At A thousand Paths we are big on healing from all angles (see our holistic healing blog here for a deeper explanation into holistic therapies), and one of the big ones for us is Inner Child Healing.

For us that seems pretty self-explanatory – you heal your inner child. I’m coming to realise though as we come up to one of our inner child workshop weekends that there’s a bit more too it than that, so I thought I’d try to untangle it a bit for everyone (and myself I guess).

Who is our inner child?

We all have an inner child, it’s just the depth to which we control or let our inner child control us that differs & how they behave according to our wounds from childhood.

Some people are super in tune with theirs & live almost 100% in that place. You know the kind of people who have no impulse control, very little discipline, go for the foods that taste the best & generally aren’t good for you, don’t like doing things they don’t want to do, often whinge & complain rather than taking action to make changes, always up for fun regardless of consequences & rarely consider consequences in advance. We all know someone like this or in all honesty we have probably been this person at some point in time. These are all super inner child behaviours – meaning basically the inner child is running the show 100% of the time.

Others try to push their inner child down all the time and supress their childlike behaviours until they come out in strange & often inconvenient ways. These are often the people who you see as super calm together, actin g like an adult all of the time with a ton of responsibility on their shoulders & then all of a sudden they lose their minds & fly into a rage or they get really angry at people for not stepping up & taking some responsibility too. Again, we all know someone like this or have been them.

For a rare few who have done some deep inner work they are able to play in the world with their inner child & when needed quiet their own inner child. These people you can see they’re sort of aware of where their stories in life have come from & they tend to work from a more balanced place, taking time out to have fun & being able to prioritise getting work done. In an argument, these people will take a step back & not engage if the person their arguing with this having an “inner child tantrum” moment.

Your inner child is that voice that says, I want chocolate when you’ve had a bad day or you’re feeling sad. It’s the one that attracts you to people who remind you of your parents or what you wish your parents had been like. It’s the voice that sometimes takes over when you feel something isn’t right or fair. The one that follows the unconscious programming that you received in childhood where you try to please everyone but yourself.

There are so many factors that influence how your inner child will play out in adulthood as you try to process & relive childhood traumas & events over & over trying to make sense of them until you understand & learn the lessons that they were meant to teach you. Factors like

• What order you were born in (yes seriously it’s a real thing not just some “middle child/only child syndrome myth)
• Whether both parents were around in your life
• What your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles etc were like when you were a child
• If you experienced a significant trauma as a child
• If you had step parents & were part of a combined household & where you sat in the age order of that family
• What lessons were instilled in you from a young age

So maybe you grew up in the perfect loving family, everyone was happy, no one ever argued, there was no horrible event or trauma, you loved everything about your childhood & your parents are awesome. So why does my inner child need healing?

If that person does actually exist, aside from wow you are super lucky, they still have inner child wounds that have been handed down from their parents & grandparents, they still have lessons that have been “hammered” in for years through lessons & societal programming that need to be worked through & may not be the healthiest.

What does the inner child healing process look like?

One of the biggest things about inner child healing is acknowledging & understanding things like:

• Where you’re playing out old wounds/stories
• The lessons that you need to learn from them
• Where your behaviours & programming have come from
• What your inner child triggers are & how  to respond to them instead of reacting

Once you are able to see all of these things more clearly you can start to heal them & take back your inner child power & “rescue” yourself from the moments in your childhood that were particularly traumatic or influential. Once you understand this & take the pain/wounds from the story, you can then decide not to continue in this cycle. Learning a different way to interact with the world & move forward as an adult, a parent, a sister and a partner.

Basic steps:

• Look at reoccurring patterns in your family tree
• Look at your parents childhoods & their inner child stories
• Look at how your parents childhood influenced how they raised you
• Acknowledge and trauma or pain from your childhood
• Deep dive mediation to reclaim your wounded inner child in these moments
• Write your story as it is & how it is changing
• Keep working on doing these over & over as you reclaim pieces of yourself
• Choose when & where to be in your inner child & when to act the adult

If you need help with this we offer Inner Child therapy at A Thousand Paths as well as regularly offering the “Healing the Past Workshop” which is a whole weekend of working on this in a group. If you haven’t experienced this work you can check out Lorraine Webb’s website before you decide & see how the training was formed & how it is already healing many people as they walk the journey.

Blessings

Michelle & Alana