Introducing: Your Inner Child
You may have heard the term “inner child” floating around in the self-help community: contacting, healing, loving it. But what does inner child really mean?
In my experience, the inner child isn’t one specific thing. It’s not a spirit, an idea, or a person. Rather, the inner child is a state: a collection of emotions, thoughts, and (usually) urgency that show up at various times in our adult lives.
To illustrate, let’s try to activate your inner child:
Imagine your boss (or partner, or professor) sends you an email containing a single sentence: “We need to talk.” What happens to you?
For me, it goes like this: my stomach drops, my breathing gets shallow, and I feel afraid. If I look a little closer, I feel kind of small, as though suddenly my boss is two or three times larger than I am. I feel a desire to escape, and my insides writhe and squirm with dread.
When I was six years old, I was called down to the principal’s office to receive punishment for (accidentally) causing injury to another student. In the memory, I enter the principal’s office and he looms dark and high above me — he has complete power, and even though I want to scream and run, I can’t. My insides writhe and squirm with dread.
The hypothetical situation of my boss asking to “talk” elicits the same feelings and sensations I had in that principal’s office more than 30 years ago.
This phenomenon, in a nutshell, is inner child.
It is a state of feeling like a child even when you’re fully grown.
This happens because we learned important lessons during childhood when we were least prepared to process them. For example, I learned about conflict resolution when I was young, subordinate, and immature in that principal’s office. Is my understanding more nuanced now? Surely. But the very basis upon which my understanding was built is rooted in the simplistic and confused experiences of a child. When stressed or surprised, I revert to that child’s understanding, along with all the fear and sense of being small, powerless, subservient.
We can heal this. When we were little, often we learned lessons in the absence of the gentle care and attention kids need, so we ended up with memories like mine of the principal’s office: distorted and menacing. But here’s the cool thing: we can contact those memories and interact with them in a different way. We can bring our adult capacities to those memories, and make right what felt wrong back then.
For this example, I imagine standing, as my adult self, behind the six-year-old version of me with my hand on her shoulder. I tell the principal that this little girl didn’t mean to cause harm, she already feels badly enough, and she doesn’t need to be punished.
I imagine giving this scared little girl a bit of room to breathe and then a big hug. When I do this, I relax and I don’t feel small anymore.
There is so much more to say about this, but I will leave you with just a question:
What situations make you feel young? If you’re having trouble answering, here are some signposts of inner child activity:
Overwhelm
Dread
Anxiety
Despair
Fear of failure or judgment
Just notice that sense of feeling young and small. Notice that you’re in a memory and you may have forgotten that you’re all grown up.
This is the first of many steps into the realm of inner child work, and I’m so happy to take it with you!
