"When we are reacting out of old tapes based on attitudes and beliefs that are false or distorted, then our feelings cannot be trusted.

When we are reacting out of our childhood emotional wounds, then what we are feeling may have very little to do with the situation we are in or with the people with whom we are dealing in the moment.

In order to start be-ing in the moment in a healthy, age-appropriate way it is necessary to heal our "inner child." The inner child we need to heal is actually our "inner children" who have been running our lives because we have been unconsciously reacting to life out of the emotional wounds and attitudes, the old tapes, of our childhoods."

It is does not work, it is dysfunctional, to deny that our childhood wounds have affected our lives.

Our emotional wounds have been dictating our lives and keeping us from Loving ourselves.

We have been an abusive parent to ourselves.

"Because of our broken hearts, our emotional wounds, and our scrambled minds, our subconscious programming, what the disease of Codependence causes us to do is abandon ourselves. It causes the abandonment of self, the abandonment of our own inner child - and that inner child is the gateway to our channel to the Higher Self.

The one who betrayed us and abandoned and abused us the most was ourselves. That is how the emotional defense system that is Codependence works.

The battle cry of Codependence is "I'll show you - I'll get me.""

We have an age of the wounded inner child that relates to each stage of the development process. It is very important to start getting in touch with these parts of ourselves and building a Loving relationship with each of them.

Anytime we have a strong emotional reaction to something or someone - when a button is pushed and there is a lot of energy attached, a lot of intensity - that means there is old stuff involved.

It is the inner child who feels panic or terror or rage or hopelessness, not the adult.

We need to ask ourselves "How old am I feeling right now?" and then listen for an intuitive answer. When we get that answer then we can track down why the child was feeling that way.

It is not that important to know the details of why the child is feeling that way - it is important to honor that the child's feelings are valid. Sometimes we recover some memory and sometimes we don't - the details are not that important, honoring the feelings is important. Trying to fill in the details isn't necessary and can lead to false memories.

"It is also a vital part of the process to learn discernment. To learn to ask for help and guidance from people who are trustworthy, . . . That means counselors and therapists who will not judge and shame you and project their issues onto you.

(I believe that the cases of "false memories" that are getting a lot of publicity these days are in reality cases of emotional incest - which is rampant in our society and can be devastating to a person's relationship with his/her own sexuality - that are being misunderstood and misdiagnosed as sexual abuse by therapists who have not done their own emotional healing and project their own issues of emotional incest and/or sexual abuse onto their patients).

Someone who has not done her/his own emotionally healing grief work cannot guide you through yours. Or as John Bradshaw put it in his excellent PBS series on reclaiming the inner child, "No one can lead you somewhere that they haven't been.""

When one of our "buttons" is pushed - when an old wound is gouged - it is very important to honor the child's feelings without buying into the illusion that it matches the adults reality.

"What we feel is our "emotional truth" and it does not necessarily have anything to do with either facts or the emotional energy that is Truth with a capital "T" especially when we our reacting out of an age of our inner child."

The following paragraphs are excerpts from one of my columns. It is entitled "Union Within" and explains some of the dynamics of the inner child parenting process.

"Recovery from Codependence is a process of owning all of the fractured parts of our selves so that we can find some wholeness so that we can bring about an integrated and balanced union, a marriage if you will, of all the parts of our internal self. The most vital component of this process in my experience is the healing and integration of the inner children. In this column I am going to be talking about some of my inner children in order to try to communicate the importance of this integration process. . . ."