Healing for your Inner-Child
“I feel like a 12 year old again”, “It was like I was having a tantrum”, or “I knew my reaction was bigger than the trigger, but I couldn’t stop myself!” Sound familiar to you? This might be an inner-child wound coming up in real time. And, if you’ve had this experience, you are not alone. No one gets to escape inner-child wounds. We all have experienced early life pain to some degree and depending on our experience with ‘nature and nurture’, as well as other factors, we might continue to suffer from this pain into adult life, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “healing your inner-child.” Sure, it makes sense in an intellectual way, but how do we actually do this?
We can’t just think our way through inner-child healing. It’s not just as simple as thinking about your inner-child and intellectualizing the concept while providing yourself with soothing and affirming thoughts. Yes, this is part of the work. However, in my professional and personal experience, in order to heal the roots of our inner-child there needs to be a felt sense experience and re-processing; an integration of the mind and the body in relation to your inner-child’s past wounds while feeling resourced in the present moment.
Why can’t we just think our way out of our childhood wounds and pain?
Many of our wounds from earlier in our lives are stored as implicit vs. explicit memories. We don’t necessarily have a specific memory that is filled with painful thoughts, details, insight and meaning about a past experience. Instead, we might get triggered or activated by an experience that brings up a familiar sensation or felt experience that perhaps reminds us of an earlier time in life. Or, maybe it’s more subtle than that and you notice a physical response while in certain situations (e.g. tension, anxiety, antsy, heavy, desire to fight, flee, hide etc.), but can’t figure out why these situations are so triggering to you.
This is why we can’t think our way out of this pain. Our bodies and nervous systems carry these types of memories; we experience the “memories” through energy, sensations, and our felt sense rather than thoughts and detailed memories. Therefore, symptoms and sensations that show up in our bodies might be flashbacks from earlier times in our lives that don’t include specific thoughts, images or detailed memory.
This is where our inner-child work can begin; noticing our triggers in real time and any activation in our body while getting curious about what the physical sensations and felt sense might be holding in relation to past wounds. The symptoms become a trailhead to begin to help heal your inner-child.
Our symptoms become an invitation for attunement.
5 Ways to help support the healing process of your inner-child:
Attune to your emotions and felt sense experience in the here-and-now.
By attuning to our adult self, we are building trust with the younger parts of ourselves and showing them that we can hold space for their pain. We are showing our younger parts that we can handle challenging experiences and be okay. And if we’re not okay, knowing when to reach out for support.
We are re-parenting ourselves by attuning to ourselves.
Acknowledge when there’s a part of you that feels younger.
Triggered or activated by something? Get curious and ask yourself if it feels like a younger part. If it does intuitively feel younger to you, bring some self-compassion to the moment and feeling, even if you don’t fully understand it.
We don’t have to know what it is, to know that it is.
Try to show up for yourself the way you would for a close friend or young innocent child.
In challenging moments, speak to yourself the way you would to a close friend or innocent child.
If this is difficult for you, you’re not alone. We all have an inner-critic and some of ours are more activated and make it challenging to bring kindness, compassion and patience to ourselves.
Here’s an important tip, instead of forcing the inner-critic away or shaming yourself for having a difficult time with this step in the process, thank the inner-critic for trying to protect you and ask it to step back a little to give you some space so it’s less intense. If you find yourself stuck with the inner-critic, ask it what it’s trying to do for you by showing up in this moment. If you still feel stuck with the inner-critic, ask it what it’s afraid of if it wasn’t criticizing you right now.
The point is, get curious and collaborate and negotiate with your inner-critic.
Throughout your day, ask your body what it needs from you.
Your body is a vessel of wisdom.
Even if no needs come to your awareness when you reflect on this, engaging in this act alone communicates to your internal system that your needs matter.
Asking yourself what you need helps to build trust with your inner-child by showing it that your needs matter and it’s ok to express your needs.
Meditation or quiet time by yourself.
By providing a quiet and focused space for you to be with yourself, you’re making time to reflect on your internal system.
Time to yourself is like spending one-on-one time with a loved on; this is a time of intimacy and communicates to your internal system that you matter.
For guided mediations to help with the healing of your inner-child, check out my ‘Healing for your Inner-Child’ meditation bundle here.
Above all, the most beneficial act we can do for our inner-child healing is to make a conscious effort to engage in self-compassion. Remember, healing is not linear and it can at times be messy and uncomfortable. We need to be gentle with ourselves during any kind of healing process.
I also know that human beings are wired for healing. We are all capable of deep and profound healing. With attunement, patience and grace, we can heal all parts of us and feel more whole and connected.
Humans are also wired for connection and we all deserve someone to bear witness to our healing journey. If you are finding yourself outside of your window of tolerance (activated without a release) or prefer doing this work with others, I encourage you to connect with a safe person and perhaps a mental health or medical professional to provide yourself the support that you deserve.
