Healing Your Inner Child

How do you know if your

inner child needs healing?

In therapy, you will often explore elements of your history with your therapist, including childhood experiences. Looking at our early relationships as well as themes or patterns can help us understand where some of the present-day struggles began.

As children, we are more vulnerable to the stressors of the world in part because we are unable to meet our own needs. We rely on our caregivers to attend to us and make sure that we’re cared for. Unfortunately, our parents and caregivers are human and it is not uncommon to have experiences in childhood where our needs were not met.

If you have moved through abuse, neglect, chronic stressors, or relational trauma in childhood, or if you feel that you had to grow up more quickly than your peers, you may benefit from inner child work.

So, what is inner child healing?

Inner child work often involves exploring what we needed in childhood that we didn’t get. In a sense, this is a bit like re-parenting yourself. Now that you are an adult, you can care for yourself in ways that you were unable to as a child.

We carry our experiences with us, even those from childhood. We can remember what it felt like to be a kid, and we can remember what it felt like in our physical bodies as well. We can connect with our pain as well as our positive childhood traits like creativity and curiosity.

We can get in touch with our younger selves at many different ages and explore what they need from us.

“By healing our inner child, we begin to create the safety and security our younger selves have always needed. By doing so, the positive traits of our inner child have room to shine. We unlock our natural gifts, our inner curiosity, and our limitless capacity to love.

On the other hand, when we avoid addressing our past hurts and feel alone with them, they transform into behaviors destructive to ourselves and our environment, such as workaholism, alcoholism, or racism” (Trieu, T., 2020).

How does inner child work happen?

Many different modalities can be used in therapy to do inner child work. At Nourished Wellness Group, several of our offerings can support this work:

• Parts work

• Self-Compassion

• EMDR

• Brainspotting

• Somatic work

The act of being curious about our inner experiences, asking what we need, and giving it to ourselves can not only be healing, but it can be regulating to our nervous systems as well.

Looking to get started on this work? Reach out to us!

In the meantime, here’s an inner child meditation to get you started.

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References:

“Inner Child Meditation.” YouTube, uploaded by The Holistic Psychologist, 30 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC5l3wdzXXM.

Trieu, T. (2020, December 31). What Is Inner Child Work? A Guide To Healing Your Inner Child. Mindbodygreen. www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/inner-child-work

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