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Identify your emotional triggers, come to terms with your regrets and allow yourself to be a kid again
If our needs weren’t met when we were young, those memories and experiences can have a way of sticking around and resurfacing long into our adulthood. That’s because who we’ve become as adults is directly informed by our childhood experiences. No matter what we’ve faced in the past, we all have an inner child that needs taken care of, especially if we’ve had past experiences that we haven’t healed from or fully processed.
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Psychologist Susan Albers, PsyD, explains that healing your inner child is about learning how to move forward, rediscovering what you need, recapturing what you’ve lost and reparenting your younger self so you can heal from past experiences. Here’s how you can begin to do just that.
“Inner child work” is the process of acknowledging, understanding and healing the wounds of your inner child. This ongoing process requires unlearning past behaviors and replacing them with new ones that reinforce positive coping skills and present-day beliefs about who you are as a person.
It involves taking inventory of your past experiences and evaluating how they make you feel in the present day. By recognizing the pain points of your life and areas you’d like to improve, you can override the ways you’d normally respond to other people, circumstances and events that cause your emotional triggers.
“It’s about reparenting yourself and giving yourself the emotional response you would have needed or wanted as a child, but doing it right now at your current stage in life,” explains Dr. Albers. “It’s about understanding the very vulnerable parts of ourselves and nurturing ourselves with self-compassion and self-acceptance.”
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The goal of healing your inner child is to make sure you fully process both positive and negative experiences from when you were younger so you can move past them with a renewed understanding of your worth as a human being with very real thoughts and feelings.
On one side, it’s easy to see how even the most positive experiences you’ve had inform who you are today. But the negative experiences you’ve had, in particular, can make the process of healing your inner child more challenging. Because of this, healing your inner child often involves some form of therapy.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy is a valuable approach for healing your inner child,” says Dr. Albers. “A therapist can work with you to uncover where your beliefs about yourself come from, especially those rooted in childhood. By making these connections, you can learn to change negative thoughts into more compassionate and supportive ones. This process not only helps heal your inner child, but also empowers you to face life’s challenges with a healthier mindset.”
If you’ve experienced childhood trauma, abuse or violence at a young age, it’s especially important that you work with a licensed clinical therapist who can help you navigate the healing process.
“It can be very painful to confront your inner child because it can tap into some very difficult, painful memories,” notes Dr. Albers. “It can be helpful to work with a therapist who can walk you through visiting some of these things from the past in a patient and calm way so that you’re not retraumatized by them.”
So, how do you turn this all around? Healing your inner child is about making sure that little version of you feels safe, protected and loved so they’re not popping up unannounced ready to wreak havoc. With the added help of a therapist, your journey of healing your inner child becomes much more manageable with these steps:
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At the end of the day, your inner child has always been hidden somewhere inside you. By confronting your inner child, you can begin to protect them and support them the way you would protect and support any one of your own children.
“You’re confronting your old belief system, noticing what needs to be worked on and what hasn’t been working, and then replacing that old system with a new one that has a lot of empathy, kindness and self-compassion,” says Dr. Albers.
Healing your inner child looks different for every person. But the general goal is to increase your awareness of where your emotional triggers are coming from. By reducing the severity of your emotional triggers, you can then learn how to respond to them clearly in a way that’s more in line with your foundational values.
“The healing process becomes very evident when you’re responding and acting in a different way,” says Dr. Albers.
Let’s look at two examples of how your inner child could show up and what it looks like when that inner child is healing.
For the first example, let’s say your parents argued often when you were a kid. In reaction to what was happening in your household, you tried to be invisible. You clammed up, never talked back and sometimes, tried to hide if the arguments became violent or abusive.
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You then carry those experiences with you into your current life as an adult by avoiding conflict in your relationships. You don’t speak up at work or in other areas of your life when something upsets you. You don’t want to ruffle any feathers, so you try to make yourself smaller in the same ways you did as a child. By doing this, you then sacrifice your own needs so that you’re not upsetting others or worsening the situation.
These trauma responses happen because your inner child is showing up in your current life as an adult and reacting to those past experiences.
“A sign of progress would be to speak up when you need to, set healthy boundaries and vocalize how other people make you feel when conflict is happening,” explains Dr. Albers. “Those are very different responses than how you would have responded as a child, and they are signs that you’re healing.”
For the second example, let’s imagine that when you text your partner, they don’t respond. Their lack of response then triggers feelings of abandonment and neglect. When this happens, you get angry and respond with a passive-aggressive text message or you get sad and automatically think something is wrong or they might be breaking up with you.
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“Instead of giving into the feelings of abandonment, you talk yourself through it,” says Dr. Albers. “You tell yourself this isn’t a sign to respond with insecure texts, but to calm and comfort yourself in that moment and to be able to work through it in a new, productive, healing way.”
You know you’re healing your inner child when:
“Healing your inner child is about revisiting your values and morals and asking yourself what you need right now to feel safe, loved and supported,” reaffirms Dr. Albers. “It’s about identifying what you need to get your needs met and identifying where your needs are not being met.”
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