Inner Child Healing: How to Heal From Childhood Trauma

Last Updated on March 9, 2024

This post contains affiliate links. Click here to read the full disclosure.

---

The inner child is your joyful, emotional, vulnerable, playful, expressional, and sensitive side. It all depends on your mood and energy level. You might see this inner child as a direct representative of your childhood.

Psychologists claim that the inner child is the human childlike attitude. It covers everything you experienced and learned before puberty and is usually happy, joyful, and adventurous but if you were neglected or traumatized in your childhood, your inner child may be small, vulnerable, and in need of protection. It’s possible you have buried this pain deeply to protect yourself. Both in the person you have become and the child you once were.

In today’s post, you’ll learn about inner child healing, including who will benefit from it, how to discover your inner child, and how to begin healing with 3 powerful exercises.

Who Will Benefit From Inner Child Healing?

Inner child work can help you resolve childhood emotions, memories, and traumas that you still hold inside.

If you are ignoring the emotions and memories of your childhood, you are allowing yourself to live in the pain of the past. You might not always feel this pain, but it can develop into issues you are struggling with today.

If you are struggling with anything mentioned on the list below, you will benefit from inner child healing:

• Childhood abuse – (emotional, sexual, or physical abuse)
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Borderline personality disorder
• Anger management problems
• Passive-aggressive behavior
• Low self-esteem
• Abandonment issues
• Self-sabotage
• Self-criticism
• Relationship difficulties
• Codependency

See also: How to heal from trauma

How to Discover Your Inner Child

Discovering your inner child is necessary before you can start healing it. Here is a little guide you can use:

1. Stop Restricting Your Reactions

Can you remember how impulsive you used to be as a child? Try to compare that to how impulsive you are now as an adult.

Instead of ignoring your impulses, listen to the little voice telling you to try something new.

2. Use Your Imagination

Use your imagination, both in your actions and thinking. You also have to find creative activities that can stimulate your imagination. That can for example be baking, painting, playing music, or even just going for a walk.

3. Find Something to Smile About

Look for activities to make your life more fun and exciting. That can be playing with children, listening to your favorite music, watching a funny movie, or doing anything you enjoy.

4. Use Your Senses

Try to recall how bright the world used to seem. Take a look around you, and truly see what’s out there.

That means you should take some time to appreciate the colors and smells of things around you. You also need to enjoy different sounds, foods, fabrics, and more.

Through these simple steps, you can begin to discover your inner child. If you discover that your inner child has been hurt by past experiences, it’s important to take some time to heal.

How to Heal Your Inner Child

The pain you are carrying from your childhood may develop over time. You might become an emotionally sensitive and dysfunctional adult. This is why you must search in your past to be able to start healing. If not, you won’t be able to heal your inner child and all the issues it has brought you.

Healing your inner child is something that takes time and patience. Here are four necessary stages you have to go through in the healing process:

1. Develop Trust

To start healing your inner child, you must first build trust. This means that it has to trust you. It should understand that you are there to both protect and nurture it.

2. Embrace the Pain

Secondly, you must help your inner child fight and move on. Try to understand the pain of it and learn to embrace it.

After truly embracing the pain of your inner child, you will be able to take the next step in your healing journey.

3. Forgive

Although it is natural to be angry, doesn’t mean you have to be heated all the time. It’s especially bad for you to hold onto grudges.

Through forgiveness, you will have the opportunity to heal your inner child. Forgiveness requires you to love and care for other people.

See also: How to forgive yourself for past mistakes

4. Drive Away the Guilt

It’s important to make sure your inner child feels accepted and recognizes its true self. You must help it eliminate the guilt and shame it’s been storing for so long.

Inner Child Work

The purpose of inner child work is to resolve and heal the emotions and trauma hidden within you from your childhood. Integrating this type of work into your daily life is an important factor in the healing process.

Below are three powerful ways to perform inner child work:

Inner Child Journaling

Journaling from the perspective of your inner child is a great coping strategy. It helps you resolve challenging or confusing experiences from your childhood. As well as recognize unhealthy patterns in your life that started in your childhood.

Start by channeling your inner child, looking at a picture of yourself from the specific age you are trying to recall. Once you feel ready, start to write about a few memories and how they made you feel. Try not to think so much about what you are writing, just write down whatever pops into your mind. This is a method that helps you reach the heart of your inner child’s pain.

Finding some journal prompts can also be very helpful, as you’ll get all the right questions that you must ask yourself to progress. That’s why I created a printable inner child healing journal with 40 powerful prompts. The questions you’ll find there are crucial to uncovering childhood trauma that needs healing. Get yours here!

---

---

See also: Journaling for healing inner child healing

Inner Child Healing Meditation

Through meditation, you have the opportunity to open yourself up to answers. Meditation helps you develop self-awareness and get more comfortable with unwanted emotions.

All of our emotions, both negative and positive are meant to be expressed and experienced. However, children usually have a harder time naming their uncomfortable emotions. They may bury or repress those feelings to get praise, avoid punishment, or maintain control. These repressed emotions usually show up later in life, usually in a negative or harmful way.

Meditation helps you feel and accept emotions as they come, which makes it easier to express them healthily. This sends a message to your inner child that is okay to feel unwanted emotions and let them out.

Inner Child Healing Affirmations

Daily positive affirmations are the key to healing because they affirm your worthiness, make you feel safe, and give you confidence.

Repeating daily affirmations helps you love, nurture, and heal your inner child. Some examples of inner child affirmations include:

• I love my inner child unconditionally.
• I trust my inner child.
• I listen to my inner child’s needs.
• I am grateful that I reconnected with my inner child.
• I give myself time to heal my inner child.
• My childhood does not define me.
• I am thankful for all the help my inner child has given me.

See also: 30 Affirmations for inner child healing

Inner Child Healing Workbooks

If you enjoyed this post on inner child healing, I would be very grateful if you spread the word by sharing it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest! Thank you!❤️

📌 PIN THIS POST FOR LATER

---