This article is part of a 3-part series and is Part 3 in the series. If you have not yet read Part 1 or Part 2, please start there. 

To Heal is to Make Whole
The word "healing" comes from the Old English word "hǣlan," which means "to make whole or sound." This word is related to the Old Norse word "heila," which means "to make whole or complete.”

In this article I’ll be describing the general process of healing the inner child. My somatic approach is informed by Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Psychotherapy, Parts work, Heartmath Institute, Timeline therapy, attachment theory, neurodevelopment; and a polyvagal understanding of the nervous system.

Inner Child Healing - Integration of Parts
Healing our inner child is the act of integrating our many inner child parts into the one whole. It can be described as a process of unifying and harmonising the various aspects of ourself. This involves recognising, acknowledging, and integrating the different parts of ourself, including the wounded and vulnerable parts and our protector parts, in order to achieve a sense of self-connection, wholeness and embodiment.

It is a process of bringing all the fragmented parts of ourself together, healing the wounds that may have caused them to separate in the first place, rewiring our nervous system back to safety, security and thus regulation, and learning to accept and integrate them into a cohesive whole. I’ll explain in more detail that process throughout this article. This integration process can be challenging, but ultimately it allows us to fully embrace our true self, experience connection and love within relationships and live a more authentic and fulfilling life.

When someone begins this work, they are rarely in touch with their inner child or the various inner child parts or protectors. What they might be aware of however are their present day negative feelings and thoughts and current challenges, be it in the realm of mental/emotional/physical health, relationships or career. I’ve had many clients tell me that they know they have ‘deeper blocks’ but they don’t know what they are, or how to access and heal them.

It is often the pain of those present challenges, which is enough to motivate someone to want to heal the root cause of them and begin this deep inner journey that will transform their inner and outer life.

Healing Requires Self-Responsibility & the Right Support
I will note here that no-one else can heal your inner child. There is no Shaman, Healer or Practitioner in the world that can do this work for you. The pain you carry deep within cannot be removed or healed by anyone else. Trust me, I tried those things for 12 years and did not even scratch the surface of my Inner Child wounds.

This pain in order to be healed needs to felt so that it can release from the body. The Inner Child part is  waiting for you to reconnect to it and give it what it needs. Therefore, even in a Somatic Healing sessions which is often about healing the Inner Child, all of the healing happens within you, by you, because of you. Therefore, you must really want this healing for yourself and choose it.

In saying that, this work absolutely requires education and support for all the reasons that I mentioned in Part 2 of this article. So finding the right safe person to support you on such a sacred journey will become one of your most invaluable investments because every area of your life transforms from this work. It is hard to put a price on that and on the ripple effect this work has on your children, partner, clients, community and the collective. This work is literally is priceless in my opinion. 

Wisdom of The Body
When clients come to see me, although I do ask them about their history, I never need to know much of the story because it will all show up through their body through the journey of us working together, and in the order that it needs to. The body has a priority of healing and the past stories, memories and emotions will surface if and when they need to. I’ve come to trust in the wisdom of the client’s body after seeing the ingenious ways the healing unfolds uniquely for each client.

So on your inner child healing journey, never go digging for wounds, just work with what is present in your body. Use whatever is current in your life whether it is an emotional trigger, relationship or health challenge, or recurring negative thought to drop into your body and feel what is present in relation to that. This is how we begin to access the inner child. Your life, relationships and health will always mirror your own energy back to you. Whatever is still unhealed will show up somewhere and somehow in your mind, body, heart and life.

Your inner child is often at the root of:

• Emotional Outbursts
• Emotional Triggers
• Relationship Challenges
• Chronic Pain
• Health Issues
• Fears, Worry, Anxiety
• Depression
• Feeling Blocked or Stuck
• Addictions
• Self-Sabotage, Procrastination
• Unworthiness, Shame, Guilt

Consider that all of the above is simply your inner child crying out in pain trying to get your attention and asking for her or his need to be met. The longer we avoid hearing our inner child the louder the symptoms can become. Just like the saying goes, first it’s the feather, then if we don’t listen to that, it’s the brick and if we miss that sign, it’s the bus.

It might be a need for connection or to be seen, heard, loved, to feel safe, to be held, to be understood or maybe supported. Remember that the only reason the inner child is wounded is because their core need was not met originally. The wound of the inner child is the pain they feel from not receiving that need. Some examples of the wound might be abandonment, betrayal, rejection, shame, guilt, boundary violation, or oppression. And of course there is every other emotion that can be present too.

Feeling is Healing
In order to meet the need, we must first be connected to the inner child. This means feeling this part of you. That does not mean imagining or visualising them. Remember that this part of you is stored in the body and when we have an inner child wound, we tend to be more in our intellect and disconnected from our body as part of our survival mechanism. So to access this part we need to learn how to come into our body and begin expanding our interoception; our ability to feel the sensations and feelings within our body.

As you practice bringing your awareness and breath into the body, your interoception increases. You move from disconnection into a greater self-connection. From head to heart. From recycling the past or living in the future to being present in the Now through your body and heart. You learn to increase your capacity to feel and to be with what is in the body, and that my friend, is embodied living.

You can start this practice by simply scanning your body and noticing what you feel in your body or by downloading my free Inner Child Healing Meditation. If you are triggered, stop and drop into your body and notice what you feel. If you are challenged or stressed, stop and drop into your body. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, just begin practicing placing your awareness into your body and feeling the interior of it with presence and breath. Become aware of what you are actually feeling deep down.

As you learn to deepen into this, you will become conscious of what is held within your unconscious. You will start to feel the parts of you that you had disowned, denied and numbed and see how they are driving your present challenges. You will see the manifestations of that inner child part within your body, mind, emotions, relationships and the choices you’ve made in life. The bigger picture starts to become clearer.

Protector Parts
As this process of deepening increases it is natural to meet with our protectors because meeting our inner child can feel uncomfortable as we start to realise the pain we carry deep inside. I was shocked when I met my inner child for the first time and coming to terms with how much grief I had suppressed and walled off. However through accepting this, the healing could begin. 

I will mention that this process of bringing awareness into the body and working somatically is typically not easy. We learnt to dissociate from our body and feelings a very long time ago. We find being in our mind much more comfortable and safe. As we begin to bring presence into the body the most common experience is either numbness, a feeling of disconnection or the mind wanting to come in and distract you with many different thoughts. That doesn’t happen so much with a guided 1on1 session as the space held creates a field of safety that allows for a client to go much deeper, however when doing this on our own, this is absolutely common.

This part of us that does not want to feel is our protector part; it is the freeze response of our nervous system. We survived our experiences by dissociating. So this response isn’t just going to go away and we cannot push or force our way through it either. The reason we are sometimes not able to be present in the moment and find our mind going in all different directions, is due to the amount of trauma and inner child wounding held in the body. The more we heal that, the more able we are to be present.

Courage and The Road Less Travelled
This journey from my experience is one of the hardest things we could ever do and absolutely requires courage. If you look around you, most people live in their mind and are not embodied. The majority of the Western world is disconnected from their heart, Soul and intuition. It’s because this journey requires courage as well as the right support in order to meet all we’ve suppressed and to release all the strategies we’ve used to cope and create a false sense of safety. Most people prefer the comfort of their safety mechanisms even though they will complain about them.

Therefore this deeper soul journey is a rare road travelled but the jewels we discover along the way is what we’ve looking for our entire life, or even perhaps for many lifetimes. How far one goes on the journey depends on their level of desire for true awakening and their level of courage. But it is my personal belief and experience that there is nothing that cannot be healed from this work. I also believe that our wounds are the portals back home to our true self meaning this work is necessary in order to become our potential. We cannot get around that unfortunately. The only way forward is inwards. Our wounds are the initiation to alchemise the pain into true wisdom and compassion; the real gold.

Therefore, be prepared for the most transformational journey of your life as you descend into the ocean of your unconscious and explore the fear, contraction, hurt and conditioning that is held within you. You will end up discovering on this journey not just your inner child but ancestral wounds and sometimes past life wounds because they are all stored within the body. Each part you discover is a part that needs to be integrated for you to restore the wholeness of your own Soul and to access your gifts, purpose and potential.

There is a Rumi quote that I have used for over a decade now in my work and I feel this quote sums up this work in the most beautiful way.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but to seek and find all of the barriers that you have built within yourself against it.”

I find this work very different from the Personal Development work that I began my career in. Personal Development might tell you to create a goal of who you would like to be, and then to take action to become that best version of yourself. That approach uses will and change is only ever temporary because we are overriding these deeper parts of us. 

Whereas on this path, we believe that your true self is already within you but just fractured into many parts. It is not about cutting these parts away or judging them, but about embracing them in the ultimate act of self love, that brings us into our wholeness. This path is the ultimate form of self-love. It is about inclusion of all parts of us including our shadow so that we can alchemise the shadow and pain into light. 

It is a journey of meeting every false idea or belief we have about ourself and the world and dissolving them. It is a journey of death to all that is not our true self in order to birth our true self. This is a journey of deep surrender and deep opening. 

Evolution from Wounded Child To Mature Adult To Divinity
It a journey of evolution from the wounded inner child into the mature adult and then into the realisation of ourself as divinity itself. Every part we integrate decreases our felt sense of separation and increases our felt-sense of connection, eventually resulting in connection with God/Source

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This is a mammoth journey to undertake but the most rewarding. Its what we are here to do. But despite this being a journey that does take time, I want to reassure you that there is certainly an end to the suffering at some point. We are certainly able to bring to completion core wounds that have often played out for lifetimes. This allows us to then live from our Soul and create from that part of us rather than wounding. It allows us to live our Soul's highest destiny and blueprint and that is what brings us a feeling of fulfilment. Nothing else can do that except living our Soul's blueprint. 

Healing Happens at the Rate of How Safe we Feel 
How fast we open up and heal depends on how safe our nervous system feels. Therefore the first step in this journey is safety, safety, safety. Through simple somatic exercises we can learn to create a felt-sense of safety and support in our body. This is not something that can be taught in an article. It needs to be experienced and felt in your body. It is only through experience do we rewire our nervous system.

Book a Somatic Healing Session today to begin healing your Inner Child

These simple exercises begin to regulate the nervous system and increases our window of tolerance and thus our capacity to be with the sensations and feelings within our body. If the window of tolerance is small, then feeling past trauma and inner child wounding can easily tip us back into the freeze response and cause us to disconnect, numb out and shut down. No healing happens while we are in the freeze. For healing to occur, we need to be in ventral vagal regulation. Therefore, increasing our nervous system capacity is the first step on this journey.

As safety settles into the system, and the window of tolerance and capacity increases, the past stored traumas and inner child parts naturally begin to surface. The protector parts then feel safe to release and let go and they start to give us access to the deeper inner child wounds. The deep pain begins to surface to be felt and released.

Layers of the Onion
This process happens in layers, like an onion. The trauma never surfaces all at once because that would overwhelm our system. It happens in stages and layers and in divine timing. Therefore when you are working with someone on this journey, it is often a long-term relationship, or at least could be depending on how deep you wish to go. 

As we continue bringing our awareness into the body, and learning to listen, honour and support what we find, those fractured parts of us start to feel seen, heard and supported. We learn to reparent these parts of us. Rather than reaching outside of us to have that need met like we’ve done our whole life, we learn to give it to ourself. It is here that empowerment, wholeness and embodiment develop.

There is an order to this work that is needed for our inner child to be healed in the fastest and safest way possible.

• Body Connection - It is helpful to have a daily practice that brings your awareness into the body in order to develop interoception; the ability to feel the more subtle levels of sensation, feeling and emotion in the body.
• Safety - We want to learn how to track our nervous system and self-regulate by creating a felt-sense of safety and support in the body through Somatic practices. This allows our window of tolerance and capacity to increase and creates the space needed for the old emotional traumas held in the body; the inner child parts to surface and release. The more safety our system feels and the more we learn to track our nervous system and stay within our window of tolerance, the less likely we are to go into a freeze response.
• Allowing - As the various parts, emotions, stored survival stress and inner child wounding begin to surface, we then learn to allow those feelings and sensations in the body. This takes practice as we’ve been accustomed to denying, avoiding, repressing, suppressing and distracting. The more safety our system feels, the easier this is to do. The practice of allowing, despite sounding simple, is initially challenging and a huge step forward. This practice develops the neurological wiring for us to be more present from within the body and this takes time to develop. The more we can allow ourselves to feel what is present in the body, the more we connect into our Self and begin to understand our own self and life.
  
• Acceptance -  As our connection to our body deepens the presence of our inner child and how we really feel deep down becomes blindingly obvious. We can no longer deny the truth of our inner feelings, fear and pain. Here is where acceptance begins. Acceptance is the complete absence of judgement or resistance. It is the acceptance that allows us to stop pretending that we don’t feel this pain. This may sound obvious but when we’ve lived in denial for a long time, the practice of acceptance is transformational. So much of this journey is about getting really honest with ourselves about how we truly feel. As we accept these deeper parts, a relationship begins to develop with them. We start to feel who they are, how old they are, how they feel, what they believe, how they’ve been playing out through your life and what they need. You come to get to know this part of you intimately.
  
• Embrace - Through complete acceptance our heart begins to open to that part of us. Like a loving Mother with open arms, we welcome this part into our heart in a loving embrace. We hold space for this wounded part of us with nothing but compassion, deep listening and patience. We begin to reparent this part by giving it exactly what it needs so that it can heal. We hold no agenda, just a pure loving space dedicated to giving this part of us what it needs, for however long it needs it. We become our own medicine.
  
• Consistency - If we are consistent in showing up for that part of us, it learns to trust us and it learns that it is safe. It starts to grow up from within us and one day we will notice that it is gone. That is when we know it has integrated. I recommend having a daily practice where we check in with our body, see what part is present and offer support and anything else it needs in that moment. I also recommend noticing throughout the day if that part arises through triggers and if so working with it in the moment if you’re able to, by going within and giving this part what it needs. My courses teach you how to do all of this for yourself and once you know how to support your own Self, there is nothing you cannot heal.

As this healing is taking place, you may notice the following:

• Tension releasing
• Pain easing or completely dissolving
• Health symptoms improving or completely healing
• More energy
• Less anxiety, feeling safer in your body, more relaxation and sense of openness
• Increased desire to be social 
• Authenticity including speaking your truth, saying No, having boundaries, asking for what you need. 
• Less negative thoughts and increased ability to not identify with them as they do arise
• Less emotional reactions and more ability to centre yourself when the triggers do arise
• You’ll notice that the part of your body where you felt that inner child part will one day feel clear and you won’t be able to feel that part of you. You will no longer feel that younger part within you. You’ll feel like an adult. The physical part of your body where you used to feel this part will also feel different; more relaxed, more open, and this part of the body will function with greater health. 
• You’ll also know it’s integrated when the things that used to trigger no longer do.
• Able to take action and move towards your goals and dreams

Awakening Our Heart and Soul Alignment
My final thoughts that I’d like to share is that this is a journey of the heart. The more we connect with and embrace each inner child part into our heart, the more whole we become and the more loving we become. This journey teaches us to expand our ability to be compassionate with our self and others. It teaches us how to love ourselves at the deepest of levels. How to give ourselves the care, patience, nurturing, respect and attention that we deserve and usually crave from others.

The wonderful thing that starts happening as we begin giving this level of attention and love to ourselves is that we no longer accept what we used to. When we know our worth, our life rearranges according to our new level of self-worth and empowerment. Every area of our life transforms and moves into alignment with our true Soul self. It is from here that our highest destiny and timeline can unfold.

Reach for the stars my friend, and let this work inspire you into your greater potential and the beauty, love and magic that is possible when you go within. I wish you every bit of courage on your sacred journey home to your Soul and the love that you are.