The fence I Once Feared
Trigger warning for mention of suicidal ideation.
I am not a therapist or mental health professional. These words are not guidance, only reflections. May they meet you gently, but please seek the care you need should your shadows ask for more than this space can offer.
Personal Reflection:
When I first acknowledged my inner child, I saw it as damaged, broken, and left behind. I discovered her during a session of EMDR therapy. I remember seeing the door to my bedroom, the one I experienced my first trauma in. The door was ajar, and I was terrified. The first session, I couldn’t go in. I stood in the doorway looking at her tiny frame huddling in the corner of my empty room. Full of fear and self-loathing. During the second session, I made it all the way too her, but I just stood over her cowering little body. My heart broke. The sound that came out of my mouth that day, was one that first responders often hear. I left the Therapist that day feeling shame, guilt and so much rage.
How could I have left her there? I locked her in that room and kept abusing her with my thoughts and words. How could I become my own abuser? How could I strip her room of every piece of joy? How dare the adults in my life allow this to happen?!
By session three I was exhausted. My therapist offered to skip the EMDR that day. She told me we could just have a talking session. But me being me said, “Nope, I’ve abandoned her long enough.” So, with a plastic do-hicky in one hand and one in the other, I settled in as my mind took me back into that room.
This time, I dopped to my knees once I was at her side. I didn’t offer to hold her, I didn’t feel like I had that right. After a while, she crawled into my lap, and the imagery fades.
I unfortunately had to stop going to therapy after that due to finances, and it was about a year before I saw another therapist. Unfortunately, they didn’t offer EMDR therapy. But the door had been opened, and I could now visit my inner child whenever I wanted to. So, I did. Since my mind had decided she had stopped aging from that first trauma, I still saw her as a small child. Which, as a mother of four at the time; that worked out well for me lol. I just added her to my list of children to nourish and care for. Unfortunately, as she we not a physical child I could actively keep my eye on, she often got left to care for herself.
She got pretty decent at it honestly. The room began filling in with things I remember bringing me joy as a child. She figured out how to step out of her room, and I learned how to play with my children. She liked digging onto our pain. My ego did not enjoy that aspect of her lol My ego was perpetually drenched in fear, so digging up those shadows and forcing confrontation, often lead to bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts.
Then one day, I met this woman. We were close in age, and we were both on a journey of healing and self-discovery. Our frequencies were aligned for a time, you could say. One evening, we decided to perform a ritual together. I was really into the “burn the church and become a witch” idea at the time. Still quite angry at religion, Christianity in particular.
Anyways, this woman and I set up a table and said some things. She posed some questions, and I met, what many refer to as my “Higher Self”. Again, I felt as if my heart had cracked open. No deafening wails this time, only soft sobs of unexplainable joy. The visual this time was one of a lake. A beautiful woman, who looked a lot like me, sitting on a bench in the light of an early evening. She emitted a light that was almost blinding and had a smile that screamed love. She said, “I am so proud of you. I love you so much.” I had always wanted to feel those words. Despite the pain in my relationship with my mother, she had said those words to me. I just never truly felt them. In this moment though, I felt them in my bones. They felt like truth in the same way breathing does. It turned into a whole thing, my mother came through, as well as some ancestors. I felt both wonderfully loved and absolutely insane lol.
After that, my ego was able to find nourishment from my higher self, and joyful freedom from my inner child. It didn’t remove the fear instantly though, which was incredibly frustrating. I would find myself performing ritual after ritual, reaching for that insane moment I had experienced. I thought I was witching wrong lol I did research and began studying different practices and cultures. Not to adopt them, but to understand them better; to understand myself better. I have always been a solitary person when it comes to any craft I practice. It’s personal, and intimate to me and not open to external interpretation.
It wasn’t long after that, that I found out I was pregnant with kiddo number five. The woman that had helped me unlock a part of my heart and I slowly drifted apart. Nine months later I had my death experience, and things just got more insane from there lol.
The first two years after that death experience were the hardest years of my lived experience. I felt so disconnected from life and living it. At the time, I blamed it on financial struggles and children with diagnosis deemed significant. I hated myself for hating my life. I was angry all of the time, and my exhaustion was so deep, it’s a miracle I managed to function at all. I saw a future where I just waited until my youngest was 18 and I just called death to come and pick me up. I saw another future where my children felt about me the way I felt about my mother. Leaving them aching and broken. I started writing letters to my loved ones, on the off chance I didn’t make it that long.
One day last year, I hurt my best friend pretty badly. I made a choice that resulted in more bad choices that ultimately hurt one of my favorite people. After that day, I decided I wasn’t going to allow my shit to turn me into a person who does that kind of thing to people I love. So, I sat my self down and wrote out every ache I had ever caused or experienced. I really let myself have it. Page after page, I laid into my ego, shoving a mirror in its face of what my life had been and become.
When I was finished, I took those pages, and every notebook/journal I had, and threw them away. I said “No more. No more of this story. No more of this pain. We are leaving this here, and you are going to heal.”
More rabbit holes opened up. Different modalities of healing. Quantum physics lol I started finding ideas/beliefs that felt good, and I hyper focused on them. A few months later, I was sitting in my car, when I realized a box in my mind that used to hold a painful memory, was empty. I was like, “Holy shit, I did it. I healed a trauma!” From then on, I was off on an adventure of digging up trauma and nourishing me ego into letting it go.
My ego and my inner child still felt like separate parts of me. I was whole, but fragmented. I didn’t understand ho to integrate them. My inner child was the aspect of myself that I had abandoned. My higher self was the parent I had always wanted to have and be. My ego was my fiercest protector, it believed that being afraid kept me safe. I had abandoned, ignored, and abused every part of me. No wonder I felt out of wack.
I stopped trying to parent my inner child. I started listening to the guidance of my higher self. And I stopped demonizing and abusing my ego. The moment I stopped demonizing it, I also stopped being afraid of the word ego. What I once mistook for abandonment of my inner child, was really my ego’s attempt to shield her. It carried the weight of her silence so she could survive.
Here’s a paradox I discovered within all of that… Freedom could never last because the belief I carried was that it couldn’t. That belief wasn’t mine originally, but I had claimed it as my own. Out of loyalty to that belief, my ego learned to use fear as protection. It locked the other parts of me away simply because it didn’t want them to get hurt. But by trying to control the living experience, it broke me apart thinking it was saving me.
It was like I had an electric fence stretched around me. Effective, yes! It kept me “safe.” But safety bred through fear is a safety that imprisons. Animals stay in their pastures not because they are free, but because they are shocked into obedience. And isn’t that the same way fear is praised in our world? Keep them in place. Keep them small. Keep them contained. Keep them distracted. Keep them ignorant to their truths.
The tragedy is not that the fence exists; it is that we forget the field was always wide open.
Now, my ego has stepped out of the shadows and integrated with my inner child. Not clinging to my hand, nor only as the guard at my gate, but as a cocreator. We walk together. It offers its fire, its hunger, its voice; I offer it tenderness, wisdom, and direction. What once felt like a fractured part of me now feels like a companion who helps weave my becoming. I am no longer in shards of broken pieces. I am a quilt made of many fabrics.
To honor the ego is to honor the one who kept watch when no one else did. To partner with it is to reclaim the freedom that was never truly gone, only hidden behind the hum of the fence.
