what is this inner child thing?

sounds like a whole lot of psychobabble to me. the idea that we were frozen at the time of our childhood trauma and have remained buried and frozen at that age and with that unresolved pain even as the rest of our minds grew up. i would say "ya, and homeopathy is real" except that A)homeopathy seems to be the only thing that works for my cat and B)EVERYONE who has ever gone through healing from childhood sexual abuse agrees that it is so. huh. ok then, how does one fix this? i've been asking myself that for some time now and i think i might have the beginning glimmerings of a clue after last night. i couldn't sleep and i'm not getting any so i thought i'd masturbate and maybe then i could sleep, right? until my subconscious decided that my normal "well that was disappointing, i wonder if i'll ever have sex with anyone else again" thoughts warranted losing it and bawling my eyes out for no reason i could figure out. very odd sensation to not know why i was suddenly so incredibly heart broken but not being able to stop my body from responding. it was like i was watching myself have a nervous breakdown from some corner of my forehead that was unaffected for some reason. as this went on and on i decided to just go with it and observe, and i started seeing all this stuff come up. all these negative self-hate tapes i'm usually pretty good at shutting off now. and it started feeling distinctly like there were two me's. the adult me who was bemusedly wondering what all this was about and about a 12 year old me who was howling out her pain that she was unloved and unwanted and hurt all the time. how she felt her body belonged to someone else since other people use it and abuse it to their own purposes and it wasn't a safe place to live so she was numb most of the time. how she felt trapped in that body and hated to have anyone touch her for any reason. how she didn't believe that anyone could ever help her or love her. how she wanted to die. how no one ever heard her. strangely i found my hand stroking my own hair of it's own accord and physically flinched as the twelve (maybe twelve?) year old violently pulled away from anyone touching her or trying to comfort her, telling me comfort of any kind is just the lies people tell you so they can hurt you more. i felt like i was betraying her when i had to force myself out of bed to go read and break out of my head space so i could sleep sometime before work. i didn't know how to say "we have to go to bed now, please calm down" without sounding like every other adult who had ever dismissed her feelings and told her in so many words she was not allowed to be angry or sad or scared. i think i should pursue this further. going to go find the chapter on this in courage to heal.