Inner Child Therapy with Rowenna
Inner Child Therapy in London and Online
DO YOU FIND YOURSELF...
You're not broken!! You're simply responding to old wounds that need healing...
Inner Child Therapy could help you if you identify with any of the above. Book a free consultation with me to discuss how this powerful therapy can help you change old patterns for good!
Book a Free ConsultationHave you noticed these patterns in your life?
In Your Relationships:
- You feel anxious when someone doesn’t text back immediately
- You’re attracted to partners who are emotionally unavailable
- You people-please until you’re exhausted, then feel resentful
Throughout Your Daily Life:
- Criticism feels like a personal attack, even when it’s constructive
- You swing between feeling “not good enough” and having to be perfect
- You struggle to set boundaries without feeling guilty
Inside Your Mind
- There’s a harsh inner critic that sounds suspiciously like a parent
- You feel like you’re “too much” or “not enough” – sometimes both
- You know you’re overreacting but can’t seem to stop
These aren't character flaws. They're signs of inner child wounds.
When we experience attachment injuries in childhood – whether from obvious trauma or subtle emotional neglect – part of us gets stuck at that age. These “inner children” still react as if they’re in danger, even when our adult life is safe.
The good news? With the right support, these patterns can change!
Your Inner Child Is In There – Waiting For You To Notice Them
Inner child therapy allows you to connect with and heal emotional triggers and attachment issues caused by challenging early life experiences. An inner child is a subconscious “part” of you, representing a childhood experience shaping how you feel about yourself and the world.
We all have inner children. When they are “triggered”, we can be emotionally hijacked by these “parts”. This can cause us to think and feel similarly to how we did when these significant events happened to us in childhood.
If you struggle with low self-esteem, feel anxious or avoidant in relationships, or feel like you react irrationally to some situations, you might have some inner child wounds.
As an Inner Child Therapist, I focus on helping my clients heal these childhood triggers and develop an ability to self-regulate emotions and nervous system responses.
What is Inner Child Therapy?
Inner child therapy focuses on healing these subconscious “parts” of the self and reducing the impact of emotional triggers and attachment issues. These triggers are usually the result of experiences in childhood that have emotionally harmed us. We call these emotional wounds “attachment injuries”.
Attachment injuries can come in many forms. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t always from evident failings in parenting like direct abuse and neglect. Sometimes our parents’ own struggles and anxieties can affect us enough to cause our nervous system to go into a state of overwhelm, resulting in an attachment injury.
As we grow in childhood, we develop an internal model of our parents, which we rely on to guide us as we become more independent. If you grew up with parents who were preoccupied with their own struggles or needs, or were criticising, abusive, or neglecting, then you may have developed an internal model of parents that treat you in the same ways.
This can lead to negative self-talk, low self-esteem, struggles with identity, and an inability to create and maintain healthy relationships. It can also lead to addictions and a whole host of other mental health issues.
I work with people all over the UK and online to help them develop a new, healthy internal model of a loving parent who can show up and support their inner children.
What is an Attachment Injury?
Before we developed more of an understanding of trauma, most specialists believed that only overt forms of abuse, natural disasters, war, crime and terrorism contributed to trauma and PTSD.
Thanks to the work of many forward thinking specialists such as Pia Mellody, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Gabor Matè, and others, we now know that attachment trauma can have just as harmful an impact on the nervous system.
Attachment trauma can come in many forms. It is characterised by consistent or prolonged disruption to feelings of safety with one or more primary care givers. This can be for any reason, and is not only limited to overt cruelty and abuse.
Pia Mellody, suggests that regular exposure to behaviour, language, information or overwhelming experiences, can be harmful to a child’s development. This can also include unintentionally damaging situations. In most cases, the severity of the attachment injury (also known as the core wound) will determine the intensity of the symptoms later in life.
If prolonged, this type of attachment wounding can lead to developmental immaturity issues and sometimes mental health challenges. It can also result in difficulties self-regulating our emotions, forming and maintaining relationships in later life.
Extreme attachment injuries:
- Physical abuse including violence, sexual abuse, aggressive or threatening behaviour (whether witnessed or subjected to)
- Neglectful or abandoning parents
- One or both parents addicted to drugs or alcohol
- Parent/s that have been incarcerated
- Death, suicide or attempted in the family
- Controlling, manipulating, gaslighting the child
- Forced labour or forcing to do tasks that are unmanageable for a child
- Restricting access to food, hygiene and/or basic needs
- Withholding visiting rights from another parent or family member
- Parents or siblings with severe or mental health issues
Other types of attachment injuries:
- Divorce/separation
- Financial instability/poverty
- Emotionally avoidant parent/s
- Leaning on the child for emotional support
- Parents with mild to moderate mental health struggles
- Over-protective, overbearing or over-esteeming parent/s
- Criticising, emotionally rejecting, harsh parents
- Emotional manipulation, parentifying or adultifying the child (such as confiding in the child, oversharing, using the child for emotional support etc.)
- Using the child to manipulate other family members or organisations
- Using faith, education or status to shame or induce fear in the child
What are the Symptoms of Childhood Attachment Wounding?
The symptoms one can experience from childhood attachment wounding can vary and can affect us in all areas of life. According to the PIT model, these issues can include:
- Less than or better than self-esteem (the latter taking the form of grandiosity or even narcissistic personality disorder in the extreme)
- Boundary issues (unable to set and maintain healthy boundaries or overstepping others’ boundaries)
- Issues of reality (difficulty owning our reality, seeing the self as bad, ugly, unlovable, or good and perfect)
- Dependency issues (too needy, needless, wantless, people pleasing, or anti-dependent)
- Moderation and containment issues (out of control, emotionally manipulative, over-contained/walled off, or controlling of others)
This can all lead to a range of symptoms, including:
- Low self-esteem, feeling defective, broken, or bad
- Resentment and raging issues
- Negative control issues
- Addictions, mental and physical health problems
- Fear of intimacy
- Enmeshment and avoidance issues
- Dishonesty
- Problems making decisions and taking care of oneself
- Feeling disconnected from the self and others, a low sense of purpose, and feelings of not belonging
- Intensity issues such as social anxiety, phobias, rejection hypersensitivity, and more
How Inner Child Therapy Can Help
Inner child therapy works by supporting the person to reparent and heal their inner child selves. By developing your own inner loving parent, you can step in and nurture your inner children in ways that the primary caregivers were unable to for whatever reason.
Within a safe and supportive environment to revisit painful feelings and emotions, it is possible to heal emotional scars on the psyche and nervous system. It’s not always necessary to go over painful memories, which means we don’t have to relive memories that can re-traumatising.
Learning to esteem our younger parts and becoming our own internal parent/s, gives us the ability to recognise and regulate our triggers. With enough healing work, you can approach yourself with more compassion, self-love and acceptance. You can let go of shame and fear of abandonment, begin to trust others, and develop healthy and meaningful relationships.
Inner Child Therapy Can Help You To:
- Develop healthy self-esteem and self-love
- Let go of toxic relationship patterns
- Build healthy boundaries and impulse control
- Learn to self-regulate when experiencing difficult emotions
- Overcome addictions and addictive behaviours
- Become better at understanding and communicating your emotions and speaking your truth
- Develop self-care routines that stick
- Build and maintain healthy relationships
How You Can Work With Me
I currently offer Inner Child Therapy and Cognitive Hypnotherapy combined, working online. I offer a range of options to suit different needs and budgets. You can see all of my packages and fees here.
No matter where you are at in life, inner child work can help you to heal the past and begin living more in the present. When you develop a deeper connection with yourself and heal childhood wounds, you can feel freer inside and start showing up as your most authentic self. And everyone deserves to feel happy and whole.
I also offer group courses where you can work alongside other people on a journey to heal their inner children.
You can find out more about my “How to Heal Your Inner Child” course here or by following the link below.
If you’d like to discuss how I can help you with inner child therapy, you can book a free consultation below. I work with people of all ages, genders and backgrounds, and it’s never too late to reach out for support.
How to Heal Your Inner Child, a 6 Week Live Online Course
Find out more about my How to Heal Your Inner Child course here. Join a group of others on a life changing journey to heal and reparent their inner children, build your self-esteem and start living life as your most authentic self.
