There is a deep and often unspoken grief in the loss of the little boy or girl inside each of us - the one who once looked at life with wide-eyed innocence, full of hopes, dreams, and pure-hearted belief in possibility.

There comes a moment in the journey of individuation when we realize that the child we once were has been exiled - out of necessity. To meet the world around us, we adapted. We grew skins - or we didn’t. We learned to protect ourselves. We made compromises. We sacrificed parts of ourselves, drifting further from our Essence.

There are many losses on the path of becoming. The moment we stand on the brink of adulthood and, for whatever reason, cannot follow the path of the heart—there lies a disruption. Perhaps your family demanded a certain career. A marriage or relationship that required us to conform to a role, a pattern, a perception. Perhaps one day we realised we had been living all along to meet the expectations of others. And then, the ache of the wasted years.

From a Jungian perspective, the grief we feel for the lost child within is not simply nostalgic - it is archetypal. Jung reminds us that the Child archetype never truly disappears. It retreats into the unconscious, waiting for us to remember. And when we mourn the lost dreams, the once-boundless trust, and the innocence we carried, we are encountering a profound psychic truth: we grieve not only what was, but what might have been.

This grief is sacred. It signals the soul’s yearning for wholeness. Reclaiming the inner child is not regression - it is integration.

When we can hold the tension between innocence—understood as a state of unguarded openness, of unfractured being—and lived experience, between what we hoped for and what is, we make space for a more expansive self to emerge.

You still carry the seeds of the life your soul longs to live.

Written for @jungsouthernafrica

Image credit: ‘Come play with me’ - Audrey Kawasaki @audkawa

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