Healing The Inner Child is Foundational To Becoming Whole
Let me begin by saying that healing the inner child is foundational to becoming whole. Most of us did not receive all that we needed in our childhood and thus left our childhood with wounds, trauma and the resulting ways our nervous system adapted in order to survive, stay safe and receive love. Many of the current blocks we experience in relationships, career, parenting and health stem back to our unhealed inner child. 

I would like to mention that not everyone will offer the same kind of Inner Child Work. For some its parts work only, for others it’s visualising the inner child and speaking loving words to it. My Somatic approach to Inner Child Work has been formulated over 17 years and is informed by Parts Work, Heart Work, Timeline Therapy, Genome Healing, Attachment Theory, Neurodevelopment; and a Polyvagal understanding of the nervous system.

Complete Healing Means Working at the Level of The Nervous System 
Therefore this article is written through that lens and experience. I feel my approach covers all the bases needed to not only heal the original inner child wound but to ensure that the nervous system is rewired into a place of safety. This is necessary for any trace of the original trauma to be resolved completely and for that person to be able to thrive mentally, emotionally, physically and within each area of their life. And yes, complete healing is possible.

Inner Child Work creates within our nervous system safety, security, and self-worth, which allows us to come into our true self (Soul) while creating within us a solid foundation to then move forward from. Inner Child Work brings us into the wholeness of our Soul, allowing us to be an integrated and embodied human being where we have access to all of our gifts, potential and purpose. It releases the internal chains we carry that hold us back from fully living our highest destiny.

This work allows us to dissolve the protective barriers that have prevented us from fully receiving or giving love, thus providing essential healing within the realm of relationships and opening us to the possibility of experiencing safe, deeply connected, loving and nourishing relationships.

Although there are other aspects to healing that are often needed, Inner Child Work is a foundational and often overlooked piece and I’ll explain why in this article.

The Wounded Inner Child
The Inner Child is often understood as the younger child part of us that is filled with wonder, innocence, creativity and joy. However, in a therapeutic setting, it is the wounded inner child that did not receive what it needed, that often surfaces for healing. This is the most vulnerable part of us that holds painful emotions and negative self-beliefs that play out and limit us in our adult life. It is also the part of us that holds our deepest longings and needs.

Inner Child Parts
It is important to note that we don’t just have one inner child. The inner child is made up of many younger parts within our psyche. The wounded inner child parts are fragments of our true self or Soul that got stuck at a particular age due to unmet core needs. These parts represent the resulting wounds, traumas, and nervous system adaptations created by past painful experiences or ongoing dynamics.

Core needs for a child can include:

• Nutrition
• Being loved and accepted
• Experiencing connection and belonging
• Feeling safe and secure
• Trust: knowing that their parent/caregiver is there for them when they need something
• Having autonomy and a sense of control
• Being held
• Feeling seen
• Feeling heard
• Feeling understood
• Feeling supported
• Being stimulated and challenged in positive ways that support their growth
• Movement
  

When a child's core needs are consistently unmet, it creates overwhelming stress, feelings and emotional pain that can have significant negative effects on our development and well-being.

Some of the potential consequences of unmet core needs include:

• Poor Physical Health: Chronic stress and neglect can have a negative impact on a child's physical health, including their immune system, growth, and brain development.
• Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties: Children who experience chronic stress or neglect may struggle with emotional regulation, experience mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, or engage in behaviours that are risky or self-destructive.
• Difficulty Forming Positive Relationships: Children who do not receive consistent love, support, and attention may struggle to form positive relationships with others, including peers and adults.
• Impaired Cognitive Development: Unmet core needs can negatively impact a child's ability to learn, reason, and problem-solve, potentially leading to academic difficulties.
• Low Self-Esteem and Self-Worth: Children who do not receive consistent love, acceptance, and validation may struggle with feelings of low self-worth, which can impact their self-esteem, self-expression and sense of identity.
• Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prolonged exposure to unmet core needs can be traumatic for a child, potentially leading to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions.

Not experiencing what we need as a child is stressful and painful. When we are left alone as a child to process our feelings, it is overwhelming because our brain and nervous system is not fully developed, and we don't have the capacity to regulate our emotions on our own. We need the support and guidance of a caregiver to help us regulate our emotions and build a sense of safety and security. Without this support, we may develop maladaptive coping mechanisms and struggle with emotional regulation in the future.

Soul Fragmentation
This overwhelm causes a fragmentation of our Soul which leads to that part of us disconnecting from the body or dissociating in order to not feel the overwhelming feelings that were being experienced in the body. When this happens, it is like we lose a small part of ourself. The more we experience traumatic events or dynamics in our childhood, the more fragmented and disconnected we become and the more we lose touch with who we really are.

The Freeze Response - The Trauma Response
The reaction of disconnection or dissociation is a survival strategy by our nervous system and is known as the freeze response. We know about the freeze response and the dorsal vagal part of the parasympathetic nervous system thanks to the incredible work of Dr. Stephen Porges.

As an adult, this disconnection is felt as a disconnect within the self but it also overflows into our relationships with others, to life itself and with Spirit/Source/God. Although the disconnect served us as a child and allowed us to survive that stressful event/s, it now becomes limiting as an adult when we are attempting to experience love and relationship and expand into purpose and potential.

Stored, Repressed Emotion
Due to this disconnection of our body and the fact that we never had the support or personal capacity to process those emotions at that time, those overwhelming feelings were buried within our nervous system, fascia and tissues of the body.

That undigested, unprocessed emotional pain and the associated negative beliefs that are buried into the body and unconscious is what we end up accessing and releasing when connecting with our inner child.

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Manifestations of Stored Emotion
Unprocessed or overwhelming emotional experiences, especially during early development, can lead to persistent changes in the nervous system, including the way the brain processes and stores information, and how the body responds to stress.

These changes can manifest as bodily sensations and emotional pain that may become embedded in the neural networks, connective tissues, and physiological processes of the body. This unprocessed and unconscious material ends up driving so much of our adult reactions, triggers, feelings, choices, behaviours and mental and physical health issues.

Triggers 
If something in our adult life, reminds us even remotely of the original event/s, it will trigger the reaction of that Inner Child part, bringing to the surface the same feelings that we felt as a child in the original event/s. 

Even if as an adult we don’t consciously remember the traumatic event/s, our body does. Our nervous system is recording every moment of our life from conception and this implicit memory will often be a cause for our triggers as an adult. Trauma that results from these earlier times in our life that is pre-verbal is more of a felt sense in our body but will absolutely be determining how we filter the present moment as an adult.

Distorted Self-Image and World-View
Based upon our past experiences as a child, we will filter our adult experiences through the negative beliefs of the inner child. This causes a distortion in our self-identity and in how we see the world and causes us to react to life with the feelings held in our body until we resolve, process and digest that emotional content, dissolve those beliefs, see the truth through our adult perspective of that past situation, and restore safety back to our nervous system.

Time Does Not Heal The Inner Child
Therefore you can see that the fragmented and wounded inner child part, is still very much alive within our psyche as an adult, with the exact same overwhelming feelings it felt during that original event/s, as well as the same drive to have that need met. This is why as an adult, we can often react in immature ways, or feel like a little girl within a woman’s body, or a little boy within a Man’s body. It is the inner child part that you are feeling that is reacting to the present moment situation and brought to the surface.

Repeating Patterns
In addition, we will often choose similar experiences and relationships that we experienced in childhood because although it is dysfunctional, it is familiar, and familiar is safe. Part of inner child work is rewiring the nervous system so that what is unfamiliar, and truly safe, can feel safe in the body. This leads us to being able to tolerate new experiences, growth and expansion. 

I also want to mention how the unprocessed emotional content and connected belief system is contributing to what we attract. I feel this is important to mention because I have seen that after a client resolves the charge from their body and heals the inner child part, what they attract changes or at the very least their perspective is transformed and therefore their experience of life is completely different. This work is foundational to radically transforming our life.

We Attract The Frequency That We Are
From the perspective of the Law of Attraction, we attract not what we consciously want, but the frequency that we are. What contributes to our frequency more than our thoughts is our subconscious feelings and emotions. Therefore, we tend to attract similar dynamics to our unresolved past. Even if consciously we desire lets say, a loving relationship, if in our subconscious is the feeling frequency of abandonment, then that will be what we attract, until we heal that wound.

Life tends to keep giving us the same experience until we can see the mirror of our own unconscious self within it, and heal. I feel that this is how the Universe supports us to grow. We do not ever truly escape our past. We must at some point face all of ourself in order to truly evolve into our potential. This is the work of alchemising our past into the gold that awaits us. The true hero’s journey. 

Our inner child is often where our anxiety, insecurity, mistrust, unworthiness, fear, sadness, grief, anger, frustration, rage, patterns of shutting down and dissociation and mental health issues come from. Those were the feelings we felt as a child from not receiving what we needed and/or experiencing traumatic event/s. It is also often where our nervous system dysregulation and the resulting physical health issues stem from.

This is how our inner child holds us back as an adult. Our inner child is certainly not just a younger part of us that we visualise in our mind. Our unhealed inner child is weaved into our physical, mental and emotional systems and underlies so much of our physical health challenges, current belief systems, and emotional triggers. This is why transformational healing occurs within us and within our life as a result of working with the inner child.

Clearing The 'Deeper Blocks'
Our unhealed inner child is often what people refer to as a ‘deeper block’. You may consciously know what you want and be moving towards achieving this in your adult life, yet sabotaging yourself, procrastinating or simply feeling stuck to achieve this. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say as a child you experienced physical abuse from your Father and you witnessed the very stressful and painful relationship between your Mother and Father. As an adult, you have have struggled to have relationships with men but have really wonderful relationships with women. One day you meet a Man who seems really lovely, gentle, kind and caring, but at the start of this relationship, despite him presenting as a safe Male, strong emotions surface such as anxiety and mistrust and all you want to do is run away or break off the relationship. This would be your inner child surfacing who does not feel safe around Men.

In order for you to truly feel safe and be able to trust your new partner and receive love from him as well as give him love, you will need to heal your inner child first. Otherwise, you will forever have this inner conflict inside of you. One part of you wanting to be with him and knowing logically he is safe, and yet another part of you that shows up in your body as strong and often overwhelming feelings, impulses and behaviours, that wants to run. Even if logically you know he is safe, your body’s memory will always win as this was linked to your survival. This inner conflict is quite exhausting and makes it very difficult to move towards what we want or receive it.

Misattunement Creates Trauma
It is very important to note that it is not always outright abuse that causes us to have a wounded inner child. Often it is the innocent mistake of your parents who were not attuned to their own inner feelings, needs and bodily sensations and thus could not be attuned to yours, and so missed essential cues as to what you needed. Or perhaps due to their own stress or trauma, your parents were simply not capable of giving to you what you needed.

This misattunement is the most common form of inner child wounding and attachment trauma in the Western world. Your parents may have given you everything on the physical level including food, shelter, clothing, holidays and all the latest toys for birthdays and Christmas, yet on the inside you feel insecure, anxious, disconnected, and like you can't be your true self or you won't be loved; or some similar version to that. This is the result of misattunement. 

Cry It Out Method Creates a Freeze Response Pattern
I’ll use this example. If your parents used the ‘cry it out’ method when you were a baby, thinking that they were helping you to become resilient and be able to self-soothe, this in and of itself would have very likely created very deep trauma in your system. Babies cannot self-soothe. The ventral vagal part of our parasympathetic nervous system that allows us to self-regulate as an adult is not fully developed as a baby and therefore we do not have the capacity to self-soothe. Babies are only soothed through co-regulation with Mum or Dad but especially by their biological Mother as a newborn and infant. That means a regulated Mum or Dad holding the baby, rocking the baby, speaking softly and kindly to help shift it’s internal state to one of feeling safe and secure.

Therefore, a baby left to ‘cry it out’ experiences such heightened sympathetic stress levels that they are then forced to go into the freeze response. This freeze response means that the baby will stop crying, but not because it has self-soothed. It has stopped crying because physically it needed to do that in order to come back to homeostasis and prevent something dire from happening such as a heart attack. In the freeze response the baby disconnects from their body and becomes numb to it’s body in order to cope and prevent feeling the original stress. If this is a repeated occurrence, that baby’s nervous system learns to go into the freeze response and it becomes a life-long pattern and a way of dealing with stress. The emotional trauma also can leave very deep scars. That baby learns early on that when I am scared and experiencing overwhelming stress, no-one is there for me. This will affect in some way its ability to bond with its parents.

The nervous system goes into a helpless, hopeless state where a part of them literally gives up. As an adult, that inner child part may experience difficulty with relationships, insecurity and anxiety, trust issues, emotional dysregulation and even insomnia and sleep disorders, just to name a few. Because their foundation of safety isn’t there, much of life’s future stressors will become much harder to deal with as the foundation of safety is lacking and the inner child baby part wonders if it will survive.

Intergenerational Trauma Patterns Passed Down
That might be a more extreme example, but any level of misattunement and not meeting the child's need for co-regulation, may have effects on that child's nervous system and create fragmentation. 

Here is another example. Let's say Mum has her own trauma and isn't attuned to her own inner feelings or inner child. When you are experiencing negative emotions, stress or fear yourself as a child, and begin to express those feelings, your Mum will innocently parent you with the same disconnection patterns she has with her own Inner Child. She might tell you it's okay and not to cry. She might give you a dummy or try to feed you or distract you with a toy rather than holding space and hearing your feelings and helping you make sense of them with her loving regulated presence. 

Because she is uncomfortable with her own emotions, she will be uncomfortable with yours. This will give you the message that what you're feeling is not acceptable and you need to hide those feelings. You'll learn to repress those feelings in order to be accepted.

You won't be receiving that core need of being heard and seen or feeling safe to be all of who you are. As an adult, you'll feel that it's hard to get close to people and have a fear of people not liking you so you wear a mask in social situations and thus always tend to feel alone and unsupported despite having many friends. You might have anxiety and feel it's hard be your true self and this is exactly how your Mum feels. This is one example of how intergenerational trauma is passed down. 

Attunement = Co-Regulation = Secure Attachment
There is certainly a spectrum to how attuned our parents/caregivers were to us and typically the more attuned, the more co-regulation we receive, and the more co-regulation we receive, the more secure we felt as a child and thus adult. The less attuned, the more insecure we felt and the more wounding that leads to as an adult. 

Why Talk Therapy Isn't Enough and Somatic Therapy Is Needed
The good news however is that all of this can be healed. 

Due to all I’ve mentioned above in relation to unprocessed emotional content being held in the body and the resulting nervous system adaptations, talk therapy will not be enough to resolve the trauma and wounding held within our inner child. It is only through working somatically, meaning working with the body, can we access the deeply buried and usually subconscious material, for it to then be processed and resolved.

Book a Somatic Healing Session now to begin your Inner Child Healing Journey

In addition to that, often to completely resolve the trauma, we also need to rewire any dysregulation that stemmed from our inner child trauma and wire any insecure attachment patterns back to an inner sense of security. This ensures a deeply regulated nervous system. All of this does take time, months if not years so patience and dedication to your healing journey is required. 

Therefore working somatically is absolutely key to healing our inner child and rewiring that part of us from survival to safety. If we are visualising our inner child only, that way of working with our inner child will be surface level only and not enough to release the stored survival stress from within the body and restore regulation to the nervous system. I’ll speak more about the process of healing the inner child in Part 3 of this article.

So in summary, as you can see, the inner child is not actually something of the past. It is showing up in the present as our adult feelings, beliefs, emotions, triggers, reactions, choices, behaviours, mental, emotional and physical health issues which is all part of nervous system dysregulation.

No matter what our inner child wounding is, resolving our inner child trauma is the only way of moving forward in life so that as an adult we can achieve wholeness and move beyond our survival wiring and into foundations of inner safety and security and self-worth. Only then can we truly thrive as a happy, whole and healthy adult, experiencing healthy loving relationships and living our highest destiny.

Part 2 of this article will go into detail about the challenges faced when doing Inner Child Work.