Cherishing the Child Within

We’re surrounded by people. Life wouldn’t be life without relationships. They make our lives happy and miserable and all between. What if there was a simple way to increase our understanding, empathy, and patience?

One way of being more understanding of people, generally, as well as being more content in our relationships, ourselves, is to imagine and see the child within every person we meet and relate with—including ourselves.

Each and every person we encounter is subject to the same challenge: we find ourselves emotional, and therefore back in our child states, in a flash.

Even the most emotionally intelligent of people cannot escape this psychological link with their past.

Cherishing the Child within Our Children

Whenever we think of the child within each human being, our thoughts stray sublimely to the children in our midst. We want to observe them with a fresh appreciation.

In this mindset—empathy for the vulnerability of the child within human beings—we immediately have copious compassion, and we may even be given to guilt for less compassionate times of the past.

The truth is when we were less than compassionate we, too, were in our child states.

Cherishing the child within our children is appreciating the unique challenges of being more-or-less hemmed in to the child state.

Cherishing The Child Within Adults Around Us

No matter whom we encounter, encompassing position and privilege and poverty, chances are we are dealing—at least occasionally—with people stuck, by the situation, in their child world.

It’s a very common, many-times-a-day type of thing.

And as we include within our thoughts that people are products of their environment, ‘victims’ (or benefactors) of their personal history, a newfound compassion sweeps before our understanding. Suddenly, patience with others is not so hard. They are how they are for a reason.

Cherishing The Child Within Ourselves

If we can be compassionate with our children and with other adults, why are we not compassionate with ourselves? There are many in this boat—those taking humility too far; guilt, for one thing, convicts some that everyone’s worthy of love but themselves.

This is bad thinking. It rejects the child within, and that is a travesty for anyone.

The greatest possible favour anyone can do for themselves is to embrace the journey towards self-love, and that can only be found, truly, within the scope of God’s love for us.

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Every single being deserves to be loved. To be truly loved means to love the child within—the utmost weakest and most vulnerable characteristic that exposes us. Love finds its way into the heart of every being that feels safe. Understanding people to a point where they feel safe with us is cherishing the child within them; the essence of their vulnerability. Then we can love them. Then we, too, can be loved.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.