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The thing about being able to see your own inner child and younger parts, is the ability to see other people’s. I can see when their inner children are scared, insecure, ashamed, and ultimately wanting to be seen and loved unconditionally.

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To be in relationship with other humans, whether it’s in friendship, partnership, or in shared spaces, is bizaaarrrre. It’s universes colliding together, bumping into sharp corners and finding soft landing spots. It’s touching atmospheres and seeing if it will blow up everything in a 10-foot radius or create the most spectacular connection. It’s constant rotation with gravity pulls from different sources.

It’s a miracle that any universe collision works. Especially over time.

I was born into universes. The universes had so many desires and dreams about the direction they wanted to go towards. And my mini universe was in instant orbit. So natural and so easy.

All I needed was physical care and the most infinite and expansive love.

Love that had no bounds.

Love that wasn’t transactional.

Love that transcends history.

Little did I know that colliding with universes isn’t as easy as that, even though every new universe deserves it.

One of my coping mechanisms is the collection of knowledge and escapism through reading.

IF I knew enough, I would be protected. IF I went far away into another world, I would be protected from this dimension. And for a second, it does!

That knowledge has helped me understand myself so much, and is such a great jumping-off point. And the worlds I escape into teach me to expand my imagination to what is possible. But when I close that book and click off the essay, I’m left with the present elements and what is in my orbit…and all the other universes I am in relationship with and the universes I am witnessing.

Right now one of the books I’m reading is What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, which is about healing from complex PTSD. Reading it is almost spooky. It’s about Stephanie, who is a child of Chinese Malaysian immigrants in the Bay Area. The child abuse she survived feels so familiar…too familiar. Stephanie is brutally honest about how confusing it is to figure out what was real, how severe things actually were, what was normalized, and how much of it has been embedded into her personality.

In college, I went to therapy for the first time. I spent the first month or two recounting my childhood, which was in a haze. I barely remembered anything, and it slowly started coming back to me in bits and pieces. At one point, my therapist stopped me and said, “Do you realize you keep on saying, ‘but it wasn’t a big deal’ over and over again after you tell me an alarming story?”

I’ll never forget that moment, because I started to hear myself say that all the time. My nonchalance was embedded deep into my personality, and I still see it all the time to this day. One time I was having lunch with friends at college, and I mentioned something violating happening to me on the train - my friends stopped me in my tracks with concerned faces and asked why I was laughing while telling that story…I was just assaulted. It didn’t even occur to me that it was anything, because it wasn’t a big deal.

Just like it wasn’t a big deal, because I knew other immigrant kids having muuuuch much stricter and angrier parents.

I watched a tiktok recently that was so basic, but resonated deeply. They basically said that we can respect a person’s dignity and have compassion for all that they have experienced - AND choose to do it from afar relationally.

If you were conditioned as a woman, you were taught that love is self sacrifice. ESPECIALLY if you’re dealing with a man. We were taught that there is virtue in seeing the soul of a person beyond their defensive mechanisms. We were taught that our love can transform people (times 100 if you were a Christian…because you were also taught that God’s love through you can change people.) I CALL B******T.

We were groomed to be abused and to bear it. By men. By authority figures. By work. By empire.

Can I write a paper about how this and that happened to this person, and this is why they do this and that? YES. They are a universe! And that doesn’t entitle anyone to be in relationship with me. (Community is another thing, and I’ll elaborate on that another time.) I’m not only talking about abusers, but people who have poor boundaries and are energetic vampires.

This orientation applies not only to the people above, but also to the people I DO choose to be in close relationship with. The more I love and know my people, the more I see the landscape of their universes. And the more they see mine. It’s a scary thing to be known and loved and possibly rejected. Yet we try, because loving connection is one of the most fundamental human needs.

When I’m witnessing my boo in dysregulation, I see her inner child. I can SEE her. When the inner child makes her way out, I see the baby hairs and the bangs. I see the dark watery eyes. I want to scoop her in my arms and hold her. Tell her I’m here and everything will be ok. Give her sweet kisses on the cheek and ask her if she wants to play a game.

Sometimes I see her inner teen. I see the rage against injustice and wanting autonomy. I see the platform boots and torn black tees. I see through the stomping and can recognize her deep longing for tenderness and respect. I want to say F**K THIS S**T! Go slash those tires and burn the house down while you’re at it.

But I can’t and I shouldn’t.

I know what it’s like to want someone to come into my life and say, “I got it from here. All your healing. Just give it to me. You’re finally safe, and I’ll never leave.” That was a fantasy I was fed since I was a little girl about my future husband. EW. THE PROPOGANDA!!!

Even though I know that’s unrealistic from anyone, there’s truth that we actually do heal through relationships. The key is how we do it. It’s not fair to hand over my triggers and trauma over to someone and say, “LOVE ME FOREVER” without self-accountability. No one owes me unconditional love, but my parents and myself. Actually someone saying they unconditionally love me is a red flag…please have some boundaries.

So when I see my boo’s younger selves, I’m invited to ask myself: how can I love her - the present adult version of her - so that she can reparent her inner children well? My role is to support her to show up for the inner children by making mature adult decisions…not from reactivity of the younger parts. Reparenting means giving our inner children stability in the present and love while acknowledging their big feelings. It means respecting their boundaries and building trust.

Ultimately, my inclination of wanting to reparent other people’s inner children comes from conditioning and is also a mirror to myself.

It pulls me to ask myself: you care so much about other people’s inner children…what about your own? How have you let your younger parts run the show? How attuned are you to them?

It’s so much easier to see someone else’s universe and be like: I can solve all of your problems if you just do xyz. Haha! I love the audacity!

It’s so much harder to look within myself and hold myself accountable. Recently, I feel a bit neglectful of my inner children. I’ve been lethargic in my bed a lot…very reminiscent of depressive episodes my mom had when she was my age.

From just a couple of bits of what I know about my mom, it makes perfect sense how she behaved and coped. AND it was still wrong to treat children like she did. I can hold the complexity of her universe and feel compassion and condemn abuse.

Not all hurt people hurt people. Just because we are all traumatized doesn’t mean that we have the right to traumatize and abuse.

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

Deep honesty with ourselves. How can we build and invest in a liberated world if we don’t know our own internal landscape - our own universe? If we don’t heal intentionally and do the hard painful work it takes to deepen our love, how can we expect it to work out when our universes collide with other universes? Let me tell you, it doesn’t work! It might work short-term, but actually building people power takes interpersonal maturity and self-accountability. Without this, it’s just liberatory fantasy…a fictional image without any chance to

become reality.

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