All children experience insecure feelings as they grow up, a child with “good enough” parents will learn to process these insecurities and stop them affecting their adult lives, a child with a dysfunctional parents will not be able to process these insecure feelings and so they will develop many more insecurities and toxic coping strategies to try and soothe themselves when they feel insecure.
When we grow up in an abusive or dysfunctional household it can lead to us developing all kinds of insecurities which can then lead to feelings of anxiety, feeling like there’s something wrong with us, it can lead to us feeling insecure about our sex and sexuality, we may develop a distrust of the world and people in it. We will internalise a lot of toxic shame, develop an unconscious belief that there is something wrong with us, we will feel inferior to others, struggle to interact with people and form meaningful relationships.
Children Need To Feel Secure
As children we needed to feel secure, we needed to be raised by people we could trust and rely on to get our needs met. A baby is totally reliant on their parents, when we were babies we needed to know we were going to get fed or changed when we cried, picked up and hugged when we felt scared.
Parents and caregivers need to be secure in themselves and their environment, they need to be getting their needs met, if a parent suffers with anxiety or feels insecure about something the child will pick on that. An insecure parent may even feel the need to compete with the child to get their partner’s attention, they may resent the child and feel jealous of them.
We need to feel accepted and safe, if a child doesn’t feel secure in their environment they will internalise this insecurity and it may lead to a constant state of anxiety. Children need their parents to make them feel validated, if a child grows up being constantly invalidated or with no validation they won’t be able to validate themselves as adults and they will constantly be looking to the outside world for validation.
Fear Of Abandonment
When parents abuse, neglect or use a child in a narcissistic manner to get their own needs met they are abdicating their responsibility to that child and abandoning it, a child who grows up in such an environment will become an insecure adult and develop a fear of abandonment. When we fear abandonment we may become people pleasers, suffer jealousy issues, struggle to trust others, be controlling or avoid being intimate. We will struggle to accept praise and be uncomfortable when people compliment us.
Name Calling
Dysfunctional people often try to deal with their insecurities by projecting them onto others, narcissistic parents will often call their children names, find fault in them, tell them they should have been a boy/girl, make them feel like nothing they do is ever good enough and put them down.
When we start school we may be bullied or feel inferior to our peers, a child may feel insecure about their weight, athletic abilities, intelligence, hair colour, looks, they may feel like everyone is judging them, there are many insecurities a child can develop when they start school. The more a child is teased about something the stronger their insecure feelings will be about it as an adult, when I was a child I was teased for blushing and this caused me to be very insecure about blushing as an adult. I used hypnotherapy to overcome these blushing insecurities.
When an insecurity gets triggered we are moving into the fight or flight response and we often become avoidant, emotionally dysregulated, we often ruminate on the event and play it over and over in our heads trying to find ways we could have done things differently. Our inner critic will probably start calling us names, telling us we’re useless, we’ll always fail. A person with insecurities will struggle to set boundaries and form functional relationships.
How Can Inner Child Healing Hypnotherapy Help?
Inner child healing is about understanding ourselves, discovering why we are the way we are and reparenting ourselves, realising there is nothing wrong with us and that we are not broken. By giving ourselves the unconditional love and acceptance that we never had as a child we will begin to see ourselves as worth defending, we will no longer feel inferior to others and start to overcome our insecurities.
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