Inner Child Therapy

Many clients struggle to understand why they feel fine one moment and get really upset the next. This may be explained as them having an adult in a wounded child. The adult is a metaphor for the part of the brain that is rational, lives in the present moment and sees things as they are right here and now. 

Whilst the wounded child is a metaphor for the part of the brain, the unconscious that contains the unhealed emotional wounds from childhood and sees the present as the past. 

Significant unhealed childhood wounds fester in the background until the stimulus in the present brushes up against them releasing a flood of repressed emotional pain that instantly turns your rational adult into an intentionally emotionally and irrational wounded child........  As Emilie Coue mentioned: Every time your emotional mind is in conflict with your rational mind, the emotional mind will always win.

Re-parenting your Inner Child therefore means learning to love, nurture, protect and set healthy limits with your Wounded Child/Emotional Self to be able to get the Adult Part/Self (Rational Brain) back in charge.

Examples of What your Adult Part won’t do is:

• Your adult is never going to be the one who has a temper tantrum at work because something didn’t go their way.
• Your adult is never going to be the gossip or talk behind another’s back to be hurtful.
• Your adult will not engage in drama of any sort.
• Your adult is never going to experience flight or fight.
• Your adult is never going to spend all of your money.

Examples of What your Inner Child Part can do when it is trying to be an adult:

• Choose to buy a new dress instead of paying the rent.
• Had road rage with driver because they cut you up in the traffic.
• Shouting at the children for spilling a drink on the floor.

Therefore thinking about your childhood,.. what might have been different for you if you always had a person there that you could have turned to during times of emotional crisis and offered you nurturing and emotional support, validation, acknowledgement, understanding, trustworthiness and respect of what you were going through and feeling at that time.... someone who was empathetic and compassionate and could have given you a different perspective that it wasn't your fault what was happening around you and that those negative self-limiting beliefs you created and internalised for yourself at that time were not true....... that's what it can feel like to have your adult self looking after your inner child and inner world.

It's not about blaming your parents / caregivers, its about understanding that they may have had their own psychological issues to deal with that meant they could only parent you in the way that they were parented.  

By working together you can learn to start recognising who is responding:

• Is it your inner child part/self (emotional brain)?
• Is it your adult part/self (rational brain)?
• Does your inner child part/self need to release the responsibility of being the adult and to hand it over to your adult part/self?