WHAT IS INNER CHILD? IS INNER CHILD THERAPY RIGHT FOR YOU?

You might have come across the term “Inner child work” and thought to yourself, “What does it mean and how can it help me?”. Let’s have a look at what “Inner child work” is and how it can benefit you.

Inner child work therapy

Inner child work therapy is a form of therapy in which you try to reconnect with your inner child. Now how do you define an inner child? You can think of the inner child as a part of our mind that stores all our emotional experiences from childhood. These are the psychological patterns we developed as a child that have still continued with us all this time.

While we are grown, these are the wounded parts of ourselves that are still contributing to how we deal with things in life. Some of us had a tough and traumatic childhood, how we experienced the world back then has shaped our belief system. A great part of that belief system still operates within us and decides how we perceive reality.

If we experienced pain, trauma or neglect in our childhood and felt as nobody loved us, we will see these beliefs manifest in our adult lives as depression, anxiety, and lack of self-respect. Identifying and resolving these beliefs is what inner child therapy work is all about.

Signs you have a wounded inner child

• You are a people pleaser

• You criticize yourself constantly for your mistakes

• You don’t have a sense of identity

• You find it hard to commit and trust

• You are very unforgiving to yourself

• You have abandonment issues and cling to even toxic relationships etc.

How does Inner Child work help you?

Inner child work is a form of self-discovery that helps you understand why you think the way you think and how you can communicate with and understand your inner child. Understanding your inner child will help you understand the adolescent issues that are causing you problems as an adult.

You may benefit from inner child work in the following ways:

• Understanding why you have negative thought patterns and how they originated in the first place.

• Discovering your repressed and negative emotions that are causing you problems in life

• Understanding how your bad childhood experiences shaped your perception and how some of your major beliefs are not in accordance with reality

• Finding ways to increase self-love and self-care

• Gain personal power and ability to set boundaries

• Attaining self-confidence

How to heal your inner child?

There are many exercises you can use to heal your inner child such as:

• Acknowledge your inner child: Understand your unmet emotional needs and acknowledgments from childhood and how they have affected your youth. Reconnect with your inner self and try to remember what things brought you pleasure when you were a child so you can experience real happiness from deep down.

• Be mindful of your triggers: Understand what causes your deepest emotions to come out and be aware of them. For example, your fear of abandonment from childhood reincarnates in some situations in your youth. Observe this when it happens and deal it with an elder person’s perspective

• Be gentle to yourself: Try to be compassionate towards your inner child. Pay attention to its insecurities and fears and see how it responds to these thoughts? And how you can give your inner self a better environment and better solutions to its problems. See how you can increase your inner child’s joy.

• Get in touch with a Therapist: A therapist can help you use this technique in the most effective and practical way possible. Get an appointment with your therapist and see how they can help you get the best results from using this method.

The takeaway

Acknowledging and understanding your inner child can open lots of doors for you and help you understand your deep-rooted issues from a new perspective. Getting in touch with your therapist might help unveil great secrets about your personality and how you look at your world. If you would like to book in a session, Joel, Radhika and Samuele would be a great fit! This could prove to be the one big step you take towards improving yourself and living a more fulfilling and better life. To understand more about Inner Child therapy and to book an appointment you can contact Vaughan Counselling and Psychotherapy at 647-267-9853.