When emotional hurt that our younger selves experienced has not been repaired and we have been unable to heal fully, we physically continue to grow but we may have unmet emotional needs. Going back to heal our emotional injuries from childhood can be achieved through getting to know our inner child.
Let’s imagine you once experienced a physical injury to your knee. Generally you are now fine but occasionally if trying a new exercise or exerting your knee more than usual, you find you start to experience some discomfort or pain in your knee that stops you being able to move comfortably.
Now, let’s imagine your knee is you as a child and the injury is in fact a traumatising and emotionally distressing experience as a child. Like a mostly healed physical injury can occasionally cause us pain, so too can past emotional injury. Although we may grow up physically from our childhood and become functioning adults, we can occasionally have experiences or interactions that trigger similar feelings to when we were a child and felt emotionally distressed. At those times our inner child can take over our thinking as they re-emerge, sometimes rather unexpectedly.
When we don’t take care of our inner child, just like a past physical injury can cause hurt in the present, so too can past emotional hurt cause pain and difficulties in the present.
When as adults we are reminded of how it feels not to have had our needs met, our inner child continues to feel that pain and this can feel uncomfortable, overwhelming or distressing despite us now being grown adults who are generally functioning in life.
If we are open to getting to know our inner child by revisiting past experiences, when our inner child’s needs were not met, we can start to make new sense and meaning of the struggles and challenges we face in adult life.
With therapeutic support we can slowly start to understand ourselves more deeply so that our adult selves might be able to slowly form a new relationship or internal dialogue with our inner child, giving attention to them and helping to meet some of those needs that were previously unmet. This means showing compassion to ourselves, building empathy for our inner children and accepting and caring for ourselves. One might say that as our adult selves go through this process, we reparent our younger selves providing the compassion required to start healing.
It is important to acknowledge that this can be a process that takes time and can sometimes feel painful or challenging. Your therapist is there to support you through this process. The benefit of this work is that it can help us become unstuck in situations that may previously have caused us distress, anxiety or shame. This can be truly healing and personally transformative, over time enabling us to feel more energised and experience fulfilment within our life experiences and relationships.
At Connect Counselling and Psychotherapy we value the therapeutic relationship and how this can be a powerful tool during inner child work. If you feel that inner child work could be helpful to you and you would like to know more, please feel free to contact us. You are welcome to book a complimentary chemistry session with one of our counsellors in order to further explore how they may be able to help you through therapy.
