Carl Jung called it the “Divine Child”, other psychotherapists call it the “True Self” and Charles Whitfield called it the “Child Within”. We all have an Inner Child. This is where our feelings live, our emotional self. We experience feelings like joy, sadness, anger, fear, or affection from within the meaning we assigned to them when we were just a few years old.
All the experiences and feelings of the little child and adolescent we used to be, still, decades later, make us struggle with emotional traumas, chronic anxiety and irrational behaviour. Or, because of those early experiences, we repeat debilitating patterns such as addiction, depression, troubled relationships and chronic dissatisfaction.
The wounds our Inner Child received can, and do, continue to contaminate our adult lives. It is the Inner Child who feels fear, panic, terror, rage, deserted, insignificant, confusion, hopelessness, emptiness or victimised, and in need of love and nurturing, NOT the adult.
The unconscious does not work in a linear time frame. Therefore it is possible to have our adult-self (who knows exactly what the child-self needed) meet our Inner Child and through guidance, understanding and love give it ‘re-parenting’ to heal the childhood hurt and pain.
Healing the emotional wounds of our Inner Child will give us back the freedom to be responsible, integrated adults who can make choices, rather than being run by programs or fears that were installed in our youth.