Healing the Inner Teen

The version of you who was old enough to be blamed for what happened, but still too young to understand it.

Everybody talks about healing the inner child.

But what about healing the inner teen?

The version of you who was old enough to be blamed for what happened, but still too young to understand it.

The one who learned shame before she learned compassion.

This was the realization that emerged during a Valentine’s Day mushroom journey that left me apologizing to the version of myself who had lost her innocence and whom I had unknowingly blamed for years.

It has taken me two months to write this. But as any psychonaut knows, the integration process is where the real work begins.

On February 14th, following an in-home massage my fiancé had scheduled for us, I drew a bath and made my way upstairs while he laid on the table to begin his session. I unwrapped the rose-shaped chocolate, said a prayer, and soaked for about fifteen minutes, warming my bones after lying on the table for nearly ninety minutes with only a blanket covering my skin.

When I rose from the bathtub, sweat gathered on my forehead and water ran down my legs. I made my way to the bed unclothed, carrying only a bottle of water and a towel.

By then I could feel the onset of the psilocybin.

The waves began gently; the familiar heart-opening process. The anxiousness that often accompanies the beginning stages of a journey, which is really just the body becoming sensitive to its own feelings again.

I lay there with my eyes closed, entering the experience with as little stimulation as possible.

Just breath and darkness.

And then the journey began.

The first thing I remember was the sensation of what I imagine it would feel like to be deeply nurtured by a mother.

My mother, who struggled with addiction in her early years, was absent sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, and often both at once. Raised by a single father who rightfully wanted to avoid even the possibility of rumors or accusations of sexual abuse, affection was scarce in our home.

There was food on the table, but very little emotional nourishment.

Suddenly my bed felt like a cradle and my blanket like a swaddle. I felt held in a way that was unfamiliar to me, yet something I had clearly needed my entire life.

I felt mothered.

And in that state of wholeness, with my chest filled with warmth, I wept.

On and on, until another memory surfaced.

I remembered that I myself once had the opportunity to become a mother.

And with that realization, my attention shifted to my womb. The birthplace and burial ground of one of my most sacred dreams.

In October of 2024 I found out I was pregnant, and by December I had miscarried during a couple’s trip to Jamaica.

Somewhere between faith and hope, I denied myself the chance to fully feel that loss. To fully believe it. To fully grieve.

But in that state of openness, everything I had buried began to rise.

I agonized. I wailed. My body moved in ways I could not control.

My body did not relax until I accepted the words that began to echo in my mind, lovingly yet firmly.

She’s not coming back.

She — the baby girl I carried not long before.

She’s not coming.

She’s not coming back.

The words repeated until I finally allowed myself to believe them. Until I recognized that the tighter I held onto her, the less space I created for something new to arrive.

In that space I felt her presence near, the sweetest, most angelic spirit I have ever known. And I finally got the chance to say goodbye.

After that goodbye, something shifted.

With my attention still resting in my womb, I began to sense a darker presence emerging from within.

This was not my first plant medicine journey, so I remained unafraid as the sensation rose from somewhere deep in my subconscious and entered my awareness.

It was almost too frightening to look at.

But I stayed with it and allowed it to reveal itself.

Before this experience I had suffered from excruciating menstrual cycles and uterine polyps that eventually required surgery. I knew there was work to be done in my womb.

But this journey revealed the deeper reason.

One can only take so many herbal remedies and eat so cleanly before realizing that something deeper is asking to be acknowledged.

The presence inside of me, the demon that haunted my life, the shadow that haunts so many of our lives, was me.

A fragment of my soul I had left behind.

Rejected out of shame.

Abandoned out of regret.

Desperate to be seen, witnessed, and welcomed back home.

Again my body began to shake. Contracting. Squeezing. Crying.

My nervous system and my womb were ready to release what I had been carrying since my teenage years.

The experiences I was too young to process at the time.

The shame that unknowingly kept me trapped in cycles of choosing unhealthy partners, losing myself to alcohol, and sabotaging my own life.

The confusion of losing my innocence with no one to confide in.

The memory of being left in a room by my “friends” with a boy and feeling the pressure to perform.

The night I lost my virginity at a party while barely coherent, with only fragments of memory remaining to document what should have been a sacred experience.

And the loneliness of having no mother to hold me through it.

As the contractions continued, shaking followed by squeezing, I felt something begin to release.

A warm rush moved between my legs.

And I understood that I was giving birth to everything I had been carrying. What had lived inside my body for more than a decade; a crimson current marking its passage.

In releasing it, I was also giving birth to a new version of myself.

Shortly after, as if prompted by my body, I made my way back to the bathroom. Hunched over the bathtub, I vomited.

Not food.

Not substance.

Just release.

Stagnancy that had been trapped in my body for over fifteen years finally leaving.

By this point my partner had finished his massage and the therapist had packed up. He came upstairs to check on me.

Still in a heightened state of awareness, I stripped the bed instinctively, wrapping the sheets into a pile so he wouldn’t see what I understood to be a kind of birthing place.

I took a swallow of water just as he opened the door.

Standing between the bathroom and bedroom, he looked at me and asked in a playful tone if I was okay.

Playfully, I said yes.

But another wave of grief rose up.

“Baby girl, I’m so sorry,” I cried to myself.

To that teenager who had been left alone to figure out life far too early.

My body slowly collapsed to the floor.

He held me there, one hand on my back, the other resting gently over my womb, and we stayed like that for some time.

His presence was grounding. The steady reassurance of unconditional love from the masculine arriving at exactly the right moment.

Affirming my strength while making space for everything I was feeling.

He gently encouraged me to take a shower so we could go for a walk.

And that’s exactly what I did.

The water felt as if it were being poured directly from the heavens, washing away what had accumulated over the years.

Afterward we walked quietly through our neighborhood before grabbing a bite to eat and ending the day curled up together on the sofa.

Looking back now, two things feel clear.

The first is that while the physical causes of womb illnesses such as polyps, fibroids, and cysts are very real, the emotional layers are real as well. And often the body continues carrying what the heart has not yet been able to release.

The healing work I am being called into through my nonprofit organization, DAUGHTER, feels more urgent than ever.

So many women are moving through life carrying versions of themselves that were abandoned during moments of vulnerability.

Teenage girls who were never comforted.
Never believed.
Never protected.

Girls who grew into women still holding those fragments inside their bodies.

We talk often about healing the inner child.

But sometimes the part of us waiting for compassion is the teenager. The one who was blamed for surviving experiences she did not yet have the wisdom or support to navigate.

And sometimes the body is where she has been waiting all along.

Waiting to be seen.

Waiting to be forgiven.

Waiting to be welcomed back home.

Journal prompt:

Where might your inner teen still be waiting for compassion?