Inner Child Therapy: What It Is & How It Heals Emotional Wounds

Introduction:

Hi there, thank you for joining me.

I’m Rowenna, and I’m a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and Inner Child Therapist based in London UK.

In this short video, I’m going to explain a bit about what an inner child is, and how this kind of therapy can help heal unresolved childhood emotional wounds.

Many people come to me when they’re experiencing insecurity or low self-worth issues, feeling less than others, having difficulties connecting, or afraid that people will leave them.

Sometimes they tell me they feel overwhelmed by emotions like anxiety or panic, shame, anger or even feeling stuck and struggling to understand why.

So let’s take a look at where these issues come from, and how inner child work and hypnotherapy can help.

What is the inner child?

So what is an inner child?

We can think of inner children as internal representation of childhood experiences that still carry strong emotions.

These can be memories of times when you felt rejected or abandoned by a parent, shamed or made fun of, scorned or raged at, ignored and neglected, or any other emotional experience that left you feeling hurt by your caregivers.

When you get triggered by a situation or emotional experience in later life, your nervous system responds in the way it did in those early life experiences.

In those moments, you might not know this is what is happening but you can feel like you’ve gone back to being a scared, vulnerable little child.

What is an emotional wound?

These imprints on your memory and nervous system are what we call emotional injuries, and they are like emotional scars that are formed during childhood.

They are usually the result of frequent or unrepaired emotional experiences that were overwhelming, confusing or hurtful to us as children.

These can be experiences of physical or emotional abandonment or rejection.

Toxic rage, uncontrolled anger or physical abuse towards the child or any other family member.

Shaming or scape-goating the child – making them feel like they are the problem.

Parents who are preoccupied with stress or worries.

Addictions or other mental health issues in the family.

Or parents who are overwhelmed and unable to be present with the child.

How emotional injuries show up

These emotional scars store painful beliefs and emotions that were formed in those moments, like – I’m no good/bad, I don’t matter, I’m not wanted or I’m all alone.

It can be really painful when these core wounds get triggered. You can spiral into terrible feelings of shame, unworthiness, panic or even feeling like you’re going to die when these child parts get triggered.

What triggering can look like

Your reactions in these moments can look like:

Shutting down or unable to express your needs and emotions.

Spiralling into panic, overwhelm or anxiousness.

Angry outbursts or fits of rage.

An inability to control your emotions, maybe you break down in tears when you need to assert yourself or ask for something you need.

Intense feelings of shame or rejection sensitivity that can come up in relationships, around colleagues or in social groups.

Fawning responses

Or you might go into people pleasing, pretending that everything is ok when your boundaries have been crossed, or being needless and wantless to avoid conflict.

Or you might be the over-doer or over-giver, you might sacrifice your own needs to make people like you or want to stick around.

You might have a tendency to mask your emotions, believing that its not safe to be vulnerable or afraid that if you show how you really feel that people will leave you.

This is a kind of shape shifting to try and be what you think others want you to be, and it can leave you feeling like a fraud or like you don’t even know who you really are.

Types of emotional injury

If you had parents who were particularly shaming, angry all the time, abusive, or neglectful, you may have come to expect negative responses from your parents even when you had basic needs.

You may have been afraid that you’d get punished for having an accident.

Or worried that if you have a need you’ll be told to “stop bothering them” if this was a common response.

If your parents were quite unpredictable you may have learned to withdraw or learn to stay out of the way so you didn’t get in trouble.

You may have developed a strategy of telling lies to avoid a beating, or you might have develop anxiety or panic disorders if your parents were extremely abusive or scary.

And of course this affects your attachment style and how you feel, behave and communicate in relationships.

Family roles as a survival mechanism

One strategy that children learn to cope with these experiences, is by taking on a family role.

You could have been the helper or hero child, believing that if you could just do more to help out, fix things or take care of your parents that everything will be okay.

Or, maybe you were the entertainer, the one who tried to make everyone laugh to distract them from being angry, or to get noticed.

Children who are scape-goated, often end up believing that they are bad and act out, trying to express the family’s pain in their own behaviour.

Or you could have been the lost child, the one who fades into the background, feeling like their needs are a burden, or that it’s not safe to be seen or heard.

The wounded inner child

So all of these experiences and strategies are what turn into wounded inner children.

These parts of you often feel fearful, insecure, needy, bad or defective and have deep emotional pain at their core.

They get activated later in life when we experience painful emotions such as rejection, during conflict or when we’ve done something that we perceive as bad, wrong or shameful.

The adapted child

Then, there’s the second type of inner child which we call the adapted child.

These are the parts of you that learned strategies to cope with those painful experiences in childhood, and they often feel angry, defensive or shameful, and can act out by being manipulative, naughty/rebellious.

They are usually untrusting, closed off, dismissive or can come across as good and perfect, but hold a lot of resentment and have difficulty connecting with themselves or others.

They get activated when we feel hurt, unsafe/vulnerable, attacked, shamed, let down, angry, disappointed or have unexpressed needs.

What happens when triggered

And so here is what this can look like when these parts get triggered:

You feel rejected or hurt by someone you love, and your wounded inner child gets activated, leaving you feeling like no one cares about you, you’re all alone and unloved.

Then, an adapted child part that learned to push pain away with anger might reacts by attacking that wounded inner child.

Maybe you’ve experienced this, if you’ve felt hurt and found yourself feeling shameful and saying things to yourself such as “what’s wrong with me”, “why am I so useless” or “no wonder nobody wants me”. It could be that your inner child parts have been triggered and you are going into an adapted child response.

Or sometimes another adapted part might take over, deciding that “if I turn the anger onto other people, then no one can hurt me”.

When this happens you can do and say things that you later regret. You can explode in rage to someone you love, or say cruel and hurtful things that make you feel terrible later.

The teenager

Then there’s the teenage part, also known as the adapted adult-child, which often responds when triggered with this kind of screw you attitude.

When this part is activated you might resonate with feeling like you hate everyone, thinking things like “I don’t need you anyway”.

You might even indulge in destructive or addictive behaviour when this part gets triggered, in an attempt to numb out pain or get a need met.

The Good and perfect adapted child

Or maybe you have a core wound of being unwanted or unlovable that gets triggered, and your adapted child goes into people pleasing.

When this happens you can feel extremely anxious and spend all of your time thinking about how to keep the other person happy or make them want to stick around.

If you have the good and perfect teenager, you might completely abandon your own needs and boundaries, accepting poor behaviour and ignoring red flags just so you don’t have to be alone or face conflict.

How Inner Child Therapy helps:

So how do we heal these emotional wounds and not get triggered by them so much?

Well, this is how inner child hypnotherapy can help.

Developing a loving inner parent

One of the things we need to develop is a sense of a nurturing and loving inner parent.

One of the problems when we get triggered into our child parts is that we lose connection with our adult self.

The inner child can feel like they are alone, out of control or unable to cope.

Lets face it, in those moments when your child parts get triggered, it’s like there’s no room for the adult to stay onboard, and this means that the child parts of you often don’t even believe you have an adult in there.

Some child parts think you’ve been faking it at adulthood all along and that one more rejection or knock to your confidence could expose you or bring the whole house of card crashing down.

So by creating a sense of an inner parent that can support the inner children, these parts of you can feel safer inside.

We can’t change the past or how we were treated by our own parents, but we can change how we treat and speak to ourselves.

By developing a stronger, more loving inner parent, we can reparent and esteem these inner child parts in ways they didn’t receive in childhood.

A nurturing inner voice

This results in a healthier inner voice, that responds to painful thoughts and experiences in the way a loving parent would, by encouraging, soothing and affirming the child.

What healing looks like

With enough healing work, we begin to see ourselves and the world differently.

We become more comfortable with who we are.

Feel safer inside ourselves and that we can meet our own needs.

Have better boundaries.

Deeper and healthier relationships.

And a kinder, more loving self-talk when things go wrong.

What to expect in therapy

We do this in therapy by:

Using guided visualisation to connect with and explore the emotions of inner child parts.

Developing a therapeutic relationship that helps model healthy attachment.

Communicating with inner child parts regularly, both inside and outside of the therapy room, learning to identify their needs and how they show up in your life.

Meeting internal unmet needs, helping your nervous system learn to regulate through difficult emotions so that you can feel safer and more resilient inside.

Rewiring and updating old beliefs and behaviours that no longer serve you. Helping your child parts to see that they are safe with you now, in the present, and no longer trapped in the past.

Book a free consultation with me

So if any of this resonates with you or if you’d like to explore how we could work together, you can book a free 30-minute call with me where we can discuss your needs and see if we’re a good fit.

You can also find lots of information on my website about my session fees and packages, and the different issues I help people with.

I hope you’ve found this short intro to inner child work helpful, and I look forward to connecting with you soon.