Your inner child is a big part of who you are! This Free Therapy Sunday, we’re looking at where to find your inner child and how to learn from them:
Global (24 September 2023) — Adulthood comes with a lot of catches. While we’d all like to be welcomed to this phase of our lives with balloons, a handbook or maybe even a celebratory snack or two (as we are with so many other chapter turns), instead we’re expected to somehow simply know which gears to shift in order to get this adulthood engine cruising. The road is long and winding, and sometimes it can feel like we’re a GPS with no signal. But what about the inner child coming along for the ride?
Unlike caterpillars, humans do not shed our former selves dramatically (and if we did, it would be pretty frightening). Yes, our cells regenerate. Yes, we outgrow our shoes and clothes and some hobbies and even people. But, the fascinating thing about us is that despite all we grow out of and into, we carry along so many parts of our past with us; often without even knowing it!
Cue the inner child. The part of us that was processing the environments around us long before we could digest that information, let alone make sense of it.
While the concept of the inner child isn’t new, the hype around it has amplified in ways only mass connection and idea sharing associated with the 2020s, is. But, this is a lot more than a buzzword.
Feeding your inner child’s ambitions, healing their wounds and understanding that many of our emotional reactions are actually theirs can be the biggest factor in a healthy relationship with ourselves. First, we need to understand who our inner child is and where they take the driver’s seat.
Look to your Inner Voice
A study published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy found that ‘automatic thoughts’ or default thoughts are ‘the gateway to the identification of core belief systems emanating from childhood experience’.
Think about what usually makes you feel big emotions; negative or positive triggers. The experiences that make you feel very excited, angry beyond your own logic or afraid without a rational explanation. What thoughts narrate these experiences? Does your inner voice revert from excitement to ‘that’s a stupid idea’, or are your feelings of anger and fear seemingly default settings?
Taking yourself out of the experience mode and into the observer mode helps you notice what you actually think and feel in the present, versus what your automatic thoughts (your inner child’s voice) are expressing. This helps you find the places inside your current life where your inner child emerges.
Reparent Yourself
Once you identify your inner child, you can start reparenting them. Even if you had the best parents in the world, parents are human and sometimes teach us their own anxieties, modes of thinking and reactions without even knowing it. Children are a lot more observant than they’re given credit for, and eventually, these observations become habits. Reparenting yourself gives you the opportunity to unlearn behaviours while feeding the parts of yourself that need more attention.
Say, you grew up in a household where communication wasn’t always present. Or in a community where expressing your emotions was seen as a weakness. Today, you might be someone who expects people to read your mind when you’re upset instead of directly expressing your frustrations because communication and expression were foreign concepts. Your mission now is to have conversations with your younger self and show them that there don’t need to be negative consequences for these things.
The key thing here, as Kobe Campbell wrote, is to give our inner child whatever was missing that we as adults are aware we need.
Play
A big part of connecting with your inner child is allowing yourself to play. It’s not advertised in our productivity-obsessed world, but it’s a direct highway to calming ourselves down more sustainably, getting in touch with our first dreams and doses of creativity, and especially for people who have unhealed trauma, a chance to enjoy elements of childhood that might’ve been missed.
Buy the toy for yourself just because it makes you happy. Paint without intention because it’s freeing and do somersaults in the pool with your friends because it’s fun. So much of adulthood is centred around purpose and responsibility, but play reminds us that there are deep parts of ourselves that desperately need to express themselves care-free.
thanks for info