Inner child work is incredibly powerful and can offer many significant benefits but like anything that’s worth doing it’s not easy, there are challenges. In this post we are going to look at some of the benefits and challenges a person embarking on this journey will face.
Some Of The Benefits Inner Child Work Will Deliver
- Emotional healing: Inner child work not only helps to process unresolved childhood emotions and traumas. It will also allow a person to reintegrate emotions that they have been shamed out of in childhood. This kind of healing can also help to re-regulate brain function after experiencing childhood trauma. I spoke more about this in previous posts, most recently the role of childhood trauma in adult behaviours.
- Improved self-awareness: Inner child work can help a person gain insight into how past experiences shape current behaviours and thought patterns. When we are children we are looking to our parents to model being an adult for us, what we observe from our parents we will often adopt for ourselves. Awareness is the first step to change.
- Better relationships: Understanding childhood needs and healing the inner child can lead to healthier adult relationships. Relationships are where an unhealed inner child most commonly shows up, the people we get into relationships with will act as mirrors to us. I have written about how inner child healing can improve relationships in several posts on my blog, in this post I go into more detail on people pleasing & codependency.
- Increased self-compassion: With an unhealed inner child being able to nurture and accept oneself fully will be very difficult. Here is a post where I speak in more detail about how inner child healing can increase self love and self acceptance.
- Reduced anxiety and depression: Anxiety is what led me to become a hypnotherapist and inner child healing hypnosis is where I saw the profound improvements in my life. Addressing the root causes of anxiety can really alleviate its symptoms.
- Enhanced creativity: Reconnect with childlike wonder and imagination.As children we often become shamed out of our creativity. When we start school we get told to shut up, sit down and pay attention, we learn to suppress these qualities.
- Improved self-esteem: Healing the inner child resolving childhood wounds can boost confidence, self-esteem and self-worth. A child internalises dysfunction and learns to see themself as a bad object. See why zoom hypnotherapy is best for people suffering from low self esteem.
- Better boundary-setting: As children we are born without boundaries, until 15 months to 3 years a baby cannot tell the difference between themselves and the outside world. If we grow up with parents who have no boundaries themselves we won’t be able to form healthy boundaries. As adults we will develop issues with codependency and people pleasing. Inner child work can help a person to gain a sense of self and begin to form healthy boundaries.
The benefits of inner child healing are so numerous there is no way I could list them all. Systems theory says that by changing one part of a system we can change all parts of the system, in direct benefits will be noticed even if an issue is not directly related to the inner child .
I am a great proponent of inner child work and believe a wounded inner child is at the core of all the issues humans face but there are challenges, some of which I will discuss below.
Challenges Of Inner Child Work
- Emotional intensity: Inner child work is not about confronting past traumas but as a person starts healing, releasing toxic shame and reintegrating the inner child past trauma may come up. The emotional intensity of these past trauma can be very high causing a person to experience anxiety, grief and anger. I address the possibility of this in the first week of the inner child program and share techniques to help.
- Resistance: Many people feel resistance when they start healing the inner child. They feel they are blaming their parents, letting go of coping strategies they adopted as children can be very frightening and cause a person to feel strong resistance.
- Time-consuming: This kind of work often requires patience and sustained effort over an extended period. I advise inner child program participants to set aside an hour every day during the course of the program.
- Risk of retraumatization: They way I do inner child work there’s very little risk of retraumatization but it can happen. I guide clients to focus on solutions and use techniques to desensitise traumatic memories through hypnosis. Without proper guidance, revisiting traumatic experiences can potentially cause further harm.
- Difficulty in self-compassion:Inner child work will increase self compassion. Through releasing toxic shame a person will be able to stop self blame and abuse they may have internalised. They will start to view themselves as worthy of love and compassion. In the beginning many often struggle to extend kindness and understanding to their younger selves.
- Visualisation: Visualising yourself reconnecting with and reintegrating the inner child can pose a challenge to some people. The exercises and hypnotherapy on the inner child program are designed to make visualising and reconnecting with the inner child easier.
Despite numerous benefits, inner child work does present a few challenges. Some determination and commitment is required to push through these challenges and heal the inner child. Without inner child healing these issues will still affect a person’s life.
Carl Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Many of the challenges a person faces when they undertake the inner child healing journey will have a negative effect on their life anyway. With an unhealed inner child a person will be disconnected from their emotions, trying to suppress them through acting out or acting in. The internalised dysfunction will create a negative self image, lack of self compassion, low self esteem, lack of confidence, relationship issues and more.
The benefits of inner child healing far out way any of the challenges a person may face.
Leave a Reply