Are you asking yourself, "I wonder what inner child wounds do I have?".
Well you've come to the right place. I've done plenty of shadow work coaching and I've written many articles to help you find out what inner work you need to do.
But first, let's make sure you understand some key ideas.
What is the Wounded Inner Child?
Your inner child, similar to your shadow, is part of your unconscious mind.
Your wounded inner child is a part of yourself that’s stuck in a time where you didn't fully process your emotions.
This wounding typically involves learning to disown a part of yourself and leaving it behind.
Family and culture make you embrace some parts of your Self, while completely abandoning others.
This happens when a child idealizes her parents and follows arbitrary rules for survival.
These rules implicitly embed the child with the unconscious idea that she is "bad"—which is a typical childhood experience.
When the child sees that some of her feelings and thoughts are unacceptable, she chooses to get rid of them.
(This creates the child’s “inner parent”, which encourages obedience at the cost of being whole.)
Then the rules and unconscious beliefs you learned as a child evolve and are carried into adulthood.
What inner child wounds do I have?
The following are transcripts of the Inner Wounds videos from my Manifestation Series.
Each section below goes into the accumulated impact your inner child wounds have had on your life.
Inner Wounds: Falling Behind
Stop thinking that you’re falling behind.
This idea that you’ve fallen behind happens because you sensed that you should’ve been doing something.
But for whatever reason, you distracted yourself and didn’t do it.
Eventually you distract yourself for too long and the gap you’ve created in your mind of where you think you should be feels overwhelming.
The more overwhelmed you feel, and the more you tell yourself you need to catch up, the harder it becomes to actually get you on track.
Instead you’d rather distract yourself from this compounding inner shame.
Your mind is convincing you with a confirmation bias that other people have it way better than you and are ahead of you, despite their actual shortcomings.
Here’s the worst part—
The more you feel you need to catch up, the more insignificant your effort seems, convincing you to do less.
Then your mind messes with you by making you believe that the more you fall behind, the more incredible you have to turn out to be.
You start thinking that you’re some underdog hero of your own redemption story.
Understand that this future triumph and redemption are a trick of the mind.
Reality is being buried by illusions of a hypothetical “falling behind and catching up” redemption arc.
Life is not a movie. These don’t actually exist.
Let go of the idea that you need to surprise the world by coming out on top.
Don’t worry about the world. Don’t worry about doing better than others.
Instead, think about doing better for yourself. Think about the next step that’s in front of you—not the next step that’s in front of others.
Because there is no catching up or falling behind.
All there is, is your next step, right now, and moving forward.
Inner Child Wounds: Struggling to Forgive
Have you been taught to blame yourself?
Do you surround yourself with people who teach you to blame yourself?
One of my past clients, a young woman, dealt with this. I recall one week she’d be very stressed out by her schedule—
Working, externing, going to school, assignments, that she ended up having a breakdown.
When she returned home, all her father had to say was that she needed to toughen up.
Not only did he have no empathy, but he actually had a very big part to play in her situation.
She goes on to tell me about a situation where she called out a safe word, and the person replied with ‘oh you made me feel like a bad dom”.
The more she talked about her relationships, the more obvious that there was a pattern of her blaming herself for everything that happens.
Some people pick up on this while they’re growing up and learned to blame themselves.
When you live in self-blame, it makes sense for you to become anxious and more self-conscious.
Because you don’t want to accidentally do the wrong thing--misplacing yourself as the cause of things that aren’t your fault
This isn’t healthy. You need to learn when to take the blame off yourself and how put it on the correct person.
Because you won’t heal until you learn to properly point responsibility at others for their actions, or lack thereof, instead of at yourself.
And yes, some people will always blame others, because they can’t handle the idea that something is actually their own fault.
Fine. But understand this—
When you finally place blame on the right person, then you can take the steps towards healing and forgiveness.
Because ultimately, by misplacing blame, your mind is trying to protect you from experiencing the negative emotions you have to process.
And that feeling you’re afraid to feel but need to feel, is grief.
Inner Wounds: Comfort in Underachieving
People who feel stuck and lack motivation are living in a cycle they can’t break out of.
You get like this when you believe there is no point trying because nothing is going to succeed.
Understand that this hopelessness IS NOT some type of analysis paralysis.
Instead it’s meant to protect you from rejection and failure. Never try, never fail.
Your issue is being comfortable with underachieving.
It’s easy to fail, everybody does it.
Your biggest problem is different.
Your issue is that one day you’ll go out and actually succeed.
And it’s gonna suck because it won’t match with your identity of being lazy, yet full of potential.
Right now you’re an underachiever. You might even think you’re smart.
But as soon as you start winning, you'll actually have momentum and a clearer view of how much farther you need to go.
And it’s far.
Everything looks easy on the outside. But every step forward won’t ever feel like enough.
Before you’re some type of underachiever, now you’re coming up while feeling far behind.
You’re almost stuck choosing between feeling comfortable and pathetic, or just feeling pathetic while stumbling forward.
Just know that imaginary failure is worse than real failure.
And every step you take matters.
No matter how small.
Inner Child Wounds: Conditional Love
Do you have conditional self-love?
Many people are brought up to believe that their worth is based on their performance.
If you were a good boy or good girl, by someone’s standards, you got love.
If you weren’t “good”, you got none.
Many people don’t know how to parent with unconditional acceptance.
Making a child believe that their worth is only as good as their behavior or output.
This can explain why people can try so hard on a dead-end relationship.
They think by putting in a lot of effort, they can convert something that could work out into something that does work out.
Turn a “no” into a “yes”.
But when you put in a lot of work for nothing in return, you feel exponentially worthless and less hopeful.
You see this a lot with people who haven’t had much luck romantically.
They haven’t realized that if someone is genuinely interested in them, things will go fairly smoothly.
But the baseline they’re used to is putting in a lot of effort to turn a “no” into a “yes”. Which almost never happens.
When the real baseline they should be working with is turning “maybes” into “yeses”, or just finding “yeses”.
When you approach life from this “Love needs to be earned” approach, you lose faith in yourself because you perceive that you’re making mistakes.
Ask yourself, do you think you have value outside of what you do?
Understand that your existence is valid. If it wasn’t you wouldn’t exist.
Value yourself. Because no matter how hard you mess up, you’re worth loving anyway.
Inner Child Wounds: Living a Fantasy
Do you process your sucky emotions correctly, or with cope?
The people who cope are those who have a bad experience and really define themselves by that experience.
“If only I did this…” “If only I did that…”
To the point that they fantasize about an alternate timeline where they made the “right” move.
This idea of “how things could’ve been” takes the edge off the negative emotions of what really happened.
Which sounds nice—
BUT
It’s a fantasy.
Fantasy helps people cope with negative emotions.
The same way a person fudges their timeline of when they got with their current partner and when they had their last one-night stand.
There’s a bit of shame they don’t want to admit to, so they tuck it in a false, fantasy timeline that lets them cope with their actions without consequence.
But the problem with fantasy is that it prevents change and results in people not learning or taking corrective action.
Negative emotions are meant to fuel action and change for the better.
But by falling into fantasy, you start living a pattern of “hope and cope”.
A better way of processing negative emotions is to take in information.
Be more conscious, and from a mature standpoint, see what there is to learn from the experience to prevent it from happening again.
You’re better off making a lesson of it and applying it now and for the future.
As opposed to dwelling in the past and convincing yourself “If only…”
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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