Like any ‘Child Within’, We use whatever ‘verbal childhood spanners’ that come immediately to hand to understand the rage and anger that spews forth from our child within.

Our addictive/dysfunctional behaviour in the past has mystified us – except that everyone, INCLUDING US, can agree two simple facts. FIRSTLY, there’s no addiction without ‘thought disorder’, broken sentences, blocked phrases.


If you don’t know this, then you fail at the first hurdle, and rightly so. SECONDLY, childhoods matter.


OK so far? Problems thinking and problematic childhoods – can you suspend disbelief for a moment and blend these two long established facts, despite what you’ve been taught all your life as the corner stone of a new recovery?


Richard, a pseudonym, is now 49. Even so, he shows that he believes he is still “being hit” today, because, apparently,
his father hit him so hard at age 2.
He doesn’t want to believe this, any more than you do.


We have listened carefully to him as he stumbles over the word ‘hit’, how he argues against the idea that he is currently stronger than his dad, even though the latter is now 74, and that even thinking he is stronger is ‘prohibited’ to him, by him.


Whether he was actually hit or not, I don’t know, and I’m not interested – what matters is that he still thinks he is being hit today – and he isn’t, that is something I do know. The key is that he begins to feel ‘relief’ once today’s reality percolates through the cognitive mire.




Are our thought processes really those of a very young child that has high jacked our emotional life? Is this what addiction is all about – our gummed up thought processes, because we the sufferer ‘thinks’ the trauma is still ‘alive’ in our heads? If the child within is provide with adequate trustworthy emotional support, could you persuade our child within that, since our trauma is dead, it’s over? If we did, would we be cured? We know childhood traumas ceased long ago – a fact we simply don’t believe – what would happen if we gently catch up with reality? We then keep desperately pressing for more, because we come to know think that our thought processes will clear and we will accomplish emotional growth into maturity.


Our journey towards recovery is simple.


Firstly we have to acknowledge that buried inside us is our true perfect being which we christen The Child Within. The Child Within is frozen in time locked away in the basement of the mind it had to survive so it learnt to cope with erratic parenting. Dad shouts, mum dies, or vice versa – the actual event is not material, the context is all. Our Child Within had no physical defence, so we had to devise a mental one – “this isn’t happening to me”. Our Child Within is caught on the hop, and gets stuck within this potent coping strategy. We can be unstuck, but only when we can be persuaded that our thinking is safe again – simple, but not easy. We also make another decision .Long ago, decades ago, IN EARLY CHILDHOOD We have made the decision that life was not worth living – it was something to ‘get through’ as smoothly and mindlessly as possible until we could die. The rule had been to imperceptibly stay as non-present as possible, while going about the business of doing what we had to do to ‘survive’, to pass as a human being to fit in. That was a rule we learned deep, deep down and stored with our child within. To seek a solution is to study the Ten Stages and then and only then will your solution become apparent. Our Childhood survival strategies get prolonged into adulthood, ‘Child Within Messages’ – it doesn’t work, it can be shown not to work, and with enough trustworthy emotional support, intuitive thinking can be restored.


Like any ‘Child Within’, We use whatever ‘verbal childhood spanners’ that come immediately to hand to understand the rage and anger that spews forth from our child within. We may find these responses brusque, challenging and angry – but such is the trust between our guides of us that they take it on the chin, and agree to be helped by it. Could this be evidence of efficacy? We believe it is, do you?

The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives.