Twelve Steps to Spiritual Awakening: Becoming The Child Through Twelve Step Recovery

The child is the almost universal symbol for the soul’s transformation. The child is whole – not yet divided....When we would heal the mind...we ask the child to speak to us.

Susan Griffin

Many years ago, I went through some major inner child healing work as part of my spiritual recovery. In my journaling and meditation, I realized and experienced that past traumas of abandonment and abuse had triggered divisions within my inner child self, and I was cracked and fragmented.

As I began to practice and live the spiritual principles of the Twelve Steps with these inner child selves, they became more and more present and loved by my God – Mom and Dad. As they began to live and breathe again in my conscious experience of my selves and Mom and Dad’s unconditional Presence -- they began to interact and share and heal. I experienced their reintegrating, their being restored to active consciousness, and their becoming increasing whole and alive.

Today, they appear reborn into a new and stable fluid child self, who responds and experiences and loves naturally and intuitively – a very present heart self.

Other separations still exists as adult selves. And as I am practicing spiritual principles of Presence, they are continuing their paths of returning “home” to my deepest and purest child self.

I experience today that I am not an adult – I have several isolated adult selves – and all of these adult selves are artificial selves that my brain created in order to protect me from the suffering of abandonment, separation, and abuse. I am being reborn within each moment – being restored with each breath – to the child my Parent-God originally gave birth to – within the wombs of their hearts.

Recovery does not mean that I have to become a different person. It means I need to start being myself again...

There is innocence within me that already knows how to trust my Higher Power, to cherish life while holding it lightly, to live fully and simply in the present moment. I will allow that part of myself to come forward and nourish me as I continue on this journey.

The Courage to Change

It takes one a long time to become young.

Pablo Picasso