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How do people heal their inner child?
The inner child healing process can be helped and facilitated by revisiting the client’s past, confronting their truths, and recognizing their pain while understanding its impact on who they are now (Jackman, 2020). Yes, unresolved childhood trauma can be healed. Seek out therapy with someone psychoanalytically or psychodynamically trained. A therapist who understands the impact of childhood experiences on adult life, particularly traumatic ones. Have several consultations to see if you feel empathically understood. In some cases, that wound to our inner child could be the result of trauma, abuse, or abandonment. In other cases, the source of the pain may be more subtle – experiencing unmet emotional needs, the illness of a parent or sibling, growing up in a broken family, or even a childhood friend moving away. Childhood trauma can alter brain structure and change how certain genes are expressed. A traumatized child may numb themselves as a defense, complicating later attempts to access the emotions needed for healing. What is inner child work? Inner child work is an approach to recognizing and healing childhood trauma. It recognizes that our behaviors as an adult stem from our childhood experiences. Inner child work focuses on addressing our unmet needs by reparenting ourselves. Unlike some therapies, which may take months or even years, Inner Child Therapy can, on average, be completed in 10 two hour long sessions.
How to heal your inner child psychology today?
You can heal the child by re-parenting it, using your supportive and loving adult self to provide comfort and protection/security. Through developing a healed inner child, you can step out of some of those intense emotional reactions, maladaptive behaviors, and self-criticisms that plague you as an adult. The goal of inner child healing is to eventually reach a point at which you can better identify your own needs, behaviors, and triggers. Healing your inner child fosters a deeper sense of self-compassion and supports your mental health. Children don’t magically “get over” trauma when they turn 18. Trauma, toxic stress, and adverse childhood experiences permanently change a child’s body and brain, which can have serious, lifelong consequences, according to a recent report from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. The 4 Pillars of reparenting are: Discipline, Joy, Emotional Regulation, and Self-care. Depending on your unique childhood experience, some of these will be more difficult than others. “Each one of us has an inner child, or way of being,” says Dr. Diana Raab, a research psychologist and author. “Getting in touch with your inner child can help foster well-being and bring a lightness to life.”
What type of therapy heals inner child?
Inner child work can be found in many types of therapy. To name a few, the inner child lens can be found in trauma therapy, Parts Work, Internal Family Systems, EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic work, Gestalt work, art therapy, and story or narrative therapy, notes Phillips. It is a method of addressing the behavior patterns rooted in childhood abuse, emotional neglect, and trauma. Inner child work combines different psychological approaches, including attachment theory, somatic therapy, Jungian psychology, and psychotherapy. March 19, 2021. Inner Child Work is a trauma-informed approach to working with people who have experienced various forms of trauma, abuse, and neglect (either within the family or outside the family) earlier on in life. Becoming more aware of the inner child through therapy or a personal journey can help unearth that pain and ultimately offer healing. Acknowledging the inner child involves recognizing and accepting things that caused pain in childhood, bringing them to light to understand their impact now (Raypole, 2021).
What happens if you don’t heal your inner child?
When children are emotionally and mentally injured, neglected, or even abused in childhood, those inner wounds never heal. The child may act out, including having temper tantrums, facing challenges in making friends, and remaining suspicious of the motives of others. Childhood trauma in adults also results in feeling disconnected, and being unable to relate to others. Studies have shown that adults that experience childhood trauma were more likely to struggle with controlling emotions, and had heightened anxiety, depression, and anger. Our inner child remembers feeling invited to a friend’s birthday party and feeling so happy and confident. Our inner child is also the one who felt the salty tears run down our cheeks when mama left the house in a rush to go say goodbye to her dad when he was dying. Types of Childhood Trauma Sexual or physical abuse. Natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, flood) Car or plane crashes. War.