Spielberg’s 1985 film Back to the Future is a masterpiece.

In the sequel, Doc Brown accidentally sends himself to 1885, and gets stuck in the wild west after the DeLorean breaks down and he can’t fix it. Back in 1955, Marty McFly receives an oversized letter from a confused Western Union employee who, after identifying Marty, informs him, “it is addressed to you Sir, but… I should tell you that we’ve been in possession of that letter for the past seventy years.”

Doc Brown, stuck in 1885, had to write a letter to Marty, and to his own future self, just in order to give his future self the proper instructions on how to come back to the Wild West and rescue him.

This storyline— getting trapped in the past, and calling out to the present for help— is psychologically appealing.

Why?

Because, although your childhood is past, and gone, it is equally and psychologically true that it is still alive. After all, are you not still haunted by your past? Do those moments when you were bullied on the playground, or gossiped about, still affect you? Does the moment when your father walked out, and left your mother, still affect you?

The past is still alive, because every age is frozen in its own present tense.

This is why we still feel like children at times. It’s also why adults are always so surprised at how old they are. Because their inner child is still a child. And because our memories are all permanently time-stamped, or encoded by that time of our lives. That’s why a smell can be so nostalgic, e.g. the smell of a specific cologne can whisk a woman back to her first kiss at high school prom. The unconscious— where our memories live— lives in eternity and only knows the present. That is to say, it only knows its own present.

Along these lines, you can think of your self as many different selves from various time periods of your life, all living together in one crowded present-tense. Your three year old toddler-self is still living in its own present-tense, somewhere in your brain. Your thirteen year old self is still there, too. Your forty-three year old self still lives on, in the very same brain as does your thirteen year old self.

And they all have to live there, together… like a family.

How does your forty-three year old self speak to your thirteen year old self? Does he ever yell at him? Is he harsh? Does he tell him he’s afraid he will screw up his life?

The way parents talk to their own children, reveals how they talk to themselves, i.e. inner child. This obviously explains why many child abusers were abused children themselves. When they later became an abuser, they did so by dissociating from their own inner child, who is still alive in the present-tense somewhere in their brain. And when they have a child of their own, that child ends up on the receiving end of what they dissociated from.

Again— we are a collection of co-existing selves. Each of our selves is frozen in time at different ages.

And these ages can, and do, talk to one another. That is what “self talk” really is. Self-talk is your adult self, talking to your child self. As if they both lived in the same present-tense. Self talk is a form of time travel.

Many of us are quite cruel to our child self. Are you?

Our child self may be like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, trapped in 1885, writing a letter to his future self. Waiting seventy years to be read, and heard. Many of us are children that have never been heard.

You can be kind to your child, and ask her how she is feeling. Is she alright? What does she do for fun? Has she had any fun lately?

Perhaps she hasn’t.

Perhaps you haven’t even asked her.

Many people feel unable to talk to that child. They feel closed off. Time travel is threatening. What happens if I brought together all the different ages of myself? Could I handle it? It seems easier just to shut him or her out.

But as Jesus said “let the little children come to me”, and “unless you become like one of these children, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.”

And the poet Wordsworth, said “the child is Father to the man.” In other words, your inner child is— strangely and paradoxically— older than you. He’s been a child, frozen in time, for much longer than you’ve been an adult.

So, perhaps you could unfreeze him and spend some time with him?

Perhaps that child is wiser than you are?

Perhaps you have something to learn from him?

Or— perhaps it is a back and forth relationship. Perhaps he needs you to re-parent him. Your parents failed him and he needs you to be kind to him and help him in a way your parents didn’t.

In the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa: “We are in a sense our own parents, and we give birth to ourselves by our own free choice of what is good.”

That quote of St. Gregory of Nyssa is my favorite quote. Of all time. It is something worth rereading and pondering.