Inner Child Work: All you need to know to decide if it’s for you E110

September 12, 2023

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This episode is for you if you want to understand better what inner child work means and what it’s all about. I received a few questions from this community and decided to provide you with the answers that you probably have when you are new to inner child work.

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It’s just a few episodes ago that I shared with you a unique perspective on inner child work that can help you tremendously if you are already in the process of deeper inner work. So check that one out after this episode, if you have not listened to it yet. 

But I was asked to take a step back and explain inner child work in general. What is it all about? What does it mean? And how does it work? So I decided to create this episode to answer your questions. Let’s start with question No. 1:

What does it mean to have an inner child? How does it get created?

We all have an inner child inside of us. It’s an aspect of ourselves that is rooted in the subconscious mind. Which means it’s mostly hidden from our conscious mind. That’s the reason why most people are not really aware of having an inner child. 

Anything we didn’t get as children growing up became an unmet need in adulthood. And those unmet needs can result in damaging behaviour if we don’t become aware and meet them ourselves.

How the inner child is created is linked to how our brains work when we grow up, particularly between the ages of 0 to about 7 years old. That does not mean that in inner child work, we always just work with our very younger version of ourselves, but 0-7 are the formative years regarding our subconscious mind. So in the work with your inner child, you can deal with versions of yourself of any age.

Brain development in our childhood

So let’s briefly review brain development when we are children. In the first couple of years, the brain wave patterns of a baby are the delta brain waves which we are in when we are sleeping. So a baby that is awake is still in a dream-like state. Then, from the ages of 2 to 6 or 7, the brain wave pattern increases slightly to theta brain wave patterns. That is still closer to a sleeping state than to an awake and aware state that we have as adults.

This is so important because the brain wave pattern that enables us to analyse data and decide if we believe in something or not just gets fully formed at the age of 12. It means that all information surrounding a child gets unfiltered into the subconscious mind and forms all kinds of beliefs, attitudes, perspectives, and world views. And all of that without ever being able to question it or decide if this is helpful or not.

And if you think about younger children, they don’t fully understand the world, adult behaviours or relationships yet. But they take it in anyway and that forms their beliefs for the rest of their life. 

This was just a little discourse to help you understand how biologically and physically the subconscious mind of each of us is formed and when it’s formed which is in the first years of our lives. 

Unmet needs that our inner child represents

Back to those unmet needs that we spoke about earlier. When we are children we rely on our caregivers, most of the time our parents, for love, care, shelter, food, and our survival. To make sure that we keep surviving and being loved and cared for, we start suppressing sides of us that don’t provide us with love, attention, and approval from our caregivers. At the same time, we overly express sides of us that give us all of it, so the sides that our caregivers approve of.

And those suppressed sides or overused sides form you into the adult you are now. Whatever spoken or unspoken rules we had in our families and environment growing up, created our concept of who we think we are and how to live our lives.

Whatever happens to us when we are children and makes us feel a high level of emotions creates meaning and memory inside of us. You could call those traumas, either with a big T or a little T. And we carry those with us in our subconscious mind until we are willing and able to work through them and release the meaning and emotional charge the memory carries with it.

There is a lot more to the inner child but I will leave it at that for now as I want to move on now to the other questions. The next one is:

What happens when you ignore your inner child or are not aware of it?

There are many ways that your inner child can impact your life. In a sense, it impacts your life constantly without you being aware of it. Only when you become aware that you have an inner child that is part of you and you start asking yourself the right questions, will a lot of things start to make sense in your life. 

The overarching concepts that you will start seeing are patterns & triggers in your life. 

You start to make sense of why certain situations keep coming up in your life or why certain people or circumstances keep triggering you and making you behave in certain and often unwanted ways. 

Examples of PATTERNS in your life are:

  • Relationships always end up in a similar situation not depending on who the person is
  • Similar challenges or problems showing up at work not depending on the job or company you work for
  • Patterns can show up as ongoing illnesses, allergies, destructive coping mechanisms like addictions to overeating, alcohol, shopping, gaming or drugs

Examples of TRIGGERS in your life are:

  • Getting angry or blowing up when somebody describes a certain aspect of you. You blow up because you cannot accept this aspect of yourself.
  • A negative emotion that you feel several times per day so it has become a habit that you don’t even realize it anymore. But you don’t see it as something that you could change and let go of.
  • Certain groups of people, cultures or world situations constantly impact the way you feel or express yourself when faced with them

All of this can be explained away as just the way you are, or you are just stressed out, or that it’s being done to you and you have no power over it. But when you start to understand about inner child work then you get a look behind the curtain. 

You are able to begin to see those patterns in your life and that it’s a repeating cycle with some variables being different each time, but in a sense always playing out in the same way.

And then you are able to do something about it. And that leads us to the next question:

So what is inner child work? What does it look like?

I like to call it inner-child integration instead of inner-child work. Of course, it’s deeper work but what really happens during the work is that you are integrating those suppressed sides of you that didn’t provide you with love, attention, approval or even survival from your caregivers.

Or you are able to uncover a traumatic experience that formed certain beliefs and perspectives in your life that hinder you in the here and now. When you are able to release it through the discovery and with the help of certain tools, you set yourself free from those limiting beliefs or behaviours and finally can move on in your life. 

My example: Healing from Hay Fever

Let me give you a recent example where I was able to let go of something by talking to my inner child. I actually healed my hay fever. I had awful hay fever when I was a teenager. It was really bad. And in my adulthood, I still struggled with it most years, sometimes more and sometimes less. But if you have hay fever you know how annoying and tiring it can be. It can really ruin the whole summer for you.

So this year, it started again around April time and a couple of weeks in I heard somebody tell a story about how they got rid of their cat hair allergy by connecting it to a childhood trauma. So I set myself down and went back to my childhood. When did my hay fever start? And was something upsetting me around that time? And could my subconscious mind have connected those events with creating hay fever inside of me? 

Conversation with my 12-year-old self

It took me just a couple of minutes to identify a situation that I highly disliked when I was about 12 years old. Looking at it as an adult, it was really not that bad. But as a child, it felt like punishment, torture and I was so upset. 

My mum back then was battling hay fever, too, so I probably just copied it from her and used it as a reaction whenever I was in that unliked situation. 

I used inner child work and went back to have a conversation with my 12-year-old self. I listened to her, I emphasized with her and then I told her that I was still struggling with hay fever but that it did not make any sense anymore because the situation was so long ago. So I asked her if she would support me in letting it go and she agreed.

I had one more short version of that conversation the next morning with my 12-year-old self as I felt my hay fever coming back, but that was it. Since that day in April, I have had not one minute of hay fever this year. I completely healed myself from it. And I do have as well this inner knowing that it’s gone for good. 

My biggest learning from the conversation from my inner child

The one important learning I got out of this experience, other than getting rid of my hay fever, was how to interact with my inner child. It’s a very emotional interaction instead of an intellectual one. If you decide to go ahead and work with your inner child, you probably end up having a conversation with him or her. When you do, don’t explain away whatever your inner child experienced with reason or logic. 

Instead, just accept what happened and how your former self integrated and understood it. Be understanding and emphasize with their emotional state about the situation instead of making them “see” what you can see now as an adult. 

You can reason with them to let go of it now, that the time has come that you as an adult are ready to integrate the learnings and teachings from this perceived moment. Provide your inner child with the support and love that you would have liked to get when you were that child in the past. Be the parent to your inner child.

Reparenting yourself

And that’s what inner child work is about – Reparenting yourself. Through this integration work you become the unconditionally loving and compassionate parent to yourself that you might not have had or missed in certain times of your childhood.

You become aware that you can meet your unmet needs and that the only validation you needed that you didn’t get as a child can now be given from you, your adult self. Through that, you allow your inner child to be the full expression of itself in complete safety and support. You can integrate those suppressed sides or let go of traumatic experiences because your inner child feels unconditional love and compassion without any judgment from yourself.

Connect with your Inner Child Meditation

If you are interested now to begin connecting with your inner child, I will create another episode in a few weeks on how to go about it. 

But until then I created a meditation for you that will start building that bridge to your inner child. It will help you to start creating a connection with him or her and that is truly the first important step. It may take time for your inner child to open up to you and trust you to be the adult and parent for them.
You can find that meditation for free on my YouTube channel: 14-Minute Meditation OR 20-Minute Meditation

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Connect With Your Inner Child

This meditation is the initial step of inner child work. Building bridges with your inner child so she or he can build trust in you and open up.

I’ve created two versions for you to choose from based on how much time you have and how deep you want to go: 20-Minute OR 14-Minute.

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