Childhood can create negative patterns which influence adult behaviour. Inner child work, connecting with our inner child, releasing toxic shame, giving ourselves unconditional love and acceptance is an extremely effective way of not only making the unconscious conscious but actually breaking these patterns.
I once had chronic anxiety, relationship issues, severe dissociative episodes and blackouts. I felt like I was faulty, like I had something wrong with me. I knew I hadn’t had a particularly happy childhood but it could have been worse I told myself. I didn’t want to dig around in the past, I couldn’t see how my childhood was affecting my adult life. I felt that inner child work meant blaming my family for all my problems. Things had to hit rock bottom, I had to witness just how bad my family was before I realised the only way to break the patterns that kept repeating in my life was through inner child healing.
How Can The Inner Child Affect Adult Life?
You don’t have to have experienced extreme trauma or abuse to benefit from inner child healing. Most people grow up with dysfunction but actually downplay it. A child doesn’t want to see their parents as bad so they internalise dysfunction, it creates toxic shame. A child needs to adopt strategies to suppress their toxic shame, to protect themselves from physical, mental and emotional abuse. The strategies we adopt as children are childish and create negative patterns in our adult lives.
Traumatic Events:
Abuse, neglect, abandonment, or significant loss during childhood can deeply wound the inner child.
- These traumatic events can leave the inner child feeling unsafe, unworthy, or unable to trust others.
- The adult with a wounded inner child may develop coping mechanisms like avoidance, dissociation, or maladaptive behaviours to surepress their toxic shame and deal with the pain of these wounds.
Emotional Neglect:
When a child’s emotional needs are consistently unmet or dismissed, the inner child can feel unloved, unimportant, or invisible.
- Lack of affection, validation, or attunement from caregivers can leave the inner child feeling empty, insecure, and craving attention.
- This can lead to an adult with a wounded inner child developing a deep sense of unworthiness and difficulty forming healthy relationships. Such an adult will struggle to validate themselves, since any attention is better than none they may adopt destructive behaviours to draw attention to themselves.
Conditional Love:
If a child’s love and acceptance were contingent on meeting certain expectations or behaving in specific ways, the inner child may develop a fragile sense of self-worth.
- The inner child may believe that they are only worthy of love if they are “good enough,” leading to perfectionism, people-pleasing, or chronic self-doubt.
- This can prevent the inner child from expressing their authentic needs and feelings, further wounding their sense of self.
Parental Modelling:
Children often internalise the beliefs, behaviours, and coping mechanisms of their caregivers, especially when they are very young. A baby cannot tell the difference between themselves and the outside world, they will pick up on their parents feelings and emotions. Neuroplasticity is its highest in this age range.
- If parents exhibit negative patterns, such as anger, addiction, or emotional unavailability, the inner child may adopt these maladaptive strategies as their own.
- This can perpetuate the cycle of dysfunction, as the inner child continues to rely on the unhealthy coping mechanisms that they learned in childhood.
Lack of Emotional Support:
When a child does not receive sufficient emotional support, validation, and guidance, the inner child may feel alone, confused, and unsure of how to navigate life’s challenges.
- The absence of a nurturing, supportive environment can leave the inner child feeling powerless, lost, and unable to develop healthy self-regulation skills.
- This can lead to many difficulties in adulthood, such as poor decision-making, interpersonal struggles, and an inability to self-soothe.
Understanding the origins of a wounded inner child is a start, it can allow individuals to begin the process of healing and breaking free from the negative patterns that have been shaped by their unresolved childhood experiences.
Inner Child Work Is About More Than Understanding
Inner child work is about more than just understanding the cause of these patterns. To fully break free of these negative patterns and break the cycle of generational trauma an individual needs to become a good enough parent to themselves. A good enough parent will provide unconditional love, unconditional acceptance, they will make the child feel safe and secure.
On the inner child program we have exercises to recognise these patterns, release toxic shame, to give yourself unconditional love and unconditional acceptance. We use hypnosis to visualise connecting with the inner child and the future, healed version of you, to see yourself the way you want to be. The work we do on the inner child program is solution focused.
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