For The “New” Inner Parent

As you become more aware as an Inner Parent you will start hearing your Inner Child more and more during your non-session activities. When you hear your Inner Child bring up topics and issues during the day, your best and safest option is always to say, out loud if possible, “Thank you Inner Child for telling me that!” This will encourage the listening to and acceptance of your Inner Child, by your IP as well as give you a brief instant to consciously pay attention and interpret what your Inner Child might be telling you.

If your Inner Child offers ideas during the day such as things to do, or suggests a rearrangement of priorities (or whatever might be the case), it’s often a good idea to “go with what the Inner Child suggests.” Practicing this on a conscious basis during the day gives your Inner Parent golden opportunities to see how things turn out when you start this practice.

Often your Inner Child has a more direct approach or nuanced perspective on your daily life activities that can make a real difference in how your chores, communications, or daily goals turn out.

Would You Like 2 Free Hours a Day?

Here is a classic yet little understood phenomenon of the SPP. When you start practicing the SELF-Parenting Program you are typically granted 2 more hours a day by this process. If you count the first half-hour as doing your session, that means at the least, another 90 minutes of free time will magically appear in your life IF YOU ARE PAYING ATTENTION AND DON’T WASTE IT. I noticed this early on in the system, but was surprised at how often practitioners missed this “free aspect” of the program.

When I investigated this during live seminars I discovered that the unconscious Inner Parent was simply filling up the extra 2 hours of time with the same old “Inner Parent garbage” that it was filling up the first 24 hours with; so the effect of starting the Self-Parenting Program became neutralized and their new “26 hour” life simply became the “new normal.”

To actually take advantage of this “extra 2 hours a day” you have to become more aware as an Inner Parent and not keep acting in the same manner that you are currently wasting your time and energy. This is where your Inner Child will be happy to point out the error of your IP’s ways. The necessary key is for the Inner Parent to learn to pay attention and act on the Inner Child’s advice.

This is where the “Thank you Inner Child for telling me that!” part comes in. Usually, if the Inner Parent can manage this, it gives you enough time for your IP to come out of its unconscious state. It is during these brief milliseconds that you may grasp the logic, or at least catch a glimpse of the internal idea suggested by your Inner Child.

Here’s a simple example of how this might work. Let’s say you have two errands to run, one on “this side of town” and one on “the other side of town.” Maybe this is something you do every week, or month. So, as the Inner Parent you’ve decided long ago to do these errands in the usual way, which is the closer one first, and then the second one further away. Suppose these errands typically takes 2 hours of your day to complete.

One day, as you are getting ready to run these errands that you’ve done 100 times before, you hear your Inner Child suggest doing the second one first. In real life as the Inner Parent, you would be lucky to hear this at all. As an early S/P practitioner, you may hear it, but then your Inner Parent could typically discount it quickly with a response of reason, logic, or ignoring and the whole opportunity would be missed. As you gain IP awareness, you may one day actually hear and contemplate what your IC is saying. 

Let’s say that, lo and behold, you did hear your Inner Child make this suggestion, perhaps because you said, “Thank you Inner Child for telling me that!” In that quick millisecond your IP makes the connection that this could be another possible way of achieving your tasks. Let’s also say in this situation your Inner Parent sees no reason why doing your chores one way or the other could make any difference, so “why not?”

Acting on your Inner Child’s suggestion you decide to do these chores in reverse order. What turns out, as the end effect, could be something along these lines.

• Because of a traffic accident you hear about on the radio, your errand doesn’t take 4 hours instead of the normal two.
• You meet a friend on the first chore, “by coincidence” and you have an enjoyable time catching up which was long overdue.
• You realize halfway there that there’s another errand you haven’t done for months and if you turn left you can take care of this finally.
• The change your Inner Child suggested (that your Inner Parent heard AND acted upon) turns out to be an easier, better, or more relaxed way to accomplish your goals/tasks.
• Good things happen for a reason you couldn’t even know about before your IC made this suggestion in a way you would never have predicted.

When you do daily, weekly, monthly chores and activities based on suggestions by your Inner Child, they often turn out to be easier, faster, better, cheaper, longer-lasting, cleaner, or more fun. I have many examples of this in my life, but the point is for you to look for and experience this kind of thing in your life.

Another Way This CAN Work In Reverse

Another way this has worked for me in reverse is sometimes I specifically DON’T do what my Inner Child suggests, typically because I believe my Inner Parent is right and that’s that! What I often see in this case, is that some unforeseeable aspect of the situation crops up, and doing it the Inner Parent “logical way” was sadly, in retrospect the “wrong” approach or backfired big time.

One example of this is when I was planning to attend a meeting that I was specifically told I could attend. In the meanwhile I had to go shopping. At the store my Inner Parent got the brilliant idea of getting some brownies for people at the meeting, because brownies are always appreciated, right?

I asked my Inner Child specifically if I should do this and it said “No” several times even as I kept asking over and over. Bottom line, I consciously decided, as the Inner Parent, to spend 7 dollars on the brownies, and take them to the meeting anyway. When I arrived to attend the meeting, another new “bossy boots” person showed up who said I couldn’t attend, it was just for “members,” so I slunk out of there with my unopened brownies in hand.

So, yes you can easily get 2 extra hours a day listening and responding to your Inner Child’s suggestions during the day. And the way this works will be totally unpredictable by Inner Parent standards, so it’s up to you as the Inner Parent, to listen and check in with your Inner Child to see how this works in your life.

The way to do this is to field test various scenarios, and see how things turn out in your situations. I predict that if you go with the Inner Child’s suggestions the majority of times, it will work out in your favor over all. It’s through this type of trial and error as your Inner Parent becomes more conscious, that these things will be revealed unto you. (cue music.)