HEALING YOUR INNER CHILD BEYOND THE CAPITALIST MIRAGE
- Jan Writer
- Nov 4, 2024
- 3 min read
Once, there was a child. That child is you—wide-eyed and hyperactive, running barefoot in the humid, gritty streets of your barangay, a tattered slipper threatening to snap at any moment. Your parents? Exhausted street vendors, balancing trays of itlog or bags of produce while calling out to customers, or maybe OFWs sacrificing their sanity in a foreign land. They snapped at you when you got in the way or when your grades didn’t live up to your cousin’s.
And you learned. You learned not only that mess is bad, but that you are the mess. That’s the first cut. The world doesn’t hand out band-aids. It hands out tsinelas discipline.
Fast-forward to adulthood. You’re stuck in the labyrinth of “heal your inner child” motivational memes and weekend wellness fairs at BGC. Buy the self-help book, or the PHP 5,000 skincare serum from Lazada. Sip your PHP 300 matcha latte because “deserve ‘ko ‘to.”
But despite all that, something festers. A voice from your childhood mutters, “Wala kang kwenta.”
Healing isn’t some sterile checklist. It’s taking your trauma, sitting it down at the dinner table, and listening to it scream until you’re both hoarse. And the hardest part? Realizing that the very architects of your pain were human too—fallible, tired, sometimes just plain cruel.
Your parents, your guardians, those walking cautionary tales—they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing half the time. And that’s not a Hallmark card of forgiveness. That’s forgiveness with jagged edges.
When you forgive, you’re not absolving them because they deserve it. You’re breaking the cycle that capitalism wants to tape back together and sell. This isn’t self-help, it’s guerrilla warfare against a system that wants to monetize your perpetual ‘work in progress’ status.
Sigmund Freud once noted in The Interpretation of Dreams that human beings are driven by deep, unacknowledged desires. Enter capitalism, the monster that whispers, “Your healing is incomplete without these 15 products and a personal brand.” It’s no accident that entire industries exist to feed on our need to mend what’s broken. Mindfulness apps with a “Buy Premium” option, meditation retreats that charge you your left kidney—they’re all part of the lie.
But the truth? The truth is that healing is ugly. It’s yelling into your pillow, it’s refusing to romanticize the past. It’s the sudden realization that maybe, just maybe, your mother wasn’t a martyr or a monster. Maybe she was a woman suffocating under expectations just like you.
“Man is the only animal that must be encouraged to live.” Encouraged—because, deep down, we all know life’s a goddamn wrestling match. One moment you’re on the ropes; the next, you’re trying to figure out if your opponent is even real or just a shadow you cast.
Healing your inner child isn’t about coddling that kid into oblivion. It’s about picking them up, wiping their tear-streaked face, and acknowledging that the adults around them were just older children in disguise, swinging and missing at life.
And don’t think for a second that understanding this means excusing everything. Abuse isn’t erased by a change of perspective. But there’s a power in understanding. It’s recognizing that your father’s rage wasn’t born in you but handed down, like a toxic heirloom. And refusing to pass it on—that’s where forgiveness mutates into something revolutionary.
Capitalism is a clown juggling flaming swords. It dazzles you, distracts you from the quiet work of healing. You’re meant to chase the next product, the next solution that promises peace in an aesthetically pleasing box. But peace doesn’t come pre-packaged. It’s stolen in moments when you put down the curated self-care rituals and let your unfiltered thoughts exist.
Healing your inner child is not the same as following a trending wellness guru with an overuse of hashtags. It’s an act of rebellion. Because capitalism can’t thrive on a society that forgives, understands, and ultimately accepts its imperfections.
When you acknowledge that your parents, your tormentors, your imperfect caregivers were once children too—it’s a punch in the gut to a system that tells you to blame and consume, not empathize.
But does forgiveness mean forgetting? No. It means liberation—yours, specifically. It means you refuse to be the next link in the chain that binds generations.
And that? That’s worth more than every overhyped self-help book that ever lined a bookstore shelf. It’s the real work. The bloody, beautiful, foul-mouthed journey to making peace with what’s broken and understanding that, sometimes, broken is the best way to be.
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