What's your "Inner Child"?

What is Inner child work?

Imagine that you're 5 years old. You're in school playing with the other children in your kindergarten class. While you’re running around on the playground, you trip and you fall, and then the other kids laugh at you.

Perhaps you may not remember exactly what happened, nor do you remember how old you were. You do, however, remember the feelings of shame, tears in your eyes and the pain in your knee. You might even remember thinking you would never put yourself in a position to be the center of attention or be laughed at again.

Over the years, although that knee will scar and heal, those feelings of shame you’ll drag into adulthood. As a result, you might feel you’re no longer in control. You’ve also lost your self-confidence. Even when taking a risk that might work to your advantage, you have this nagging feeling that roots back to the incident in the playground in the past - even if you don’t remember it entirely.

Inner child work is an approach to recognizing and healing our childhood trauma. It recognizes that our behaviors as an adult stem from our childhood experiences. During inner child work we focus on addressing our unmet needs by re-parenting ourselves. This type of self-discovery helps us understand out behaviors, triggers, wants and needs.

By allowing ourselves time to go within, we begin peeling back our everyday coping mechanisms (being avoidant, numbing of our feelings, etc.) and are able to fully accept and integrate our subconscious into consciousness.

Inner Child Worksheets

As an adult, I've come to realize that many patterns and ways of reacting (and thinking, even) come from a wounded inner child. Part of my own inner healing process and why I enjoy creating all things mental-health realted is because it's how I not only do what I love (design), but also learn and share with others all of this valuable information.

I've created these Inner Child Worksheets resource for anyone interested in knowing more about what is the Inner Child in a more practical way.

Click here to grab the worksheets!