The Inner Child is a part of who we are, our original child nature.
The Inner Child is just like a real child. In fact, she is the child that we once were when we were small. She lives inside of us, even when on the outside we appear to be fully grown.
The Inner Child is the side of us that is innocent, playful, emotional, present-moment oriented, sensory, and vulnerable.
The Inner Child remembers everything we experience but remembers it as sensations and emotions, rather than as facts and narratives.
Just like a real child, our Inner Child may not be able to verbally explain to us “what happened” in a way that makes sense to the rational mind.
Still, she has sense memories of what we experienced in our child bodies. She also keeps the emotional component of our memory records, not as concepts or thoughts about emotions, but as pure emotional feeling states.
When, out of nowhere, we are flooded with emotions or body sensations that don’t seem to fit the situation we’re in, that’s the child having an “emotional flashback”, or a memory.
The Inner Child is the keeper of how our life feels to us, through the felt sense and through our emotions.
We can recognize our Inner Child parts both by the fact that they feel psychologically younger, more emotional, and instinctive and because they communicate by way of body sensations and emotions to express their stories and get our attention to their needs, more than through thoughts and ideas.
The Inner Child lives in the realm of sensation and emotion. When she communicates with us, she does so with bodily sensations and with emotions.
If the Inner Child doesn’t feel safe, for example, we will feel unpleasant physical sensations and negative emotions that are telling us she’s not experiencing herself as safe in this moment.
When the Child is communicating a lack of safety, we will either feel the sensations that go along with the fight-flight nervous system state of hyperarousal – things like rapid heartbeat, shallow breath, and muscle tension – or the numbing, dissociating sensations that go along with dorsal collapse. Both of these states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal of the nervous system are ways that the Inner Child is communicating to us that she is sensing danger.
On the flip side, when the Inner Child feels safe, nourished, and connected, she will communicate her good feelings in terms of pleasant, richening, grounded physical sensations. Feelings like inner expansion, softening, warmth, and even the physical sensations of smiling and brightening, looking around at the world, and reaching out to engage, are communications from the Inner Child.
Emotionally, unsafety will be felt as fear, anger, dread, depression, and shame, and safety will be felt as happiness, satisfaction, liveliness, curiosity, and openness.
To listen and tune into our Inner Child, we need to use her language of physical sensations and emotions.
To understand the language of body sensations, we need to practice somatic awareness, becoming conscious of our inner body sensations and our five external senses too.
If we notice sensations of unsafety, we can help our child know we got the message by responding using the felt sense, to communicate something back to her.
For example, when we tune into our physiological sensations and notice that our heart is aching and full of pressure, we may recognize that the Inner Child is communicating through this sensation.
We decide to stop what we’re doing, pause, slow down, and flow our attention to this sensation, allowing gentle focus to linger there. Gradually, our awareness of what’s being felt and communicated may expand and become more vivid to us. We may feel into the dimensions of this sensation, to its qualities, its movement.
As we do so, we find ourselves wondering what our Inner Child may be telling us with this sensation. If another little child told us that her heart was hurting, how might we respond to that?
We might get down on our knees and come face to face with her, we might convey compassion with our voices, we might fold her into our arms for a hug, or even take her onto our lap. We might hold her tight, rock her until she’s feeling safe again, safe enough to try to help us understand more.
Placing our hand over the aching spot in our heart, we may begin to detect warmth coming from our hand and flowing into our heart. Staying with this exploration may eventually lead to a sense of lightening and releasing of the ache that was in our heart. The Inner Child feels us contacting her, showing our care through the warmth in our hand.
This is only one example of the many ways that we might tune into the Inner Child. By understanding that she speaks to us primarily in bodily sensations and feelings, we can look out for her communications, and make sure we are telling her we love her and are here for her.
The Inner Child, like all children, can be difficult. She can be aggressive, temperamental, destructive. Because she lives in the moment, in senses and feelings, concepts like “later” and “tomorrow” are hard for her. She can be impulsive.
When the Inner Child takes over, that means, in Internal Family Systems language, that we have temporarily become “blended” with her. This is what happens when we are having sensory or emotional trauma flashbacks when we are triggered.
If you look into a woman’s eyes while she’s blended with the Inner Child, you’ll see a little girl there, eclipsing the adult woman. You may see childlike motions, facial expressions, gestures, and voice tone as the Inner Child communicates.
When the Inner Child is in charge, we are regressed to a previous age neurobiologically, momentarily taken over by a previous version of ourselves. This much younger, more vulnerable, and less masterful version of ourselves can’t control impulsive behavior very well, or understand logic, such as consequences of actions.
This isn’t a safe or positive state to be in for very long. So when we notice the Inner Child has taken over, we should take steps to regulate ourselves.
Start with using physical sensations to help regulate the nervous system. Use simple, easy interventions such as Peter Levine’s self-hug or vagal reset tools, like the butterfly hug.
For times when we’re really triggered, the SCOPE protocol is a handy sequence to follow, as is the PEACE protocol from the Sensorimotor Therapy Institute.
Once the body is more regulated, we can connect with our emotions, validating and accepting all feelings we’re having. It’s important not to judge, analyze, or problem-solve yet. Simply naming, describing, and allowing. “This is anger…this is sadness…this is shame…”, and compassionately holding the truth of emotion.
Once we are feeling heard and accepted emotionally, we can start to use our higher-level thinking to reason and problem-solve.
If we are stuck in the Inner Child state most of the time, this is usually a sign that we got interrupted in a previous stage of development, maybe in several stages, and we won’t be able to move forward without healing our developmental trauma.
Luckily we can always go back later as adults and do some re-parenting. Re-parenting the Inner Child means giving ourselves what we need to unfreeze our growth process, which helps us move forward to complete developmental stages and tasks.
For example, if we are frequently stuck in experiences of deep unsafety in the body, living in fight-flight, or dorsal shutdown, then we need to start with creating experiences of basic safety in the physical world.
We can then move on to emotional and relational development, which may mean working on our attachment trauma, through consciously reparenting the Inner Child.
A relationship with the Inner Child unfolds over time. Here are some practices that will help you establish, secure, and cement a loving relationship with this part of you.
Use the Inner Child’s primary language of physical sensation to form a connection. You can do this through touch, such as gently patting, stroking, tapping, holding, rocking, and massaging your body.
Learn to apply vagus nerve reset tools, and practice embodying somatic resources that help create feelings of deep relaxation, comfort, containment, and regulation in the physiology.
The positive psychology article on Somatic Experiencing shares 8 very effective therapeutic resources, practices like Noticing Physical Comfort and Grounding.
Evidence collected by researchers in the field of ecotherapy suggests that interacting with nature provides many opportunities to re-activate sensorimotor processing to grow again, essentially restarting our development and helping our Inner Child parts move through developmental stages.
Touching, listening to, looking at, and smelling objects found in the natural world are all helpful.
You can do this by spending time in nature settings, collecting nature items to take home, and making assemblages out of nature materials. Using all five senses helps positively reconnect to a growth process in the here and now.
The Inner Child, like all children, needs play to be able to grow and develop.
You can play with the Inner Child once you are an adult, by using art materials, sound, and movement, giving her chances to have gentle, fun contact and connection in safe ways.
If you’re not sure what art activities to do with your Inner Child, browse activities used in art therapy with children and see what sounds safe and fun to you and her.
Another helpful resource is the list of 100 art therapy activities to try out from Better Educate.
We can help the Inner Child learn to trust us by becoming a secure attachment figure for her. If she feels safe in her bond with us and knows that she will not be shamed, blamed, or abandoned by us, she will eventually return to more regular states of hope and joy.
If you don’t know much about attachment, familiarize yourself with the attachment needs of children found on psychology today. Through the power of imagination, we can re-parent and restore secure attachment, through self-touch, self-comforting, and self-talk.
Whenever we relate to our Inner Child as a loving mother and father would relate to a very beloved child, she gradually forms the bonds of security and attachment to us which will allow her to relieve her burdens to us.
A happy Inner Child looks the same as a happy child! Take a moment to imagine the posture, the energy, the facial expressions, and the overall vibration of a jubilant, safe, playing, connected child.
When your Inner Child is happy, she will be lighting up the first two structures of your brain, the brainstem, and the limbic sections, and glowing up, out, and through the cortical layers as well. The happiness of the Inner Child bubbles up out of us like a spring out of the ground.
Although the outer adult physiology may be calm and still, the brightness, energy, and glowing vitality of the Inner Child will be detectable within and from the outside, as a visible radiance of calm and well-being.
When the Inner Child has pain, it is communicated in the body sensations and emotions. It is also visible from the point of view of an outside observer, in subconscious expressions of the body, such as posture, energy levels, eye contact, and facial expressions.
We can tell when someone is in a bright, open, and bubbly state – the sign of a happy Inner Child. Likewise, we can sense when another person is restricted, collapsed, conflicted, shut off, or suffering, through the ways that they seem to inhabit their own physiology, including their face.
If you cannot easily notice your inner felt sense and emotions, you can ease into a state where you can feel sensation more effortlessly, through activating your physical senses.
A few minutes of sensory stimulation courtesy of exposure to nature, art materials, or even just taking a moment to notice colors and shapes, listening for sounds, and exploring textures of the room you’re in, should help you get in touch with what’s going on somatically and emotionally.
You can also use other art therapy tools, such as drawing or downloading a template off of Clip Art Best of the outline of a body, using colors and marks to indicate areas of sensation which you are able to detect in and around the body. All of these tools will help you be able to detect whether your Inner Child is happy or in pain.
All in all, the healing process with your Inner Child is a kind of intra-psychic reparenting: the Inner Adult adopts your Inner Child, and begins to care for it and give her the love, nourishment, safety, and securely attached relationship that she needs to restart its development wherever development was halted. This process leads to a happy, healthy Inner Child, who lives forever on inside in a state of connection and love with the Inner Parent.
Like any relationship, intimacy with your Inner Child will grow over time. If you manage to build a strong bond with your inner child, allowing to form a secure attachment to you as the Inner Parent, your relationship will start growing at an unprecedented rate.
You will be surprised and delighted by the way that your Child continues to learn and grow, bringing joy, enlivenment, present-moment awareness, and play to your inner and outer life.
This relationship is formed, strengthened, developed, and verified over the rest of our lives.
At Villa Kali Ma, we take a whole-woman approach to healing, that incorporates all the layers of a woman’s experience, including most especially the Inner Child.
Through our somatic mindfulness therapies (mindfulness and self-compassion, yoga, tension and release exercises, massage, etc) and trauma treatments (EMDR, brain spotting, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy), we help every woman experience the physiological safety and stabilization required to be able to heal.
In addition to bottom-up and felt-sense-based therapies designed to help with reprocessing and re-sensitization, we provide many forms of therapy that speak to the Inner Child in her native language, such as Expressive Arts Therapy, gardening, Equine Therapy, and outdoor group activities in nature.
In individual psychotherapy and group work, we basic attachment needs, gently entraining women to relational connection and safety. We practice how to feel into channels of social engagement in ways that will bring nourishment, support, and connection in community.
Our programs for healing trauma, mental health disorders, and addiction provide a safe, secure, structured nest inside of which to find and reconnect with your Inner Child. The little one you once were, the delightful, innocent, adorable little girl you still are, can be recovered. Once reconnected into your heart, she will bring you joy, relationship, and meaning far beyond what you may have imagined possible.
2912 Managua Pl,
Carlsbad, CA 92009
(760) 350-3131
recovery@villakalima.com
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