Warming the Stone Child

The deep feelings we have buried are those which belong to the child we were, the child who was innocent and free and who knew joy until his spirit was broken by being made to feel guilty and ashamed of his natural impulses. That child still lives in our hearts and in our guts but we have lost contact with it, which means we have lost contact with

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And here I was, in my process, all alone, years later, realising that the antidote to the fear was to meet it, to look it in the eye and ask what it wanted on my behalf. My fear was the voice of my inner child. She just wanted to feel safe. So, we sat by my inner bonfire with my inner wise elder, and I promised her that I would have her back, no ma... See more

And that’s the first reason Winnicott gives for the mother’s “hatred” of the child: “the baby is not her own (mental) conception.” On the one hand that is what makes a child so genuinely amazing: their potential to surprise us with their development, their unfurling beyond what we know or could imagine. It is also what makes the child infuriating:

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