What’s “Inner Child Healing” and How Can Breathwork Help?
Inner child work is irrelevant if you have no heart.
Now that we've got that out the way…
Sometimes it’s hard to love your adult self, but it’s almost impossible to deny love to a child. Inner children live inside you and bookmark moments in time. Your body is a scrapbook and it holds the memories of your life: some beautiful, some brave, many cruel. We see our lives through the eyes of our wounded inner children. Feelings buried alive never die. Our past clouds our vision, hardens our eyes, and ices our heart over. Experiences get stuck and stored in your body. But like all things, they crave to move. Breathwork lets you speak your body’s language. Connecting to a younger you and breathing allows feelings and experiences that were buried alive come to the surface, be expressed, and leave. This is healing.
We never get the love we need, that’s why we need ourselves. It’s never too late to have the childhood you needed. Loving yourself is not a fluffy thing. It’s not indulgent or selfish and it cannot be outsourced.
Love is your damn job. And by the way, you’re hired. You start today 😘
Inner Children as a lens for healing
Before we dive in too deeply, remember you have many inner children, not just one. Inner children act energetic bookmarks for particular phases of your life, or specific moments in time.
Your inner child acts like a lens for how you perceive experiences happening right now. This inner child is informed by your past experiences. Whether you had a “great” childhood or not, your inner child is at work in your life. When you begin to acknowledge your inner child and accept it, healing begins so that you can relate to yourself in a kinder way. Also, never forget that inner child is a simplification. There’s a whole lot you’d say to yourself as an adult. But when you relate to yourself through your inner child, a lot of that inclination towards self-loathing dissipates.
You are absolutely (never-ever-ever) “done” with inner child work. Because your inner child is a literal lens, it needs to be regularly cleaned and polished so that it can filter your everyday experiences appropriately (i.e. in an honest way that actually benefits you as an adult.)
Your inner child is both the oldest and the youngest part of you. It stores early memories and experiences, like a bookmark in time. Each of these get imprinted, making its own unique inner child – so you’re kind of like a Russian doll with multiple inner children just waiting to be unlocked so that they can feel safe and loved.
When you take the time to start healing your inner child, that feeling of safety and love that you impart opens you to a powerful channel of creativity, intuition and play. But when you leave your inner child undiscovered, hidden and hurting under the layers of your adult life, that creative channel is blocked.
It’s easy to ignore your inner child when you busy yourself with your “important” adult responsibilities. Who would have time to even consider what their inner child is, let alone what it needs and how to tend for it?
But let’s be real: “Grown up” is made up. We’re all kids pretending, accepting our adult roles and acting along on stage because that’s what everyone else seems to be doing, too.
A Closer Look At Your Inner Child
A lot of people begin to relate to their inner child as that “little voice” inside of themselves. The voice that asks you why you’re doing something or how come you’re avoiding someone. But more often it’s the voice that makes you feel misunderstood or ignored. The one that tells you no one loves you and that you’re in this big world all alone.
There isn’t a day that your inner child doesn’t show up – it’s always with you, shading your current life experiences with its own perspective and opinions. That time you felt abandoned as a 6-year-old could be why you get so angry when a friend changes plans last minute. Or that moment as a teenager when you felt completely misunderstood in class might be why you tear up in an office meeting when a colleague offers a differing opinion.
Until you start caring for these younger version of yourself, these often frustrating or inexplicable waves of emotion will continue to rise.
Healing your inner child is just a fancy way of saying that you need to address the ways you were hurt, or felt hurt, as a child. Whether you are aware of them or not, your childhood experiences left wounds and their scars influence your life. No matter how “good” your childhood was, we all had unmet needs and experiences that were emotionally distressing – that’s just childhood! And because your subconscious literally freezes these feelings and experiences, until you “unfreeze” them, they’re going to create emotional patterns in your life that block you from feeling completely whole.
When you start to look at what “inner child healing” really is, you realize that it’s just another way of saying that you’re finding ways to let your consciousness rest so that your subconscious is allowed to be acknowledged and tended to.
How you tap into your subconscious can vary (those loads of ways to do it), but the end goal of this work is to dive deeper into your feelings so that you can address the pieces of your inner child that feel rejected, shamed, and neglected. It’s a process of opening up your personal Russian doll – and that requires pressing the pause button on all of the coping mechanisms that we’ve developed along the way.
Getting into our bodies so that we’re truly embodied is the beginning of being able to fully integrate our subconscious into our consciousness – it’s the beginning of finally feeling whole again (or maybe for the first time ever!)
Getting In Touch With Your Own Inner Child
Your inner child (or children, because there are many!) is a remnant of moments in your childhood. Some people’s inner child is created with experiences from a very young age, while others are more influenced by teenage years. But, all of our inner children are a culmination of various ages – it’s not just one experience, one moment frozen in time.
As a child, you were naturally curious and creative.
Those characteristics are still there! You just have to find a way to get in touch with them – and that all begins with letting your inner child know that they’re safe, valued, and valid.
Remember how impressionable you were as a child. You were a sponge, taking in your environment, your experiences, and all of the people who surrounded you. This “sponginess” was important – it’s how you learn! But, it’s also how your subconscious gets deeply scarred. Even if you don’t remember all of the details of your childhood (and, honestly, who can?) your subconscious recorded those experiences like video on film. All of those moments still exist –
How you felt when someone you loved yelled at you
The day you lost your soccer game
That birthday when none of your friends showed up
Not being asked to the dance by the person you *really* liked
Having your favorite holiday ruined by being sick
A teacher scolding you in front of your classmates
Your beloved pet passing away
There’s no shortage of recordings – no shortage of fingerprints on the glass you’re currently looking through as an adult.
The more you internalize these experiences, the more they disrupt your life and block the flow of your fullness. Think of it like this: It’s a beautiful day outside and you’re enjoying lunch in your kitchen, looking through your window. There are fingerprints and smudges on your window, but it’s up to you to decide if you focus on the smudges – or if your attention is given to the beauty outside.
And, of course, you can always start cleaning your window.
Healing Your Inner Child: It’s More Important Than You Might Think
What happens when you ignore your inner child? Well, you start looking and acting like everyone else. And that’s exactly where the trouble starts. So many of us ignore our inner child because it’s simply the norm. Most adults go through the motions of their days, coping by numbing themselves to how they really feel, striving to fit in rather than to reach their full potential.
In fact, it isn’t until you decide that you want to push yourself to do something bigger, something better, live life fuller, that you start realizing that there’s something holding you back.
And that’s where inner child healing starts to come in for a lot of us.
It’s that moment you realize that it’s not bad or shameful to feel the way you’re feeling. And, when you dig deeper, there's a reason for it, too. Those feelings are remnants of your childhood, subconscious recordings that are playing back under the surface of your life. When you’re busy numbing yourself so that you can just go from task to task, these feelings build up under the proverbial rug – eventually, you’re going to have to deal with them (and usually at the worst time possible.)
The moment those big feelings erupt, we have the tendency to get angrier, even violent towards them – which only intensifies the inner child wound that’s provoking them in the first place. It isn’t until we learn to tend to our inner child that these feelings start to be soothed. And when that healing begins, everything has space to shift in our lives. It’s like clearing the dirt out from under the rug – or finally wiping the smudge marks off the windows of our home.
As your inner child gets healed, you’ll notice things like:
Your curiosity increasing
Your ability to love expanding
Your creativity being easier to tap into
Your self-esteem improving
Your addictions decreasing
How Do You Know If Your Inner Child Needs Healing?
Everyone can benefit from inner child healing because everyone has a childhood; everyone has recorded memories from their experiences as a childhood.
Have you ever met a child that doesn’t benefit from love? Care? Affection? Play?
So while everyone should absolutely find ways to tend to their inner child, here are a few signs that your inner child is really crying out for your attention:
You’re highly reactive to your environment. When everyday moments leave you feeling triggered and you either get highly irritated or increasingly detached, then it’s a sign that your inner child is working to take control of everything in order to feel safe and protected.
You’re becoming more and more of a lone wolf. If you find yourself making excuses for why you “don’t need anyone” in your life, then it’s probably your inner child feeling afraid to connect to people.
You’re self-sabotaging your life. When your inner child is hurt, it can cause you to become increasingly destructive in your life. Whether this is through addictions that are causing harm to yourself and others, or just bad habits that keep holding you back, the root cause is most likely your inner child feeling angry – think of the destructive nature of a child having a tantrum!
You’re emotionally immature and have poor mental health. Part of childhood is learning how to handle the ever-changing waves of emotions. It’s experimenting with boundaries and learning which reactions are appropriate. But when your inner child is learning and experimenting through your subconscious as an adult, it can have some seriously negative side effects, including:
Depression
Lack of motivation
Isolation
Inability to emotionally connect
Insomnia
Significant weight fluctuations
Lack of focus or productivity
Anxiety
5. You find yourself habitually repeating patterns, especially in relationships. When you’re attached to something, including subconscious wounds, then you find ways to create patterns in your life so that you don’t have to let go. Patterns, especially destructive ones, can be an indicator that your inner child is gripping tightly to something.
6. You’re avoidant during conflicts. Rather than dealing with an issue you have head on, you find yourself avoiding it. This translates to victimhood and blaming others for things going on (and going wrong) in your life. The flipside of avoidance is being overly dismissive – of your own feelings and the feelings of people you care about. This dismissive attitude can lead to passiveness and lethargy, especially when it comes to your personal life.
“How free would we be if we stopped training ourselves to be a society that’s quick to shut down dialogue, to censor, to label, to humiliate, to misrepresent, to cancel, and to create enemies where they don’t exist.” – Africa Brooke
Finding Pathways To Your Inner Child
There’s not one “right way” to start tending to your inner child. There are plenty of avenues to access your inner child so that you can start healing wounds and freeing yourself to live to your fullest, most creative, most playful potential. Each of these avenues offers something unique and only you’ll be able to decide which is right for you.
The best pathway to your inner child is the one that resonates with you the most. And, obviously, the one that gives you the best results. After all, inner child work is meant to make your life better – why wait around for something only mediocre?
Here are a handful of tried and tested pathways to your inner child to help you get started:
Building Belief. Inner child work relies on building a relationship between yourself and your inner child. As in any relationship, you have to develop trust. That means, your inner child has to have faith in you to show up and to continue to do the work. That’s why being consistent with your inner child work is the best way to generate positive results more quickly. If you say that you’re going to do a practice, or a class, or even spend more time listening to your inner child, then be sure to show up. Imagine the damage that is done when someone who a child loves promises something and then fails to follow through.
Validating Your Feelings. Yes, everything you feel and believe about your childhood is true and valid. There’s no point in fighting it! But rather than spending time belaboring the trials and tribulations you faced as a child, validate those feelings with authority so that you can move on. Read this part again: So that you can move on! Accepting things for what they are and your parents for who they are gives your inner child the ability to feel heard and understood. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to villainize your parents or the events in your childhood. Accept it without spinning it into something more destructive … so that you can move on!
Neutralizing Your Reactions. Many times, adults have a difficult time developing a relationship with their inner child because what they remember creates shock to their systems. This shock often leads to depression, which leads to denial, which then leads to grief (which is why so many people avoid starting a conversation with their inner child in the first place). Finding methods to neutralize your reaction to experiences can help you to become more consistent with your work. For many, utilizing pathways to the subconscious, like breathing, allows them to start a conversation without having to directly replay specifically difficult or painful memories or experiences.
Creating Safe Spaces For Grief. Your inner child has deep wounds that are painful to interact with, even when you bypass your consciousness through your subconscious. Feeling grief is a natural part of rebuilding a relationship with your inner child. Let yourself cry. Welcome the tears as part of the healing process and know what a relief it is for your inner child to finally let that pain be acknowledged.
Deepening The Connection: Becoming A Friend Of Your Inner Child
Your inner child doesn’t speak to you in words, which is why thinking too much about your childhood can only get you so far – and almost always, eventually to a deadend. Your inner child understands communication on a sensory and somatic-based level, which is why it’s important to be intentional about taking time to connect – it doesn’t just happen when you think about something painful that happened in your childhood and then you try to make sense of it.
Children love to play. They’re experiential. And your inner child is no different.
They want to spend quality time with you, but not in a sterile, office-meeting setting.
Here are some fun ways to enjoy developing a connection with your inner child:
Practice breathwork. Your breath is your body’s language. It’s able to communicate at a level that words and thoughts cannot reach. Deep breaths not only soothe stress, which enables your inner child to feel safe, but other breathing techniques can help you release stored memories, rewire your nervous system, and clean out your subconscious so that your “inner-child filter” sees the same way you see.
Mindfully check in with all of your senses. Because your inner child communicates on a sensory level, taking time throughout your day to stop and engage all of your senses is a simple way to let your inner child know that you’re thinking of them. As you slow down your breathing and sit quietly, become aware of what you smell, hear, taste, and feel. If you have your eyes open, you can focus your attention on one thing you see, too.
Let your inner child choose an item of clothing that you wear. Don’t let yourself be so serious all the time! Your inner child is curious and playful. Embrace that by being intentional about an item of clothing you wear – What would make your inner child happy? What would make them smile or laugh?
Allow your inner child to make decisions throughout your day. In addition to an item of clothing that you wear, let your inner child make occasional decisions for you, too. What was a color that you loved as a child? A hobby you enjoyed? A song that you always wanted to dance to or sing along with? Think about the things that sparked magic in your life as a child and find creative ways to re-integrate a part of them into your life.
Go on a magic walk with your inner child. Have you ever taken a small child on a walk? Do you notice how slowly they’ll walk? Or, when they’re excited, how they’ll stop walking altogether and skip or run? Children meander as they go for a walk, noticing the small details. They don’t stop to check their phones, count their steps, or see what time it is. They just go for a walk – and it’s all magic.
Remember that your memory is protective.
Give yourself time as you begin this work. With practice, patience, understanding, and presence, you can begin to bring your inner child – and yourself – back to life.
What were the things you didn’t get as a child but desperately needed?
All your inner child work really revolves around that one question. And, of course, taking action so that you can be the caregiver you always wanted.
If you choose to leverage breathwork to aid in your inner child healing, try my free session, Meet Your Inner Child. Through breathwork, you can unlock the stored memories that are causing your inner child pain and give them the environment they need to heal. The magic of breathwork is that you don’t have to know exactly what’s going on or identify perfectly which memory is causing inner child trauma – the breath takes care of all of that for you on a subconscious level.
