Working on our inner child is a therapeutic form of healing, introduced by Carl Jung, that focuses on acknowledging and revisiting childhood memories, childhood trauma and repressed emotions and experiences that affect our present lives as adults so that we can resolve, heal and learn to re-parent ourselves.
Innerchild work involves revisiting experienced trauma that lives on in the body and affects how we think, feel, react, manage stress; it affects our relationships, our self-esteem, our decision making abilities and our ability to regulate our emotions.
We access the inner child through our triggers. How we feel and react to people and situations that may seem out of character for us or that may be part of our character but that we are unable to control. For example: We feel angry at work because our boss didn’t put forward our ideas, rewind back 25 years and we were a child whos parents didn’t listen to us or meet our needs.
Working on the inner child helps us access the root cause of our emotions and helps us release stored trauma which lives in the body, in our behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, how we think, how we feel and again, how we react. This release helps regulate our nervous system and helps us find balance and calm.
Gabor Maté says “Trauma can affect your brain's emotion networks to make you overreact or under-react to stressful situations. Trauma creates fixed neural networks that are isolated from other parts of your brain and resistant to change. Avoidance behaviors and trying to suppress your trauma don't work and can create more damage.”
Attachment styles also come into play when we look at the inner child. How we are attached to other people as an adult comes from childhood, were our needs met? Were we loved? Did we perceive that we were loved? Were we listened to? Did our parents have time to play with us and nurture us?
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Connecting with your Inner Child | Wild Flow Co 2024
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