The Importance of Discovering Your Inner Child.

Discovering our inner child feels like a whimsical process to many people but its importance in our healing journey cannot be undermined. We think of being in touch with our inner child as being more about having fun than healing. While having fun is a key part of our well-being, the real need to connect to our child is to understand what drives us and why we operate in our lives the way we do.

Many of us don’t understand the role our inner child plays in our lives and how they send us down a path of self-sabotage.  My exploration into healing took me deeper and deeper into trying to understand my psyche and my discovery of Canadian physician Gabor Maté opened a world of healing up to me that I never knew would change my life for the best. Along with shadow work, nothing has helped me more than connecting with the child within me who feels the pain of her upbringing and unconsciously comes to the forefront of me in times of insecurity.

The Child Within Us Is Running The Show

The inner child within us is believed to be the unconscious driver behind all of our actions. Both their joy and their wounds motivate all that we do. This child is particularly present when we are in conflict or struggle both externally and internally. When we are stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn our inner child is the one who is in that process. When we are in panic and in a state of anxiety our child is inside us running around in circles not knowing what to do. When we shout and rant, the child inside of us is enraged. When we cry, the child inside of us is sad. Every reaction we have that feels difficult is our wounded inner child on display. These very human actions are learned in our childhood and if we understand this, we can see the importance of finding that child within us and helping them to heal.

It is believed that our personality is developed in response to the behaviours that got us love or kept us safe as a child. The things that we do in our lives that are considered positive often got us a lot of praise, the things we do that are deemed negative were developed as a product of self-protection, on this journey, both need to be examined. We must find what truly motivates our behaviours and if they are a part of us that we wish to take into our future.

How I Found My Inner Child

In the process of understanding what would be required of me to find my inner child, I learned that our current behaviours and traits are often rooted in the past, lodged in the unconscious mind, the part of me that was harmed at a specific age. As a generational trauma survivor, it felt unlikely that I had only one wounded inner child as I had experienced multiple traumatic events at various ages. Finding my inner children was a process that required me to look back on my past self and find the traumatised ages that needed love but didn’t receive it, exploring how that child felt and what I could do to soothe her pain.

My inner child discovery started under the watchful eye of a trauma-informed therapist. It was a difficult and triggering process and should not be attempted without a trusted support network. Help from a therapist is highly beneficial, if not crucial in this process.

Connecting to my inner children required me to attempt to still my mind. I found breathing techniques helpful in this process. In the stillness there was a voice speaking to me, I listened to what it said without judgment and started a gentle exploration into it. I attempted to identify the age of that voice; this allowed me to step back into the past and find that version of me and what my circumstances were like.

On my journey I have found 8 Inner children (ages 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10, 13 and 15) so far, I am sure many more will come forward as I continue to explore my inner workings. My 2 and 4-year-olds are where my fear is driven from, they are both scared and unsure if their needs will ever be met, the root of my anxious attachment. My 6-year-old is afraid of the future and doesn’t know where she belongs. My 8-year-old is the parentified version of me who has been put in charge of a world that she doesn’t understand. 10-year-old me is tired and fed up with having to take care of everything. Teen me is confused and angry. At 13 my world was opening up, puberty hit hard, boys came on the scene, I started my period and my body changed. 15-year-old me is rageful and wants justice.

Amongst the sadness is a version of me who loves creativity, fun, play and joy. I found her within my 3-year-old self who started developing her obsession with dance, music and art. I found that the positive aspects of my inner children ran through many years of my life as a young person but these were heavily suppressed in my adulthood. I knew I must reawaken that part of me in my healing process.

How I Am Healing My Inner Child

Discovering both the joyful and painful parts of me locked in my inner children helped me to see why I had developed the self-sabotaging patterns of my adult self that had affected both my life and the lives of others. In listening to the wants of my inner children I have been able to see how the coping mechanisms of my adult self has perpetuated the pain I felt within, bringing forward the worst version of myself. I knew that for me to heal I would need to be prepared to look at the darkest parts of myself, choose to love them fiercely and help them recover from their painful experiences.  

To heal those patterns, I realised that I needed to stop ignoring and denying my inner children their voices and needs and I started the process of reparenting myself. I learned to offer each wounded child inside of me stability, validation and comfort, all of which I did not receive enough of from my parents when I most needed it. Self-love is an important part of the process of healing our inner child. My blog on Self-Love may be interesting for you to be able to understand self-love more, you can read it by clicking here.

In connecting to my inner children, I moved forward with gentle words to their pain and sadness, just as I would if a crying child were standing right in front of me. My inner children felt a lot of resistance to the kindness and love I offered them and their sadness or rage was sometimes so loud that spending time with them felt overwhelming but I knew that the part of me that resisted these gentle words was the part of me that needed healing the most.

Before this work, I mistook the discomfort in my internal world as being external and, therefore beyond the realms of change. I previously spent a lifetime running from my emotions and feelings believing that they were my identity and because I felt the world so heavily, nothing could be different. With consistent practice of self-love and inner child connection, their voices have changed. It is no longer difficult to receive my own love and care and the knock-on effects to other areas of my life have been monumental.

To heal our inner child, we must also give them the things they love the most. When my inner child desires to play, I play as she likes to play – I colour, paint, play games and build Lego, anything that involves using my hands and creating. When she says I want to dance, I take her dancing. My pain holds me back here but nonetheless, I go, even if all I do is enjoy the music and company it provides (she loves to be around people). Most importantly I have brought back to my life my inner child’s love of singing. This work has allowed me to reconnect with the parts of myself that I thought were long gone.

The process of reparenting myself has given birth to a new me. I no longer deny myself the inner world discomfort that I have suppressed for years, feeling the full range of my emotions and feelings to their entirety, slowly seeing, acknowledging and cleansing myself of decades of trauma and hurt. This process is slowly healing the wounds of my past. The phrase “You have to feel it to heal it” is true. Until now I had been attempting to cover my wounds with plasters, hoping that somehow that would be enough to stop the bleeding of a knife wound, leaving my inner children silently screaming in pain. I now tend to each wound lovingly with full care, gently stitching each one together with words of love and reassurance, soothing my inner child with the care they have needed for a lifetime.  

When I had taken a deep wade into the realm of my inner children, I was able to connect to something within me I had never allowed myself to experience, a part of me that was longing to be felt, my heart-centered nature. I have always had a lot of compassion and care for others but I often felt that my love was strictly reserved for certain people under certain circumstances. There was always something that felt uncomfortable and disconnected about that mindset.

The past had shown me that to protect myself from harm I must deny feeling love for those who had hurt me, love felt dangerous and therefore conditional, and in an attempt to not feel it, I suppressed it. This was the disconnect I was feeling, my heart and mind were not aligned, my heart wanted to love but my mind said no! Inner child work peeled back the layers of this hurt revealing a heart underneath that wanted to be seen and truly felt into.

In this experience, I have come to know myself as an ever-loving being. I no longer deny the love I feel in my heart for others, regardless of how much they have hurt me. This has helped me to process and accept many experiences of my past and see them for what they are, a heart longing to be seen. Allowing myself to feel unconditional love has opened my world up to a deeper understanding of not only my pain but the pain of others, too. My compassion extends well beyond its original range and I choose to live in alignment with my values by showing up in my world in a different, more loving way.

How did I know I Was healing?

Offering love to my inner child has helped me to learn how to regulate my emotions and develop healthy coping mechanisms. When something arises in me, I no longer run from the pain that surfaces, I sit with it and offer it space to be felt and comforted, reversing my desire to avoid negative feelings, increasing my resilience to stressors. Providing myself with consistent loving words of kindness and reassurance give me a sense of self-trust and validation. Being sure to take part in fun activities gives me soulful relief from adult life. Self-care and time spent alone allows me time to work on me, growing the understanding of my inner workings. These actions allow me to show up more authentically in my world, automatically giving the best of myself to others without the need to receive. In this way, I now meet my own needs.

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 The process of healing my inner children has allowed me to return home to my heart and live in to who I feel I am meant to be, this is a felt sense of security and it is within us all. The journey is hard but can be life-changing if we are only willing. I reiterate that this process is best undertaken with the care of a trauma-informed therapist and/or a good support network. With the right approach and care, we can transform our inner worlds from places of discomfort to places of calm. The child within us just wants to be loved, when we give that love to ourselves the outcome can be life-changing.