Inner child work is a major passion for me, I have created inner child courses with more on the way and I believe hypnotherapy is an amazing tool for anyone who wants to reparent their inner child. Healing my own inner child helped me overcome many difficulties and obstacles that I was experiencing in my adult life. I became interested in hypnosis because I was suffering all kinds of issues and hypnosis helped me to massively increase my self esteem, self confidence and self worth. 

Like many I wanted to avoid doing the inner child work, I was scared of my childhood memories and didn’t want to face the toxic shame that I had internalised. Many write inner child work off as naval gazing and try to undermine the value of it, for me it was life changing. Standard hypnosis, counselling and coaching helped me but it wasn’t until I did the inner child work that I really noticed a sense of calm and self acceptance. 

Recovering From A Dysfunctional Childhood

A damaged inner child can undermine our ability to enjoy a healthy and functional life, we all have an inner child and they will be damaged to some degree whether we realise it or not. It is estimated that 80% of people grow up with some form of dysfunction, we don’t have to have grown up in extremely violent or abusive households to benefit from inner child healing. As children we are extremely vulnerable, we have no boundaries and our neuroplasticity is at its highest. We are looking to the grownups around us to form our sense of identity, to know what’s safe and what isn’t. 

We Internalise Everything 

Without boundaries we internalise everything, it is believed that we can’t differentiate between our infant selves and our caregivers until we are around three years old and around 95% of what we know is learned before the age of five so if our parents are abusive, if they abandon us in someway we will think it means there is something wrong with us, if they are anxious we will pick up on that anxiety and believe the world is not a safe place. If there is a lot of arguing we will internalise that and think we are responsible. 

Toxic Shame

Internalising this dysfunction causes us to develop toxic shame, toxic shame can cause splitting and make us feel ashamed when we need help, feel angry, assertive, sad, fearful, sexual or even joyous. We become cut off from vital parts of ourselves, these disowned parts become sub personalities and we will project them onto others. Every part of us has value and needs to be accepted, reparenting the inner child can help us to reintegrate these parts and accept them. 

To cope with toxic shame we need to alienate it from ourselves. When we feel these emotions we experience toxic shame and we need to distance from it. Anger is a dangerous emotion to alienate, without it we take on more toxic shame until we become an object of contempt to ourselves.

A Recording Of My Toxic Shame Workshop Can Be Found On YouTube

Parents Like Gods

As children our parents were like gods, we needed them to feed and change us, we had to trust them when they told us electrical sockets were dangerous and hot water would burn us, we believed what they told us to be true. We had to believe them and trust their judgement so if they called us thick or stupid we internalised that and believed they were right, if they abused us physically or emotionally we thought it was because there was something wrong with us. 

Even the best of parents with the greatest of intentions can set us up for issues later on in life, if they told us something limiting we took it as the gospel truth and it will be shaping our reality to this day even though they may not have meant to damage us, it may have been done with the best of intentions. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have, I cannot repeat that enough. 

Relationships

Reparenting my inner child with hypnosis has helped me to improve the quality of my relationship with myself and the way I interact with other people, reparenting the inner child can help us to overcome codependency and people pleasing. If we don’t resolve childhood trauma we will either act that trauma out or in, we may become narcissistic abusers or people pleasers with an inability to say no. 

Trauma Responses

As I mentioned in a previous blog post a dysfunctional childhood will often cause us to overdevelop one of our trauma responses, we are all born with equal access to the four trauma responses they are fight, flight, fawn or freeze and childhood dysfunction can cause us to become more reliant on one of these trauma responses. Fight types will have issues controlling their anger, freeze types will suffer with severe anxiety, flight types may develop addictions and addictive behaviours, fawn types will become susceptible to abuse and have an inability to say no. 

Learning To Matter

As children we not only over develop trauma responses to try and stay safe, we also take on family roles such as black sheep, scapegoat, super achiever or wonder child. These roles enable us to function and find a way to matter within the family unit. Through reparenting the inner child we can take back healthy access to all our trauma types, stop projecting past experiences onto present situations, give up our family roles and get in touch with our authentic selves. 

Hypnotherapy & The Inner Child

Learning how my inner child became wounded helped me to begin to accept him and release the toxic shame I had taken on, I then used hypnotherapy to reintegrate all ages of my inner child. Hypnotherapy helped me to reparent my younger self through affirmation and visualization making him feel accepted and loved. 

People who have worked with me to heal and reparent their inner child have experienced life changing results below is some recent feedback

Pat Wann

“I have done the course with Mark -nearly completed; it certainly is food for thought. Very inspiring talking with Mark and others on the course, really makes you look at where you have come from and why sometimes we behave the way we do. No fault / blaming etc, It’s just really interesting. I think anyone with young children or even slightly older children would certainly benefit from the experience this course provides. My children are all grown up, I wish I had known more when they were younger. Also as a therapist I think it helps to give an insight into people’s behaviours/ habits/ problems etc.. A very well worth listen.”

Karen Gregory

“I have just finished this 8-week course with Mark for Healing the Inner Child and building Confidence and it was really good and the exercises were really powerful. I have integrated my healed inner child and removed old negative scenarios from my mind, and I feel confident and positive! This course is well worth attending. Thanks Mark Stubbles”

Sarah Parker

“Extremely pleased with the results of my hypnotherapy sessions with Mark. I never knew that this type of therapy could be so powerful. I feel differently and am becoming the person I want to be. I never thought it would happen so quickly within the space of a few weeks. Highly recommended!”

I offer inner child healing sessions either one to one or via a very powerful group program, book a call with me here to learn more

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