A Circle on the Floor

In psychology, the concept of the “inner child” is often misunderstood. Actually there are very often several inner children that an individual creates as a coping mechanism to survive growing up in the presence of severe emotional and/or physical abuse. Each of the multiple inner children likely doesn’t know the others exist. (By the way, this is not to be confused with multiple personality disorder which has nothing at all to do with the inner child concept.)

In the early 1990’s I suddenly started having panic attacks, and I went through an “inner child rescue” therapy process that involved a form of self-hypnosis. During the process, I found out to my own astonishment that I had neatly hidden away many inner children to cope with various abuses during my childhood. I had long forgotten most of the events associated with the creation of these inner children, but as the hypnosis revealed them and I got to know them, the panic attacks concurrently disappeared. As a result of this incredible experience I had, I thought about how wonderful everything might have been if I and my inner children were fully visible to each other. I know the concept is a bit abstract, but I wrote A Circle on the Floor to express how the process might work if the inner children were physical beings.

A Circle on the Floor

Deep inside my head there live these separate parts of me,
Most of them just vestiges of conscious memory,
Infants, toddlers, gangly teens, and school boys of all ages,
All the different characters from my life's many stages.

Some are proud and some ashamed, abandoned and abused,
Some are lost and some are scared, and others feel confused,
All are separate entities whose lives seem unrelated,
Crammed inside one body, yet completely isolated.

Wouldn't it be nice if they could come out from inside,
And join me in a circle just to talk about our lives,
For each of them has seen life from a different point of view,
And each of them has secrets that the others never knew.

Yank the phone, turn down the lights and maybe lock the door,
Then sit around, legs folded, in a circle on the floor,
Then we could spend so many days relating what we knew,
Unraveling the mysteries, the past that we'd been through.

And gradually we'd get to know each other very well,
And then we'd merge together when there was no more to tell,
'Cause once we let our secrets out there's nothing left to do,
But travel through what's left of life enjoying it anew.

Steven Pein
July 1993
Copyright 1994
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