I’ll go first…after 10 years of speculating in the market (read: gambling in high risk assets) I realized I shouldn’t ever touch a brokerage account in my lifetime. A monkey would have made better choices than I did. Greed has altered the course of life many times over. I am at an age where I may recover from my actions over the decades, but it has taken its toll. I am frugal and have a good head on me, but having such impulsivity in financial instruments was not how I envisioned my adulthood. Its a bitter pill to swallow, since money is livelihood of my family, but I need to “invest” all I have into relationships, meaningful moments, and fulfilling hobbies.
Mmm. That sounds like something someone is selling. There’s many theories of childhood development, going right back to Freud, and they don’t necessarily have a lot in common with each other.
I’m the sum of my nature and my experiences. It was a painful way to grow up, but in some ways it’s good practice for a dysfunctional world. In other ways it’s maladaptive, and all the therapists I’ve seen have talked about finding strategies or new ways of looking at things to deal with that, not finding some way to erase it.
Inner child work isn’t for everyone. Luckily, there are many methodologies, like you mentioned. The main purpose of inner child work is to process the stuck emotions/ the stuck grief that left you emotionally stuck in whatever age the trauma happened. You’re not erasing anything, you’re acknowledging what happened and feeling the feelings that you originally shoved deep inside. This is how you reach the unmet developmental milestones.