Why Do We Talk So Much About Our Inner Child?

I’m sure at this point anyone and everyone reading this is familiar with the idea of the inner child.  However, I suspect that most people may not fully understand the concept or at least they may not fully grasp why it is such a common theme.  There are a lot of approaches and notions about healing our inner child and for most of us, at the very least, exploring this area of ourselves is something that can be really beneficial.  In my work with clients, we often wind up at least lightly visiting their childhood and doing some exploration.  However, most of our work is not done there, it is just a lens with which we can view why they may respond the way they do to certain situations and understand where some of the patterns and choices in their lives may stem from.  I often joke that this is the ubiquitous meme with Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” standing in front of a board with string tying all these things together in our therapy.  So much of what we do and have done is interconnected. 

As a starting point, there is often a point that we have to agree upon before we move forward.  That point is that every child is deserving of unconditional love and acceptance.  For most people this may give them a brief pause as they think about the person some children grow up to become, and so they stop and say “well this person does not deserve that” but my argument will go to the old nature versus nurture argument.  Maybe that person became a horrible person because of the things they have gone through.  Maybe if they had a loving childhood they would not have turned into that person they are.  They likely were not genetically predisposed to being an asshole.  But ultimately, a child deserves to be loved and accepted no matter even who their parents are, where they were born, or what portion of the world they are born in.  Once we establish that every child does indeed deserve the same love then we can start to do some additional digging and look at the childhood we experienced.  For most of us, childhood was “normal” and the reason we think of it as normal is because we simply have no other frame of reference for what a childhood should be like.  We may have friends or other family members who we spend time around and see a different experience, but we still think of ours as normal.  That can change the older we get and the more critically we look back.  In fact, for many clients they see when we look back parents who loved them but missed meeting some of their needs.  This is often what we see when we look at emotional neglect.  Childhood was not “bad”, but it was not exactly what we needed.  This is the ground where many people I work with start to see the patterns that were present throughout life emerging. 

Our inner child is the part of us who had unmet needs or experienced some other trauma which shaped us at an early age.  For most of us, it could be repeated patterns or expectations from our family, or it could be something more obvious like abuse.  As a parent, we know we will never be perfect, but the goal is to be “good enough”, to let our kids know they are loved, accepted, and that they are special while also setting limits and boundaries.  We can course correct and adjust based on age, but realistically it is about us showing our kids they do not have to do anything to earn love, and if we cannot meet something they ask for, it is about us letting them know why we cannot meet that desire.  Part of the boundary process also means we do not put emotional weight on our kids that is not age appropriate.  We do not want to confide in our kids about our stress, but we can let them know we are stressed or sad, but make sure they understand their job is not to fix or address that.  When our parents make us carry an emotional weight that is beyond our development or when they make us responsible for their feelings, comfort, or happiness, that kid will grow up feeling they are responsible for everyone else’s feelings and will sacrifice their own.  THAT is the inner child who needs healing.  We can find that pattern’s origin and then work to address that.

Once we find the moments in our childhood that left us stuck in these patterns, we can start to unravel things moving forward. We see the way these moments and lessons have played out for us repeatedly in our lives and we can start to understand why we have felt so stuck and like we could not break out of the cycle we have been trapped in. Starting to recognize those responses based on the feelings we have in those moments, both historically as well as in the present, allows us to begin intervening in the present and building capacity to address these repetitive moments now and as we move forward. We certainly can do some more “woo-woo” type things with visualizing actually going to our childhood self in each moment that comes to mind and offering them comfort, safety, and security they simply did not feel and tell them they deserved better while we hold and comfort them. For some people that will feel too out there and ruin the process, but for other that can really help codify the process and make them feel like they are actually intervening. The important part is recognizing the place these patterns come from and addressing them, so we no longer fall into those patterns. For most individuals, that is a real challenge because they feel like they are not being themselves and they anticipate people thinking they are jerks because they now have boundaries. But it all comes back to all of us deserving the love and acceptance. Had we been shown that in childhood, we would value ourselves as equal to others rather than putting them ahead of us, even when it costs us greatly. We are not punishing people with our healing nor are we saying we are more important than anyone else, but rather we are saying we deserve the same things we have willingly given or allowed other people, and changing the dynamics of relationships in our lives to ensure we are treated with respect and equality.