Summary & Takeaways from Healing Your Lost Inner Child by Robert Jackman

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll give my summary and take aways from the book Healing Your Lost Inner Child: How to Stop Impulsive Reactions, Set Healthy Boundaries and Embrace an Authentic Life by Robert Jackman.

Here is the overall map to my book videos: I give an overview which covers a quick summary of the book, the audience, and some background on the author/authors; then I review the structure of the book and give additional details; I'll give my recommendation; and finally, I'll review 5-10 takeaways that were either surprising or new information for me.  First, an

Overview

This is a book that introduces a process for healing your inner child.  This includes a foundational education on the concept of the inner child, the types of wounds and ineffective behaviors that result, a process for how to identify your wounds, ineffective behaviors, and triggers, and some exercises that walk you through how to adopt more functional tools, better boundaries, and a more integrated, authentic life.  This book is aimed at people who want to do their own Inner Child work without necessarily working with a therapist and has extensive exercises for the super motivated.  The author is both a psychotherapist and a guy who has done a lot of healing work himself on his own inner child.

Structure

The book is set up in 8 chapters.  The first three chapters are an overview. 

• Chapter 1 gives an overview of your inner child and how that child was formed
• Chapter 2 talks about the healing process as identifying hurtful childhood events that are linked to your current issues and dysfunctional patterns.  This process brings out the Responsible Adult within you who has matured chronologically and has good, functional behavior patterns.
• Chapter 3 discusses the different types of childhood wounds we can receive

Once those first 3 chapters give a foundation, the following chapters put that knowledge into action:

• Chapter 5 provides a bunch of exercises that help identify childhood events and the kind of household you had, plus your behavior patterns and triggers, and then it begins the process of writing letters to your inner child and finding good functional behaviors.
• Chapter 6 defines internal/external boundaries and describes how to set good boundaries.  There are also some exercises that help to understand your boundaries. The author then describes bubble and picket fence boundaries.
• Chapter 7 provides some exercises and information about having your Responsible Adult Self Step Up and shift to using your new functional tools and finally,
• Chapter 8 discusses healing, living a more authentic life, and bridging the gaps between your former behavior and relationships to your more functional and integrated life. 

Recommend?

There is a certain kind of person this book would be really useful for -- a person who is disciplined, introspective, open-minded, and doesn't have severe childhood trauma.  If you are missing any of these characteristics, it might be better to get started with a mental health therpist who can help provide structure, discipline, insight, and support for really difficult childhood experiences.  But if you fit this profile, this book can really help to provide a structure to process through these experiences and emotions.  As a therapist, I plan to use many of the worksheets and questions in my practice.  I think the exercises are particularly good in terms of providing questions and prompts to investigate your experience and behavior.   Now, my

Take Aways

• Snow globe wounds - I like this concept, which is that when you experience a core wounding, it freezes like a snow globe at the age you were when you received it and it shows up again when it is triggered in your adult life at that specific age of wounding.  Your inner child can have many ages, depending on how many wounds you have, but they are all frozen in time.
• Impulsive reaction vs.  Functional responses (2) - I've heard this called many things, but I like the characterization of ineffective protective behaviors created by your inner child as impulsive reactions and the ones that your employ as your responsible adult as functional responses.  The author also has a nice list of these behaviors. 
• 3 Ways through Trauma - the author identifies 3 ways that we cope with trauma -- suppression (when we consciously push down memories), repression (when we unconsciously avoid difficult thoughts), and dissociation (when our bodies save us from having to experience thoughts of severe trauma by checking out).
• Trauma Defenses - the author cites some ways that we block actually dealing with trauma: Discounting (or saying it wasn't that bad), protecting others (like our parents), normalizing the abnormal, denying that healing is possible, avoiding bad memories (see the previous 3 ways through trauma).
• Internal/External Boundaries - I'm used to talking about external boundaries (or positions that you establish with another person or situation), but I like the concept of internal boundaries, which are personal agreements that you have with yourself about each issue.  It's easy to see how an inability to set internal boundaries could result in having bad external boundaries.
• Boundary Confusion - a big part of this book is about boundaries and unfortunately, it was confusing to me.  There were a lot of terms like Angry Boundaries and Extreme Boundaries that seemed to overlap significantly.  Plus, I could not understand whether the author's term "Bubble Boundaries" were good or bad?  Or why?
• 3 Information levels - the author differentiated between three different levels of information that you can control about yourself.  How you handle these types of information is an indication of how you are controlling your boundaries.  The levels are public (like name, town where you live, job -- the kind of info you would find in a social media search), the next is personal (which you might share with family, acquaintances, and colleagues (like preferences, address and phone #), and finally private info you would only tell close friends and family (like fears, hopes, relationship status, and past trauma).
• Letters to Inner Child - I liked the prompts that the author had for letters to the inner child, but I was surprised that he didn't suggest using the non-dominant hand approach like most other inner child letter processes. 
• Emotional healing - the approach in this book makes a lot of sense, but it stays fairly cognitive.  In other words, it gives a good explanation for why you do what you do and makes a good case for shifting to more effective behavior, but doesn't dig into how to make your inner child feel safe and loved.  I have another book summary coming up soon of a book that does a better job of this. And finally,
• Healing Signs - the author talks about ways to know you are healing.  Some signs are: you aren't triggered by things as easily, you feel lighter, calmer, and more at peace, and you are kinder to yourself and others.

Conclusion

I found this book to be a pretty good primer on Inner Child work and to have great exercises and questions for working through this process on your own.  I did find some of the boundary categorizations confusing and hard to follow and also felt that it stayed more safely in cognitive, rather than emotional, territory, but it is worth the read for anyone who is interested in learning more about how their childhood wounds might be showing up in their current behavior.

I'd love to know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!