Escaping The Narcissist’s Sado-Masochistic World

A narcissistic relationship begins in a utopian state of wonder and bliss, before devolving into a hellscape of ritualistic humiliation, rejection and abuse. As the months pass, the narcissist’s attitude grows colder, their comments more biting, and their abuses more painful. Even the sex can become rougher and more crude.

As the target’s self-esteem plummets from their treatment, the narcissist amps up the abuse into a sadistic fervour, which further erodes the target’s self-esteem, hence reinforcing the cycle.

This raises the question: If someone treats you so badly and disrespectfully, why not just walk away?

Those who know what a trauma bond is understand why a target puts up with abuse. Those who know what a sunk-cost fallacy is understand that the more the target invests, the more likely they are to remain, hoping for an eventual return on their investment. The target’s (magical) reasoning is that the more love they show the narcissist, the more it will heal them both and lead to a happy ending. To the outside observer, however, the target seems like a masochist begging for pain. And in some ways, they would be right.

Welcome to the sado-masochistic world of the narcissist.

Venturing Into The Darkness

So what gives? Why does a narcissist devolve into emotional, sexual and physical sadism? What is fuelling this horrible behaviour? And long before the target invested their mind, body, soul and finances into the relationship, long before the trauma bond set in, why did the target accept the punishment doled out by the narcissist?

The answer lies in two places: The narcissist’s unconscious, and the target’s unconscious. Deep inside both lies a mysterious figure, acting from the shadows, infecting the narcissist and target’s every decision, helping to reinforce the sado-masochistic cycle as it devolves into a chaotic storm of confusion, humiliation and pain.

Every narcissistic relationship has a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ person. The narcissist knows exactly which one they are, and ensures their ‘goodness’ by provoking the target’s ‘badness’ through shaming, criticising, ridiculing, undermining and attacking the target.

For their part, the target contributes to their ‘badness’ or ‘lessness’ by sublimating themselves to the narcissist. They see little wrong with allowing the narcissist to control their life, have their way in bed, and be the judge of all they do. The target inherently believes that they are less capable and less intelligent than the narcissist. Caught in their idealisation, the target sees the narcissist as the divine answer to all the ‘badness’ they carry inside — even when they are not aware of the fact.

Popular psychology talks a lot about the ‘critical voice’ in people’s heads. This incessant tormenter questions your every decision, judges every facet about you, and reminds you in no uncertain terms how inferior, incompetent and horrible you are.

Thoughts are tangible to the light of awareness. In the practice of mindfulness, where one directs their focus inside, thought is typically the first layer which arises to consciousness. This explains the hyper-fixation on the critical voice.

Some people grew up with vocally-critical parents. As a result, scolding comments such as “You stupid child!”, “You’ll never amount to anything!” and “You’re pathetic!” ring in the abused child’s mind.

For others, the negativity emanating from within is not so sharply expressed. These people rarely hear a critical voice. Instead, they may experience a painful unease; a vague sense of being ‘bad’, broken or inferior somehow. This might manifest as a heaviness in their chest, a tension in their jaw, a gnawing anxiety, a desperation to be accepted, or a tendency to want to isolate themselves.

To muddy the waters further, behaviours can arise which are rooted in a self-perception of inferiority, incompetence and ‘badness’. People-pleasers supplicate and place themselves last, assuming the ‘lower’ position in all interactions. Putting yourself down, pretending to be overly lovable, averting eye contact and refusing help from others are some other ways inadequacy can be expressed.

Whether it is through mind, body or behaviour, this gnawing sense of inadequacy emanates from a singular source which often escapes awareness: The ‘bad child’ inside.

How We Become ‘Bad’

In the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, a ‘bad object’ is an early, introjected self-representation perceived as having negative qualities.

Who is the judge of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ in this world? Anti-heroes such as Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Harley Quinn are some of the most loved characters in film and television — despite their heinousness. One person’s idea of immorality is another’s idea of power. In a world where we cannot help but become enthralled by the audacity of narcissistic and psychopathic behaviour, the concept of good and bad is an ever-elusive thing to capture.

Yet in the world of a child, good and bad are simple to gauge: Your parent is the judge, jury and executioner — without exception.

Because of their vulnerable state of helplessness, a child remains on the precipice of terror and death. Their very survival depends on the whims of the parent. To cope with this precarious state of affairs, the child splits their reality into a binary all-good/all-bad perspective. Anything or anyone that meets the child’s needs for sustenance, love, attention and nurture is deemed good, and everything else is repulsive and must be dismissed. This is demonstrated in the child who is quick to throw a temper tantrum, then quickly appeased when they get their way.

In childhood, our parents are the only path we have to get our needs met. So in our split state of mind, we deem them all-good. Divine, even. Our parents can do no wrong. We see them this way because if they could do wrong, then our solitary source of survival becomes compromised. This is a terrifying reality to face.

Nonetheless, parents are flawed humans. They can get angry and frustrated. They might fail to attune to our needs and feelings. They can dismiss us, humiliate us, ignore us, rage at us and take away our freedoms.

Parents might carry complex trauma, and they can have personality disturbances such as narcissism, psychopathy, borderline and paranoia. This can lead to them instrumentalising their child to maintain psychological balance. Parents with complex trauma are often in deep pain, and they relieve themselves by passing it on to their children, resulting in ritual humiliation and horrible abuse.

Such mistreatment is more than enough to make a child feel bad about themselves. Yet there is something else, something more insidious, which can make a child feel defective to their bones. Something which poisons their very existence.

An Unwanted Arrival

A question which should be posed to all parents is: When you first found out about the pregnancy, how did you feel?

Most parents would express that they were pleasantly shocked, elated or filled with joy at the news. Yet how many would admit being filled with dread and fear? How many would reveal their seething anger and resentment at the news?

Nobody dares to question a parent’s real feelings about their child, let alone the parent themselves. It is too taboo to consider, too shameful, so terribly wrong. What parent would admit to their child or even to themselves that they resent the child’s existence? None, because a parent knows that their attitude holds the seed of their child’s destiny — whether that be their thriving or downfall.

Unwanted pregnancies are all too common. This is understandable when you consider what a monumental undertaking parenthood is to even the most capable. Accidental pregnancies can happen early in life, when the mother and father do not feel prepared. People can have ambitions for themselves which a pregnancy derails. Others are trapped in unhappy and abusive relationships, and the pregnancy only digs the hole deeper, leaving the new parent drowning in a dystopian hell. And finally, some people simply have no desire to become parents — ever.

Despite all this, society has zero tolerance for arguments against child-rearing. A pregnancy is always a good thing, and anyone who says otherwise is a horrible person. You only have to look at the Roe v. Wade conflict between liberals and conservatives in the US to see how loaded this issue is. The ‘right to life’ has zero tolerance for the right to choose your attitude toward said life. In traditional and ethnic cultures, abortion is seen as a horrible sin. Caught between the tectonic plates of these two realities, a parent faced with an unwanted pregnancy is often forced to repress their feelings and move forward.

Yet when negative emotions go underground, they do not disappear — they simply leak out in all facets of the parent-child relationship. This might show up as resentment and contempt. How the parent looks at the child, speaks to the child, or behaves with the child is affected. The parent’s energy and attitude towards the child become effectively poisoned. This repressed resentment oozes out 24/7. While nothing is actually said, the child subliminally picks up on the truth. Deep in their bones and soul, the child knows they are not wanted. The child’s very existence is an insult — a reminder of how the parent’s life was ruined.

Rather than warmth, love and delight emanating from the parent, the child experiences only coldness. An unwanted child is rarely ever fully supported. Their parent is not curious about them, takes little joy in their presence, and makes minimal effort to get to know the real them.

In the best cases, a parent will begrudgingly yet diligently play a functional role in raising the child, making sure the child is fed, clothed and has the bare necessities to navigate life. However, this empty ritual lacks the ‘soul’ of good parenting. The relationship is forever tainted by the fact that the parent never wanted the child, laying the foundation for a bone-deep sense of inadequacy and unlovability. Of being bad.

An Unholy, Second Birth

Objectively, a cold, spiteful or neglectful parent is bad. Any sane person would admit this. And how do we deal with bad people? We get angry at them, defend ourselves, and in extreme cases, we walk away from them.

In the life and mind of a child, however, this is impossible. The parent must be all-good, after all. And in the child’s binary world, ‘good’ cannot exist without the ‘bad’. Furthermore, to cope with the shame, pain and anger of having an abusive and rejecting parent, relief becomes necessary. Yet the child cannot ‘walk away’. They cannot defend themselves. They cannot even understand what is going on. The child’s clever solution then is to create a dumping ground for this negative energy. An entity. Someone else to take the blowback, who the child can designate as bad.

To achieve this magical, almost occult feat, the child delves deep into their soul. As the pressure builds from a torrent of terror and abuse, the True Self splits into fragments. From this state of flux, the child conjures a ‘bad child’ to direct their pain and anger towards. Every time the parent ignores the child, rejects the child, lashes out at them, stares contemptuously at them or humiliates them, the child points their finger at the ‘bad child’, and directs their shame, anger and terror at them. “You are bad”, they say — but not to themselves. The bad child is to blame. This mantra is like a magic spell. Repeated often enough, it is powerful enough to conjure a Frankenstein from within the Self, who stumbles out of the blackness of the soul to help the child cope with their ordeal. The more neglect, humiliation and abuse the child experiences, the stronger the spell becomes, and the bigger the Frankenstein grows.

All of this is pre-consciousness. Awareness and ego emerge gradually after years of life. The ‘bad child’ is formed before time, like a god out of Greek Mythology. It exists in the realm of energy, not the manifested realm of thought and awareness.

As the child gradually grows into a toddler and beyond, and they begin to form conscious memories, their real timeline begins. Their world comes into being, and the light of consciousness dawns like a sunrise. Meanwhile, the ‘bad child’ remains in the shadow of the unconscious, away from the light — as all bad children must. It lurks beneath the ocean of the child’s Self like a sea monster, behind the veil of awareness like a phantom.

With consciousness and ego come new forms of power for the child, and the lid slams shut on the ‘bad child’, casting it into the wilderness of the shadow. There it remains, filled with a mammoth flood of disowned toxic shame, fear, rage, grief and trauma, exerting an irresistible, gravitational pull, threatening to drag the child into its terrifying centre. Out of this prison, a voice whispers to the child: You’re hopeless. Immature. Inadequate. Inferior. Ugly. Weak. You don’t deserve to be happy. Why would anybody love you? Loser.

There the bad child remains. To avoid dealing with this dark reality, all one has to do is remain above the surface — never, ever venturing into the dark place within.

A challenging task indeed.

Badness In Plain Sight

The ‘bad child’ does not disappear when it is relegated to the shadow. It remains ever-present as we move forward with life. Yet the mind has countless strategies to dampen the bad child’s painful emotions:

• Denial And Grandiosity: Any time shame or guilt arise, the child tells themselves that they are fine. Good, actually. Great! The best. Grandiosity becomes the cherry on top of the cake of denial. You never have to feel bad about yourself if you convince yourself that you are immune from inferiority and immorality. Grandiosity tells you that you (and your life) are perfect, or will be perfect in the very near future.
• Dissociation: Feeling bad is not possible if there is nobody there to feel. A person with a bad child will drift into their imagination many times each day, creating an alternative fantasy world where they have the control. This allows them to conjure scenarios of freedom and success, which numbs their underlying shame. Dissociation also involves indulging in mindless distractions such as social media or binge-watching.
• People Pleasing: If you are bad, then others must be good. If others are better than you, then they will never accept you unless you convince them otherwise. People pleasing involves acting charming, doing favours for others without asking, self-deprecating and flattery. No matter how nice you are, however, it is never enough. After all, you remain bad. So when people do not accept you, you double down and act even nicer, until all boundaries are dissolved, and you feel empty, bitter and used.
• Externalising Blame/Playing The Victim: A nice hack to being bad is to deny it and spot the bad people around you instead. I’m not bad, you say. Everyone else is bad! Others are to blame for the things going wrong in your life, but never you. This is paired with playing the victim, where you convince the people around you that you are the unlucky sufferer of constant misfortune, and that you are powerless to stop it.
• Avoidance: Humans have a way of making us feel inferior, of exposing us to our badness. When we become overwhelmed by the world, and our bad child threatens to overrun us, we withdraw and embrace solitude. This allows us to avoid accountability or be in the presence of people ‘better’ than us, which can make us feel less than in comparison. Even if we must be in the presence of others, we resort to aloofness and coldness, closing off our hearts from others to avoid being vulnerable.
• Addiction: Perhaps the most common ‘medicine’ for a bad child is addiction. A person might over-indulge in promiscuous sex, over-spending, over-eating, over-working, drugs, alcohol or any other dopamine-centric activity or substance.

The above are all attempts to regulate one’s mood and deny reality. Those who carry a bad child are forever at risk of being exposed to their repressed toxic shame, rage and trauma. As a result, they tend to resort to fantasy as a way of coping, using their psyche as a form of virtual or augmented reality which brushes over the unpleasantness of life. Such ‘neurodivergent’ people can only relate to other ‘neurodivergents’ who are willing to co-create a fantasy-based world that allows them to bypass their sense of inferiority and badness.

The Sado-Masochistic Dance

Two people carrying a bad child are destined for a painful union. Not only do they need to navigate their own bad child and its accompanying coping mechanisms, but also those of the other person. Neither person can relax and enjoy the connection. They remain forever vigilant, lest their badness be exposed.

This perilous state of affairs would normally end a relationship before it begins. Yet the trauma of the bad child is fuel for fantasy, allowing both people to idealise the other as perfect. Together, the couple creates a fantastical, dopamine-fuelled realm. Nobody can do wrong in this world. For a while, it seems like the problem of the bad child has been resolved. How can you be bad when you’ve found someone who fully accepts you? Who loves you unconditionally?

The problem is that neither person is being themselves. Using a combination of denial, dissociation and grandiosity, the couple rides the wave of fantasy without ever needing to expose their authentic Selves to the other — at least in the beginning.

Furthermore, for any union, polarity is needed. This leads one half of the couple to fall into the ‘inferior’ position, and the other person to play the superior or ‘better’ half. There is nobody better to fill this role than a narcissist.

In BDSM role-play, a dominant partner (dom) holds sway over a submissive partner (sub). The dom calls the shots, and the sub does as they are told. The dom inflicts pleasure and pain, and the sub takes it. The idea is to create tension and polarity for the enjoyment of both parties. In BDSM role-play, one person is bad or ‘naughty’, and the other is tasked with ‘punishing’ them in order to restore them to goodness. The sexual release is then intended to balance one’s shame around their sexuality and bring the couple closer together.

Perhaps most fascinating in the BDSM power dynamic is the control the sub holds in their submissiveness and ‘badness’. By dangling the bait of surrender and sin, the sub gives the dom a shot of power via a license to punish and dominate. The sub becomes irresistible to the dom, inviting them deeper into their realm of endless possibility. The longer this goes on, the more addicted the dom becomes to the sub for a sense of power. It is only a matter of time before the dom falls victim to the sub’s ‘tyranny from below’. Power gives way to pain, pleasure to despair, as the dom realises they have been lured into the sub’s rabbit hole. The dom’s ‘power’ was an illusion the entire time.

In a narcissistic relationship, the narcissist believes they are in control, able to dole out pain and pleasure at will, when in fact, they have merely fallen victim to the collective masochism ruling over their relationship. A closer look reveals why.

The bad child must stay intact at all costs like asbestos must remain inside a building. Exposing a person to their bad child releases its radiation poison of toxic shame, rage and trauma from childhood mistreatment. When someone is in a relationship, the vulnerability of being seen exposes their soul to the light. For the bad child, it is like breaking off the plaster of a wall and exposing the asbestos to oxygen. To restore the wall, a person must have their bad child reinforced via mistreatment. For this, the sado-masochism of a narcissistic relationship becomes fertile soil.

Through narcissistically abusing their target, the narcissist props up their ‘superior’ false self by attacking the target’s self-esteem. That is, they can only be ‘good’ if the other is ‘bad’.

Beyond this, the core ways a bad child is reinforced in the relationship are:

• Approach/Avoidance: We all crave love, especially if we believe we are bad. Being cared for and accepted soothes the pain of the bad child. However, this requires intimacy, which means the bad child is exposed to being seen. To deal with this dilemma, the bad child uses a push/pull technique. First, they seek out love and intimacy. When they get it, they grow fearful and cold, alienating the other person in the process. Then as the coldness in the relationship becomes too painful, they approach again for renewed intimacy.
• Rejecting Love: A person with a bad child will not let you care for them, compliment them or support them. Being treated well threatens the bad child and awakens its repressed emotions. Therefore, the bad child does everything in its power to push love away. They may argue against your kind words, remain silent when you encourage them, or tense up and close their heart when you touch or hug them.
• Projective Identification: The bad child’s goal is to remain intact while not being exposed. It ensures this by covertly pushing the other person’s buttons in a way where the person reacts badly. ‘Reactive abuse’, as it is known, unsettles and provokes the other person into anger, frustration and resentment. Over time, it causes the other person to mistreat, humiliate and betray the bad child, hence keeping their ‘badness’ in place.

Both the narcissist and the target may use the above techniques, with the end game being pain, not love. This good/bad polarity keeps the relationship intact while maintaining the bad children of both people.

In the madness of a narcissistic relationship, sadism and masochism become indistinguishable from each other. Each person’s refusal to accept love inflicts masochistic pain on themselves, while also sadistically hurting the other person. You see this in couples who stonewall and silent treatment each other. Such people associate love with conditionality, frustration, rejection and pain. They have a preference for withholding partners, and therefore prefer narcissistic and abusive relationships because they reinforce their badness. This may seem provocative to anyone who has been in a narcissistic relationship, yet it pays to consider why we were looking for love in a place completely void of it.

The bad child chooses partners who will torture them, reject them and cheat on them, as all narcissists are prone to do. A person with a bad child craves love more than anything to soothe their pain, yet is terrified of it at the same time. As a result, the bad child compels us to deny love to ourselves. This sado-masochistic approach to love is a tightrope walk, where the polarity of good and bad acts as the glue that keeps the relationship intact, without having to rely on actual love as the glue for connection. Love is corrosive to the bad child’s defences, and therefore is intolerable.

If you love a person with a bad child, they will punish you for it in order to punish themselves. They destroy intimacy at every turn. Unwanted, unloved and unseen in their childhood, they internalised a destiny of rejection and pain. Their core purpose is to live in a permanent state of badness — never allowing themselves to be truly loved, accepted or valued.

The Inevitable Betrayal

The end game for anyone with a bad child is abandonment. The bad child expects only abuse and betrayal — that is all they believe themselves worthy of. The bad child actively works to achieve this outcome even as they pursue love. The person’s thriving towards life is always offset by the bad child’s downward pull toward death.

The bad child not only expects the worst to happen, they depend on it. Being hurt, betrayed and tossed away is an inevitability even before the relationship begins. Anything is better than facing the truth of their badness. Who would want to come face-to-face with the howling reality that they are unlovable, irredeemable and inferior? The bad child’s ‘destiny’ must be fulfilled, and they shape their world accordingly. The bad child sabotages relationships with the good people in their life, while inviting in the wrong people — narcissists included.

For their part, a narcissist denies their bad child in favour of a grandiose, ‘superior’ false self. Yet their behaviour towards the target is still self-sabotaging. The narcissist secretly hates themselves, believing they deserve the worst, even when their grandiosity says otherwise. The target also struggles with self-loathing, even when they dream of unconditional love. The narcissist’s sadistic mistreatment of their target ensures that love never breaks through, while the target becomes gradually worn down. It is a matter of time before the relationship ends, either with the target breaking down and leaving, or the narcissist discarding the target. In the end, the narcissist and their target share one destiny: Betrayal and abandonment.

No matter how hard the target fights to love the narcissist, the narcissist will fight harder to abuse them. This makes the narcissist both sadistic and masochistic. Their abuse of the target only hurts themselves. Meanwhile, the target is acting masochistically by inviting abuse from the narcissist with their people pleasing, unconditional support and lack of boundaries. Both parties sabotage. Both co-create the sado-masochistic ‘love’ they believe they deserve.

How To Heal A Bad Child

‘Inner child work’ has long been touted as the pathway towards healing and growth. To go a step further, it can be useful to acknowledge when the inner child holds an unshakable yet false belief that it is inferior and worthless. Making matters worse is when this bad child is fighting to maintain its position while actively sabotaging anything and anyone that threatens it — us included. The process of exposing and transforming this phantom of the soul can therefore do with a related name: inner bad child work.

This practice starts with a paradigm shift. Your ‘badness’ is a by-product of other people’s ‘badness’ being handed down to you when you lacked the power to resist. You are NOT bad, yet you have a bad child inside you. This bad child saved you, having been created as a last resort against a flood of life-threatening shame and terror.

Most importantly, while your ‘badness’ is not your fault, it is your responsibility to heal it. If the bad child is like a building containing asbestos, then safe removal of the ‘badness’ becomes paramount as it is with asbestos. That is the essence of inner bad child work.

The three steps to healing the bad child are as follows:

1. Meditate On Your ‘Badness’

Change only occurs when you consciously and lovingly support your bad child in ascending to the light. It begins with admitting that you have a bad child, and to make a practice of meditating on your ‘badness’.

Close your eyes, relax, and direct your focus within. With love and curiosity, invite your bad child to reveal itself to you, where ‘you’ is your Higher Self capable of alchemising the bad child into goodness.

Entering into the heart of the bad child is a treacherous experience. There is a reason why you avoided this practice for most of your life. In any case, try to remain neutral during the meditation, even when the emotions and thoughts that arise are not. The more you surrender to the idea of the bad child, the more heaviness you can expect to arise.

You may also feel the irresistible urge to label yourself as ‘bad’ for what you are feeling. When shame gets especially heavy, we tend to resort to grandiosity by pretending that nothing is wrong. You might also feel the urge to partake in an addiction, or to ‘punish’ yourself for your emotions. This is neither good nor bad. You are a neutral observer who is creating space and acceptance for the bad child’s emotions and beliefs. Nothing more, nothing less.

2. Journal about Your ‘Badness’

The bad child meditation is likely to lead to a flood of shame, grief and despair, especially when you first begin the practice. It is likely that your bad child has way more negative emotions than you can contain. It can help to take the work into a therapist’s office when needed, or to journal the process in order to manage and make sense of the emerging chaos.

Start by writing down what it’s like to be with the bad child.

What sensations and emotions come with the bad child? Do you feel tension and tightness? Shame? Sadness? Heaviness? Helplessness? Grief? Hatred? Rage? Despair?

What thoughts arise? Do you attack yourself or your life situation? Do you find yourself caught in a cycle of despair and negativity? “You’re a loser.” “You’re disgusting.” “Give up.”

Write it all down, and remind yourself that none of this is gospel, nor is it permanent. These are repressed emotions and thoughts you internalised and consolidated within the bad child. None of these are you.

Some questions to consider as you journal are:

• What makes you unlovable?
• What makes you inferior and incompetent?
• What makes you unattractive?
• Why exactly are you flawed?
• Do you deserve happiness? If not, why not?

By exploring such questions, you can begin to form a map of your ‘badness’, so you can better navigate and release it.

Another useful practice for mapping your ‘badness’ is to sit in a public space and people-watch while comparing yourself to others.

Look at people you are attracted to, or those who appear more confident than you — basically anyone who draws your attention. Focus on your thoughts and emotions in response to these ‘superior’ people. How do they make you feel? How do you notice yourself responding to their presence? Consider how your energy compares to theirs. Do you shrink in comparison? Do they seem joyful and light, while you remain heavy and dark? Do you become flooded with shame? Be mindful, yet neutral. Write down everything for later study.

3. Alchemise Your ‘Badness’ Into Goodness

The most challenging aspect of inner bad child work is the overwhelming heaviness you will inevitably feel day in and day out.

The bad child can quickly morph into an all-encompassing, all-consuming void of sadness and pain, where despair and darkness reign. This is why the urge to dissociate, act out or give up often arises. This is why narcissists exist. Badness is so painful, grandiosity becomes the only way out. Fantasy and escapism quickly follow. In effect, grandiosity is a deal with the devil. We sell our soul to stop feeling the pain.

There is another way, however. A middle way between good and bad, between shame and grandiosity. And that is self-neutrality.

By meditating on and accepting the bad child, you have already begun to apply neutrality to your repressed emotions. In order to alchemise that heaviness and ‘badness’ into goodness, you also need to be neutral about what makes you good.

Start by considering the following questions:

• What would it feel like to be lovable?
• What would it feel like to be competent?
• What would it feel like to be attractive and confident?
• What would it feel like to be ‘good enough’? To be worthy of dignity and respect?

By detaching from and revealing your bad child, you create movement, space and possibility within. You are no longer bad; you are feeling bad emotions brought on by a painful past. Suddenly, your sense of Self is in flux again.

At the beginning of your inner bad child work, you will likely only have shame and anger flooding your inner space. Yet by revealing your pain, you create the circumstances for it to release. Under the loving, neutral and conscious eye of your Higher Self, you will uncover possibilities for transformation.

If you feel ugly, consider what a sexy or beautiful version of you might be like. Above all, consider what energy this beautiful version of you transmits out into the world. Is your energy flowing? Are your shoulders back, and is your head high? Are you soft, playful and vibrant? Are you on? There are so many qualities that our bad child represses, which when allowed to be expressed, make us infinitely more beautiful.

Use your imagination to attract a new reality. Imagine yourself to be lovable, confident, magnetic and majestic. Picture a scenario where you walk into a room of people, and you feel calm and content with yourself, your energy flowing unhindered by shame. Pendulate between the heavy emotions and the visualisations of goodness. Remain neutral about both. Your mind will do the rest as it rewires the neurons in your brain.

So how might it feel not to be less than others? To be equal to them. To be worthy. The assumption that you are inferior, repulsive and bad is a subjective lie. The opposite assumption is also a lie. What makes you better than everyone else? Is this not grandiosity?

Why are you not ‘good enough’? Why do you always have to be less? Self-acceptance is being who you are in the moment, warts and all. You might feel shame and sadness, but that does not make you bad. The bad child was born during a time of great pain. It took your shame, your fear and your grief, and it carried them on your behalf until you were ready to deal with them. Now is that time. Now is the time to repay your bad child by taking the load off of its back. And as you accept this burden, you will notice the shame and sadness have space to move. You notice that the bad child was not bad after all. It merely accepted that label on your behalf to save you. For that, it deserves your love.

In loving your bad child, you unify it with your True Self, bringing it back to its rightful place in the light. Free of the tyranny of your repressed ‘badness’, you discover your soul to be a fertile garden, plagued by the weeds of your past. Inner bad child work is the process of weeding. What grows in the garden of your soul after that is up to you. So choose wisely.

There is an ideal version of yourself, based in fantasy, who can only be good enough in the future, or when you find the ‘right’ person. Then there is the grounded sense of your potential, fuelled by the energy of your True Self. The former is delusion, the latter is divinity. The former leads only to bondage and pain, the latter is the way towards that elusive sense of goodness and wholeness you have been seeking for a lifetime.