Inner Child Work to Regain Authenticity

Our authentic selves and our inner child are intertwined within us and form a powerful role in the subconscious part of our minds.

If you have been distanced from your authentic self or inner child, the wounds you carry may be deep but it is important to know that you can do the healing work to find your way home.

The deeper work of healing your inner child.

We all have an inner child.

As children, we have core needs  to be seen, to be heard, and to have the space to be and authentically express ourselves. If, as children, our needs were not met, we can be wounded and then grow to carry that wounding within ourselves. Much of the work that we do to heal our inner child is to heal the wounding that occurred as a result of unmet needs. However, the inner child is within us and calls to be recognized whether our childhood needs are met or unmet. The inner child has positive attributes as well as difficult attributes which call to be explored.

Inner child work involves identifying the ways we can meet our physical, spiritual, and emotional needs in a way that suits us as unique individuals and it is about reconnecting with the positive states of childhood.  Positive states of childhood such as joy, curiosity,  spontaneity, mindful presence bring the possibility for human connection and fulfillment.

Our inner child is made up of our creativity, our intuition, our spontaneity, our ability to play, to be joyful, and to connect with others, the accumulation of our suppressed childhood emotions and fears,  the accumulation of behaviors we were conditioned to perform as children to meet our emotional and spiritual needs, and our suppressed childhood emotions.

 Feeling Secure and Safe Supports Being Our Authentic Selves

Why is being our authentic selves so challenging? 

When we don't feel safe in our bodies or within our relationships, we feel too vulnerable to risk being authentic.

Why is feeling safe difficult for so many of us?

Humans are the one species born not fully developed; we can't take care of ourselves and are physically and emotionally dependent. We need an adult meeting our physical needs and to facilitate our ability to meet our emotional needs. We need an adult to hold space for our unique spiritual expression.

As children our brain is in an egocentric state. We are limited to seeing the world through our own eyes and our own limited experiences. We have yet to develop empathy. We filter all that happens to us through our egocentric mind state where we believe that everything happening is about us.

Marni is a year old. Her mother is her primary caregiver. Marni's mother returns home from her work around 5 PM, she works as an accountant, and is often very stressed out. She loses her temper with Marni's four year old sister. Marni watches her mom yell at her sister and experiences her mom's anger without awareness of the context. Marni's mother seems angry at everybody. Marni doesn't know where her mother was before arriving home or what her sister did to cause their mother to lose her temper.  Marni attributes what is happening around her to herself.  She assumes that she is the reason for mom's yelling and sister's crying. She begins to cry.  The more consistently mom loses her temper with Marni's four year old sister the more ingrained Marni's problematic beliefs are going to be ingrained in her mind. Marni will internalize the beliefs that she is a problem or bad and that what went down when mom came home was about her. Similarly, when Marni is upset, she assumes everyone is upset.

At this young egocentric phase, Marni is forming beliefs about herself and others, about relationships, and about the world based on her early experiences.

Marni does not have the cognitive ability to separate herself out from her experience  around her.  Marni is likely to assume the beliefs she formed in childhood are true as she gets older unless and until she explores herself  when she is older.

The child that received those messages is the inner self we seek to reconnect with now.

The inner child who had these early childhood experiences remains in our subconscious with our suppressed emotions and continues to influence our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors about our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs being met or unmet.

Healing arises when we can understand how our inner child is carried within us and how it expresses itself in our adult life.

 The egocentric state of our childhood is something we can slip back into and out of as we evolve. Even as we mature and gain empathy, we can be triggered in such a way that our inner child's fears are triggered.

Mike, a psychiatrist in his mid forties, grew up in a volatile family. His parents each divorced and remarried twice, remaining angry with each other through all of it. Mike was the youngest sibling in his family and the only child still living at home when his mother and father got divorced. His mother was consumed with anger and grief about her marriage. Today, Mike has found himself screaming and yelling, despite his intentions not to. In those moments, he becomes out of touch with the empathy he has so extensively honed in his work.  He loves his partner, but has become mean and engaged in name calling on several occasions. Intellectually, he knows that he should  step outside himself and imagine how his partner feels being called some very hurtful names. However,  in the moment when his inner child is activated, he retreats back into an egocentric state and can think only of himself. He is focused on protecting  himself emotionally in that moment. Mike is living in the shadow of his childhood pain and his unmet childhood needs.
 

Inner Child and Self Care

Chances are that our habits were habits modeled for us in childhood. The way we come to care for ourselves grows out of how caring for the self was modeled before us by our caregivers.

Notice the way you care for your body: the quantity and quality of your sleep, your diet, your commitment to exercise, the extent to which you seek work-life balance.

How does the way you care for your self feel for you?

How did your inner child learn to care for his or her self?

We were all born emotionally dependent. Emotional regulation is something our inner child learned from observing his or her parents. For some of us, the way we experience and cope with emotions arises as a remnant of our past.

If we do not act intentionally, we may use the same coping tools or skills or make the same emotional regulation choices that our caregivers made.

Patrice's mother was filled with negative emotions but was never willing to express them or work through conflict no matter who that conflict was with, whether it was Patrice or Patrice's father or her own sister, Patrice's Aunt. Patrice remembered that there was always someone her mom was not talking to because she was angry or hurt. She gave every person she experienced conflict with the silent treatment. Patrice was often on the receiving end of her mother's silent treatment.  Her inner child learned that when a person is mad, they employ the silent treatment toward whomever they are mad at and withdraw love from that person. Patrice noticed herself engaging in the same behavior as her mother engaged in when she became an adult.  When she was angry with someone, she would withdraw her attention and communication from them. She felt relief in punishing this person who hurt her by cutting interaction with them and withdrawing love. As a child, Patrice's experiences with her mother were lessons learned in how to cope with her feelings. When, as an adult, she felt anger, she did what she had learned to do.

We can heal our souls and our spirits by exploring and connecting with our inner child.

Children act in line with their authentic selves.  The response to that authentic self by the child's caregivers is extremely influential. 

Imagine a child who is gifted musically. The child comes from a family of musically oriented people. The family celebrated and connected with each other through music. The parents cultivated the child's talent with lessons and positive feed back. They complimented the child on their musical talents.  The influence of the caregivers cultivation of the child's musical talents influences the child to express themselves musically later in life. Contrast that supported child with a child with the same authentic musical self but who receives negative responses from their caregivers to their love of music.  Perhaps the family ignores the child's yearning to play an instrument or they are told musicians never make money, this musically gifted child becomes an adult who squashes the part of themselves that loves music and whom internalizes the belief that their love of music is a sign of something unfavorable about them.

We are authentic in childhood. Our experiences socialize us into disconnecting with our true selves. Reigniting your relationship with your inner child is a way to find your way back to that authentic self and to regain aspects of your essential self that were misunderstood in childhood.

Denying Our Own Reality

Oliver's father was frequently drunk when Oliver was a child. Oliver became afraid whenever his father drank too much because he sensed that his father would not be available to him after a few drinks. His father would drink while watching the news. He stopped coming to the dinner table to eat with Oliver and Oliver's mother. Oliver's father would drink and comment while watching the news until he decided to make a tall drink and take it upstairs to bed.

Oliver asked his mother why his father drank so much and Oliver's mother said that it wasn't true that Oliver's father drank a lot. She explained that Oliver's father had a stressful job and so he had a drink or two after work to relax. Oliver's mother insisted nothing was wrong with Oliver's father's drinking every night.  Oliver's mother denied Oliver's reality. Oliver began to doubt himself and tried to convince himself that there was nothing wrong with his father's behavior. Oliver sensed a problem with his father's drinking. His sense was invalidated by his mother. Oliver was dependent on his mother and father and needed to believe them in order to feel safe.  Oliver began to deny his own perceptions of the situation.  As he grew up he had the habit of denying his intuitions and perceptions. Even when Oliver was a teenager and his father got a second DUI and lost his license, Oliver told himself that the laws were overly strict and that his dad just had bad luck.  As an adult, Oliver overrides his own feelings.

Trusting yourself and listening to your intuition is like meeting yourself once again. Realize that you have the tools to take care of yourself even if you haven't been using them. Build confidence that you can come into the world authentically.

Invalidation

As children, we are characterized by our parents. They picked qualities they saw in us and convinced us that what they perceived was true, that we should believe our parent's opinion about us over how we feel about ourselves. The things we are told about ourselves as children become beliefs we hold into adulthood.

What were you told about yourself as a child? Were you told that you are too sensitive, too serious,  lazy, a drama queen, overly emotional, weak, that you're too much, that you're not enough, you are too talkative, ungrateful, or always miserable. The things we are told about ourselves become beliefs we carry into adulthood. Reconnecting with your inner child helps you to see that you are not the way you were defined or characterized, that what your caregivers told you that you are isn't the truth about who you are.

Those things that someone told you about who you are doesn't mean what they said is the truth about who you are.

Invalidation arises when our caregivers encourage us to be like someone else. You might have been told you should be like your sister, your brother, or the kid who won the spelling bee. Sometimes our parents try to define the way we look. A parent who is externally driven and is always complaining that their child is overweight or too thin is also invalidating the child in a way that may cause the child to distance themselves from their inner child or authentic selves. As adults, the child who is invalidated this way comes to see themselves the way they were described as adults.

These are some of the frequently experienced events that a lot of us have in childhood, that we translate into beliefs about the self. We all have an inner child. With patience, we can begin the process of observing our inner child in the world. We can start to see the way the conditioned patterns of our inner child invalidates that child and set the intention to practice validating our inner child ourselves.

Begin to practice acknowledging the presence of this inner child and then getting to know this inner child. We can't know what we haven't had any experience with. Knowing our inner child precedes healing that child. The process can cause us to feel a lot of discomfort because we are going against our conditioning. However, mindfulness brings us into our own lives as our unique selves.

With consciousness comes connection.

With consciousness and connection comes the ability to observe objectively.

With consciousness, connection, and the ability to observe objectively comes the ability to create space between ourselves and our conditioned patterns and to create safety and security in our bodies and our nervous systems, in our emotions and to find our way home. As we learn how to observe our inner child from a compassionate space, we can  begin to implement change.

 

You are hard-wired to be self-connected.  You need only open the inner door to access to the creative part of you. Self-connection is a game changer. To find out more about how I can help you make this essential connection, read more here.