Finding and Healing Our Inner Child
Do you ever find yourself reacting to certain situations in a way that feels overwhelming or outsized? In these circumstances, no matter how extreme the feeling, have you felt emotionally justified? Do you find yourself yearning for others to reassure you amidst this feeling or insist that someone else act in a particular way that will relieve your activated emotions? Do you ever get teary-eyed or tender when you think of yourself when you were a child, or see an adorable picture of you when you were a kid?
If so, you may have just uncovered your wounded inner child.
What Is the Wounded Inner Child?
Introduced by Carl Jung, the wounded inner child archetype represents the vulnerable, often traumatized part of the self that carries unresolved pain from childhood that often manifests in a myriad of ways in our adult lives.
The wounded inner child is a therapeutic channel to conceptualize and access the emotionality of a younger you, who may have struggled in reaction to unmet needs.
Can You Have a Wounded Inner Child Even if You Had a Good Childhood?
These unfulfilled needs may have emerged in response to traumatic childhood experiences, or, conversely, in reaction to seemingly banal, subtle, internalized moments of pain during childhood (i.e. rejection, punishment, or feeling “bad” or misunderstood, etc.) All this to say, the wounded inner child can develop even if our parent(s) were phenomenal caretakers and did their best, as it’s one way for the psyche to organize formative, negative experiences, no matter how extreme or trivial.
How Does the Inner Child Show Up in Adulthood?
When triggered as an adult, our unresolved, inner child wounds may reopen or reactivate, causing out-of-proportion responses or behaviors. For instance, you’re furious or livid when several hours have passed before your partner texts you back. When they come home you retaliate by giving them the silent treatment or conveying your outrage in a passive aggressive manner such as avoiding eye contact or “assertively” unloading the dishwasher. When your partner explains their reasonable cause for the delayed response, a fight breaks out where you angrily share that you felt forgotten and deprioritized. Your partner reacts to your angry tone by getting angry themselves until the altercation escalates.
In this example, perhaps your wounded inner child was triggered by severe and familiar feelings of abandonment. When your partner did not return your bid for connection promptly or with a sense of urgency, you may have felt the pangs of devastating detachment and internalized inadequacy–feelings a younger you may have struggled with during childhood. Maybe your parent was rarely present due to work or addiction? Maybe your friend group ostracized you in middle school for wearing the wrong color shoes? Whatever the reason, your wounded inner child may still feel this pain, provoked time and time again throughout various everyday situations that evoke a similar and familiar feeling to the core wound in childhood.
Why Do We Learn to Bury the Inner Child’s Pain?
To survive, most of us learned to bury these feelings or “just get over it” in order to move forward. Some of us may have developed protector parts to compensate for the inner child’s pain. For example, if one’s inner child was bullied and felt small and insignificant growing up, they might have then developed a tough, unforgiving part of the Self who stands up to injustice and protects other vulnerable people from danger in adulthood. Whatever the case, internal coping mechanisms were most likely established to navigate the inner child’s pain and to avoid further affliction.
Why Is It Important to Reconnect With the Inner Child?
However, in doing so, counterintuitively, we create a great deal of distance from our inner child’s emotional experience, leaving them to feel even more unresolved and unheard, exacerbating the pain.
How Do You Heal the Wounded Inner Child?
In order to heal this inner child’s pain, we must unlearn our various emotional survival skills/defense mechanisms (i.e. suppression, intellectualization, denial, etc.) and reconnect with this young, wounded part of us. Often, the inner child’s pain stems from caretakers misattuning to their emotional needs during childhood. When we defend against our inner child’s pain in adulthood, we repeat the same misattunement we experienced as a child, causing deeper detachment and emotional self-abandonment.
The inner child yearns to be acknowledged, heard, and nurtured (not suppressed, ignored, or siphoned off). And while we had valid reasons for the ways we coped with these painful feelings and experiences, we must make our way back to our wounded inner child and show them the love and attention they crave. We must allow them to cry in our arms, as we longed for from our caretakers in childhood. We are now our inner child’s caretaker and we must hear them, sit with them, and validate their feelings in order for them to finally heal.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to heal your wounded inner child, reach out to our Client Care Coordinator today to find a therapist who can help guide you back to you.
Warmly,
Ali Eagle, AMFT