IN THIS ARTICLE
Do you ever feel like throwing a temper tantrum? Like you're so stressed, annoyed, frustrated, or angry and have an urge to just throw your hands in the air and stomp your feet?
This may be because your youngest self, still living inside you, is triggered.
Meet your inner child: a childlike aspect, archetype, or sub-personality subordinate to the waking conscious mind.
The inner child lies within all of us, some see theirs as a younger version of themselves, others may view it as a feeling or memory associated with their childhood.
No matter the way we relate to it, our inner child plays a huge role in the way we experience joy, receive love, and behave in personal relationships.
Inner Child Work And Healing
Our inner child is just like any other child. They are in need of care, completely dependent on others, playful, naïve, and require a lot of attention, love, and nurturing. For some, childhood memories bring forward a lot of joy, playfulness, and fun.
But if your childhood was filled with painful memories, trauma, and emotional distress, you may see your youngest self as scared, vulnerable, and helpless.
In order to cope, you may have suppressed this pain and these memories to protect your youngest self from getting hurt again. This is a natural and valid response to have when we are young and in pain, but these coping strategies only hurt us more as we get older.
Suppressed childhood pain always finds a way to show up in our adult life. It often ends up affecting our ability to regulate our emotions, meet our own needs, build healthy relationships and accept ourselves for who we are.
Inner child work offers us an opportunity to tend to this wounded inner child within us. It's through this pathway of self-discovery where we can not only make peace with our childhood trauma but also, step into alignment with our true selves.
SHOP SOZY
What Healing Your Inner Child Looks Like
Inner child work simply begins with our awareness of them. The more curious we become, the more answers we begin to receive. For many of us, the pain we endured in childhood has been held within us for many years, meaning that inner child healing does not happen overnight.
Although there is no quick fix for our inner child, the journey to resilience is a beautiful and rewarding one. Be gentle with yourself, go slow, and take the time to really explore what lies beneath the surface.
Here are the first steps toward the healing process.
Getting to know your inner child
Like meeting an old friend for the first time in years, there is much to learn with our inner child. Begin opening yourself up to this inner child's presence and set aside sacred time to ask them questions. Sometimes it can be nice to set up a "lunch date" or an interview with your inner child and ask them the following questions:
- "How old are you?"
- "What do you need the most?"
- "What are you afraid of?"
- "How are you feeling?"
You may notice strong emotions come through like anger, resentment, fear, grief, insecurity, abandonment/rejection, anxiety, or shame. These emotions can be triggering at first and that is entirely okay. See how long you can sit with these big emotions and continue asking your inner child what they need to move through them. Then begin to see if you can trace some experiences where your adult self felt similar emotions.
An example could look like this:
Your partner gets stuck late at work and doesn't make it to the event you planned. Even though deep down you know they wanted to be there, you still feel disappointed and even chosen over. Your frustration comes out in the form of pouting and staying silent for hours, refusing to return your partner's texts or calls.
Reflecting on what happened here through the lens of your inner child, you may realize that your disappointment felt a lot like the many times your parent never showed up to your dance recitals, or soccer games or talent shows because of other commitments. This left you always feeling "chosen over", the same way you felt when your partner couldn't make it to your event.
Staying open to the voice of our inner child can provide extremely valuable insight as to why you feel the way you do and more importantly validate the distress you have been experiencing.
Journaling from Your Inner Child
Journaling is a powerful tool for emotional regulation, processing thoughts and even balancing the left and right hemispheres of our brain. When we are exploring inner child work, using this tool from the perspective of our inner children allows for their voices to be heard and their hearts to be seen. Having an inner child journal can be a very supportive and sacred practice during your healing journey, and help you identify any unhealthy life patterns that began in childhood.
To begin, set up a safe space where you have privacy and no distractions. Envision that your adult self has left the room and your inner child is the one holding the pen and paper. You might begin to recall your childhood memories and your overall childlike side. Leaning in from this point of view, notice what your inner child writes. There may be sprinkles of low self-esteem, compulsive behaviors, or hidden emotions that show up in the words your inner child expresses. Try not to overthink the process or analyze what your younger self is writing out. Allowing this process to unfold naturally is an important part of the practice.
Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied in multiple professions to support healing trauma. Much of the work in Somatic Experiencing (SE) addresses the health and wellbeing of your Nervous System, using different mind-body modalities to regulate the body. SE provides a supportive space for childhood trauma survivors to explore their pain, feelings, unmet needs, physical abuse, and emotional neglect by tapping into the physical sensations their body experiences. For those that experience physical ailments or chronic pain, SE work can be extremely beneficial.
Try this simple SE technique to release whole body tension at any time and anywhere:
- Unlock your jaw, open your mouth wide, stretch the muscles along your jawline
- Drop your shoulders, roll your neck in a slow circular motion
- Shake your hands and arms
- Move your eyes side to side
- Stick your tongue out and exhale (making an audible sound is a plus!)
- Take 3 deep belly breaths
Understanding Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems or IFS is a powerfully transformative and evidence-based model of psychotherapy. This integrative approach to conventional therapy takes a look at the unconscious mind to identify and address multiple sub-personalities or families within each person's mental space.
The core belief is that we have a collection of inner "parts" that offer valuable qualities and then a true Self (our core self) that innately knows how to heal. Over time, through past trauma and social conditioning, we can suppress some of these "unwanted" inner parts in an effort to protect ourselves from further pain, shame, or rejection. In IFS, welcoming all parts is the main objective.
IFS therapy offers valuable insight to your inner child because the Inner Child is in fact, one of our inner parts. Along with our Inner Mother, Inner Victim, Critic, and many more, our Inner Child (child archetype) plays a crucial role in gaining awareness over our coping mechanisms and past experiences.
In IFS, interviewing and getting to know each of these parts is the first step, however, It's important to find a qualified practitioner trained in Internal Family Systems to practice this work. The official IFS website offers deeper insight and more resources to explore which you can find here.
Reparenting
When embarking on inner child work, many will discover pain associated with a variety of unmet needs. Reparenting is a powerful form of self-care and self-love that allows us to receive what we did not get in childhood. By self-parenting our inner child, we allow this part of ourselves the opportunity to feel taken care of and begin to heal these old wounds.
Reparenting is simply intentional self-care. We often think of self-care as getting a pedicure, taking a bubble bath, or treating ourselves to a face mask. And while these are all ways we can meet our own needs, reparenting takes self-care a step further.
When reparenting, it's important to tend to what we may think of as "basic needs". This may look like having a homemade meal cooked for us, having quality time set aside intentionally for us, feeling supported emotionally, or feeling physically safe.
We can begin to meet these unmet childhood needs by setting aside time throughout our days to meet them. Instead of eating on the go every day, handpick ingredients to prepare a homemade meal. Instead of putting "free time" as the last priority, schedule out 1-2 hours solely for yourself.
Setting aside intentional time for ourselves and placing our needs at the top of our list shows our inner child that they matter the most. This is integral for inner child healing.
Playing + Joy
One of the most wonderful things about children and our childhood, in general, is our constant curiosity and desire to play. Research shows that playing changes our brain to help develop executive functions like regulating emotions and solving problems (very important for both children and adults). In addition, data has shown that play supports the following:
- Developing social skills
- Improving academic performance and focus
- Reduces stress
- Improves sleep
- Improves ADHD related behavior
- Reduces aggression
- Fosters creativity and improves mood
When tending to our inner children, re-engaging in playtime is incredibly important, especially for those of us who had to "grow up early" or endured childhood traumas. By re-exploring creative outlets, we reignite and reclaim experiences of joy. The more often we allow ourselves to experience these moments, the safer our inner child feels to express themselves.
Having an Inner Child Photo
In most cases, our inner child will relate to the need for being seen, heard and held. Since many resources like Journaling and Somatic Experiencing meet the need of being heard and held, incorporating a way for your inner child to be seen is crucial.
This can be done by placing a photo of your younger self beside your bed, on your desk, refrigerator, or bathroom mirror. Find a space in which you pass by every day, where you may have the opportunity to notice this photo and spend time admiring it.
Connecting to Supportive Resources
In addition to re-parenting practices, journaling and somatic experiences, working with a therapist to support your inner wounded child and discover healthy ways to find joy can be an extremely supportive practice. Additional resources may include:
- Prioritizing your mental health
- Practicing self-acceptance (of both your adult self and inner child)
- Cultivating and nourishing a more conscious relationship with loved ones
- Exploring shadow work
The Bottom Line
Inner child work offers us an opportunity to gain more insight into our emotions, our behaviors and our triggers. Although it's not always an easy process to journey back through our life experiences, the good news is, it's never too late to start.
TOP
