Do you ever feel like a part of you has been hurt, neglected or forgotten? That part of you is your inner child, and it’s high time to heal and reconnect with it. In this blog, you will discover how our inner child gets wounded, the ways it manifests in our adult life, and simple yet powerful practices to start healing and connecting with your inner child.
Who Is Your Inner Child?
Your inner child is a part of your unconscious, which still carries the essence of your childhood. This includes your playful, curious excitable, imaginative aspects that are full of life and wonder, and also includes aspects that are afraid, reactive, suppressed or wounded, where the child self has become stuck or frozen at a certain age and has not grown up over time into adult emotional maturity and consciousness.
The way you were parented, your conditioning and education system play a huge role in the way your child self grows, respond, reacts and matures into adulthood.
What Is The “Wounded” Child?
The wounded child is a shadow that is deeply related to your most pressing challenges related to survival and holds the memories of your childhood, where you may have experiences abuse, neglect, control, abandonment, enmeshment or other hard and soft traumas.
As with all shadows, you can identity it, acknowledge it, validate it, and use it to become aware of self-absorbed attitudes and hidden motives, which are basically centered around wanting mummy and daddy’s love and approval.
What Does It Mean To Heal Your Inner Child?
Inner child healing is an approach that helps us to recognize that our behaviors as an adult stem from our childhood experiences, and focuses on addressing our unmet needs by reparenting ourselves.
When you begin working to heal your inner child, you sort of go back in time — emotionally and mentally — in order to better understand how your inner child feels from the perspective of an adult. With a new vantage point, your adult self can start to untangle the coping mechanisms your fourteen (or four) year old self came up with to protect you from further trauma.
Essentially, the first step is to objectively observe your inner child with curiosity, noticing the coping mechanisms it developed over the years to keep it safe.
How Does The Wounded Child Influence Our Adult Life?
Here the thing: Adults are sneakily controlled by their unconscious inner child, and this leaves a child in charge of their lives. When wounded, our inner child is full of shame, fear and sometimes rage because of the maltreatment it endured.
Your inner child is the lens through which your adult self makes your life decisions.
Can you imagine a child you see on the street trying to make sense of adult relationships? Or make career decisions? Predictably, such attempts could only end in disaster.
However, this is what happens every day in the lives of people who have a wounded inner child. These small, lost, and lonely parts of ourselves are afraid, anxious, and insecure, and that can make our lives miserable.
However, there is hope. Inner child work, including re-parenting oneself, can ease the pain and heal the wounds left behind by caregivers who were absent, neglectful, abusive and toxic – not able to provide us the love and safety we needed.
What Causes A Wounded Inner Child?
Inner child wounds stem from a variety of childhood experiences, and are often associated with attachment and relationships to caregivers; therefore, they tend to manifest the most strongly in relationships, especially more intense and vulnerable relationships such as romantic partnerships. The most prominent forms of inner child wounds are abandonment, guilt, neglect, and trust.
Whether you experienced neglect, abuse, or other forms of trauma, it is essential to recognize that these events shape your beliefs, behaviors, and relationships as an adult.
However, it is also necessary to acknowledge your resilience in the face of adversity. Despite the challenges you may have faced, you can heal and grow. One of the ways you can heal your inner child woundings is through cultivating Your Inner Family.
Cultivating Your Inner Family: Re-Parenting Your Inner Child
Re-parenting your inner child requires cultivating your Inner Family — creating safety in your body, compassionately expressing your emotions, listening to your inner child and setting healthy boundaries.
The more you do this, the more your inner child is going to trust you, feel seen and important, be able to fully express, grow up and mature into an adult who knows what he/she wants, knows how to honor him/herself fully and knows his/her worth.
Conscious Father energy holds space, remains present and witnesses without judgment. He protects his children and provides for them, joyfully sacrificing at times in order to serve love. He offers stillness, silence and deep holding, and guidance when asked to help his children through the trials and tribulations of life.
Conscious Mother energy is unconditionally loving, forgiving nurturing and compassionate. She protects her children emotionally and physically and treat her children with fairness, patience, generosity and a commitment to their growth. She is tender, soft and affectionate as well as strong and fierce when the situation calls for it.
You can consciously bring in healthy Father & Mother energy to yourself, to your inner child during these following practices.
Practice #1: Creating Safety In Your Body (Listen, Witness, Feel)
First, it’s important to differentiate between security and safety. Creating security comes from a stress reaction. It involves controlling things so you always know what’s going to happen and what to expect.
Creating safety allows the direct experience of whatever is alive in the child to be seen, witnessed and allowed without having to control future circumstances to prevent discomfort. Creating safety comes from our ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings and sensations in our body. To witness ourselves with compassion and curiosity.
Most of the time, when our emotional body is activated, we judge or shame ourselves. Instead, you can create safety for yourself by bringing in Conscious Father energy that says “I’m not going anywhere, I am completely here with you, I am listening, you matter” and Conscious Mother energy that compassionately holds and nourishes you.
It is important that you acknowledge and validate whatever you are experiencing. “It is fair enough my love”. On a physical level, allow the emotion or tension to vibrate with breath, sound and movement as you hold yourself with Conscious Mother and Father energy.
On a more mental level, you can listen to your inner child by dialoguing with this part of you, moving back and forth between your inner child and adult self to uncover how you feel, what you need and begin truly understanding and embracing this part of yourself so it can mature and blossom.
Ask your inner child what they think/feel about something before making decisions and begin setting boundaries that reflect this new level of love, protection and honor for yourself.
Practice #2: Setting Healthy Boundaries (Honoring Your Needs)
Boundaries can be described as imaginary lines we draw around ourselves to protect our physical, sexual and emotional energy from people’s imposing or unwanted behavior. When we know what our boundaries are and how to assert them, we teach others how to interact with us during communication, at work, dealing with our children, interacting with family members, and when we are engaging sexually.
It is your healthy boundaries that say “no” when you don’t like something, when you want something or someone to stop, when you don’t want to do something that you may otherwise do our of guilt, obligation or pressure, or when you are being mistreated. Remember that “no” is a complete sentence. No justification explanation is required!
Have the courage to be true to yourself and to respect yourself. Have courage to make your needs and your love for yourself more important than your fear of losing love. You matter and remember your “no” is more important than somebody else’s “yes”. Loving someone does not equal tolerating behavior.
Ask yourself: What do I need right now to completely love, honor and look after myself?
Practice #3: Play And Have Fun (Freedom To Let Loose)
Your inner child has a lot to teach you, not only from the growing pains but also through this aliveness and wonder that your wise, divine child holds, where you’er able to enjoy the present moment, freely express yourself, trust love and savor the simple things in life. Allow yourself more fun, play and joy. Most children just want to play, explore and enjoy. Playfulness is different for everyone so find out what your child likes by dialoguing with him/her and set some time aside for more fun, play and joy.
Ask yourself: What activity makes me feel most alive and joyful? What did I love as a child? How can I make space in my day to day to add more of that/those activity(ies) into my life?
Conclusion
Healing your inner child is not for the faint hearted. It’s shadow work and requires commitment and consistency as well as compassion and grace. If you have felt triggered reading this, know that it’s ok! Breathe through the resistance and move some energy with a good full body shake.
At the core of our journey to healing our wounded inner child is self-love & acceptance, where we embrace all parts of ourself, especially the parts that have not felt loved, so these parts can integrate into wholeness and maturity of the adult self.
Where instead of seeking external validation, deriving your worth from what others think, hiding who you are to gain love, you are truly being yourself, loving yourself deeply, honoring your needs and going for what you want unapologetically.
