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Meet Your Inner Child: Overcoming Destructive Relationship Patterns

• Tabitha MacDonald • Episode 38

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Would you like to transform your relationships and parenting by understanding the hidden parts of yourself? This episode of the Mindful Love Podcast uncovers how unprocessed childhood traumas can shape our adult interactions. I share an emotional story about how my daughter's toxic relationship with a narcissist challenged me to be both a supportive mother and respect her individual healing journey. Through open communication and intuition, we navigated these complexities, ultimately leading her back to a place of healing. The overarching message? Healing our traumas is crucial for breaking harmful patterns in love and dating.

Imagine the profound impact of addressing generational trauma on your family. This episode highlights the rapid positive changes that unfold when parents deal with their unresolved issues, all while modeling emotional safety for their children. By sharing our healing journeys, we encourage our kids to engage in their own emotional work, creating a healthier family dynamic. We also touch on the chaos that unresolved parts can bring into romantic relationships and how intuitive coaching can pinpoint and resolve these deep-seated issues, paving the way for more harmonious connections.

Ever wondered why feelings like jealousy or fear of abandonment can feel so intense? These emotions often stem from unmet needs during our formative years. In this episode, we explore the concept of the inner child and how it shapes our adult emotional responses. Relating a personal experience, I explain how understanding my inner child helped me navigate an emotionally charged situation. To aid in this journey, I provide a resource for an inner child meditation on my website. We invite you to share your experiences and insights to help build a supportive community aimed at achieving healthier, more secure relationships.

Are you ready to feel supported on your healing journey?  The Soma Flow Library of Healing is now available.  With a powerful meditations, hypnosis sessions and Superconscious Recodes to restructure your unconscious patterns, this is a must have tool to your journey back to you.  

About Tabitha
Tabitha MacDonald is an Intuitive Coach and Healer committed to helping people overcome their pain as fast as possible so that they can have the love, success, freedom and fulfillment they truly desire.

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Tabitha:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindful Love Podcast. My name is Tabitha MacDonald, I am an intuitive coach and tonight I want to talk to you about our parts. I do a lot of parts work with my clients and I explain it like this Uh, when we have unprocessed traumas and trust me, we all have them Uh, we have a part that is created to deal with a really big emotion when we're little. So I like to use the example of like, let's say, kelly was at school and it was. She was in her kindergarten class and her teacher might've picked up her picture and said oh, you know, you better study math, you're not very good at art. She would have coded up a part to deal with the humiliation and embarrassment of that, that anytime she tried to do something creative would tell her that she couldn't and would either have an intense emotion of shame or guilt or humiliation, depending on how her body registered the experience.

Tabitha:

So when we're talking about relationships and we're talking about love and dating and being married, these parts are running the show most of the time. It's interesting because my daughter just moved home and she's 18 years old She'll be 19 soon and I knew she started dating this guy who was a total narcissist. I could tell like the minute I met him my narcissist radar is extremely high, probably because I grew up with them and then dated them my entire adult life and so now I'm very well trained to be able to detect the energy of someone who's very narcissistic. So when I met this the guy, I was immediately like, oh my God, she's following my patterns, insert like DNA and ancestral trauma and Burt Hollinger's work, family Constellations and I just thought like, oh my gosh, if I, you know, keep doing the work on myself, it will. It will pass down to her. And, you know, part of that is true. Part of that is they still have to have their own experiences. We can't protect them from all of their pain, but anyway. So the relationship kept getting progressively worse.

Tabitha:

And as a mother and if any of you moms are listening, I'm sure you can relate when you see your teenage daughter especially reliving some of your worst memories, you pretty much want to do anything possible to help them and you them and prevent them from experiencing the same pain and mistakes that you did. And I also am incredibly intuitive. So I was looking at it at both spaces one from my mom perspective and then one from a more spiritual soul's journey perspective. I had her human design read many years ago, and so I knew that part of her journey was to learn how to experience her feelings. And I thought, well, if she doesn't have pain, or, you know, she doesn't have these experiences, she's not going to come here to do what her soul came here to do, which was to really learn how to process through really big feelings. It's one of her, one of her soul lessons.

Tabitha:

So, as we were going through this, it was trying to hold space for both, and it's really hard Like I'm not going to lie that holding space for both not an easy experience when your own triggers are coming up of. Oh my gosh, had I, you know, worked through my trauma before I got pregnant, then this wouldn't be happening. This is my fault, for we're always dating narcissists. Her definitions of love are all screwed up because of me, like guilt, guilt, guilt, mom, guilt, right. And I just kept being present with it and thinking, if this is all happening for her and this is also happening for me, because we live in a co-creative universe, how can I best support her on the journey? And I thought, well, I'm certainly not going to call him out again, because when I did that the first time, she almost stopped talking to me and I had to do a lot of backpedaling in order to get her to start talking to me again and really keep my nose out of it, start talking to me again and really keep my nose out of it, which you know was hard. But also I loved her enough to do that so that I didn't lose connection with her.

Tabitha:

Because if your daughter or son is dating a narcissist, one of their primary goals is to get them to alienate from their family, and so I'll do a whole different episode on that. I don't want to get distracted about talking about parts, but I just want to say that, like if your child is entangled with someone who's emotionally manipulative or narcissistic in nature, making sure that the line of communication stays open with that child is incredibly important. And, yes, it means you have to bite your tongue and learn how to use your intuition to guide you to make sure that the relationship and communication stays open. So, with that said, many months later I think it was about eight months she finally called and the level of pain she was in was just unbearable and I and I knew it was time to give her the hard talk and and say, like I'm actually worried about you. You know I have a podcast all on narcissistic abuse. I actually made it for you, like you know, one day I knew you would need it and I need you to listen to me right now because you're on at that point where you're If you go further I'm afraid I won't be able to pull you back out. And I think she finally heard and he finally did something that was so outrageous that she finally had enough. And you know she called and I said I think you know, as your mom, I think it's time to come home for a little while and just recuperate. And then, you know, we'll figure out a new plan. And she agreed.

Tabitha:

So I flew down there and picked her up and we drove home together and it was a beautiful drive home. It was nothing like the nightmare of a drive that we had on the way down there, which was like car breaking down expensive hotels, like nothing working out storms. It was like the universe was screaming this is a bad idea. And on the way home it was like sunshine, no traffic, perfect. Everything was. Nobody got tired there was no, it was just beautiful. And Kira, my daughter, she was like I feel like the universe is really speaking to me right now and saying that this was this, this choice was really good to come home. And I said, yeah, I feel the same. I feel the same. Blessings upon us right now.

Tabitha:

And, um, so we're driving home and, you know, we're really starting to unpack the narcissistic abuse and I do this, um for a living. And so I could hear the ruminating patterns in the brain, I could hear the thought loops, I could hear the traps, I could hear the part-time personalities and I could just witness her, stuck in patterns in her brain that she couldn't get out of. And you know, right before I got there, she had let me do a recode on her because she was really meshed in the pain and I was very concerned that it was going to send her into a really dark place, and so we have a really great relationship. So I did a recode for her and within 24 hours, she started saying things like wow, I don't know why I thought he was so attractive. Or oh, this isn't making sense now, because the recode helps undo the gaslighting and the manipulation and the? Um, just the all of it, all of the, the entanglement of, of lies that that gets created in the brain when it endures narcissistic abuse. And so we had already made a little bit of headway from that, which was great.

Tabitha:

And then on the way home, I really started just listening about what her experience was like and she told me this story about when she went over there to go break up with him and she physically couldn't leave, like her body felt like it was incapable of moving, and I knew the feeling that she was talking about. I've experienced it many times. And she said it was like something took over and she just stood there, even though he was saying mean things, even though she knew she needed to go, but she was frozen. And then she said she started like raging and she only gave me a little bit of information. I think she was a little embarrassed, but later she told me more about it and I yes, I did ask for permission to share this story. So I don't. I really respect her privacy and how she communicates with me, but I know that this story will help other mothers and young women who are ensnared in abusive relationships.

Tabitha:

You are most vulnerable between like 18 and 21. So you know she would say that she'd start raging and yelling and she couldn't even figure out what was happening. It was like nothing made sense. And I said, yeah, that's a part-time personality takeover. We don't know which part it was, because you know it's probably dormant now, but that's what it feels like when you have a part takeover it's like your behavior doesn't make sense and it's a young part and it's acting from the perspective personality behaviors of the age where that part was created.

Tabitha:

And so when we got home we did I have a section in my course called Parts Integration from Narcissistic Abuse and as we were doing it and we were doing the meditation to uncover the part, she told me it was a three-year-old. And I immediately remembered her three-year-old. That girl was stubborn. I mean stubborn. She did some things like tantrums and had a hard time managing her emotions. And, um, also, when she wanted something or you know, she stood her ground. And I thought, oh, this is a hard child to parent, but, man, she's going to make a powerful woman. This is hard but it's also good. Um, but what? What?

Tabitha:

The memory was that she started telling me because when we do parts work, it's not necessarily the actual event that we have to go work through, and I think that's like one of the biggest hurdles to people you know getting help is that they're afraid they have to go really unpack these really painful emotions. And what we're looking for is the emotional imprint, not necessarily the accuracy of the memory. We're just looking for the emotional imprint and how the part remembered the experience, and so this isn't like going in and uncovering all of the depths of shadows in the brain. We're just looking for how the part remembered the experience so that we can help the part mature and develop new patterns of behavior that are in alignment with what your choices are. And so when she started telling me about what the part felt like, I remembered exactly when it was created.

Tabitha:

We had belonged to this mom's group and I had three very close friends and they all had daughters her age age and we were all best friends. And then, like with Girl Clicks, for some reason I was the one who got ejected from the friend group. I still really don't know why. I did try to talk to them at some point, but all of the answers were very different and so I just had to let it go. But when it happened, I the most painful part was that my daughter was so sad. She was three years old. She lost all of her best friends and up until that point she was extremely social and she had no problem hanging out with a lot of kids and she didn't have any insecurities or issues. She just was totally authentic and felt very comfortable being around a large group of kids. And after that experience she stopped that. That went away and she started only focusing on one kid at a time and she couldn't ever have more friends.

Tabitha:

And I didn't realize, because back then I wasn't doing the work, I didn't understand neuroscience, I didn't understand any of this, and so I just thought it was because we moved, because not long after that we had to. We had to move because of the 08 crash and, um, you know, our lives as a family just fell apart. And so I figured it was all of the stress of the move and the struggles we were having and me having to go back to work because my ex-husband was laid off, and really what it was was this experience of losing all of her friends. And so she coded up that groups of friends were not safe and that they would abandon her, and so she said that it felt like she was standing there screaming, saying I will not be left behind. And that was the part that took over when she was having this fight and it was wanting to be healed.

Tabitha:

And it's really interesting because once we did the parts integration work, like the next day all of a sudden she's like, well, why haven't I been calling anybody, why have I been isolating? And she's no longer living in fear or hiding and just her old self is like fully emerging, and it's so fast. It's so fast and it's so beautiful to witness and watch. Because I do my parts work as well and sometimes I'll see where oh okay, this was my DNA structure that I inherited from my family line and I passed it down to her. And when we use the superconscious recode to go heal that DNA structure or the energy structure in the family history, I immediately see how much faster it is for my daughter or my son to transition out of that pattern that they inherited from me. So this goes into just really understanding well how those parts are created, but also why it's necessary for us parents to do our work when we want to help our kids. I know a lot of parents really want to help their kids and we have a lot of kids with high anxiety and stress in a way that I don't think we had to experience when we were growing up. And I always tell people like, do your work first and it will transfer energetically to your children, but, more importantly, they're going to see that it's safe because they'll watch you go through it.

Tabitha:

I've been very open and honest with my children about my journey of transformation and healing and with my children about my journey of transformation and healing and you know she's seen me do it in a way where it's safe and she sees me changing and growing and evolving, and also the struggles and the frustrations I have of having to deal with old trauma, but not in a way where I'm dumping it on her and I just always say like I'm cleaning up my stuff so you don't have to deal with it when I'm older. And I think that honesty and transparency really makes it easier for her to do her own inner work and she's 18. And I think that anytime an 18 year old is already committed to doing their internal mindset and emotional regulation work like that's a good thing Because those are tools that are going to help her throughout her life, and it's just makes me very proud as a mom, because there's so many things that I did wrong and aren't wrong that I think that I perceive as having done wrong, did wrong and aren't wrong, that I think that I perceive as having done wrong and that I carried a lot of guilt with, because I, you know, didn't realize that I had all this childhood trauma that was running the show and that also how it was impacting my relationship, choices and definitions of love, and I did my best to shift them as much as possible, but I had limited knowledge and education about what any of it was. Anytime I tried to go to counseling, I had protector, controller parts that were so good at giving the counselor really good information that they would just go on that surface level story thinking that that was the original event. They had no clue the hornet's nest that was hiding underneath that story, and that's where, when I started working with intuitive coaching, it became so much different because they were able to see past the blocks, past the barriers, past what I said, into the thing that was actually holding me back from having what I wanted. And so I just want to explain how these parts interfere in relationships because they create so much chaos when we're trying to build a romantic partnership with another human being. And tonight I just want to talk about the inner child, because the inner child is the one who overreacts to minor issues, and so if you find yourself having extreme reactions to small problems, your inner child is probably at play.

Tabitha:

One of the ways you can tell is that you'll feel childish emotions. Childish emotions include jealousy, fear of abandonment fear of abandonment specifically and extreme neediness, and this is often just created in a time when you were a child and you had needs that weren't being met, and so this, like part of you, was created to make sure that at some point, that need would be met, and they developed a certain type of behavior to get the need met. Now, we never want to judge this aspect of us. They were three, like I mean they. You know our need to belong and to be loved and to be nurtured is actually a survival need at three years old, because we cannot survive without a tribe, and so the pattern that was created in the brain is just operating on repeat, like Groundhog's Day, so it's operating on old programming that was created by a three-year-old, and so if you ever find yourself in an argument and you're like looking at your spouse or your sister or your mom whoever and you're like why does this person literally behave like a three-year-old?

Tabitha:

Right now, you're actually probably talking to their three-year-old part. This is helpful for you when you're engaging with someone, because if you try to use logic and reason now all you parents know that if you're a target and your kid wants a Star Wars gun and the answer's no, there's no logic and reason you can sit there and be like it's not in the family budget this week. They don't care. All they know is they want it and they're going to scream, kick and throw a massive tamper tantrum inside of the Target store because they want something that they can't have. I mean speaking from personal experience. I remember dragging my son out of Target and because of this very experience and they're not you can't be logical with them. There's no logic in that conversation. And so when you're witnessing another human being in their part, their three-year-old part does it make sense to use logic? When you're trying to resolve a conflict? Probably not.

Tabitha:

So the best result would be to go back into a space of nurturing, because really the inner child is looking for nurturing to know that it's not going to be abandoned or rejected, and to feel a sense of belonging. And to feel a sense of belonging and you can also do this for yourself If you feel yourself becoming jealous or you know having an overreaction to a minor issue and you know other types of triggers and that's going to be part of your journey is to figure that out, because most of the time, we have no clue. I mean, I was just doing this yesterday. I was on my way to a meeting and I was running late and I couldn't find my keys and I literally started throwing a tantrum like a two-year-old and I got so frustrated with myself because I do this work all of the time. So I knew my two-year-old was digging over and I'm like, okay, I really don't have time for you right now. I need to find my keys. And then I thought, okay, well, what, what is it? And it was.

Tabitha:

It was FOMO is fear of missing out. It was like fear of missing out on something important and then being the only one left out, which is a total like being kicked on the outside of the click response. And if you live in a family where there's a lot of triangulation, you'll know what that feels like, because somebody always has to be on the outside so everybody else can be on the inside. I am going to upload an inner child meditation onto my website. I'm going to put the link in the show notes and you can go to mindful of dot love and there will be a link to that download. I highly recommend that you take advantage of it and and do the free inner child meditation and connect in with the inner child and start learning how to heal that part and aspect of you. Now, if you haven't yet had children, this is a wonderful thing to do before you start breeding.

Tabitha:

So the reason is that nobody gets out of here without trauma. Big traumas, little trauma, it doesn't matter. We all experience them, just like this trauma that my daughter had. It wasn't from me, it was from society, and whether or not we create a beautiful, safe space for our children, um, and they experience these traumas out in the world or they experience it from internal family systems of dysfunction and addiction and abuse. We all experience traumas and the thing that's the most important to understand is that you can have a big trauma that registered as a big trauma and created a lot of parts that react to something and when you say the story maybe to somebody else, they might be like well, that's really not that intense, you know, it's how you registered it. So I work with a lot of people where they're like, well, my stories really aren't that like. You know, lifetime movie network-ish, like they're just kind of like, you know, leave it to beaverish.

Tabitha:

But it doesn't matter what your experience was, it's how you registered it as a child and so if you have behaviors as an adult that don't align with what you want, that don't align with the type of intimacy and connection that you really crave, chances are there are some parts that are preventing you from having it. And that's where your inner work becomes your responsibility, because our our need is to have close, intimate relationships. And, just like my daughter learned um, because it's funny, because she goes, you know, the the big learning for her was wherever you go, there you are. Because she thought if she moved and she started a new life, that she would have all new experiences, and what she basically did was went and recreated on a worse scale what her life and her social life was like here, and what she learned was it didn't matter where she moved or what she did to wherever, and keep recreating that old social pattern until we figured it out and recoded and coded in a new one which is secure, loving, healthy relationships. So I started having her read books on what does secure look like, secure love look like, and how to identify it and learn about it, because what she was experiencing is an anxious, avoidant attachment style, and that's where you have both anxious and avoidant attachment styles.

Tabitha:

So start doing the work and start asking yourself these questions, like when other people are acting like a child, you know, do you really want to engage with them in that state, trying to use logic and if you're feeling that way, really take the time to just sit and go.

Tabitha:

How old am I right now and what is the wound that's really coming to the surface? Like I said, you can download the meditation on my website and I really look forward to hearing about how your experiences with this meditation and also part of your journey, like, what are you learning about yourself when you do these exercises? And I'd love for you to share and please, if this was helpful for you, I would really appreciate you dropping a review and sharing with others. It helps small podcasts like mine get seen more in the ranks up against the big corporate ones that have more of an audience. So thank you so much for listening to the Mindful Love podcast today. My name is Tabitha McDonald. I'm an intuitive coach and I'm just really grateful for your time and your attention today and I hope you have an amazing day. Thank you so much.

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