What is Inner Child work?

Overview of what inner child work is and how it can help you overcome your present day challenges.

Jenn Thongtan

9/25/20266 min read

Inner Child Therapy

Life transitions change us biologically, emotionally and spiritually.

We don’t realise we have created a pattern. The pattern is often rooted in survival and safety. The problem is this pattern of survival and safety was suitable for a child.

The adult has grown up but the pattern has remained. Often has become so intertwined that the adult owns the response as part of their personality.

Finding the origin of the pattern is the root of inner child work.

Revisiting Early Conditioning

Emotional sensitivity, anxiety, grief to name a few are patterns that stay with us through adulthood. We believe they are part of us, part of our personalities, fixed.

But….. many issues are buried in childhood patterns:

Perfectionism
People Pleasing
Self-criticism
Need for approval may surface

Inner child exploration allows these feelings to be acknowledged with compassion, reducing shame and emotional reactivity.

By soothing the inner child as you would your own child you can learn to regulate your nervous system and rebuild inner safety, essential for emotional balance.

Restoring Joy, Play, and Creativity

Reconnecting with the child within:

Restores playfulness
Encourages imagination
Supports curiosity
Counterbalancing the feelings of loss or limitation.

How does it work?

Through guided trance and dialogue, you will learn to re-parent yourself, offering the nurturing, boundaries, and kindness that you may not have experienced at the time

You will feel empowered to navigate midlife with renewed self-worth and emotional balance.

Inner child work teaches self-compassion.

Background

Carl Gustav Jung introduced the concept of the Inner child by referring to this as the Divine Child or Eternal Child, the universal symbols living within our subconscious.

Jung believed that the inner child embodies our earliest sense of wonder, creativity, and emotional truth, often buried beneath layers of adaptation and social conditioning.

This ‘child’ represents hope and the capacity for psychological rebirth.

During major transitions like divorce, death of a loved one, loss of job, house, menopause. this archetype often re-emerges, inviting the individual to integrate parts of the self that were neglected or suppressed.

Unmet childhood needs often resurface in adulthood as emotional triggers, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or difficulty setting boundaries.
Healing involves re-parenting and offering the care, validation, and safety that may have been missing.
Children who adapt to meet others’ expectations lose connection to their authentic self.
Healing involves recognising the pain of that lost self and learning to feel and express emotions without repression.

Early caregiver/parent relationships shaped our emotional security and coping patterns.

Unresolved childhood experiences are stored both psychologically and in the physiologically within the body.

As we grow, we develop through phases of growth. We experience life in a way that forms through our experience and it shapes the way that we respond to people and situations as adults.

There are times during our development when our life experience does not meet our needs or to answer the needs of survival. We develop coping mechanisms and strategies that are required at the time.

The problem happens when the coping mechanism becomes permanent in our lives as we get older. These are learned responses from a point of view of survivial.

We can still feel the pain that we felt as a child whilst not having certain needs met; this is the child within that requires support.

We might support ourselves by self-medicating and anaesthetising our inner child with work, food, lack of food, sex, alcohol etc.

Our Inner Child can come out to play, be funny, amusing, endearing, cheeky and mischievous. This will all depend on the desired outcome.

This behaviour can also deflect from the real issues if someone is too positive, never serious, not wanting to look at their own life and portraying a particular role.

The Adult and Inner Adult

We have all heard the voice of our inner adult, knowing, wise, thoughtful, caring, considerate of others, with adult needs and desires.

Does the adult self-spend time with the Inner Child, or does the Inner Adult ignore the Inner Child?

Perhaps the Inner Adult feels too important or grown up and finds the Inner Child embarrassing, dissociates from the Inner Child and so once again the Inner Child is ignored, not played with, or cared for.

The Adult Child

A child or teenager can experience the feelings of being an adult for example offering the awareness and advice beyond their years,

Here the inner adult is appearing because there is not an equivalent adult supporting the child or family and the child has to fill this role as best as they can.

They are still a child and don’t have the life experience to parent themselves at this age.

Of course, the inner child and inner adult have developed with the perception of what an adult or child is, and this again has been influenced by our experience.

‘Acting Out’

The acting-out behaviour is driven by the attempt to keep difficult feelings and memories hidden.

Acting out stops the development of more constructive responses to the feelings in question.

If there is behaviour or stimulus within a family dynamic either one or both parents or siblings that need more support and attention from the parents than other children.

Whether it is a form of neurosis, depression or possibly struggling with poverty. The parents might not be able to meet the needs of all the children, or offer adequate care for each individual child’s psychological growth.

The children might attempt to meet their own needs in a way that assuages their own discomfort or pain.

This acting out ‘coping mechanism’ might be anger, bullying, eating disorders, sexual experimentation, addiction, self-harm and many more.

These can all represent a call for attention where needs are not being met.

Anesthetising feelings because they are too overwhelming to deal with leads to repeating the behaviour that helps them to forget.

‘Acting In’

Acting In can be an internalisation of behaviour causing a range of internal physical and mental health issues. IBS is an example of internalising behaviour. Over-eating and under-eating can cause nutritional deficiencies and lead onto more serious conditions affecting our physiology and can cause damage to our organs over a long time.

The understanding that eating, drinking alcohol, drug taking is not good for the body yet continuing to consume is a form of acting-in.

The internalisation of ‘others’ behaviour or comments is stored in our emotions and needs to either be expressed or suppressed

People-pleasers who avoid confrontation and lose the ability to say no even when it is affecting their mental and physical health can often lead onto more serious and chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia, lupus, ME, where the body is literally screaming out in pain to be heard.

It’s my parent’s fault…..

Blaming parents for their lack of parenting skills is not the answer for long term change.

Acknowledging our parents also are a result of their own parents, can provide a reason for the repetition. Almost feeling sympathy for not knowing or being aware of how their actions have caused a chain reaction.

With Inner Child work we can take responsibility for our own growth, rather than blaming parental ‘others’.

This allows us to complete our childhood with our understanding of what was required

Learning to love the Inner Child.

If we are unable to love and accept ourselves - how might someone else?

This is not loving ourselves when we are slim, gaining a partner, when someone loves us or when we gain achievements. This is conditional love.

How would we recognise that we are loved?

We are looking to love ourselves unconditionally, as a child requires.

To love our self for WHO WE ARE

NOT who we want to be

OR how we wish to be seen

OR as someone else might want us to be.

This work helps you to understand who you are and who you want to be.