Why should we heal our inner child?
Inner child work is so essential and valuable. We were truly the most vulnerable during our younger years and often times a lot of us didn’t have the best external environment, situations, or people to model or guide us into being a whole and empowered adults. Not only were we vulnerable, but our inner emotional landscape was also so rich and complex.
We were like sponges absorbing, learning, modeling reactions behaviors, taking on other people’s belief systems of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Often times, neither ourselves nor the adult around us had the proper emotional vocabulary or intelligence to really nurture and teach us. Not to mention, we had practically no control over our circumstances.
But what’s beautiful and heartwarming is that you can reparent and heal your inner child as an adult. Oftentimes we seek approval, validation, and love from other people as adults, and this can be either healing or create some unhealthy codependent relationships. However, when you are finally able to step into a degree of an empowered adult/self and begin to love and embrace and to hold your own inner child – that is some magical stuff.
How might your inner child show up?
We have to first become aware and acknowledge that there exists an inner child. In our physical body, our emotional and mental psyche. The inner child plays a definitive and sometimes defiant role in the way we show up relationally, with people. And it also shows up in our self-talk. The mental chatter that goes on in all of our minds.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out episode 14. How to talk to your ego, inner child and higher self. I invite us to begin to see, understand, and feel ourselves as an ecosystem. Everything is relational to everything else. Every organ influences every other one. Our mental and emotional states have influences over our bodies, organs, and cells. Our thoughts have influences over our physical body, etc…
The inner child can show up in so many different ways. It can show up as genuine wonder and elation when we discover something new that lights us up. If you think about a baby in their first few years of life – every single thing is brand new, we were encountering new stimuli every single day, just being so open and amused to explore everything. So even as adults, when we travel to new places, when we meet new people, or when in a magical moment we come to appreciate the beauty and intelligent design of the nature of our universe. We then again get to embody that child-like wonder. It is this exhilarating flutter in our mind and in our hearts, you can’t help but smile and feel such deep reverence for that particular moment.
Of course, more often than not, our inner child shows up during conflict and challenges.
Here’s an example:
Perhaps growing up you had an absent parent, whether it’s literally or just mentally/emotionally absent. So you did your best to get into things they’re interested in or just tried to be extraordinary or spectacular so that they’d notice you or give you more attention or affection. And as an adult, you’re now a high functioning achiever with a wide variety of hobbies and interests… And then one day you’re in a conversation with someone, and they very casually make a remark such as: “Oh my god, you like that? That sounds SO boring.”
And objectively it’s no big deal, not everyone’s going be interested in the same things. but all of a sudden you either felt attacked and hurt or you get really irritated and angry. Because instead of hearing what was actually being said which is: this thing you enjoy I don’t enjoy as much. What we heard was ” YOU ARE SO BORING AND UN-SPECIAL” and so the inner child that worked so hard to be this extraordinary person has been deeply triggered.
How to heal your inner child?
Reframing a victim mentality into an empowered state. As adults… in varying degrees, we are all more empowered now than when we were as a child. Reframing victim mentality doesn’t mean we dismiss or invalidate our pain nor our experiences. Instead, it’s acknowledging them fully, and seeing they no longer need to have power over us. We cannot deny anyone’s pain, but we can learn how to stop prolonging suffering. Suffering is kinda like meta-emotions. When you feel angry because something bad happened, and then you feel ashamed for feeling angry. Suffering is like an added layer to that pain we experienced, but it’s oftentimes generated from our own consciousness.
Practice conscious inner child work. We can carve out some time – just like we do for exercising, meditation or Netflix binging. There are several ways we can consciously reparent our inner child. When we’ve contemplated and discovered a pattern that tends to create triggered reactions from us, we can begin to explore and to track when we initially had a strong reaction to this feeling or emotion. Was it an experience with our parents? caretakers? maybe a sibling or a classmate or even teacher? Just be completely open to see what your subconscious mind might show you.
When we have been able to locate a specific instance during our younger years when we felt so unseen and ignored and perhaps unworthy, unloved, or just angry and frustrated. We can now invite ourselves in. -To explore visualization meditations and actively reprogram our memories of those experiences and re-imagine an ending for our inner child that is more empowered and loving. By either stepping in as the adult self and offer the attention and love to our inner child when they needed it the most, or we can step in and speak with the other people present at that time. Get really creative about these visualizations. It’s our chance to re-write and recreate a movie ending that we hated to one that we really needed.
For more, please listen to the podcast episode “19. How to Love and Heal Your Inner Child”.
Available at the top of this post, or on Apple Podcast and Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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