Inner Child Healing - Does It Work?
I wasn’t sure at first, either.
I was on The Adult Chair podcast last week to discuss my experience with inner child work (Is there a better word than work?) with Michelle Chalfant.
You can hear my story and that of two other coaches - Rebecca Fellenbaum and Jill Vyn, here.
Fifteen years ago, everything in my life was blowing up all at once. A crumbling marriage. Lost money. A failed business. I was in a therapy intensive, my second round within five years.
“Do you know about inner child work?” my therapist asked one day. No, I didn't. And after her brief explanation, I wasn’t quite convinced it was even a thing - at least, not for me.
Still, she kept bringing it up. "What does your little girl think about this?" she'd ask.
Yeah, I don’t know, I’d tell her. And I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. It seemed weird. Plus, I have real problems; I thought, why are you bothering me with all this inner child crap?
What I didn’t know was that my therapist was trying to steer me in the direction of my emotions and feelings. She knew I would need to draw upon them to make some critical decisions down the road.
I couldn’t tell, but she could tell I had very little access to how I was actually feeling about the situations and people around me and that I would need to understand myself better if I was to make decisions that were truly in my best interest.
Back then, I couldn’t tell you how I felt about much - how the people and situations around me were impacting me. I could tell you what I thought about all of these things, but not how I felt about them and how they impacted me. There’s a big difference.
Then, I had a transformative experience.
A little girl, about four or five: She was in the back seat of a car with me. Wrapped up in seat belts. Chained. Unable to move or speak.
And that one experience opened me up to the idea of working with my inner child.
A lot has changed since then, in me and my life. Today, I continue working with those young parts and am learning to love them and, thus, myself.
So, what even is it?
The Adult Chair Model
In the Adult Chair model (where I am trained) and many therapy modalities, there are three main parts of your psyche: The Child, The Adolescent, and The Adult, or your fully actualized self. Not everyone refers to it in these terms, but we’ll use these for our purposes.
Your child-self holds the key to your emotions, creativity, passion, trust, connection, and so on.
This part of you develops between birth and about age 7. It’s the source of your deepest connection (with others and self) and can also be the place of your deepest wounding since this part of you is so open and vulnerable.
Since this wounding happens when you’re very young, you likely don’t have the tools, resources, and support to fully process pain and trauma, so a small part of you shuts down or uses other coping mechanisms (like making up stories) to avoid pain and also survive.
This serves you well at the time - it keeps you alive and functioning. It works until it doesn’t.
In your adult life, these wounded parts show up in several ways. Triggers, negative beliefs about yourself, etc. that cause situations that don’t serve you or your higher self well when you’re an adult.
The problem is you live your life through the lens of that childhood wounding until you go back and clean it up. If you don’t, it will keep showing up (in different ways) over and over until you deal with it. This happens to everyone - no one is immune. It’s a part of life.
Healing the wounding of your inner child is essential to operating in your ‘best self’ as an adult.
So, what happened once I could access my feelings for the first time in a long time, or maybe ever?
Joy. Anger. Disappointment.
I felt emotions I didn't know were there and didn’t know I had.
The most profound realization was that I'd been numbing myself for years. Drinking. Eating. Shopping. Anything to avoid feeling. I called myself, an equal opportunity medicator. That’s part of what was keeping that little girl silent.
Once I became aware, I made a big decision. I got sober and became active and intentional (and honest) about other ways I was numbing. Without the numbing, I began to understand how the life around me was having an impact, which led me to better understand what it was I wanted out of life.
I started to realize my own worth.
Now, when something feels off, I check in with my inner child, sometimes through journaling, sometimes just a quiet moment of reflection.
"What do you need right now?" I ask.
Fair Warning
The healing isn't linear. It's messy and weird. Sometimes, the biggest changes come from unexpected places.
Looking back, I'm amazed at how far I've come. From the woman who thought this was all "a bunch of crap" to someone who's found profound healing.
Michelle’s launching a new course, Deepening the Connection with Your Inner Child, if you’re interested in learning more.
