Inner Kid Connection: The Sensitive Inner Child

As I've stated in a previous post, inner kids are sensitive. If you do have, or have had, or have known someone who has an active inner child, you've probably already noticed that they are sensitive creatures.

This is because inner children are usually born from trauma in our lives. At some point, each of us was hurt and an inner kid grew out of that pain. They are in some ways blocks of emotions to which we assign personality and (if we role play) a back story intended to support their personhood as a character.

Roleplays like Birchwood Isle treat inner children as though they are characters. If we look at a "character" as a creation in the mind of a writer (or even an actor) then we run the risk of treating inner kids as though they are two-dimensional strings of words on a screen or a paper. This might be acceptable in other role play settings, but in an age play group, we have to treat one another with greater sensitivity than we would if the characters were two-dimensional and not damaged pieces of ourselves.

Most of us remember to treat our own inner kids with care, but it's easy to forget that another person's inner kid is as important as our own is. Today I'd like to admonish everyone reading to consider every emotionally real inner they find as being as important as their own, and do not hesitate to treat them with the same respect with which you'd like to be treated. Every one of these "characters" is born from trauma, abuse, or abandonment, and they have a right to be sensitive.

This is a good time for me to stress that it is especially important to understand why Birchwood Isle asks that each of the inners on our site (whether child, teen, or adult) be able to rely on their "keeper." Some people refer to this as the "big," but since we recognize that adults have their place in our mental universes as well, even they should be able to rely on us to keep them safe from the bad things in the world.

No world is perfect: Not even Birchwood Isle. I don't think that we'd want it that way, because I believe that in order to heal, the world has to be a natural one that makes sense to the people who live there. But when conflicts arise, you must be able to care for and protect your inners. 

Nobody else can do this for you, but we should attempt to be forgiving, generous, and gentle with one another to help fill that gap.