“I’ve heard of inner child work, so, yeah, I might try it out, I’ll have to look further into it and see.”
The person I was having lunch with, who I’d recently met at a retreat, almost looked exasperated at my response.
“Look. As children, we have needs of being heard, seen, and validated. If these needs didn’t get met, they are going to play out in our adult lives in one way or another,” she said.
Prior to her explaining it like this, inner child work always seemed so abstract to me, and I’d never quite gotten it.
Her explanation made it finally click and I went on to dive deeply into the work.
This is how I would define inner child work now:
The younger aspect of your psyche who didn’t get their needs met is sort of frozen in time. By meeting their needs and “reparenting” them, you unfreeze this aspect of your psyche (your inner child) and integrate them back into yourself.
If you operate your day-to-day life totally unaware of your inner child, well: they are going to rule your life behind the scenes.
They will pick your partners, your jobs, your friends, you name it. They’ll pick the same type of person or situation over and over again, until after the fifth cheating partner you get a clue that something might be up (that, or you decide all men/women/people suck and vow to never trust again).
Your inner child can run the gamut of in the womb to a couple years younger of where you are now. And, you can have multiple inner children running about in your psyche.
Here are some questions to reflect on to see where your inner child might need healing:
(CW: domestic violence)
How safe did you feel as a kid?
Did you feel safe to express yourself?
Did you feel safe to turn to your parents if you felt bad or scared?
Was it easy to get the attention of your parents?
Did you feel heard?
Did you feel seen?
Did you have to keep your head down to avoid negative attention?
How stressed out were your parents (including during the pregnancy)?
Did your parents fight a lot?
Did they ever get really angry or violent towards you?
How stable was your life?
Did you feel appreciated for who you were?
Did you have to do anything specifically to receive love/validation, or was it unconditional?
What was your relationship like to your siblings?
Were you bullied in school? What was your relationship like to your teachers? (It is of my opinion that school and 13+ years of it is actually a traumatizing experience, but we just treat it as a normal thing.)
Honestly, this list of questions is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the lines of inquiry, but it’s a good starting point. You can also think of any big, defining wounding moments in your personal history as places where you may have a frozen/fragmented aspect of your psyche.
So! Now you are aware that you probably have a wounded inner child (FYI: we all do.). Awareness is an * awesome * place to be in. The next step is actually healing the inner child.
Just like parenting a real child, healing and reparenting your inner child is not a one-and-done thing. It takes a consistent and dedicated practice. You also have to know which wounds specifically you are dealing with (i.e wound around not feeling seen, instability, conditional love, etc.).
Here are some ideas:
– Mirror Work. Meeting your own gaze and saying the things to yourself that you wish you heard as a kid.
– Talking to a photo of your younger self. Same principle as above, but talking to a photo instead. (Tip from Christine Hassler!)
– Meditations. You can do timeline therapy to rewrite situations you were in as a little kid, with your adult self coming in to reparent your younger self.
– Journalling. You can tune into your younger self and channel them, or use your non-dominant hand to channel them. (Tip from Naomi!)
When I first started doing inner child work, mirror work and meditations were my main tools. I got practiced at noticing when my inner child was triggered (i.e when I didn’t get a text back) and reparenting her on the fly.
What exponentially shifted my inner child wounding, however, was theta healing. I’ll always always recommend it, especially for inner child work. One session of theta healing covered for me what weeks of meditations could, and heal pretty traumatic memories at that.
Now, inner child work is a foundational piece in my practice of healing myself and others.
Want some guidance into transforming your old patterns and wounding into freedom? I would love to chat.
If you are doing inner child work, be proud of yourself. 🌸 You’re stopping generational patterns and ushering in a better world for the future.
To your growth and healing,
Tasmia (thuss-me-ah), Smia for short