How I Dealt Emotional Issues With Regression & Inner Child Therapy

I was almost on the verge of falling into the dark space of depression when I came across regression therapy.

They say that ‘when the going gets tough, the tough gets going’. But when everything around you starts crumbling, the most difficult thing to do is to keep your sanity in place.

Something similar happened to me last year when at the same time both my professional as well as personal life had gone for a toss. Everything started disintegrating in front of my eyes and I wasn’t able to do anything about it. In a matter of few months, I was standing in no-human’s land with not enough money to be able to pay my own bills and in a career spanning over a decade I had to ask for money from my parents.

As far as personal issues are concerned, emotions I never knew existed within me started surfacing right from extreme mood swings to anxiety, feelings of emptiness and extreme grief.

I was almost on the verge of falling into the dark space of depression when one day while browsing through Facebook I came across a post talking about regression therapy and I immediately felt that it was my calling.

Having read Dr Brian Weiss for a good number of years I knew the outline of the therapy but never knew what it entailed for me. So, I took a leap of faith and went for my first session.

In the first session itself, Dr Gaurav Deka combined regression with inner child therapy also called the inner child integration therapy, something I hadn’t heard of then. That is when I came to know that I am carrying a lot of baggage from childhood as well as previous lifetimes.

Layer by layer and session by session we started working on the issues and slowly I felt that the intensity started decreasing and I was more in control of myself. After a few sessions, while talking to Dr Deka, I found out that he himself went through a spell of depression and how alternate therapy, or holistic therapy as he calls it, helped him revive his life. And how despite being a trained medical doctor he decided to learn psychotherapy and help others.

On World Mental Health Day, Dr Gaurav Deka shares his journey from dealing with depression to becoming a healer himself.

“Nine years ago, I started seeing a psychoanalyst for my unending spell of depression. There were days I felt enormously relieved because of it, for I could rationalise all my emotions and I understood why I was going through it; the answer to every ‘why’ and every ‘how’ was available to me with utmost clarity. My only worry was: when would this end. It felt unbearably long.

“There came a time when it just became too tedious, and I began to panic if I will ever get out of it. It is not that I had lost faith in traditional therapy, allopathy and medicine but I had begun to wonder if there is anything else that could get me out of this bottomless rabbit-hole, that seemed to suck me deeper and deeper day by day. My entry into the world of alternative and holistic therapy began slowly with this near hopeless wonder and desperation.

“It was in the end that regression therapy and inner child integration therapy – which were absolutely new names to me – came to my rescue. After just four sessions, I woke up with the sheer disappearance of the emptiness and anxiety that seemed to wrap around my heart every single morning,” shares Dr Deka, who is now a renowned Inner Child Integration Therapist and a transpersonal expert, based out of New Delhi.

Human beings are experiential beings. We love to feel, touch, undergo and experience things. Inner child therapy through regression is an experiential process. Therefore, working with the body, or somatic therapy plays a very important role in it.

“I do not like to call the less-popular therapeutic interventions as alternative medicine or approaches, but I rather like to call them holistic. In other words, all encompassing and working on the whole of our system, rather than just addressing the mind, the brain or its chemical imbalances,” continues Dr Deka.

I had seen that many of our traditional therapeutic approaches - both allopathic as well as drugless - focused so much more on symptoms, on managing the current state of ‘normality’ or ‘sanity’, and on alteration or modification of behavior that ‘feelings’ hardly played any role in helping a person heal.

Discovery in itself is not enough. It is the responsibility of the adult to bring the child to a safe space, relive the trauma by using the body and live it till the end so that the brain and the body registers that ‘it’s over’. It’s the responsibility of the adult to take care of the child, keep it safe and become aware of its survival mechanisms. Many a times, it is these survival mechanisms that seem to become obsolete in our adult lives and keep creating conflicts in our present day life. Hence they need to be resolved.

“With almost all my clients, I begin with the question: how much of me is actually me? How much of whatever you are carrying – be it anger, distress or sadness – is actually yours? Many a times it’s also the people whom we have loved, been loyal to, family members and parts of the family, that we may not have any conscious access to. But because as children we all have had parts which were vulnerable, sometimes weak and lonely, we do carry parts of those times and the people around, and continue to live with them the rest of our lives out of our loyalty or fear of letting go. The key to freedom is to allow yourself to ‘feel’. That’s how we heal,” concludes Dr Deka.

(With inputs from Dr Gaurav Deka.)

(The author is an independent journalist based out of New Delhi. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. FIT neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)