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Caring for our mental health is more essential than ever before. The way we treat our bodies, how and with whom we spend our time, and what thoughts take center stage in our minds are vital. In the monthly Shondaland series A Path to Well-Being, we’re sharing science and strategies to help you better understand and manage your well-being. Remember when you were a little kid and loved to hula-hoop or play with Hot Wheels? How you were always climbing trees, riding your bike, and performing skits with your Barbies and G.I. Joes?.….Continue reading…
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In some schools of popular psychology and analytical psychology, the inner child is an individual’s childlike aspect. It includes what a person learned as a child before puberty. The inner child is often conceived as a semi-independent subpersonality subordinate to the waking conscious mind. The term has therapeutic applications in counseling and health settings. The concept became known to a broader audience through books by John Bradshaw and others.
One method of reparenting the inner child in therapy was originated by art therapist Lucia Capacchione in 1976 and documented in her book Recovery of Your Inner Child (1991). Using art therapy and journaling techniques, her method includes a “nurturing parent” and “protective parent” within “inner family work” to care for a person’s physical, emotional, creative and spiritual needs (her definition of the inner child).
It also posits a “critical parent within” and provides tools for managing it. Charles L. Whitfield dubbed the inner child the “child within” in his book Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (1987). Penny Park’s book Rescuing the Inner Child (1990) provided a program for contacting and recovering the inner child.
In his television shows, and in books such as Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990), John Bradshaw, a U.S. educator, pop psychology and self-help movement leader, used “inner child” to point to unresolved childhood experiences and the lingering dysfunctional effects of childhood dysfunction: the sum of mental-emotional memories stored in the sub-conscious from conception thru pre-puberty.
Within the framework of psychosynthesis, the inner child is often characterized as a subpersonality or may also be seen as a central element surrounded by subpersonalities. Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS therapy) posits that there is not just one inner child sub-personality, but many. IFS therapy calls wounded inner child sub-personalities “exiles” because they tend to be excluded from waking thought in order to avoid/defend against the pain carried in those memories.
IFS therapy has a method that aims to gain safe access to a person’s exiles, witnessing the stories of their origins in childhood, and healing them. These 5 wounds are rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal and injustice. The wound of injustice (like all other wounds) creates emotional overreactions within you. So you can get better by eliminating the roots of these irrational emotional memories.
The term “inner child” is often used to describe the connection you have within yourself to your child self and your childhood memories. At times, you might find that certain behaviors or emotions mimic those you experienced as a child, causing you distress as you try to navigate an adult world. Think back to a moment you felt genuinely excited and giddy. It could have been when doing something you enjoyed or when receiving excellent news.
This is an example of a positive inner child trigger. Even if you’ve never had this experience, there are ways to access it by tapping into your inner child.The symptoms that occur when the inner child endures this type of neglect and inhabit adults can be: Deep-seated feelings of anger. Inability to love themselves. The development of low self-esteem. In some cases, that wound to our inner child could be the result of trauma, abuse, or abandonment.
In other cases, the source of the pain may be more subtle – experiencing unmet emotional needs, the illness of a parent or sibling, growing up in a broken family, or even a childhood friend moving away. Your inner child consists of previous versions of you that still exist within you. The inner child that affects our present-day adult lives can mirror any age from our youth, whether it’s our 5-year-old self, our 11-year-old self, or even our teenage self.
Painful early experiences often stick with us into adulthood — from being yelled at by a teacher or rejected by playmates to experiencing childhood trauma. You might even feel “stuck” at the age of trauma, unable to move on emotionally without first processing your past. Imagine, for example, that something causes you to feel embarrassed or ashamed at work, and you have a disproportionate reaction—maybe crying hysterically or erupting in anger.
“It’s likely that your inner child is being activated because it remembers feeling shamed and rejected by a parent,” she says. In univariate analyses, all 5 forms of childhood trauma in this study (ie, witnessing violence, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse) demonstrated statistically significant relationships with the number of different aggressive behaviors reported in adulthood.An inner child is a psychological concept that represents the childlike aspects of our personality and emotional state.
It’s a metaphorical way of describing the younger parts of us that can sometimes emerge when we are faced with stressful or traumatic situations.Some causes of inner child wounds include: Not being cared for physically (e.g., child had inconsistent food and housing, child was physically or sexually abused).
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