Part 7f of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult
Like any oppositional leader, the Rebel claims to speak for the marginalized, in this case, the Innermost Child. If you remember, the Innermost Child is the original part of me, but it’s still there. It feels things that are not delineated by my Feelings. The Innermost Child has no voice because it has no language. The things it experiences is whatever cannot be captured by words.
Many people believe the Innermost Child is a hedonist, that it wants nothing more than to re-experience what it was like as a baby at the breast. Your Rebel might try to recreate this in a permanent Dionysian revelry. If it succeeds, you’ll be unfit to live in society, for when you cast your lot so much towards individual freedom, you become unable to have stable relationships or a good job. Moreover, you’ll have to forgo more refined pleasures. The fifty-year-old hedonist, getting shit-faced for the thousandth time never gets to see Paris. Nor is he even free, for the drugs have made him their slave.
I’ve worked with a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts. Their use generally emerges in adolescence under the influence of the Rebel and continues through their twenties and thirties. They devote themselves to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. As time goes on, they run into the limits of that lifestyle, finding themselves in jails, hospitals, or a marriage with someone who demands they grow up. Their Rebel is a Pied Piper that led their Innermost Child to ruin. A healthy Rebel would have guided them past hedonistic temptations to the things that really set them free.
Next in the series: Shame and the Rebel
Keith R Wilson 