By Nancy Minister, Therapist, Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows
If you’ve ever done work at The Meadows — either in an inpatient program or our Survivors I Workshop — you’ve likely had some experience getting in touch with your inner child. So, how is that young part of yourself right now?
Go ahead: close your eyes and take a deep breath. Feel that child’s energy. Are they content? Restless? Sad? Scared?
Who you are is primarily shaped by how you were cared for during childhood and what you learned to fear. How you were conditioned often carries into your adult life, informing your feelings and everyday decisions. Healing your inner child rewires your mindset and releases those fears, helping you experience more joy throughout your life.
Experience the warmth and love you have for your inner child in your body. Take a moment to provide for their needs. Learning how to connect with them can include anything from reassurance to a promise to go for a walk later. Your inner child might need you to feel any fear, pain, or shame so you can get in touch with where those feelings are coming from and address them.
How you were conditioned often carries into your adult life, informing your feelings and everyday decisions.
Signs of a Wounded Inner Child
What is your inner child? It subconsciously shadows the trials and tribulations you experienced during childhood. Whether you realize it or not, you often carry your inner childhood wounds into adulthood — becoming disconnected from your inner child when life’s stressors come into play. Regardless of whether you experienced childhood trauma, your inner child holds onto the positive and negative emotions associated with your experiences.
Everyone carries childhood fears into adulthood, but not every person has a wounded inner child. A wounded inner child often masks their feelings and avoids conflict, holding back tears or anger and leaving uncomfortable situations instead of addressing their emotions. They tie productivity and success to self-worth, constantly striving to be the best. They’re often people pleasers, frequently confiding in others when making significant personal decisions. A wounded inner child also has trouble setting healthy boundaries, especially with their parents and romantic partners.
Healing Your Inner Child in the Survivors II Workshop
One of my favorite things about facilitating the Survivors II Workshop at the Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows is helping folks revisit their relationships with their inner children. The child part of themselves they rescued in Survivors I probably feels happy, safe, and loved. However, it may be helpful for that person to reconnect with their inner child from a different time. Having gained a greater sense of themselves, they’re often ready for more trauma work.
Sometimes people return to The Meadows for Survivors II to address adult issues such as ongoing or past relationship problems, traumatic experiences, or addictions. Often, they need another layer of healing from childhood abuse or relational trauma.
Because of my passion for inner child work, any way you slice it, the Survivors II workshop will include some connection with that inner child. Yours could be a fearful, sad, and wounded child or an adapted child that is rebellious, angry, or shut down.
Healing your inner child allows you to dig deeper to learn more about the wounding—the feeling energy and the messages you still hold inside. Often, the connection people make with their inner children is very sweet.
We use various treatment modalities to get in touch with the underlying source of the issues that people come to address. For example, your homework at the end of the day might be an inventory, a letter, a collage, or another art project. The goal of the homework is to get in touch with your feelings and understand at what age your underlying inner childhood trauma started. Rescuing the child and releasing the sense of energy tends to bring much-welcomed relief. It’s fun for me to be creative and match the homework with the person’s goal for the week.
I’ve had this blog post about how to heal your inner child in my mind for a few months now. However, my inner girl has not been happy with the idea of me writing a blog. She’s scared, having had some social trauma as a teen. Even as those fears arise, I breathe and allow my functional adult to affirm that I have boundaries and can protect myself and her. What do I need protection from? It turns out my thoughts make up various things about betrayal, judgment, and shame.
Healing your inner child by letting go of the feeling energy and re-parenting that child part changes the neuropathways in our brain.
Inner Child Work Changes Your Reality and Your Brain
What’s truly exciting about learning how to heal your inner child is that it’s validated by neuroscience. We hold relational and survival experiences in our limbic brain in the form of implicit, procedural memories. When we go back in time and access the feelings and experiences of hurting, neediness, abandonment, rejection, fear, or worthlessness, we retrieve them from that part of our brain.
Healing your inner child by letting go of the feeling energy and re-parenting that child part changes the neuropathways in our brain. Focused attention on loving that child part of yourself creates new neuropathways. This means building a felt experience of warmth, love, protection, and even physical nurturing by—yes—hugging a pillow.
So, check in again. How is your inner kiddo right now? If you’re finding they could use some extra nurturing, it might be time to join me for the Survivors II workshop. For more details on inner child work, contact us at Rio Retreat Center today.