How To Heal Your Inner Child

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.

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.

What is ‘inner child work’?

“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.”

Healing requires therapy

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.”

Ways to heal your inner child

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:

• Acknowledge your inner child and what they have to say. “When you listen to your inner child, you’re allowing and validating any feelings that you may have,” says Dr. Albers. “As a child, you may often be taught to cut yourself off from those feelings or ignore and avoid them. But as an adult, the first step is paying attention to when you are having a significant reaction to something and take it seriously.” For example, when you receive critical feedback at work and feel a surge of shame, pause to acknowledge that your inner child is reacting to past experiences of being judged. “Instead of letting those feelings overwhelm you, remind yourself that this feedback is about your work, not your worth, allowing you to respond constructively and grow from the experience,” she adds.
• Understand your triggers. Knowing yourself and what triggers your emotional impulses is key to finding out how to respond in a healthier way. “If you know yourself and you know you’re incredibly sensitive to feeling abandoned because of a sense of abandonment you had as a child, you can watch out for it,” illustrates Dr. Albers. “You can look for it in relationships with friends and other people around you, and spot when you feel oversensitive to abandonment.”
• Journal about your experiences. Take note of when you feel your inner child popping up and write down how those moments make you feel and the kinds of responses they inspire. “Journaling can help you understand if there are any patterns of behavior you participate in,” says Dr. Albers.
• Mirror your motives. Mirror exercises can help you flip the script so that you start to internalize more positive feelings about yourself. “Look at yourself in the mirror and start saying positive and healing statements as you’re looking at your reflection to reformulate some of those automatic beliefs that pop into your mind,” recommends Dr. Albers. “Tell yourself that you feel worthy and that you are good enough.”
• Write a letter. Write a letter to your inner child, or try writing from the perspective of your inner child. “If you’re writing to yourself, you’re giving yourself the love, compassion and empathy you needed, and a sense of safety and trust,” notes Dr. Albers. “If you’re writing from the inner child’s perspective, it can help to illuminate where these wounds are located inside of you and how they may be popping up.” So, next time your inner child is triggered, try writing a mantra to yourself, something like: “Dear little me, I see your fear of not being good enough and I want you to know that you are loved, worthy and capable of amazing things — no matter what anyone else says or does.” Sit with that, repeat it to yourself and really focus on believing it.
• Meditate with your inner child. “Imagine a version of yourself as a child sitting next to you. Talk to that child version of yourself and tell them what you wanted or needed to hear as a child,” suggests Dr. Albers. “That often taps into very deep places for people to identify where your wounds are located.”
• Don’t forget about the positives. You want to focus on both the positive and negative aspects of your inner child because chances are, you had moments when you were young where you felt happy, safe and playful. “Those positive memories helped create your sense of the world,” says Dr. Albers. “So, if you felt safe and comforted in a relationship with an adult or a friend when you were younger, you may also be able to identify and recognize when you feel that way again in a new relationship as an adult.”
• Try something new. Many of these steps revolve around increasing your awareness so you can start to change the way you think and feel. But once you have insight into your inner child, it’s time to put all of that awareness into practice by changing how you act and react to the world around you. Instead of doing what you’ve always done, try a different approach. “It’s also helpful to let your partner know what you need,” encourages Dr. Albers. “If you were a child who needed more hugs as a kid and you tell your spouse that when you’re feeling down, you really need a hug, that’s going to be more healing because it taps right into what your inner child needs in that moment.”
• Be child-like. Allow yourself to let go every now and then and do something you once loved as a child. Be playful. Explore your curiosities. Pick up an old habit you let go of long ago. “For a lot of people who have inner child wounds, they didn’t feel safe enough to play and experience joy when they were kids, so they often feel cut off from that part of themselves,” shares Dr. Albers. “Tapping back into that as an adult helps you reparent yourself so that you learn it’s OK to have fun and do things you did as a child that gave you joy.”

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.

How you know your inner child is healing

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.

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.

“Instead of giving into catastrophic thinking and 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:

• You can self-soothe when conflicts come up.
• You use healthy coping mechanisms when responding to uncomfortable situations.
• You openly express your needs instead of internalizing grief, guilt or shame.
• You can identify your emotional triggers and work through them.
• You act or react differently than you would in the past.

“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.”