor and
dissatisfying. Most of the time we do not figure why this is
so, and is necessarily so. This is because its not very com-
mon in our culture to talk about inner energies and the sub-
tle 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 education that is
primarily manipulative and compulsive instead of informa-
tional 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 subtle process that involves
time and constant fine-tuning.
Our culture is absolutely hostile to this kind of learn-

ing. It is far off the way we are trained to behave and to
function. I even go as far as saying that learning about our
inner child means to turn the back to this society with its ig-
norance and its brutality. It means to open the door to a
35
new world of sensitivity, a poetic world that is unknown to

most of our contemporaries. Its to open the way to inno-
cence.
36
Chapter Three
Creativity Central
To begin with, you have to open a door to your under-

standing of life. Its not enough that you work through this
guide. What is important is what is going to happen to
your feelings, and what is going to happen to your set
opinions.
As long as those set opinions are alien to the idea that
there are multiple universes and layers of consciousness,
youll have a hard time to get to grips with the idea of the
subtle realm of energy I am talking about here. With other
words, sitting in a coffee shop and listening 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 be-
lieve 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 neither ra-
tional thinking, nor irrational thinkingbut both;
Accept the fact that male and female are relative ex-
pressions 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 natural and in-
tegral;
Forget all moralistic concepts and black-and-white
theories.
If you agree to approach these ideas and to integrate

them in your existing worldview you have a good chance
to succeed with enhancing your creativity level. But an ac-
tion 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 fol-
lowing:
Prepare some paper and color crayons. Take one
crayon or several at a time and, after breathing deeply
38
CHAPTER THREE
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, intuitive, more
joyful and less brain-draining way. This will activate your
inner child and invite this energy to participate in your
daily activities.
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 sentences like:
Since I was a child I liked to be around paintings.
And there was aunty Ida who had these wonderful 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 paint-
ing. I liked that smell of the paint. It was like the anticipa-
tion of something joyful to happen. Since then I love paint-
ings. So often I had that idea to open a caf-gallery, a place
where people enjoy 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.
39
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 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 accepted, and that shall
be an uplifting experience for you.
You cant recover an inner child that is not collaborat-
ing, that prefers to remain the rebel because that child was
always betrayed, hurt and neglected, because 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 not calcu-
lated, but spontaneous and with the impending risk that
you may be rejected or regarded as being off-track, such
as
40
CHAPTER THREE
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 superior;
telling your child that she or he is a unique person
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 problems

you had with her or him, you value the exceptional bond
between the two of you and the significance that this rela-
tionship 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 receive 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 whispers. And they are easily forgotten if
you are not attentive 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 summa-
rize 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,
41
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 subtle guid-
ance. This force is connected with all of our inner entities,
but primarily with your inner child, because its primarily
innocence that creates the openness needed to receive: a
beginners mind, as it is called in Zen.
By contrast, what most effectively blocks off this supe-
rior guidance is pride, arrogance and the feeling that one
possesses special professional knowledge that one regards
as the ultimate truth.
42
Chapter Four
Inner Child Recovery
The process of awakening your inner child consists of

two parts, Inner Child Recovery and Inner Child Healing.
Healing our own inner child is not only a path of en-
richment for yourself. It also changes your awareness of
children around you, and renders you more sensitive for
their needs. It is a matter of systemic logic that in as much
you love and respect your inner child, you love and re-
spect children around you. My own work showed me this
truth, and many specialized psychiatrists express it in their
writings.
With these few thoughts as an introduction, I would
now like to focus on elaborating a comprehensive method
for inner child recovery and healing. Whatever you might
have done already in matters of inner child recovery and

healing, please note that the method is less important than
the motivation you have for doing this work. Methods are
tools only, but motivation is the motor for bringing about
the changes of awareness we are waiting for!
When reading wisdom books, you can make out an
amazing similarity with regard to what would possibly be
the best conduct or attitude toward others and life in gen-
eral. It is overwhelmingly shared by our great sages from
all around the world that it is a natural, innocent, creative
and flexible attitude that is the most likely to bring about
harmonious relations with others, help us to be more pros-
perous and blessed, and bring about long-term health and
emotional balance.
Well, this 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 result that flows out into the social envi-
ronment and that brings multiple benefits for self and oth-
ers. It might then astonish us why working on the inner
child has not gained more popularity?
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 condi-
tion of my inner child? Then listen inside for a subtle re-
ply. Before doing that first activity, simply read through the
44
CHAPTER FOUR
various inner child types. There are four pathological, dys-

functional types, and two healthy types. You need this in-
formation even though you are later going to use your in-
tuition to find out what type your own inner child is. Once
you know what type of an inner child it is, you can more
appropriately find the right measures for inner child re-
covery and healing. Suffices you quietly peruse the follow-
ing 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 impression rather
than a fact; it is the idea that your inner child got lost. The
inner child cannot get lost. Having lost contact with your in-
ner child, you havent lost it. I mention this here only be-
cause in some of the literature on inner child recovery the
expression is used.
The inner child may have been declared lost by psy-
chiatrists who diagnosed the cataleptic inner child. In fact,
the cataleptic inner child is lost for the eye of the beholder
45
since it appears to be deadbut isnt. In fact, there is a

difference between somebody who is in a state of mute-
ness, of catalepsy, and somebody whose inner spirit has
left forever. Considering research on out-of-body experi-
ences, we know that in states of catalepsy and coma, the
life spirit is still attached to the physical body and only in
death it is cut off and departs.
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 assumption is of course a
hypothesis, although it bears some convincing logic, for
otherwise it would be unexplainable 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 information 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 re-
covery successfully. And if your inner child does not col-
laborate 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 en-
46
CHAPTER FOUR
chanted 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 experience we
equally know that the organism can appear dead for days
without actually being dead. Furthermore, even if you do in-
ner child healing with a psychiatrist, you as the patient
have to do the essential work in the process of recove-
rynot the psychiatrist who can only be a catalyzer. That
is why you as the patient must become actively involved in
the recovery procedure and focused on a positive outcome.
However, 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 consider your
inner child as lost. This is in my experience the best condi-
tion for successful inner child recovery and healing.
The Betrayed Inner Child

The betrayed inner child is the inner child that has com-
pletely lost trust in adults because that child was repeat-
edly 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 pleasant experience! In most cases, its actually
not an agreeable experience; you may actually go through
47
quite a bit of mourning, crying and a sort of life review, but

that will ultimately be to your benefit.
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 cynical, but compared
to the damage that the cataleptic inner child and the wounded
inner child have suffered, the betrayed inner child is some-
what better off. This, however, does not mean that the be-
trayed inner child is easy to heal. Rather the contrary is
true. Betrayal 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 particularly those who
are labeled in their society as delinquent 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 peers. This
inner child has never been given a voice, was never lis-
tened to.
48
CHAPTER FOUR
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 environ-
ment. Instead of being a mirror for her child, she is a mir-
ror to nobody since her mirror 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 abor-
tion that failed.
Yet those mothers use to override their guilt feelings
toward their child with jovial speeches and balsamic talk
featuring themselves as the childs generous 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 rational-
ize down her relationship with the child as some form of
duty, an obligation, a crux to bear, a sacrifice.
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 sometimes unbounded hatred, fury, and
violence. For her love is conditioned, not genuine. In order
to punish the child for moving and enjoying life, she en-
trances and hypnotizes the child with deafening and dead-
49
ening suggestions that therapists call magic spells. Thus,

narcissistic mothers raise children who will, once an ado-
lescent, 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 aquarelles express the pain she has
suffered under the rule of her cruel mother.
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 catalep-
tic child, and this for an important reason: this inner child
can express feelings. The wounded inner child may com-
plain or even run amok, but is not paralyzed in its expres-
sion. The wounded inner child is the entity in us that easily
cries. Tears are this childs most natural way of exterioriz-
ing 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 react
defensively and refuse help or support, and resist your at-
tempts of inner parenting. In the actual voice dialogues,
this inner child may tell you that you could not be trusted
50
CHAPTER FOUR
because you were an adult or because you most probably

had bad or hidden intentions. Your caring behavior might
be misinterpreted as a one-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 ex-
ploited, 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. How-
ever, 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 prototypi-
cal magical inner child as the main author of this book. The
magical inner childs reality is a world of dreams and fair-
ies, 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 reality, everything can happen and
miracles are nothing special, but rather the order of the
day.
51
In poets, painters, filmmakers and musicians the magi-

cal inner child is usually strong, if not dominating the in-
ner scene. The same may be true for great scientists 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 eter-
nal archetype of the divine child, as it was uniquely de-
scribed by Carl Jung.
The Playful Inner Child

The playful inner child is perhaps the most natural mani-
festation of our inner child. Often the playful inner 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 entertainment, and even politics. It
is reported about Alexander the Great that he used to play
horse riding with his children even in the presence of for-
eign ambassadors visiting his court. Picassos playful inner
child was notoriously very strong and he could relate to
his children from this energy and then got on their level,
playing with them in a manner of child-like innocence and
grace.
Last not least we know from great and famous busi-
nessmen such as Bill Gates that they like to play with in-
vestments 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 opportunities. One of the
reasons why personal computers gained such widespread
52
CHAPTER FOUR
recognition as useful and creative tools is their intuitive

interface that permits us to use the energy of our playful
inner child for learning 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 initia-
tion, and that I can assume your enthusiasm and anticipa-
tion being stronger than your resistance!
Nonetheless, do not underestimate this resistance. Re-
sistance is a phenomenon we encounter in every therapy
and even, beyond that, as a general feature of human be-
havior. There are multiple reasons for resistance, here are
some of them
Our natural desire to keep going and do business as
usual and thus without change and without having to
modify our inner software;
Our emotional attachment to the past or past experi-
ences;
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
53
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 accommodate what it requests. What it re-
quests is obviously to drop the new and mind-opening ac-
tivity as soon as possible.
This retroactive or retrograde energy is actually a nega-
tive 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 be-
come 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 situa-
tions. 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 easier to combat than
an enemy that we are unaware of!
54
CHAPTER FOUR
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 individ-
ual resistance. Sometimes it takes decades or even centu-
ries 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 collective
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 resistance:
Do not resist or fight it;
Do not belittle it;
Do not forget about it.
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 mean-
ingless 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.
55
Come down from your cloud and see that we, the majority,
live good and healthy lives without listening to all those
voices!
Only people with weak willpower will listen to such non-

sense. 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 with-

out 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 and gatherings, or the
latest fashion or boom. You should take a leave from them
and you will never regret it. Your solitude is bliss com-
pared 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 secret to ef-
fectively cope with resistance is accepting it and acknowl-
edging its right of existence. You may give it a voice and
personify it. Call it Mister Handicap 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
56
CHAPTER FOUR
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.
You
I have scheduled a work session with my inner child for to-
day. 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?
57
You
But, can I really hear you?
Little You
Never mind if you can sense me, hear me, feel me, intuit me,
guess me or get my thoughts telepathically. Thats individu-
ally quite different but the most important is that you are
willing and open to receive my message, 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?
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.
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CHAPTER FOUR
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 actu-
ally quite serious business. Getting those voices to express
themselves openly and fixing the dialogue on paper is a
good way to cope with resistance and get conflicting ener-
gies in you into a state of mutual acceptance and, ideally,
cooperation. 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 procrastination. 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 attitude is a
state of preparedness. There is no sluggishness in it. Its a
state of readiness to act. But its not aggressive. It defends
only. When the voice of resistance manifests, let it speak
59
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. Recognize evil as a neces-
sary part of life and you will be in peace! And, believe me,
there will be less evil.
Get in Touch
The third step on your way to recover your inner child

is to get in touch with that child, to open yourself to this
energy. That sounds easy to one and difficult to another.
And in fact it is easy for some and difficult for others. It
depends on how you previously have dealt with your in-
ner landscape. Was it an unknown 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 impor-
tant 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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CHAPTER FOUR
You believe that this was a turn of destiny to follow.

A welcoming attitude helps to get our work starting 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 in-
ner child recovery for the department heads of a resort ho-
tel. The audience was from the start bathed in icy silence
and nobody ever took notes. Later they made a number of
negative, abrasive remarks that showed their utter misun-
derstanding of what was supposed to happen.
I knew that for them to get in touch with their inner
child individually really depended on their level of recep-
tiveness. Our inner child abhors to be pushed or dragged
into something not familiar. And so, perhaps in that semi-
nar, I had been too pushy, too quick or distracted. The ex-
perience taught me the importance of preparation which is
the reason why I am rather lengthy at introducing the mat-
ter, and why we advance 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 and holistic
thinking, not through logic and reasoning. Try to be more
centered, more relaxed, more quiet inside and more recep-
tive than usual. It is intuition, not thought that communi-
cates 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 intervals in between your thoughts
61
At the start, to be frank, I was rather anxious. Contrary

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 inner child since my in-
ner 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, almost 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 as those
who brought you up and who were responsible 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 commodity 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 newcomers do when using
voice dialogue.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Bad Example
Are you there, Inner Child? I want to talk with you. I

want to tell you a lot. Yes, I have neglected 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, going

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 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.
What ? Well, Im glad you responded. But what
you say surprises me. You say I wont listen. Are you
mad with me?
Mad? You are joking, hey? Mad is a flat expression
of my feelings. You have not deserved even my mad-
ness. 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 feeling?
Not only madness. I feel you are a very stupid per-
son.
63
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 become
apathetic because of frustration, of disappointment.
Yes, youre right.
You have stopped thinking by yourself, moving by
yourself and taking independent decisions.
Yes, but its so difficult. You know, on my work-
place, they just ask me to follow their stupid policies,
their work orders, and yet I know its not effective.
You know better. But you do not act on your intui-
tion, 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 emphasize
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 ad-
vance. Your inner child is unpredictable by definition.
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
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CHAPTER FOUR
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 recov-

ery work, you may wonder about how you relate to chil-
dren 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 in-
ner 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?
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 emotion 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.
65
Thats a good example to see how logical emotions are,

contrary to what most people believe who hold that emo-
tions 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 ob-
server 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 start-

ing phrase. Any kind of opening. If you are short of ideas,
just write the following little sentence:
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 attentive 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 explana-
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CHAPTER FOUR
tions for it. Its a rather silent process in which you try to
get closer, to understand things that till now you never
understood.
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 dif-
ferent 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
instead 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 atti-
tude toward your inner child is
empathetic and welcoming;

patient and peaceful;
humble and innocent;
curious and joyful.
67
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 experi-
ence. It can well be that if you are getting attuned to one of
those pairs of characteristics, your inner child may respond
spontaneously and almost without cynicism. In fact, the
ironical tone that may manifest is often meant as a provo-
cation 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 reasons
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 bet-
ter feeling about it, especially if the first experience had
been a bit scary. You are getting used 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 feeling of how powerful that inner child iscon-
trary 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.
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CHAPTER FOUR
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 gener-
ally 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.
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 examples. I let you guess
who is who
69
Pierre
Today I want to discuss a rather important issue with you.
When father left, you were just one year old. However,
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?
P
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
P
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.
P
See, you have to understand that children tend to feel in-
volved when something goes wrong between their parents.
They tend to take a part of the blame. I knew that father was
going for other women but that alone did not explain the
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CHAPTER FOUR
true motivation of his behavior. After all, behind his dissatis-

faction with mother, there could have been another motive,
for example, a lack of self-worth. Or, really, that he had ex-
pected 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 re-
sponding and in the last two answers it was Peter.
Paul is the incarnation of guilt, shame and fear while

Peter is the guy that is uplifting and comes up with solu-
tions 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.
71
Chapter Five
Inner Child Healing
Some people regard inner child recovery and inner child

healing as one and the same process or even use the expres-
sions 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 synonymous, 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 detected? On the other hand, it is of course true that
inner 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 recovery that we
can bring about inner child healing? To be honest, I never
asked that question when I did the work. I completely ig-
nored that. I learned the theory after I had done the prac-
tice. That may appear kind of upside-down to you, but to

evaluate it in hindsight I must admit that it was rather fa-
vorable; for I had not been blocked by those intellectual
categories and this theoretical knowledge. I was really in-
nocent when I engaged in that work, really deprived of a
scheme, a map for the landscape I was going to explore. I
just went into it with a childish sense of adventure and
wonder.
Perhaps that starting point was not bad. You may have
another perspective, a more informed 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 diagnosis? Your psy-
chiatrist? 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 psychiatrist, and not in the group.
Now, your inner child is going to make this diagnosis!
You find that funny? Well, its quite unusual but its like
that. Your inner child, in the recovery process, will gradu-
ally become conscious of its particular affliction. 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.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Generally speaking, the healed inner childs attitude is

much more flexible, playful and humorous than the af-
flicted inner childs behavior. Furthermore, it is typical that
you consider the opinions of your inner 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 involving creativity, major changes in
life, emotional affairs and even business affairs.
If your Little Professor is well developed, it can become

a wonderful business venture guide, for example for in-
vestment. While flexibility and harmony are typical once
the inner child is healed, the situation until 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;
sometimes, in extreme cases, a schizophrenic split;
paranoid fears or persistent anxiety;
over-excitation, sexual dissatisfaction;
75
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 count-
less. To understand the healing process, I must refer back
to the beginning, when I was talking about the fundamen-
tal energetic life principles that explain the functioning of
our psyche. There is general agreement among health pro-
fessionals 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.
Our organism can cope with energetic misbalance, but
only up to a certain level and for a certain time. If the mis-
balance is too strong or lasts too long, or both, the distur-
bance 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
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CHAPTER FIVE
itself. This is pretty much contrary to mechanistic medicine

but it is nonetheless 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, in-
ner 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 talking about.
Thus, nature helps to get it all done once we seriously en-
gage in recovering and healing our inner child. Let me
now outline further in detail the healing process. Ill com-
pose 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
77
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 inner child. This
results in one-to-one dialogues. The healing process adds
an additional element. The inner 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, har-
monious relationship if healing is to take place.
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 obtru-
sive nerd cannot be said to act its role in a healthy psychic
environment. There must be something wrong with the
ensemble, the group interaction inside the psyche, our in-
ner team, if the inner child behaves that way. Therefore, in
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CHAPTER FIVE
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 inner 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. Careful. Do not
replace one pathology by another! To have a blown-up in-
ner child with disabled or handicapped 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 difficult, for
it takes a subtle understanding of group interaction.
We have an inner team in our psyche once these enti-
ties 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 com-
municators, 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 however naming it that way, without
giving it importance. We do it naturally if we have that tal-
ent 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 unrecov-
ered 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
79
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 and
that they have their best performances when they experi-
ence the greatest stage fright.
Fear that is mastered transforms into courage. By the
same token it is true that depression that is mastered trans-
forms into self-confidence.
Now, how will you prepare the inner child for entering
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 work-
ing 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 re-
action as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of the readi-
ness 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 en-
tities that may come up, you can begin with inner child
healing.
How, in practice, is this going to happen? I often re-
ceived questions that focus on very down-to-earth prob-
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CHAPTER FIVE
lems. How is this going to happen in my dialogue? What

must I do now? And I reply, simply and humbly Sorry, I
dont know. It is of paramount importance that you de-
velop autonomy in the work. This is so because we are very
different. Everybody has a different psychic pattern and
reacts differently in identical 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 principles.
How they are applied in practice depends on so many fac-
tors 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 moment 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.
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 because it feels
so unreal. I am so happy to be in touch.
81
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?
Peter
Are you kidding? You know it very well. Thats the proto-
typical 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 acquainted with
some other voices in me that sometimes want to contradict me
or you since they have a somewhat different way to see the
world
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CHAPTER FIVE
Peter
I am scared to meet them. They are perhaps not very under-
standing.
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 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 ei-
ther if you had total control 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?
83
Walter
Okay.
Some people, and among them even therapists, think

that the inner child needed a lot of pet care. I do not sub-
scribe 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 positively to frankness and straightfor-
wardness. 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 ex-
press itself.
Crying is a way to communicate, but not a very effec-
tive way. Crying says only one thing, I feel hurt and want
you to take care of me ! While in verbal communication
many more and much more subtle messages can be com-
municated.
Thus, I think it is mistaken to pity the wounded inner
child. The right method is based upon an optimistic ap-
proach that tries to move onto healing as soon as possible.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Act Two
The Inner Child Interacts
Let me open this second stage of inner child healing

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 Pierre 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.
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.
85
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!
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 differently and has
a different mental and emotional setup. You try to put yours
on top and implicitly tell Peter that he is off-track.
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CHAPTER FIVE
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 focus
on giving Pierre and Acid a voice to utter, and I have to. I
cannot just focus only on you, Peter.
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 behav-
ior.
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.
87
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 empatheti-
cally 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 cooperation.
Peter
Hey, great! Thats a great statement! I appreciate it. I feel
valued for the first time. Oh, that feels good!
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 misunderstood 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.
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CHAPTER FIVE
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.
Pierre
I think its because of lack of information that this happens.
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 reasons I felt
that this work is necessary. I was rather oscillating 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 constructive for my overall atti-
tude, my way to appear to others.
At first, when doing inner child recovery, it often ap-

pears 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 out-
ward relationships, you cannot remain, and limit yourself
89
to a harmonious one-to-one with your inner child. For the

way you are going to interact with your outward audience
is not determined by your one-to-one with the inner child,
but by your inner childs interacting with the other inner
entities.
While interacting with others, we unconsciously pro-
ject 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.
Thus weve got nine possible constellations when we

communicate with others. And this is only a reductionist
kind of picture, for I dont consider psychic entities other
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CHAPTER FIVE
than the traditional set of three already acknowledged by

the founder of Transactional Analysis (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 enti-
ties 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 giv-
ing another dimension to your communication skills. Inter-
estingly, 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 en-
hanced maturity. It is your soul that draws the main bene-
fit 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 confront
your inner child with the other inner actors, and to lead
this dialogue in a way that all benefit from it. The task is
91
not an easy one. Your role as an intermediate is particu-

larly 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 di-
rector. If you commit major mistakes, for example by arro-
gantly 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 attentively to all
the input that comes up, to all what is said, and to respond
in a manner that is not judgmental 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, what-
ever they say, however bullish, blunt, stupid, pushy or
aloof they may seem. Behind an aloof voice, lots of wis-
dom can be covered that only will appear if enough trust is
built in the interaction.
And there you see the parallel to your communication

with others. The principles of inner and outer dialogue are
exactly the same. All is based upon trust and trustworthi-
ness, 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 con-
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CHAPTER FIVE
sciously, is going to be the starting log for your entire suc-

cess as a human being.
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 happens next.
93
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 proc-
ess is concerned. How are they going to act inside of you?
Thats a bit far-fetched, isnt it? Yes, if we talk about a pro-
ject in real life that is wholly carried out by your inner ac-
tors. Let me give an example.
As a trial project for Act Three, you set up the following
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:
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CHAPTER FIVE
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

costumes, 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 op-
portunity for finding a suitable new partner.
Let us take these examples as moot court events to see

what possible kind of interactions your inner team is going
to develop. In practice, you are dealing of course with your
own daily events, but demonstrating the principle, I will
use these situations to exemplify the general principle.
I will proceed in the following way. I first give you a
sample dialogue that you may consider only as one possi-
ble 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 re-
sults in matters of synergistic interaction of your inner
team when carrying out specific tasks in daily life.
95
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
R: Your Inner Adult
LY: Your Inner Child (Little You)
B
Have you prepared our meeting ? By the way, I totally
forgot about it. I find all of this silly and nonsensical. 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?
Y
Perhaps we should consider it as what it is: a mere proposal
from our consultants. Its up to us, after all, to implement it,
or not. And we can do it in our way, no?
B
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 an-
other gimmick ending up in distracting them from their work?
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CHAPTER FIVE
R
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.
B
You mean in the case the work is something like repetitive or
boring or does not give the employee any empowerment, 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 con-
sciously non-focused activity that is based on mere trial and
error and that has no specific purposeother than playing.
B
But, you wont seriously consider our staff playing games
here while they work, do you? That would really be kind of
crazy, wouldnt it?
R
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 robot. Its to be
empowered to change something in the setup or come up
with something new.
B
But
R (hurriedly)
I am not talking about total freedom. I was thinking of re-
warding those who do more than just the usual routines
97
B
Yes, definitely, thats a good idea. I find that idea has merit.
What else?
C
Those who care about the company are generally those who
think about improving what they do. The only viable strat-
egy 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
B
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 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 with-
out 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 standards. Its just not demo-
cratic!
B
Okay, then, lets consider that more in detail. What can we
possibly change, or, how can we change work processes so
that personal impact is validated and not punished? And
how can we punish those who abuse the system, for there is
a danger here that you cannot deny ?
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CHAPTER FIVE
C
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.
B
Youre right. Thats a good point. Im getting into it now. So,
lets see that point later and what security features 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 per-
sonal impact and remunerate that part of giftedness that
smart people bring into their work. (Switching to R) Let me
give an example. The Note-It, these little yellow sticking pa-
pers, was invented, some decades ago, by a simple employee
of 3Ms packaging department. But 3M, already at that time
(!) had a policy for rewarding creative input of their employ-
ees. Every Friday, 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 decided to realize
their inventions, a percentage of the profit share.
B
Yes. But we are not 3M. They could afford that, we cant.
R
At that time, they were not yet a multinational corporation.
But its through empowering their employees to that point
99
that they got fantastic ideas that made them much stronger
than their competition. I think part of their tremendous suc-
cess is due to this attitude, an attitude that, if I dare to use
that word, calls on the inner child in every person.
B
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 vali-
date the person in her integrity to give more creative free-
dom. 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 innovation capacity than
this one hour per week free time granted to their employees
has cost them.
B
Well after all, thats not a bad idea. Not bad, really. Im get-
ting 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 concept department. Let
them come up with detailed suggestions. And please write a
report about our meeting, very short, and forward it to them.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Y
Okay. Ill do that. Thanks.
B
No, Im the one who has to say thank you. You have given
me very valuable input. In a way, all that responds to some-
thing 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 communication. 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 because
you, in this example, were playing out your inner 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 silent until the moment he be-
gan to draw the circles in his agenda.
That was the turning point of the whole conversation
and that led to the final victory of convincing the boss to
act on the proposal. The boss was convinced at the end not
101
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 game. That way the boss was driven from his own
inner 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 supposed 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 reversed as

in real life its not always the female that cheats her part-
ner 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 cheating 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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CHAPTER FIVE
R: Your Inner Adult

P
Its really a nice restaurant, such a warm and welcoming
place. You made a good choice!
Y
Yes, I thought youd like it. I know you like tasteful settings,
and thats one of the things that we share, no?
P
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 wonderful. 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
P
What are you telling me, darling? Theyre as fresh as they
were the first day I got them
R
Are you kidding? Were no more in our twenties. And there
is a difference between real roses and paper roses
P
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
103
C
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
R
But weve barely finished our meal! Dont you like a dessert?
Youve been more requiring in younger years. [Switching to
LY] But maybe , your tiredness is more general than that?
Maybe its kind of metaphorical?
P
Youre talking in riddles. Can you not be more open with
me? What do you mean?
C
I care about discretion. And you seem to care about it, too.
P (very nervous)

R
Do you really want me to be more open?
P (pale)

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CHAPTER FIVE
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?
P
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
R
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 doing to me
P
Okay. You know it. Well, Im afraid I cant figure how you
could find out about it
R
Thats not important. Let me assure you that I never spied
you out. Thats not my style. It was a chance event that re-
vealed 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
105
P
You know, I was really not seeking it.
C
So much the worse! You have been drawn into it?
P
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.
R
As it happened to us some twenty years ago
P
Yes. I think, and please dont mind me to say that, I think its
human
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 be-
fore. I really appreciate your openness. It kind of re-bonds
me with you.
Y
Really? I cant believe thatafter all.
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CHAPTER FIVE
P
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 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!
P
Really not?
C
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.
P
So you really care that much about me?
R
I care for you and for both of us. After all, we had a beautiful
relationship during all those years, no?
P
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 grow. But
107
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?
P
Yes , please, I see it. I am truly sorry. I should have been
open with you. But I was afraid
R
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.
P
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.
R
Lets see that again tomorrow morning. Just to make sure its
not the effect of the cognac
P (laughing)
No, its real, its real
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 connected on a child-child level with
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CHAPTER FIVE
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 children
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 vulnerable 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.
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 rela-
109
tionship. 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
enrichment for both of us. I cant know for you, though,
and you must decide for yourself how much you value our
relationship. (LY) When you turned me the back recently
during the meeting, that hurt me. You were kind of icy and
I couldnt figure why. (R) True, we dont have all our inter-
ests 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 enlarge our lives and our experiences. (C) I care too
much about our relationship to just let it go for this differ-
ence 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 together. 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
emotions in my heart, and I beware of them since they un-
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CHAPTER FIVE
dermine our positive power and self-esteem. (LY) I 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 exchange, can
vivify a message and add a note of empathy 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 dimension that the inner
child (LY) added to this letter is one of honesty, truthful-
ness, innocence and outspokenness. If the other person has
a minimum left of his or her previous interest in the rela-
tionship 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 reminds

the addressee of their previous debates and says that they
had learnt from those exchanges. LY was saying that and
added that there had been a sense of innocence and won-
der 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
111
other on an emotional level. We do not now why presently

the addressee kind of deactivated his or her inner child so
that this bonding was no more possible.
In fact, the voice of the inner child can easily be si-

lenced by rationalizations, by a hypertrophied inner adult
who wants to control all by reason, or a hypertrophied in-
ner parent who wants to control all by care, or, worse, a
hypertrophied inner controller that smashes down all in-
tuitive wisdom and wants to control 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 result will be posi-
tive without doubt and the relationship will be healed.
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 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
opportunity for possibly finding a new partner. These are
the actors:
D: Your daughter
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CHAPTER FIVE
R: Your Inner Adult

D
Right, you take me to that party and buy me a costume ?
Y
I said I want to think about it.
D
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
D
So, what do you want?
C
Its good that you ask so straightforward, after all. I should
perhaps be more open with you. I dont know.
D
What do you not know?
C
I do not know you enough to know all about you some-
thing like that.
D
You know me already for seven years.
113
C
Yes, but a situation like this one is new for both of us.
D
What situation?
R
So, let me be cool and say it the cool way
D
Yes, thats great, to be cool!
R
Well, you see me alone, already for two years. And you
know that before I was not alone
D
Yes, before there was Daddy. But then he went away. So
what? Do you want to have another Daddy?
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
D
Again, you dont know. What do you know ?
C
I know that you need another Daddy. And I need something
else, too.
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D
You want to sleep with somebody again?
R
How do you know?
D
You seem to know a little only. But I know much. You always
say that you dont know. But I know that I know.
C
You know that you know Very smart, indeed.
D
I cannot buy another friend for you, but perhaps you can
meet one at aunty Idas birthday party?
R
Why the hell at aunty Idas birthday party? There is nothing
more boring than aunty Idas birthday parties
D
Not for me. Last time, there was a nice little chap. And we
had a good time together.
C
Did you? But I dont like little chaps, I want a big chap, you
know?
D
Yes, I know.
115
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?
D
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 anything.
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?
D
You dont have fun when Im around?
C
Look, yes, but only once the guy accepts that I have a
child from a former relationship ...
D
Oh, first you dont want to tell him?
R
No. Sometimes, that puts them off.
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CHAPTER FIVE
D
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
C
I did not say that hes going to be Daddy, but perhaps, you
never know, hes going to be Daddy Second Vintage
D
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 care
anyway
117
Evaluation
This kind of fun dialogue between mother and daugh-
ter reveals how tricky it can be to talk with children when
its about emotional matters. Children tend to react in of-
ten 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 disappoint-
ment 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 interactions and, as we see it here, the mother
used her inner child to ask for her daughters understand-
ing and collaboration in this somewhat delicate situation.
It was by letting her inner child say that first she approves
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 parents use to
do in similar situations, she would have made her daugh-
ter 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 betrayed her child by
telling a lieas so many lesser honest parents do.
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CHAPTER FIVE
It was by acknowledging innocently her need and de-

sire for love and sex that she could win her daughters col-
laboration. 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 mother with the chap; a
silent will to be less demanding 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 symbiotic 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 es-
pecially valid for relationships, inner or outer.
119
Chapter Six
Inner Child Art Guide
Introduction
This is a guide to the inner child art work. In the previ-
ous 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 precaution 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 creativ-
ity 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
attempts. 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 gen-
eral 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
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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, creative endeavor, private or pro-
fessional, if you only rely on your inner parent or your in-
ner adult. If you do that, nobody will deny it to you, but
frankly, you would be foolish!
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 doing
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 ex-
periences 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 going to draw or
paint, and to compose music. If you like your spontaneous
creations, you may keep them. If you dont like them, you
123
may destroy them. But please, before you do the latter, an-
swer 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. Be-

fore 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 mani-
festation 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 influence of the other inner
entities. I guess that in about eighty percent of all cases this
is going to take place.
What about the rest? The remaining twenty percent of
people who have healed their inner child have to do some
additional work with the inner parent, inner 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
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CHAPTER SIX
intuition, not a malevolent inner tyrant. In cases of doubt, I

recommend 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;
Be yielding to anything that comes spontaneously;
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 doing.
Some of these points need to be discussed more in de-

tail. 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 de-
sert. And you are going to love it to such a point that you
never anymore want to miss it in your lifeeven though
125
you may be utterly alone there and without one single

friend, except your inner child.
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CHAPTER SIX
Main Theme
The essential in inner child art is that it is not predictable
and that there is no techniqueat least not for the produc-
tion. Later, there can beif you wisha post-production
that works out the inner childs productions in order to
professionalize their appearance or refine the essence that
has been created spontaneously. This post-production is
not a process where the inner child is involved; or at least
it is less involved. 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 intel-
lectual and systematic techniques, in the creation phase we
apply strictly no technique, and we certainly have to get rid
of any intellectual involvement.
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.
As there is always a small portion of yin in a big accu-

mulation of yang, there is a small portion of intuition in
every intellectual process. And as there is a small portion
of yang in all accumulation of yin, there is always an ele-
ment 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.
127
I think if it was not there, there would be misbalance

and we would simply be mad.
Salvador Dali said that the only difference between
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.
If you ask me, I find it necessary to begin with relaxing
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 technique,
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 emo-
tional restrictions. Both have to be dealt with if you are out
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CHAPTER SIX
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 virtually eve-
rybody lacks faith in miraclesand inner child art work
truly is miraculous. If you come along with a proud, skep-
tical 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 answer:
Nobody. Because you just believe it. And Id reply 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 tomor-
row 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 to-
morrow morning. But who has told you that? Nobody. Of
course. You have faith in it. So please dont tell me that you
live totally without faith, based only upon your pretend-
edly 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!
129
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 us-
ing high-quality headphones:
http://ipublica.wordpress.com/music/relaxation/deep-ocean/
It is the four tracks under Deep Relaxation.
While you hear the music, you focus inside a moment

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 in-
side, directing your inner attention to your navel region
and you breath consciously into that region of your body.
You imagine to charge your belly with vital energy.
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 agree-
able. At the same time, it could well be that you feel sud-
denly 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 sensations only show you that
your body has been charged with a surplus of vital energy.
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CHAPTER SIX
How does that feel like? Thats not something nebulous or

imaginary. Its very real and it can be described accurately
as follows:
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;
you feel a warm stream from your head to your feet;
you feel you are fully conscious yet rather apathetic.
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 to therapy, and
later was diagnosed with an anxiety neurosis that still later
expanded into a compulsion neurosis. Only years after
that, once both neuroses were healed could I experience 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 what this author says? I
131
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 dif-
ferently and then hold what we see for different kinds of
truth. We may rightly do that, and theres nobody to con-
tradict 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, according
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 investi-
gation 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 in-
ner artist is no lesser than the higher self. Others will say
that its the inner child and others will name it inner 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
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CHAPTER SIX
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 often the ones
who are not the great brilliant successes, have that inno-
cence. 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, especially those
of you with a hypertrophied inner parent. They dance like
monkeys around the banana. They 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 inno-
cence 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 situation 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 dif-
133
ferently, but you must do it if you want to open the door-

way to real creation and genuine creativity. The actors:
IC: Inner Critic (IC sounds like icy )
Y
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.
Y
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 repeat-

edly no success, for years and years, that I am caught in a net
of guilt, of anxiety, of self-reject that makes me feel inade-
quate 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 considerably 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, 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.
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CHAPTER SIX
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 con-
duct. 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 irresponsible. I try to influence you to learn about
the values commonly shared in this society.
Y
But what about my individuality, then? What about my origi-
nal and sometimes daring ideas? Forget about all that?
IC
You have to evaluate it on the scale of proper conduct or the
principles this culture is based upon.
Y
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?
135
Y
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 rec-
ommendations.
Y
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 pretends 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 re-
pressive again. But there is more freedom, too, in other re-
spects. 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.
Y
I am a nonconformist.
IC
Yes, and you mean it. You almost hit it on everybodys head.
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CHAPTER SIX
Y
I thought that this attitude comes from you, inner critic?
IC
Not at all! I always want us to be respectable. Its coming from
your inner child, of course.
Y
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 sympa-
thize 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.
Y
But why do you not give me support on that way? The inner
child gives me support but often it is not strong enough ei-
ther. You could help me much more by not sabotaging my
natural outgoing attitude, but to help 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.
137
Y
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 tremendous 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 orches-
trate this inner landscape and conduct it so that it pro-
duces 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 committed the mis-
take to wait too long which makes that things pent up in-
side. Much depends also on your general attitude, your
work and your environment. If, for example, you have a
creative and rather independent job, its much easier for
you to cope with a pushy inner critic than if you work as a
clerk or administrative 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 originality,
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CHAPTER SIX
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 endeavor. Please
do not belittle the sometimes nagging conservatism of that
inner entity. In some cases it borders fascism, in some oth-
ers it just runs on pure arrogance. 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 restricted

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 written
for, not just for having you sit down and do a drawing
once in a while. I have trodden this path because of an in-
ner conviction that most of us are robotsas 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 actually talk about allabout living
in general. Its that vast, and its that important!
139
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 relaxed. 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 reluc-
tant doing things for no purpose, and that is your greatest
problem!
Doing things always with a purpose in mind destroys
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 liv-
ing if you have no purpose. You have been fed with these
hypnotic spells, you have repeatedly 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 experience an atrocious fear doing something
without a purpose.
You may reply that, of course, you have a purpose be-
hind your doing. Its that you want to be or become crea-
tive, that you want to have your inner child do some art
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CHAPTER SIX
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 characteristic of
play that it bears its purpose in itself and 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 purposewhich 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 purpose.
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 meditate about certain
141
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.
Usually, in my experience, a kind of satiation comes up

after around five, sometimes ten drawings. It will be dif-
ferent 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 typically, 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 answer
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 if that special
excitement which is triggered by your inner child is lack-
ing, you will quickly lose any interest to continue. It would
be foolish to endanger your excitement through putting an
obligation or restriction that could be taken as a boring
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CHAPTER SIX
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 session when youre not
sure you will be alone and undisturbed than to go on and
be surprised, or even questioned 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 peo-
ple have this astonishing ability to make down everything
they dont get in their narrow mindset of predefined val-
ues. 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 enjoyed 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 per-
ceive certain patterns, motives, original ways of expression
143
that come from deep inside of you and that you are going
to identify in your repeated productions.
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, traumata or fears. However, be careful
with those conclusions. They can be misleading if derived
from superficial evidence and insufficient observation.
It needs long practice for developing an intuitive psy-
chological 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 coun-
terproductive, it could be the end of your creative flow.
Your inner child will harshly contradict those rationali-
zations 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 inter-

pret 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!
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CHAPTER SIX
Spontaneous Composing
We are a visual culture. Research has shown that visual
stimulation and visual pleasures in our culture by far out-
weigh the joys derived from sound. Youll find that almost
everybody likes photos, enjoys colors or likes sightseeing.
While there are not many people who really enjoy and ap-
preciate 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 music, or to play a musical instrument are a mi-
nority.
Why? It seems that this is merely a cultural phenome-
non. Sociologists say we are a visual society, a visually ob-
sessed 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 stimuli, you may
want to try spontaneous composing as your next step in
inner child art work. You may never have touched an in-
strument. Never mind. That is better than to have touched it
wrongly! The worst antipathies against playing musical
instruments are created by forced musical lessons. It can
have devastating psychological consequences.
145
Spontaneous composing or instrument play is the only

form of instrument handling that has truly deserved 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 nothing 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 daring, 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 in-
spirational 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
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CHAPTER SIX
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 spontane-
ously 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 with-

out being heard, except you exercise in a bunker. What can
you do if people are so insensitive that they perceive music
as mere noise?
Now, by using a digital piano and connecting a pair of
headphones, I can improvise undisturbed and without fill-
ing the ears of others with unwanted sounds.
You may still object that there is a greater obstacle for
getting people involved in spontaneous composing than it
is for having them do spontaneous art since generally mu-
sical instruments, and especially pianos, are expensive.
That is true in general, but that argument is not really
relevant since anyway only people who have already 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 something, 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
147
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 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 mo-
ments 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 wayre-
lying 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 accumu-
lated sense of failure, of all this friendly or unfriendly gos-
sip 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 gentleness, patience and understanding.
Inner child art has nothing to do with playing right or
wrong. It has solely to do with playing. As soon as you
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CHAPTER SIX
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 bat-
tlefields, 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 human
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 heroism
that is marketing propaganda of a deeply alienating manipu-
lative consumer system, you are dead before you are born!
For most of you, the difficulty to open up your creative
potential is exactly this judgmental, critical, skeptical and
deeply ignorant attitude that you developed under a life-
denying and debilitating education. 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 prob-
lem, generally, because their original, natural sense for the
149
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 culture.
The moment you decide to rent or buy a musical in-

strument, you have done the first decisive step toward 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 not a solo instrument
such as a flute or a trumpet but has many registers, sonori-
ties and it is truly polyphonic. 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 instrument and not
able to render a percussion-like kind of music accurately.
Moreover, the organ keyboard is much smaller. It en-
compasses only sixty-six keys while the piano contains
eighty-eight, thus providing deeper bass and higher treble
levels.
Those of you who have heard great pianists playing
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 important because once a drawback
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CHAPTER SIX
occurs because of your resistance, it is essential that you are

prepared to deal with it. If not, chances are that you give
up prematurely.
The preparation that I suggest here is similar to the one

used for inner child work in general. It is tuning in and
turning inside, so that you connect to the inner child en-
ergy 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 beginning 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 Americas most successful career
trainers writes in his book Zen and the Art of Making a Liv-
ing (1999), p. 87:
Laurence G. Boldt
Societys propaganda will tell you that you are in-
adequate, 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 lis-

tening to what the group says or those called the achieved
ones, those who have made it. Working with your inner
child, you get rid of that point of self-delusion to consider,
or not, yourself being achieved.
151
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, curious or adventurous.
If you do not know any of those and are surrounded by
the road-runners, then its definitely better 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 per-
son, 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 everybodysome-
thing that is impossible actually.
By the way, I never had that sense of identity earlier in
life and could develop it only under the condition of cut-
ting off all bonds with others for a certain time, and do a
hypnotherapy. This retreat yielded 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 height-
ened receptivity and sensitivity. I guess its the state a child
is in when they are at play. This is our single most valuable
treasure, a treasure however that most of us have lost.
152
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 religio-
This was affirmed also by Jeremiah Abrams, an Ameri-
can psychologist and specialist on inner child recovery and
healing, who has published one of the best readers on the
subject, a book I highly recommend and which I have re-
viewed. (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 gen-
erations, if not millennia. So what we need is not enlight-

enment, but simply, a way back to the light. The light was
always there. And we need no guru for we have the guru in
our bosom. The guru is our inner child.
Of course, its much easier und requires less commit-
ment 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, cannot 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 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 this is an illu-
sion, 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 trig-
gered the change, two decades ago.
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POSTFACE
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 medals, honors and spe-
cial 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 some-
thing to say in the world.
The inner child has a streak of truth to it that lets it
come over as a freak, at times, not the tender obedient 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 happened of all those great
revolutions that brought us forward. For these revolutions,
inventions, discoveries and advancements in conscious-
ness were all brought about by individuals, who, including
my own little self, were not tender little toddlers as chil-
dren, and had never any even slight tenderness with their
parentsand 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.
155
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 you, in a way you may trem-
ble in awe about such intense feelings! But the most impor-
tant is this, the inner 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
doing 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. Characteristics 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 energies 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 per-
sonality, which may help you to get a job in the arts, but
may at the same time drive you out of all your relationships
156
POSTFACE
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 ig-
nore. The reason is that they feed only their child self and
disregard the other inner selves to a point to become mis-
balanced. 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 peo-
ple can live in such a state of isolation for long without be-
coming depressive.
I wasnt really able to show you what inner child art
work is all about and how it works. Its difficult to describe
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 inte-
grating your inner energies so as to become whole again
holy!
157
Glossary
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. Posi-
tively, 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 either mute or cataleptic so that its
energy cannot manifest, or else its energy is turned
upside-down which makes an inner child that is re-
bellious, 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 typi-
cally the energy of the pathological inner child, but it
also occurs as the shadow side of a healthy inner
child. Its voice typically is complaining and some-
times rebellious.
Necessary Inflation
Necessary inflation means the process of inflation of
the childs self-awareness. The inflation itself is not
equal to true self-esteem but it prepares healthy self-
esteem in that it inflates temporarily the egosuch
as a balloon inflatesand leads to a kind of childish
selfishness that is often misunderstood by moralistic
education. What actually happens is that the childs
psyche kind of beta-tests its future robustness and
survival-ability in a competitive or even hostile en-
vironment. It therefore temporarily 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 edu-
cation, 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 retalia-
tion against the inflated childa fact that leads to
millions of depressive and crushed adults who are
blocked in their healthy expansion and their growth
160
GLOSSARY
into true individuality, as well as blocked on the

creativity level.
Inner Parent
Inner parent is an inside entity, part-personality or
psychic energy that represents our inner value stan-
dards, our moral attitudes, our caring for self and
others, but negatively also our judging others, our I-
know-better attitude or blunt interference into the
lives of others without regard for their privacy. The
hypertrophied inner parent energy plays a dominant
role in tyrannical and persecutory societal, religious
and political 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 intellectual nerd or through emo-
tional frigidity, cynicism, skepticism or an obsession
to measure human relations purely on a scale of rea-
sonableness or straightness without considering the
emotional dimension and without sensitivity. The hy-
pertrophied inner adult energy plays a major role in
modern education where it results in devastating
damage on the next generations emotional integrity.
Inner Triangle
The term inner triangle has a double significance. It
signifies either the oedipal triangle that impacts on
the formation of the inner child or the constellation
161
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 differ-
ent parts of the person. Contrary to folk wisdom and
popular psychology, this is not per se a pathological
phenomenon, but exists 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 psyche.
162
Book Reviews
Books on Voice Dialogue
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 myself

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 pre-
sented; each contribution is essential and brings a new in-
sight and perspective for awakening the inner child. Jere-
miah 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 accordance with the oldest of
164
BOOK REVIEWS
traditions. In fact, the Hermetic Tradition was teaching the

dialogue with our inner selves as a path to self-knowledge,
and unfortunately this is today forgotten in our rushy and
outwardly 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 culture.
Let me tell you upfront that this book is not about psy-
chiatry. You do not need any psychological knowledge for
reading it, and applying its wisdom in your own life. Most
contributions, and to mention here especially 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
contributions, written from the pulpit of psychiatric pro-
fessionals, to mention only John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Bran-
den, 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
publish a few quotes from the contribution of each author
to the reader.
165
Jeremiah Abrams
If we are to stop abusive family patterns and not
transmit them to the next generation, then the inter-
nalized parental image also must be recognized as
wounded. Such compassionate awareness is a de-
veloping phenomenon in the lives of those coura-
geous adults who are overcoming their shame and
pain in order to acknowledge 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 history of his fam-
ily. He is taught most of the memories of early
childhood, a whole history which the child will al-
ways 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 mod-
eling and abandonment. This created our shame-
based identity. Because we had no authentic self, we
166
BOOK REVIEWS
clung to our caregivers in a fantasy bond or built

walls around us where no one could hurt us. These
earliest imprints colored all our subsequent relation-
ships. /225
The emotionally shut-down person literally is filled

with will, i.e., becomes will-full. Willfulness is char-
acterized 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 experienced
as a source of pain, rage, fear, embarrassment, or
humiliation, to be repressed, disowned, repudiated,
forgotten. We reject that child just as, perhaps, others
once didand our cruelty to that child can continue
daily and indefinitely 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 negatively, 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 repudiated, 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 trouble-
maker that obstructs our evolution as well as our
enjoyment of existence. The external expression of
this phenomenon is that we will at times exhibit
167
harmfully childish behavior, or fall into patterns of

inappropriate dependency, or become narcissistic, or
experience the world as belonging to the grown-
ups. /244
On the other hand, recognized, accepted, embraced,

and thereby integrated, a child-self can be a magnifi-
cent resource that enriches our lives, with its poten-
tial for spontaneity, playfulness, and imaginative-
ness. /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 peo-
ples 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 deliteralizing consciousness and restoring
its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought
patterns. Rather than interpret the stories into con-
cepts and rational explanations, we prefer to see
conceptual explanations as secondary elaborations
upon basic stories which are containers and givers of
vitality./278
Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal

belief, a literal statement, we have lost the imagina-
168
BOOK REVIEWS
tive metaphorical perspective to ourselves and our

world. /278
The main body of biblical and classical tales directs

fantasy into organized, deeply life-giving psycho-
logical patterns; these stories present the archetypal
modes of experiencing. /279
John Loudon
There is a sense then in which the self is a lifelong
project, as long as we remember that it is a project
that requires as much passivity as activity (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 any-
thing, becoming anything in order to be fully what it
is. /238
In later childhood, one is socialized into conven-

tional values and meanings. While this is necessary
for an adequate sense of self-worth and basic orien-
tation and for social order, all too many of us can
become arrested at this stage of development and
lead what Paul Tillich calls heteronymous lives, in
which something external sets our priorities, estab-
lishes 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 cer-
tainty), we are set on a path that leads not back to
169
the childhood we may nostalgically idealize but

forward toward an authentic fullness and integra-
tion. /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 noncommunica-
tion as Winnicott said, because it had to be pro-
tected. 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 vitality. /137
Jeffrey Satinover
I would say that the puer may result from a parental
milieu which, in a roughly eighteen-month to a two-
year-old child, habitually disrupts any sign of asser-
tiveness, of action or fantasies 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
By reflecting back to the child his specialness and

grandeur, the parent helps to sustain a kind of nec-
170
BOOK REVIEWS
essary inflation. This inflation will motivate 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, individuation,
is dependent on spiritual freedom. When we say, for
example, a man has a free spirit, do we mean that he
freely or necessarily transgresses the imposed man-
ners, mores and taboos 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, time-
less 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 occur with a primitive
form of consciousness in which inner and outer real-
ity 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 tra-
dition and the development of a new form of con-
sciousnessa consciousness which promotes the
cultivation of imaginal freedom. /265
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
171
The lack of firmly rooted kinship connections is per-

haps more responsible for our sense of isolation and
alienation today than any other single factor. Fre-
quent 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 feelings 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 internal 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 depend-
ent on the connection to another for completion.
There is no longer the fear of experiencing and ex-
pressing ones feelings, 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 ex-
pectations which we are all prone to make upon
172
BOOK REVIEWS
those we care for. In addition, the revealed soul gen-

erally evokes the emotion of love, especially when it
demands nothing from the other. Thus, inner
wholeness opens the door to many more possibili-
ties for soul-connection, in spite of the lack of ers
promoting 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 full-
ness radiating from this child. It is as though the
space between the two people is alive and vibrating.
/177
The vulnerable child is tuned in energeticallyit 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 en-
ergetic connection to it. /177
Caring for this inner child through an aware ego

gives a feeling of real strength. It represents real em-
powerment. /184
173
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
dialogue actually is all about? Its a synonym for the inner dialogue
with all our inner selves.
The Voice Dialogue Manual accompanied me with valu-

able advice over these years; I highly appreciated its clarity
and depth that gives immediate credit to the authors im-
mense expertise with facilitating personal 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 introduce the book:
Voice Dialogue is not a school of psychotherapy, it is

not a substitute for psychotherapy, and it is not a
profession in and of itself. It is a technique for psy-
174
BOOK REVIEWS
chological exploration and for the expansion of

awareness. Although it can be a highly effective tool
for any psychotherapist it should be clearly under-
stood that it is not a complete and autonomous
therapeutic system. /78
The authors appear to be way beyond the mechanistic

paradigm, radiating a true and living spirituality. One of
the objectives of their unique and empathic approach to
personal development and transformational change is to
help people develop their unique vulnerability, their open-
ness 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 anxi-
ety 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, defenses, and pro-
jections.
Now, there is one pattern that is stronger than the oth-
ers and which builds most of our character armor: its our
inner controller. The authors write:
The protector/controller is the primary energy pat-

tern behind many other selves. For example, it will
utilize the energies of the rational self and the re-
sponsible parent as a way of maintaining control
175
over our environment. When most people use the

word I, they are in fact referring to their protector/
controller. For the vast majority of us, protector/
controller energy is the directing agent of personal-
ity. 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 fingerprint, which is an expres-
sion that beautifully wraps around our inner clarity, and
cosmic identity, when we are in the state of total aware-
ness, 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 emo-
tional identity. Its coded as a vibrational code, and its re-
lated to the flow nature of our emotional 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 system of relationships
is affected by this loss. If we are no longer in touch
with those qualities that make up our unique psy-
chic fingerprint, then it is not our deepest and most
vulnerable self that is involved in relationships. In-
stead, it is a group if subpersonalities, watched over
by the protector/controller, that determines our feel-
ings and behavior./15
176
BOOK REVIEWS
Another expression I find helpful for understanding

our inner life is the notion of disowned selves. The authors
write:
We can be helpless victims to the multitude of rela-

tionships in our lives that reflect our disowned
selves, or we can accept the challenge of these rela-
tionships and ask: How is this person, or this situa-
tion, my teacher? Asking this question in itself rep-
resents a major shift in consciousness. A great deal of
the stress in our lives results from our tendency to
attract reflections of our disowned selves in our rela-
tionships, and we continue to suffer as the same pat-
terns are repeated in our lives. Unfortunately, for
most of us there is no support to learn this lesson
inherent in this process. Without this support the
energy 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 disturbances 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 an-
ger, 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 de-
177
pression will lead you back, through dreams and intuition,

to the original wound, which was inflicted upon you when
you were punished, 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 distraction, else we take
anti-depressants, thus avoiding the catharsis that the de-
pression would naturally trigger. And on it goes.
Every time you get angry because somebody interferes
with your boundaries or lacks respect toward you, instead
of using your anger positively as it should to put that per-
son straight, you escape into your next depression.
Hal and Sidra Stone speak in such a case about dis-

owning the anger energy, which is a good terminology that
vividly describes the effect of the unhealthy repression of
desire, which is unfortunately an integral part of our patri-
archal 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 unconsciously and attract additional energy
to themselves. They soon lose their natural qualities
and become malevolent./32
Emotional flow is the natural positive flow of the bio-

energy. Demonic and destructive energies are the result of
178
BOOK REVIEWS
a negative polarization, which in turn is the consequence

of the repression of the original desire and its biogenic ex-
pression 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 energies. They are
among the major disowned energy patterns, and as
a society we pay a particularly heavy price for their
negation./33
The subpersonalities also protect themselves by re-

vealing themselves only to a facilitator who has ac-
cess to a similar energy. Thus, the facilitator must be
aware of and able to locate the energy pattern within
himself or herself that resonates with the subjects
energy pattern./76
As an evaluation, this book clearly has merited the at-

tribute excellent, both in its addressing the intelligent lay
reader and the psychic health care professional. For both
audiences, there is ample information, which is not just
theory, but practical and directly applicable when actually
doing the work of voice dialogue, 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 handling the in-
ner 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 Asset, New York: HarperOne, 1993
179
180
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Personal Notes

Coaching Your Inner Child: A Complete Road Map For Your Inner Journey

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COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD

BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

Sovereign Immunity Litigation

Coaching Your Inner Child

The Leadership I Ching

Leadership & Career in the 21st Century

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

2014 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for deriva-

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Designed by Peter Fritz Walter

Publisher Contact Information

Author Contact Information

About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Swit-

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a

Upon finalizing his international law doctorate, he pri-

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,

Write About What You Like

Express Your Feelings

Jot Down Creative Ideas

Inner Child Types

Mastering Your Resistance

Peter and Paul

Chapter Six! 121

Inner Artist, Get Ready!

Book Reviews! 163

Personal Notes! 199

This guide is the fruit of twenty-four years of work on

The biographies of creators, artists, healers and busi-

In the East, meditation serves the need for reconnecting

See Jeremiah Abrams (Ed.), Reclaiming the Inner Child (1990)

Our modern media culture rarely ever informs about

The result of this denial is human potential wasted in

Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and heal-

tion, there is poetry, there are films. A recent Google search

and beast, instead of contributing to close this split and

Embracing the Way,

What about being truly human? Is there not beauty in

This is a guide into the Who is Who of your inner child.

make their living with helping maintain and reinforce so-

Professor in the sense Eric Berne used this expression. This

This insight should actually prevent us from standard-

Besides that, great care and sensitivity is needed to

unrealistic to say that because of the mistakes one may

And there is an emotional factor as well. The inner

Genuineness primes. For those of you who write poetry or

Adapting well to your environment;

Listening to what your neighbors or friends say;

Doing things as one should do them;

Being persistent and patient, well-mannered and nice;

Obeying to a strict system of values and principles;

Having a high standard of moral or ethical values.

If you want to sell any of these virtues to your inner

A long silence followed by a funny remark;

A warning that youre going to be a robot soon;

A serious remark that youre not connected;

A hint that youre a boring, annoying nerd;

Your inner child is not the instance in you that wants