Experiences that people have as children, whether they are experienced as good, bad, or neutral, can have a significant impact on individuals’ lives as adults. Inner child work is one way to nurture those fragmented parts of yourself to help you thrive and have healthier relationships with not just yourself, but with others as well.
What Does It Mean to Have an Inner Child?
Each and every person has an inner child. To acknowledge your inner child is to identify a younger part of your psyche that impacts how you move through the world as an adult. It impacts not only how you think and react, but also how you feel. Your inner child does not just have to be your child self, it can also be parts yourself from all lived experiences in every stage of life.
For example, your inner child can be an adolescent self, a teenage self, or a young adult self. Characteristics of an inner child portray themselves on a spectrum. There may be playful or fun parts that are confident, warm, or loving, that help you achieve secure attachment with others. Or there may be wounded parts that are portrayed by anger, low self-esteem, anxiety, or shut down, causing an anxious or avoidant attachment with others.
If you have experienced trauma in your childhood, or events that you experienced as traumatic, no matter if they are Big T or Little T traumas, your wounded child has core wounds that likely need addressing. As this blog, Understanding Your Inner Child, states, “It is important to note that not every stressful situation will lead to trauma, but every traumatic event is very stressful.”
Befriending your inner child may prove to be emotionally exhausting work, especially if you have experienced one or multiple adverse childhood experiences. Some of these negative experiences could be physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, neglect, or being a child with a caregiver/caregivers struggling with addiction/mental illness, incarceration, or divorce.
Your inner child is constantly communicating with you. Do you find yourself making choices or reacting in ways that don’t seem to match the level of intensity expected for that event? If you resonate with this, your wounded child may be acting out or asking for help. Life is so much more than living in survival mode. You deserve to be fully free.
The Impacts of a Wounded Inner Child
When your inner child is suffering, your whole self may feel the various impacts. Individuals may be doing themselves a major disservice by overlooking or ignoring their wounded inner child. In doing this, people may be ignoring how our past influences the present moment. Global spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh expresses that a wounded inner child may represent not just yourself, but several generations as well and when you practice inner child healing, you also are healing that of your ancestors.
When you have childhood wounds that are not tended to, you may feel as if you’re walking around with a big weight on your shoulders. Each person may have different events or experiences that trigger their inner child and it is important to be aware of what they are. Remember, the main goal of a wounded inner child is to survive – you are no longer in “being mode” — you are in survival mode. Listed below are some examples of what having a wounded inner child may look or feel like.
- People pleasing
- Increased anxiety
- Shame of self or the body
- Fear of abandonment
- Fear of change
- Avoiding conflict
- Constant safety/connection seeking
- Inability to set boundaries
- Low self-esteem
- Not feeling worthy/deserving of good things or love
- Difficulty connecting with or trusting others
A question you might ask yourself when you are feeling triggered or dysregulated could be “How old am I feeling right now?” Psychiatrist and author, Bessel van der Kolk, says that the body keeps the score, meaning your body remembers the traumas you experience. If you find that you are getting dysregulated, check in with yourself and your body about what it is trying to tell you.
If you’re noticing that your inner child gets activated frequently, it might be time to consider some healing work. People have the ability to carry wounded parts of themselves around until they directly address the source. If you are not connected with this inner child version, those old wounds you carry may not be fully completed or healed properly.
How Can One Heal Their Inner Child?
In Kelly Bramblett’s book, “Your Inner Child: A Guided Journal to Heal Your Past and Recover Your Joy,” she indicates that inner child work is viewed through a trauma-informed approach. This means that the coach or therapist working with the client meets them where they are at and asks the question “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”
Reparenting your inner child can have a trickle-down effect in many domains of your life. You may find that through this work, your mental health, physical health, self-esteem, and the way you interact with others are changing for the better.
Some additional strategies for inner child healing might include. but are not limited to:
- Look to children for direction
- Revisit childhood memoires or look at old pictures
- Journaling
- Create structure and boundaries within your life and relationships
- Writing letters to your younger self
- Spend time doing things you used to enjoy as a child
- Guided imagery meditation
- Talk to your inner child and provide them with affirmations they needed to hear
- Talk to a therapist or coach specialized in trauma informed care or IFS therapy (Internal Family Systems)
- Speak to yourself kindly
Finding your inner child may help make it easier for you to understand your adult experiences by healing from painful pasts. This can allow space for you to provide self-compassion when you need it the most. It may seem like a foreign concept, but you can be your own parent. You can give yourself the gifts that you did not receive as a child. Some benefits from doing this work are:
- Becoming free of unhealthy beliefs
- Healing old wounds and growing as a person
- Become more connected with your authentic self
- Ability to feel more connected with others and yourself
- Understand yourself and your emotions and reactions on a deeper level
- Free you from the shackles of your past
- Improved emotional regulation due to healthier coping skills
- Knowledge of how past trauma impacts present behavior
Healing from inner child wounds is possible. You deserve to experience safety, peace, and tranquility in your lives and relationships. Through this work, you are connecting those fractured parts of yourself and giving yourself the gift of wholeness, which will lead you to be able to access a more balanced and healthy self.
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