How do Sexual Freedom and the Inner Child Relate to Each Other?
By: Dr. Denise Renye
Once you start spending time with your inner children, you begin to find out that they are multifaceted. They have encountered a lot and are resilient, beautiful, and vulnerable. Likely, they have endured conditioning of many kinds from family, culture, and religion. Their unique spirits and joys may have been repressed or ridiculed. They may have experienced enmeshment or an invasive parent. Enmeshment, also known as covert incest, is when a parent looks to their child for emotional support and psychological validation.
This sort of conditioning to be responsible and present for a parent’s emotional needs could result in the child growing up to learn to hide their own needs, including sexual ones. There may be guilt present when emotional, psychological, and sexual needs appear. This could lead to unhealthy or even abusive relationships. Children in homes such as these may have learned curiosity about sex was not normal because sexual curiosity would have taken the focus off of the adult’s needs and getting those met.
In dysfunctional households, taking the focus off of the adult’s needs would have not been OK so children learn to stop doing so. There are also some households where the incest was overt and all of the above may have been multiplied.
In my practice as a psychologist and certified sexologist, I have worked with many individuals who seek help due to an issue that is manifesting at a physical level as sexual dysfunction. Because I work in a trauma-informed way, I take a full history of any trauma the person has endured. They may not be conscious of it or the trauma may be pre-verbal, meaning the person cannot express what happened to them in words because it’s instead a sensation that is communicated somatically, or through the body.
Trauma is not only the traditional things people think of when referencing trauma, but also intrusion by a parent, being parentified, experiencing enmeshment, or overt body violations. The body embeds impressions from events or circumstances and healing comes from bringing safety back to the body and the inner ones that may have gone into hiding. Befriending those parts, bringing light to what they experienced, can result in deep insights and powerful healing.
How do you do that? My blog offers a plethora of examples and mechanisms, and that includes giving the inner children what they (you) did not receive growing up. This could be healing around sexuality because many individuals had to hide their sexualness, whether it was simply being a sexual being, that they had an attraction toward a gender that didn’t align with family values, or even simply that they had sexual feelings and expressions thereof, or something else entirely. With inner child exploration, hiding is no longer needed and something new takes shape.
By looking within and doing inner child exploration, you may become curious about sexuality, sexual needs, and what is pleasurable for you, which are all important and essential to a healthy and thriving sexual self. Why does this happen? As I mentioned in my previous post, creativity and sexuality are two sides of the same coin.
Inner child exploration is often playful, creative, and in the Indian psychology paradigm of the chakra system, activates the second chakra. The second chakra focuses on creativity but it also governs sexuality. Therefore, when you engage with creativity, you also engage with sexuality, for they are, in essence, one in the same. It makes sense then that inner child play arouses other perhaps long-buried sentiments, ones you have been conditioned to deny or turn away from. The intense conditioning we receive from family, culture, religion, and the school system are not to be taken lightly. It requires a devotion to consciousness to evolve through, and past, conditioning.
The messages we all receive around sexuality and freedom to even be a sexual being are tremendous. Inner child play is a deep dive into the core of the self and may allow you to find your way back to who you were before all of the aforementioned conditioning.
Imagine a sense of freedom. This freedom comes from within and once it is accessed, you may find that freedom without (externally) is that much more within reach. In short, engaging with inner child play can allow you to be more you. And what the world needs is for you to be the most you you can be.
To set up an appointment with me (Marin County Sexologist), click here.
Journal Prompts
Reflect on a childhood memory or experience that involved creativity or playfulness. How did this experience make you feel at the time? How do you think it influenced your perception of creativity and sexuality?
Take some time to journal about your current relationship with your inner child. How connected do you feel to your playful and creative side? Are there any barriers or conditioning that you notice inhibiting your ability to freely express yourself in these areas?
Consider the concept of conditioning and its impact on your sexuality and creativity. Are there any beliefs or messages you've internalized from family, culture, or society that have influenced how you view these aspects of yourself? How might you work to transcend or evolve beyond these conditioning factors?