The longer you survive without killing your inner child, the more everyone who already killed their inner child will start trying to kill yours because why should you get to have dreams? You imply (by existing with an alive and happy inner child) that theirs didn’t need to die. By living well you reveal that they are not living well, and they perceive that as you doing violence to them.
Since they did kill their inner child, there must have been a valid reason, it must just be the way the world is, or inner kids are bad and deserve it, or that aliens will enslave humanity if there are inner children alive by some date. Or literally anything. The inner child had it coming.
Then, in order to prove the reason was right, they have to kill your inner child and drag you down with them, thus proving they had no choice but to kill their inner child by giving you no choice but to kill yours. This is for your (their) own good, just submit and die peacefully like a good doll.
Now, they can’t actually kill your inner child short of killing you, but they can inflict pain on you until you do it for them. They can attack any inner light that they see and then DARVO and say the inner light shot first. Stop being happy, stop caring, don’t think, don’t try. Being visibly alive is disgusting to them, a nails on a chalkboard reminder of all they’ve lost and given up for no reason.
Because anything else is “unsafe” to them, because anything else proves that they didn’t need to submit to inner child murder, because anything else proves they weren’t strong enough to save their own love of life. And if they weren’t strong enough, you can’t be either, fuck you.
If you are strong enough, it inherently makes you stronger than them and thus dangerous to them unless they can kill your inner child and make you a shambling husk longing for death but too broken to die without being told, like they are.
If someone hurts you for being good and true and genuine, because it reminds them of all the ways they’re being shitty and bullshitting themselves?
This is excellent and insightful. It mirrors the answer to one of the thornier questions in Internal Family Systems: If the Self cannot be damaged, why do protectors feel the need to take over and protect it? The darkest and final answer is that important adults in our lives punished us when we demonstrated any qualities of the Self either because it threatened to destabilize the abusive system in which they enjoyed control or simply out of reflexive hatred (of the Self). Eventually, our protectors learned that taking over and preventing any appearance of Self was the best way to avoid getting hurt.