Inner Child Work
Inner child work is another extension of Inner Work Practices and aids in healing pain, trauma, and difficult experiences from our childhood. Working with our inner child is about making space within our inner landscape for our younger self to be seen and heard.
Practicing inner child work involves retrieving memories from our childhood, working through our feelings and emotions around these experiences, acknowledging and accepting our past, and addressing our behavior patterns, unmet needs and emotional wounds that resulted from our childhood.
Each one of us can benefit from inner child work. Our inner child emerges when our best friend does not answer our text message and when we do not see eye to eye with our partner or colleague at work. No matter how old we get, we always carry our younger selves with us each day.
The Inner Child Archetype is also one of the universal archetypes that we all share. This is the archetype that creates our perceptions surrounding life, safety, loyalty, nurturing, family, group bonds, and community. There are many aspects to this archetype that are more specific to our unique personalities, such as the wounded or orphan child, the nature child, dependent child, innocent child and Divine child.
We are designed to receive our Soul Life Lessons as early as childhood and how we respond to these situations will change our energetic makeup as we move forward throughout childhood into adulthood. When we fail to address these issues as we get older, our shadows grow and cause chaos in our adult lives.
The Path of Self-Discovery
The self-development journey begins in childhood. As young children we learn about family, safety, security and survival. As we become toddlers and preschoolers, we begin to learn about relationships outside of our family. As we navigate this new path with teachers, peers and friends we learn more about life and our emotions.
As we transition into our adolescent years, we become more independent as we discover our hearts and minds, our passions and what we believe in as individuals. As we move into our young adult lives, we discover our strengths, talents, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities and we begin to make choices aligned with our beliefs.
Although this process is ideally how we would mature into spiritually responsible adults, due to the complexities of life, this may not be the path we all traveled. This could result from a difficult childhood, traumatic childhood experiences, or past memories from childhood that we need to work through and process.
At times we may discover something that seems “normal” to us as adults, especially by society standards, has actually had a significant impact on our inner child. Many will speak about divorce like it’s no big deal. And while for many, perhaps it truly is not. But for some, deep within, this may have caused emotional pain and trauma for our inner child.
When do not honor our feelings and experiences as children, and ignore our inner child, as adults we will find it difficult if not impossible to create and sustain successful relationships or take responsibility for ourselves in the physical world. Leaving us with the wounded child and the shadow manifestations of never feeling loved, accepted or stable in the physical world.
Working with the energy of our inner child can open a new relationship to life. Our inner child represents our imagination, creativity, emotions, and our hopes and dreams. It gives us space to go inside of ourselves and explore our true feelings and the parts of our personality that were rejected and labeled as “too much” or “inappropriate” by family, teachers, classmates, friends, and society as a whole.
When we go deep within to explore our inner child we peel back the layer of our thoughts, beliefs, and our coping mechanisms. Do we tend to conform to what others believe so we are accepted, or do we stand firm in our views? Do we avoid challenges, or do we numb our feelings instead of working through them? When we get to the root cause of our struggles we can fully accept and embrace every part of ourselves.
Like inner work, inner child work is a long-term commitment to healing from within. Going deep to discover hidden and repressed memories and heal our wounds from the past, identifying fears, shadows, tribal beliefs and negative behaviors and dissolving the hold these patterns have over us. As we continue to do so we cultivate a deeper connection to our inner child, live through the wisdom of our Soul Life Lessons and find soul centered balance in our lives.
Clues that your Inner Child may need your attention
Although there are many indicators that our inner child is trying to connect with us, the list below is a starting point for your own self-discovery journey.
- Overvaluing independence, adopting the mindset that you don’t need anyone. This can manifest in never asking for help, to always going it alone, never wanting the support of others.
- Being highly reactive, including suddenly feeling irritated, frustrated or just wanting to detach from the situation. This can manifest when we get irritated in traffic or frustrated that our friend is not seeing our point of view.
- Experiencing poor mental and emotional health. Some examples include spending too much time alone, weight loss/gain, inability to sleep, increased anxiety, depression, feeling uninspired and unmotivated. This can manifest as shame, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy.
- Continually repeating the same patterns of behavior in relationships and life experiences. This results from attachment wounds created in childhood that we recreate in our lives and relationships as adults. This can manifest as an inability to let go of what no longer serves us.
- Harmful coping mechanisms such as addiction to substances, shopping, gambling, sex, food, or even chronic procrastination. These patterns are particularly destructive as they can manifest chaos in our lives from harm to our health to trouble with law enforcement.
How to Practice Inner Child Work
Inner child work can be challenging, uncovering hidden and repressed memories, and working through our painful feelings, but there is hope and healing from this path. Our inner child is the center of our emotional landscape, our wellspring of creativity, and the core for our hidden gifts and aptitudes.
The key to inner child work is to recognize that we are speaking and interacting with a child. In doing so, we can work through the energy of their language, which is emotionally and creatively based. Speaking to our inner child through rational thought and intellect is like an adult telling a child to stop eating cookies before dinner. The intention should be to create a safe emotional space that incorporates art or play.
When we begin to connect with our inner child, we can embrace the depths of our emotions, improving our relationships with others and ourselves. We can rediscover our hidden talents and gifts and create a life with joy and purpose.
Inner child work does not replace the need for therapy or programs that aid in healing childhood abuse, neglect and trauma. Inner child work is designed to work in conjunction with all healing paths, including metal health support. No matter what kind of childhood we experienced, inner child work can get tricky alone, please don’t hesitate to reach out to someone for support.
Examples of Inner Child Work
Meditation/Visualization
Connect with your inner child through meditation using a childhood photograph. Try to connect with yourself by visualizing your image, try to remember how you felt, what the atmosphere was like, noting any significant smells or tastes.
Even if the feelings that come up do not make sense, remember you are speaking to your child self, not your adult self. Embrace the emotions and senses that come up and honor how your inner child is feeling. Let them be seen and understood.
This exercise will foster a connection with our inner child so we can begin to understand our emotional patterns as children.
Write a Letter
Write a letter to your inner child. Let them know how much you love them and care for them, and they are safe and accepted. The purpose of this exercise is to acknowledge and honor the feelings of our inner child, letting them know all is good now, we are safe.
Write a letter from your inner child. This one can get tricky as it works best using your non dominant hand. This is to tap into the perspective of our inner child by bypassing the rational side of our brain. In this letter, your inner child will write to your adult self, asking for what your younger self needs to feel safe and loved. Such as nurturing, compassion, or empathy.
Affirmations
Inner child affirmations are a powerful tool to aid with inner child work. When used consistently, affirmations can reprogram our thought patterns in a positive and nourishing way. These can be used throughout your day to help stay grounded, or you can practice speaking affirmations to a photo of your inner child. The goal is to remain consistent with the practice.
Inner Child Affirmation Examples
- It is ok to be you.
- You are special just the way you are.
- You are loved and accepted.
- You are allowed to say no.
- I want to hear your thoughts and feelings.
- I believe in you.
- I am grateful you were born.
- I will protect you from all harm.
Examples of Inner Child Work Continued
Historical Life View
With this exercise you will review the timeline of your life and go back to the beginning. If doing this as one long path seems challenging, it may be easier to break this out into sections such as Infant 0–1-year, Toddler 1-3 years, Preschool 3-6 years and school age 6-12.
As children, many of us experience enormous difficulty during our childhood years and traveling the road back to the beginning may prove extremely challenging. It is important to reach out for therapeutic support to ensure emotional and mental stability and overall well-being, as inner child work is a crucial step in the self-discovery journey to healing.
On the other side, there are many of us that experience difficulty during childhood but as adults we dismiss the experiences they seem “status quo”, or “normal”. Looking through the lens of our inner child can open us to realize that many of these childhood experiences were hurtful and painful.
Something that seems so mundane like finding out Santa Claus does not exist could prove to be a traumatic experience to us as children. Being children, when we hear such news our first instinct is to go to an adult for support.
What if in that exact moment you went home to tell your Mom all about this terrible thing you heard at school and for the first time, she gave you the “oh, it will be ok honey” because for the first time, right in that moment, she was too busy to hug you, leaving you feeling rejected and abandoned. We may dismiss experiences such as this as adults, but as children they can be quite damaging.
During my journey, one experience that stood out to me was my view on divorce. When my parents divorced, I didn’t think much of it as this was something that was normal in society as I was growing up. During my journey, I discovered that the act of divorce was not the core issue, it was how some things transpired that hurt my inner child.
Digging deeper into this experience allowed me to connect with my inner child in a more profound way by looking at the experience through the lens of a child. This allowed me to feel empathy and to truly feel all those emotions again and then release the hold they had over me. I was able to let go of the past and find a path to healing.
That is the purpose of this exercise, to help you recall your feelings, thoughts and emotions and what life was like as a child and if you felt safe, loved, accepted and supported. Many times, you will find that your younger self felt abandoned, rejected or unloved. By embracing the feelings of our inner child, we can honor how we felt as children and release the pain from the experience and let go of the hold the past has over our lives.
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