Try inner child therapy These clinicians draw from several modalities, like shadow work, attachment theory, psychoanalysis, and even art therapy. Inner child therapists help you draw connections between your childhood experiences and how they may still be subtly guiding your adult behavior.
Inner child work can be found in many types of therapy. To name a few, the inner child lens can be found in trauma therapy, Parts Work, Internal Family Systems, EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic work, Gestalt work, art therapy, and story or narrative therapy, notes Phillips.
Healing your inner child doesn't happen overnight; the work can take years. But it's worth it, Stern says. “You'll probably be capable of healthier adult relationships,” she notes.
So if you habitually make an effort to meet the needs of your inner child, that's a sign that healing is happening. And meeting the inner child's needs, she adds, will vary depending on the situation but can look like validation, reassurance, self-soothing, implementing boundaries, or identifying expectations.
People with wounded inner children can often experience persistent and chronic feelings of emptiness, helplessness and hopelessness. They might feel that they are existing as a false self and that their life lacks a sense of aliveness or spontaneity. They might also feel deeply disconnected from others.
Childhood trauma, where the child's needs are not met, destroys a child's sense of safety, causing them to become hypervigilant and scared. In adulthood, these inner children never go away, and neither does their feelings of being unsafe and that the world is a horrible and dangerous place.
You may find yourself frequently becoming angry, upset, or feeling victimized by how certain situations play out. If you quickly react from an emotional place and find it difficult to assess situations from a logical perspective, this is one sign that your inner child may be running the show.
The concept of the inner child was first introduced by renowned psychologist Carl Jung. 2 Our inner child can drive many of our emotions in our daily life, especially when we are unaware of it. When you lose conscious awareness of your inner child, you lose conscious awareness of a part of yourself.
Inner child work often shows up in trauma-informed therapeutic modalities, like trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
According to recent studies, childhood trauma can have a lasting impact on our mental health and behavior in adulthood, including at work. The wounded inner child refers to the part of us that carries the emotional pain and unmet needs from our childhood experiences, which can show up in various ways at the workplace.
Becoming more aware of the inner child through therapy or a personal journey can help unearth that pain and ultimately offer healing. Acknowledging the inner child involves recognizing and accepting things that caused pain in childhood, bringing them to light to understand their impact now (Raypole, 2021).
You lose your inner child at the point when you think that you do not need it anymore. You lose it when you succumb to the pressures of society, when you get a little too conscious, and when you think that others might begin to laugh at you.
That's because many people don't try to connect with their inner child, unaware that it affects their current adulthood. Our inner child affects how we respond to difficult feelings or situations in our current life. We may not be aware of the connection, but the past is often connected to the present.
They can be triggered by their parent's lack of attention, surface-level conversations, and inability to see them in a deep and emotional way. This creates feelings of hurt, anger, and loneliness. Being ignored: On a basic level, experiencing childhood emotional neglect is a form of being ignored daily.
The inner child reflects the child we once were in both his or her 'negative' and 'positive' aspects. Both our unmet needs and suppressed childhood emotions, as well as our childlike innocence, creativity, and joy, are still waiting within of us.
The inner child's main concern is safety and when triggered, her fears can control our adult behavior below our conscious awareness, limiting us in a variety of ways, until we become conscious of this.
You might have difficulties trusting, low self-esteem, fears of being judged, constant attempts to please, outbursts of frustration, or social anxiety symptoms that won't let up. Can childhood trauma be healed?