UNHOLY ALLIANCE: The Dangers of Mixing Pop Psychology with Christian Truth

Example

INNER CHILD

(Childhood Influence)

It may be news to many of us: Spirit guides teach not only metaphysics, but popular psychology. "Inner Child" is one of their topics.  

Channeled Teachings  

         “The child within was never loved ‘good enough.’” We need to give the child the love he or she wants. Otherwise the child “stubbornly refuses to grow until they get that missing love.” As a result, some people “continuously project parent onto everyone” in their adult life. “Many men are drawn into relationships seeking a mother, not a wife or lover or friend.” Even when they find someone who is willing to act like their mother, “eventually they will realize that ‘try as you might, you are not my mother!’” In any case, they continue to “project mother onto everyone.” Besides the inner child, there is also an adolescent within who is usually in a state of sheer panic. Both still influence us as adults. Nevertheless, there are meditation techniques that can “release the past and the hold it has on you, but you must want to let go.”[i]

            Does this sound familiar?  If you guess this is a quote from one of your favorite Christian psychologists, you are in for a big surprise because this is the teaching of a very famous New Age channeled spirit guide, Lazaris.

Secular Psychology

        While a significant percentage of New Age spirit guides teach that our childhood experiences greatly influence our value system and beliefs, this is definitely one of the most popular psychology topics among psychologists.

        Examples of secular psychologists teaching the impact of childhood experience are everywhere. Although the term “Inner Child” may or may not be used, these teachings are so popular that any example I give seems superfluous.

        As one psychology textbook sums it up, “Psychoanalytic theory maintains that the most significant influences on our personalities arise from the unconscious, which contains residues from early childhood experiences.”[ii]

        Bradshaw is the one who popularized the tern “inner child.” According to him, there is “an infant, a toddler, a preschool and a school-age child in each of us.” There is even an adolescent in us.[iii]

Christian Psychology

        The teachings of childhood influence among Christian psychologists are also abundant. In this area, I found not much difference between channeled teachings, secular psychology and Christian psychology.

        For example, Meier and his co-authors say, “There is a wealth of data regarding the role of early environmental factors on mental health – and mental illness. For example, … Children raised in a home with a faulty value system tend to adopt that value system themselves.”[iv]

        Dr. James Dobson also says that low self-esteem among women may be traced to early home life in one way or another. “Thus childhood inferiority imposes itself on mental apparatus for decades to come.”[v]

 



[i] Lazaris, The Sacred Journey: You and Your Higher Self  (Palm Beach, Fl: NPN Publishing Inc., 1988), p. 118-120.

[ii] David Myers, Exploring Psychology (New York: Worth Publishers, 1990), p. 307.

[iii] John Bradshaw, Bradshaw On: The Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem, rev. ed. (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc. 1996), p. 234.

[iv] Paul Meier, Frank Minirth and Donald Ratcliff, Bruised and Broken: Understanding and Healing Psychological Problems (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 24.

[v] James Dobson, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women (Wheaton, Illinois: Living Books, 1987), p. 28.