The following is the transcript for my free video A Complete Guide to Inner Child Healing.
A Complete Guide to Inner Child Healing
When you are a child, you have no way of filtering out what is good or bad for you. At a young age, you are absorbing all of your experiences with your parents, school, home, and everything in between. Each of these factors has influenced your psyche in some way.
Then as an adult, you don’t understand why parts of your life seem to be on repeat. Why you’re attracting unhealthy, dysfunctional relationships, or why you are constantly finding yourself in some sort of lousy circumstance. Things like this.
We’re gonna look into all of these things. And while we do, we’re going to be picking up any pieces of yourself that you have left behind. Uncover any shadow beliefs or unhealthy, dysfunctional, unconscious beliefs about your existence. As well as any inherited psychological inheritance from your parents.
Like everything I talk about on my blog and TikTok videos, understand that this is a process of building self-awareness, self-acceptance, and universal Love.
Welcome to my video series, A Guide to Inner Child Healing.
What is the inner child?
Everyone has an inner child. The inner child is a part of the unconscious that holds key ****memories, associations, expectations, emotions, and patterns based on the first twenty years of your life.
During your first twenty years of life, your parents or caretakers are teaching you right from wrong, what’s okay and what’s not okay. However, during this civilizing process, the child is implicitly taught that they are existentially not okay.
For example, if mom or dad find you scribbling crayons on the wall. They’re gonna stop you and tell you, “No, don’t do that.” Depending on the parent, the child will either learn that—
- What you did was bad, or
- You are inherently bad, and your actions are proof of that
Ideally, a parent teaches their kids the first way. But, realistically, many of us are taught the second way, where we learn that something is inherently wrong with our Selves.
Nevertheless, this civilizing process is necessary. For example, you need to know that it’s not okay to shit on the kitchen table.
However, when a child learns that some thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are not okay. She will try to get rid of these qualities and parts of her personality.
She does this because a child relies on her parents to protect her and keep her safe. So being accepted is essential for their survival. And when you’re a kid, you’re the center of your own world. So it’s easy for a child to believe that anything their parents do is because of them.
Since all a child wants is acceptance, connection, and love, they will behave in whatever way they believe will best get them. Even if that means disowning parts of themselves.
During these formative years, you are undergoing your own childhood traumas. As a result, you’re accumulating inner child wounds that you are too young and inexperienced to process on your own.
These emotional wounds eventually evolve into existential beliefs about your very existence.
Inner child healing helps you mend these inner wounds and purify your psyche from these dysfunctional beliefs.
This is important because you are unconsciously reliving the same dysfunctional patterns from childhood.
Everything you perceive to be wrong with your life that you’re having a tough time shifting is rooted in your childhood experiences.
By the end of this, you will become more aware of your unconscious beliefs, how they have been causing you to live a life of self-sabotage, and how to heal the inner child so you can better shift your life’s circumstances.
💠 Share Story of Early Child Pain
- These core emotions become the backdrop of your life
- You might remember pervasive feelings you had in childhood
- Regardless, these inner wounds have infected your perception of Life and yourself
The life You’ve Been Given.
By understanding your childhood, you will know why you are attracting the life you are currently living.
Firstly, we have to acknowledge that everyone is going to have a blind spot in their self-awareness.
One of the most significant ways of uncovering and shedding light on these blind spots is to realize two things:
- You are much more than what you think you are right now.
- Your programming is built in a way where it can be challenging to get an accurate look at yourself; your psyche can be very self-protective
Because you’ve been brought up with certain beliefs, they are your idea of what’s expected.
You’ll gain a more accurate perception of reality by mending the psyche and understanding the negative childhood beliefs you’ve picked up instead of continuing your current life with the psyche distortions you carry now.
Keep in mind that this is a process that will take time to self-reflect and build your self-awareness.
Most of us live our lives fairly unconsciously. Meaning we are living out these default beliefs.
But by uncovering our shadow beliefs, replacing them with healthier beliefs, AND applying them consistently and practically—you will find yourself being more conscious in your actions, more alive in life, and witnessing things getting better.
To notice things getting better, you have to be mentally present to witness them.
“If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” It’s that sort of thing.
Now I know that most of my audience is already spiritual. But for those who aren’t, I want to say this.
Spirituality is a tool that can help you outgrow your problems. Especially when so many people are dealing with things in life that can’t be helped. We are all products of circumstance with some type of limitation.
The problems we can’t solve, we must grow bigger than. Spirituality is what helps us outgrow these problems.
Emotional Addictions
Your unconscious beliefs are why you live unhealthy life patterns on repeat.
“Why does this always happen to me?”
“I never get anything.”
“Why is life so hard?”
Remember that each of your existential beliefs is rooted in your emotional inner wounds.
You’ve gotten so used to hurting a certain way in childhood that you unconsciously gravitate and attract situations where you can relive those pains and confirm your beliefs.
It’s a twisted form of comfort.
- “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” —*Carl Jung
For example, you can say you want a relationship. But then you only find yourself desiring people who are taken or unavailable.
This is why it’s so important that you do inner work. So you can become conscious of your unconscious truths.
If things haven’t been going your way—then it’s time to admit that there’s a problem.
Here are some emotions that people are addicted to:
- Betrayal
- Abandonment
- Disappointment
- Humiliation
- Isolation
If you have a pattern of experiencing these emotions, there is a sort of unconscious sadomasochistic pleasure.
Don’t take that too literally. Just know that it’s time to get you addicted to growth, not dysfunction.
I should also point out that these emotions are actually moreso beliefs. Especially if you express any of the following qualities:
- Vandalizing
- Very dependent on others
- Inability to form strong relationships
- Manipulative behavior
- Taking too much responsibility
- Overly aggressive
- Overly passive
I also want to point out that any physical addictions are usually due to the emotional addictions I just mentioned.
For example, if I feel isolated or with a sense of boredom, I might suddenly find myself scouring the fridge for food.
Noticing your own emotional needs can go pretty far here. Whether you need company, excitement, or whatever it is.
When you become aware of your unconscious truths by building self-awareness, the more you’ll realize that all of these dysfunctional patterns were things you’ve been doing to yourself.
Before, it wasn’t your fault. How can you be responsible for something so personal when it’s been outside of your awareness?
But now that you’re aware, it’s only right that you do the inner work to change your life’s trajectory.
💠 List out all of your negative life patterns, habits, or circumstances
Where in your childhood do you think these life patterns are rooted in? What circumstances activate your physical addictions? What are your problematic emotions that you feel on a repeated basis? What is it about your childhood that you think makes you not like your life right now?
How to Think for Yourself
Reality Testing is where you question your inner beliefs. So any beliefs you perceive are getting in your way, you want to retrospect or test to see if this has been the actual case in the real world.
Many of us are carrying over a lot of beliefs about the world that we picked up in childhood. But, depending on each person, some of these beliefs are quickly discarded while others stay persistent.
The best way to start thinking for yourself is to compare what you’ve been told and what you’ve experienced.
This will be very different for everyone, but the point isn’t supposed to come to some general consensus. This is personal, so understand that there is no absolute truth that applies to all.
Believing otherwise is what creates sick, distorted psyches in the first place. In fact, this is evident that you need inner child work. Either your mind is projecting problems, feeling powerless, or submerged in hate for the world.
The point is for you to realize, “Hey, that didn’t turn out to be true. Definitely not for me, at least.”
And what’s most important is that you learn to not judge these things as good or bad. Instead, learn to accept things as they are, not by how you think they should be.
The grass is green. The sky is blue. Why get angry about a snake having fangs?
Practice more acceptance and judging anything as less than perfect than it is at the present moment.
This helps you shed any arbitrary beliefs you inherited in your formative years of how things should be. Which frees up your ability to think for yourself.
You really want to question the beliefs pushed onto family, friends, school, religion, society, culture, and tradition.
Here are a couple of examples of beliefs you should question:
- You should always be there for your family.
- Authority figures are there to always help you.
- This group of people brings down society.
- It’s your fault they hurt you because you made them do it.
- You are unlovable.
💠 You are Loveable. Always Have Been, Always Will Be.
Retrospection & Introspection
One of the harshest things to accept is that an adult, possibly older than yourself right now, is capable of mistreating a child the way your parents possibly mistreated or abused you.
Since you were a child, any abuse you endured is just the way things were. It was Life.
Someone who grew up in an abusive household might tell themselves, well, they were stressed out, and I was a shitty kid. So, therefore, I deserved to be spat on, beaten, degraded, and so on.
Somehow they picked up this idea that the way they were mistreated was somehow their own fault.
It’s not your fault.
Those are excuses they gave you to mistreat you. And now you’re making excuses for them.
You’re essentially trying to pass it off as “It was no big deal.”
But you know what’s funny? Many times when people say, “it’s no big deal,” they are in denial.
They don’t want to deal with the uncomfortable feelings that lie deeper in the Truth.
We’re talking about your life.
We’re talking about your childhood, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
You can say, “Oh, they tried their best,” but that doesn’t mean it was good enough!
You’re an adult now. So take the time to look at what happened to you in childhood through your adult eyes.
Look at the first twenty years of your life and explore the things that hurt you.
It’s not going to all come up at once. So whatever comes to mind now is what you can do some inner work for and mend.
There will be things that will resurface forgotten hurt memories throughout life, and you can work through those as they come.
But for now, what are the hurt memories coming to mind.
Inner wounds are moments in time where your psyche is in a state of arrested development because you didn’t get a chance to process what happened.
These emotional inner wounds eventually become existential unconscious beliefs.
Look at these memories of your youth from the eyes of your adult self now. Think about these shadow beliefs that you may have picked up from that.
Examples of shadow beliefs are:
- Nobody can be trusted
- I’m blameless & you’ll always forgive me
- I’m always wrong
- I am pure
- I am helpless
- The world wants to dominate me
- I’ve always been a loser
- Everyone is ungrateful
Those are a few examples. But think for yourself, how do you think these events impacted your self-image? The way you see yourself.
This isn’t the most straightforward exercise because it was normal for you. But hopefully, you’ve witnessed healthy examples in your life or trustworthy people to use for accurate points of reference.
By identifying those times you were hurt, you can understand how they impacted you, process the events, and start letting go.
Again, this is a process. It’s not easy. But it’s a start.
💠 Last Words with Parents On Your Deathbed
Don’t be afraid to cry and get angry during these exercises. This is a popular therapeutic exercise that can help you accept your parents’ faults. It lets you grieve over the loving childhood you didn’t get and will never get. And it gives back responsibility to your parents that you may be wrongfully carrying yourself.
💠 Meeting Your Inner Child and Letting Them Know You Are Here Now
This is an Active Imagination exercise where you are imagining a child version of you and you are listening to what it wants from you. In the end, tell this child that it can feel free to express itself, to play and love life, apologize for not being there when it needed you, and not to worry because you’re here now. You will protect it.
After you finish this active imagination meditation, you’ll notice some of your repressed qualities will be unblocked. Let it happen. Its part of who you are and what might come out strong at first will eventually temper itself. For example, the very first time I did this, the next morning I woke up and had written the most beautiful piece of anger ever created, in my opinion. Then for the next several days, my body was constantly expelling noticeable body heat. This helped my tap into my aggression, my anger, something that I never expressed because I had disowned it long ago. Now it’s a part of me, it’s not repressed, and I’m a better person because of it.
Ultimately, have your own conversation with this inner child. Do it as often as your intuition tells you. Trust yourself that you can communicate with it and trust that you will reach the deepest truths about yourself this way. Because you will. Ignore you ego telling you that this is silly. All the ego cares about is protecting itself. Push that aside, get past the resistance, and find a place where you can do this meditation free of judgment while also dropping your own. This level of self-confrontation, despite how uncomfortable, is largely what inner work is. Do your best to not get in your own way. Allow yourself to feel through everything and take as long as you need to take. Then rest afterward, because you will be tired.
Until next time, your brother, Rich.
Here are some resources I recommend:
A Light Among Shadows is a guide to self-love and being that helps you overcome negative self-talk, instill genuine self-acceptance, and overcome self-hate and resentment by making sense of people’s level of consciousness and your spirituality.
Shadow Work for Beginners Series helps you beat negative patterns and beliefs, integrate your shadow, heal your inner child, reclaim your projections, build emotional maturity, and take back your life by becoming whole.
Shadow Work for Relationship Series helps you heal your attachment style, navigate relationship issues, and build a healthy, mature relationship.
Advanced Shadow Work is an ongoing publication with continued in-depth insight and practical advice you won’t find anywhere else on the internet for practicing shadow work, self-awareness, inner healing, spiritual development, and more!
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