Your Inner child is that part of you that has experienced you as a child. It includes everything you learned and experienced as a child, before puberty. Your Inner child is a part of you that is unconsciously present in you, which influences what you feel and do. It is formed based on your own character, the circumstances in which you grew up, and the social environment in which it happened.

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Healthy Inner child

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Within the ideal world, a completely healthy Inner child exists. In your childhood, your needs have been addressed exactly the right way, you have responded to your emotions in the right way, and you have always received the proper support from everyone around you.

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You have had just enough of everything: support, love, and attention to emotions and frustration as a child. And you’ve been through just enough nasty situations that matched exactly what you had to learn or discover at that moment. Then you have had exactly the right thing, in the right quantities and at the right time. However, no parent or social environment can offer this perfect balance to a child.

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Some say that everything you experience is just right. That you should learn from everything, you experience. But some experiences are just too complicated. If you don’t get help or act on it as an adult, these experiences can slow down, scare, or even further damage you for the rest of your life.

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Even without major traumatic events, many smaller, too difficult moments remain, which your Inner child stores and which you have to deal with when you get older.

The healthy Inner child, therefore, does not exist. Yet some say they are in balance with their Inner child, which is possible. These people often paid a lot of attention to their own background and personal development. They gave their Inner child as much as possible and healed it where necessary. They have ‘looked’ at their own history and background and, where necessary and possible, supported their Inner child with new insights, experiences, and feelings.

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Damaged Inner child

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As a child, you are dependent on your parents. You love them and don’t want to hurt them. If you experience unpleasant situations and cannot turn to your parents correctly, you don’t know what to do. You are not seen and not helped in processing what has happened. To maintain yourself and still cope with the unpleasant and overwhelming situation, you will hide your emotions and feelings.

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You put your pain, sadness, feelings of powerlessness, disappointment, and other harmful and difficult feelings away because you do not get help in dealing with and solving them. This damages your Inner child. As a result, these nasty feelings and hidden pieces of yourself will start to express themselves. One way or the other, your Inner child will point out your pain, sadness, and fear. For example:

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• Fear of intimacy

• Highly flammable aggression

• Anger that is impossible or difficult to place

• Inferiority feelings

• Insecurity

• Fear of failure

• Perfectionism

• Difficulty with authority

• Having negative thoughts about yourself and others

 

Your inner child will develop a survival strategy to not end up in that nasty, damaging situation again. Examples of child survival strategies include:

 

• Don’t make mommy angry

• Trying your best, when you really can’t or don’t want to

• Stop asking questions so as not to tire daddy

 

If you are not helped to resolve your damage as a child, you take your survival strategies into adult life. Examples of adult survival strategies include:

 

• Perfectionism

• Not being able to say no

• Completely absorbed in your work (workaholic)

• Immediately suppress emerging feelings

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In the beginning, the survival strategies will give you a sense of relief. But in the long run, these, and the associated learned patterns and ways of doing things, will not continue to be so supportive and constructive. They can damage you further.

How can you create a healthy, loving relationship if you fear intimacy? Did you suffer from feelings of inferiority? Then there is a good chance you withdrew and were often an easy target for bullies. Did you choose to prove yourself right with anger or aggression? Then you may have started bullying. Or have you sometimes entered into a battle with your parents or school? And how did the negative thoughts about yourself affect you?

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Patience and persistence

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"Recovery from the effects of trauma and growing up in a dysfunctional family and world takes patience and persistence. We are naturally impatient to reach the end without delay and skip the hard work of healing. An essential part of successful recovery is learning to accurately name what happened to us and the components of our inner life as they come up, including our various feelings, and learning to tolerate emotional pain without trying to medicate it away.

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One of the most profound healing principles is embodied in the phrase “one day at a time.” Although healing takes a long time, by using this admonition, our outlook can shift immediately, making the journey not only more tolerable but meaningful and anchoring us in the present moment. As we grieve our buried pain and work through our core recovery issues, we will slowly release our past unresolved internal conflicts with patience. We gradually discover that our future is a destination not yet determined. Our life is in the present, where we can eventually find peace."

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– Charles L. Whitfield, M.D.

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“where the mother is not sufficiently in touch with her body, she cannot give the child the bonding necessary to give it confidence in its own instincts. The child cannot relax in her body, nor later in its own." – Marion Woodman

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Many mothers, fathers, or other parent figures are mentally and emotionally impoverished. A likely reason is that their needs were not met as infants, children, and/ or adults. They are thus so in need that they tend to use others in an unhealthy and inappropriate way to get these needs met. To survive, the child who cannot develop a solid True Self compensates by creating an exaggerated false or co-dependent self.

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At times, the mother herself is so impoverished and needy that she uses her infant to satisfy her own unmet needs. This is a fantastic thing about children. They can sense that the mother is destitute and eventually detect her specific needs and provide for her. Of course, this carries a significant price – the denial, stifling, and stunting of the child’s own true self. That price escalates as the child grows into an adult, with resulting physical, mental-emotional, and spiritual pain and suffering.

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Developmental deficits have life-damaging consequences. If you want to change these damaging patterns, you must reclaim your childhood.

Reclaiming your childhood is painful because we must grieve our wounds. The good news is that we can do this. Grief work is the legitimate suffering we’ve been avoiding with our neuroses. Grief work, which can be called original pain work, demands that we re-experience what we could not experience when we lost our parents, our childhood, and, most of all, our sense of I AMness. The spiritual wound can be healed, but it must be done by grieving, which is painful.

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I can tell you from my own experience that working on your inner child can considerably contribute to your personal well-being. Before and during my training in Inner Child Therapy, I was also allowed to look at my own Inner Child to give a place to traumas and bad experiences from my own childhood.

I believe that it is essential for a coach to have an idea of what it is like to be guided in finding your Inner Child. So besides having a positive impact on my life personally, I now also have more knowledge and experience in guiding your journey and discovering your childish needs.

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