Inner Child Healing
Does your Inner Child want your attention and need healing?
- Do you ever react disproportionately when upset?
- Do certain places, people, smells, sounds or memories trigger an extreme emotional reaction?
- Do you worry you lack control over your anger?
- Do people accuse you of being manipulative?
- Has anyone ever told you that you seem to have 2 completely different personalities?
- Do you lack confidence in yourself?
- Are you a people pleaser?
- Do you struggle to remember parts of your childhood?
- Are you emotionally immature?
If you experience any of the above then you might well have inner child healing and Integration to do. The above list cannot be exhaustive, each of our childhoods and our personalities are unique, so our coping mechanisms will be too. If you are interested in learning more and healing your inner child, please read on.
How your Inner Child communicates.
Inner child healing is integral to the healing journey, it is also fundamental in achieving a happy, healthy, beautiful life. Every one of us has carried unhealed wounds from childhood and these wounds will impact your life until dealt with. The necessity of inner child healing is obvious when we have areas in which we react in perhaps an inflated way.
For example, maybe we have a very strong reaction to the feeling of being ignored, we become emotional, angry and upset because of the percieved rejection, we know our reaction is excessive through observation and hindsight, but at the time we felt very justified by our emotion and felt incapable of a lesser reaction. Other people perhaps do not react as strongly when they face a similar situation, or accuse you of being angry or manipulative when you are faced with a particular challenge. You may notice that for the most part you are calm and relatively content, but if you are continually triggered by a feeling that you believe you have no control over, then ‘another side of you’ can become exposed.
How does Inner Child trauma happen?
Inner child trauma causes these behaviour patterns and challenges within a personality. Throughout our life we have traumas, not every trauma has to be a car accident or a death to be worthy of counting as distressing to a developing young mind, that doesnt have the experience of exposure and survival to comprehend the situation. These childhood traumas can be so captivating and strong as to become formative and remain with us (especially if we were not shown how to process our feelings and recognise our emotions) we can have an aspect of self stuck there in that scenario. This aspect of self will suspend in time and development (many parents struggle to adequately support their children when they experience perceived distasteful emotions, not always due to wilful neglect, but because they themselves also have an immature emotional regulation system, lack awareness and are unconsciously parenting).
For example, if a seven year old child experiences a distressing rejection, which is not adequately supported and therefore is not sufficiently processed, then this aspect of self will continue to be stuck in the trauma as if a seven year old. This results in an adult who has an overblown reaction to any perceived rejection as if they were still that distressed, unseen, unheard and unvalidated child. That trauma will remain with that fractured aspect of self, the wounded inner child, until the adult self reaches in and supports that child, allowing healing to occur and integration to happen.
Inner Child Illuminating Exercise
Finding out if you have an inner child wound that is surfacing to ask for attention and healing, can be a remarkably simple exercise for some people.
- Do you have a childhood memory that causes a troubling emotional reaction within you?
- Maybe you deliberately try to avoid thinking about it?
- Do you worry you’ll get upset if someone else brings it up?
- Can a trigger making you think of it change your mood?
- Have you had to make amends with someone you treated in an unacceptable manner, because they unwittingly triggered this memory?
- Is even taking part in this exercise making you feel uncomfortable?
If you answered Yes to any single one of the above, then Yes, I would suggest that you have a surfacing inner child wound. If you didn’t resonate with the above then maybe you don’t have a surfacing wound. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have a childhood trauma, it may mean it is repressed, maybe you do not have the capacity to work with it at the moment, or perhaps you disassociated from the event.
Inner child healing allows you to care for that stuck child, taking the burden of the trauma away, liberating the inner child, resulting in that wound being healed and that aspect being integrated into the whole. Thus allowing the adult self to confidently step into competence and take radical self responsibility.
Shadow work allows you to claim your true power over your own happiness, health and life course.