Inner Child Therapy with Rowenna

UK and Worldwide Online

Inner child therapy is a powerful way 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, which represents a childhood experience that shaped how you feel about yourself and the world.

We all have inner children, and when they are “triggered”, we can be emotionally hijacked by these “parts”. This can cause us to think and feel in similar ways 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 certain 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, focusses on healing these subconscious “parts” of the self, and reduce 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 and not always from obvious failings in parenting such as 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 in the world.

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 in 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 your 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.

Some examples of extreme attachment injuries include:

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
Parents or siblings with severe mental health issues such schizophrenia, untreated personality disorders, prolonged clinical depression, extreme OCD, eating disorders etc.

Some examples of more common/subtle forms of attachment injury can include:

Divorce/separation or breakdown of the primary relationship
Emotionally avoidant parent/s lacking ability to show affection or express feelings and emotions
Parents with mild to moderate mental health struggles (especially if untreated and prolonged) such as generalised anxiety, depression, OCD etc.
Over-protective, overbearing/controlling or over-esteeming parent/s
Criticising, emotionally rejecting, harsh or scapegoating parents
Parents using emotional manipulation, neediness, 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

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.

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 other’s boundaries)
Issues of reality (difficulty owning our reality, seeing the self as bad, ugly, unloveable, or good and perfect)
Dependency issues (too needy, needless and 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 the self
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

You can learn more about Pia Mellody, and the PIT model here.

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. Healing in connection with others can be very powerful and is a great way to build new, healthy connections with others. It can also help us to learn relationship building and communication skills for life. Which is something that those of us with attachment wounding can really struggle with.

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.