How to Heal Your Inner Child With 10 At Home Exercises
In this post you’ll discover How to Heal Your Inner Child With 10 At Home Exercises
What's My Inner Child & Why Do I need to get to know it?
Our inner child are one or many emotional parts of ourselves that develop over time during significant
events, moments, or experiences.
When an experience feels unsafe at that age and no adult steps in to offer comfort, the pain and shame can linger for years to come. Inner child exercises are one way we can access that younger self and offer them the comfort they needed but didn’t have access to at the time.
Inner child healing is important because it recognizes past trauma and provides the necessary tools for moving forward. Understanding where certain behavior patterns stem from is an important step in the recovery process.
3 characteristics of the inner child
According to Psych Central there are three ajor characteristics of the inner child:
"(1) they share a physical body with an adult being—that is, you;
(2) they are caught in a time warp: that is, even though the body they inhabit is fully grown, they still think they’re physically small and proportionately vulnerable, especially to people who resemble their original caretakers in some way;
(3) when threatened, they revert to behaviors that are related to unhappy events early in their lives, and they recreate the sense of helplessness, pain, rage, and fear that those original events evoked in them.”
What You Can do to soothe your inner child?
Learning to self soothe was probably a skill you were never taught as a child. And no, your parents having you "cry it out" is not self soothing–it teaches you nothing other than your parent will ignore you until comply and behave the way they want you to. That's abusive. Plain and simple.
Why is self-soothing so important? According to NAMI, "When you are upset or stressed, it is important to know positive ways to cope on your own—that’s a skill important for our individual growth no matter who we are. Finding ways to self-soothe can help you feel at ease when you are dealing with frustration, excitement or having intense emotions. It can also reduce the amount of worry and fear we carry around with us."
Self-soothing is an important skill to have at home before you begin to try these at home exercises.
Ten inner child exercises
Now that you understand how to calm your CNS down with a few recommended self-soothing techniques. Here are some of my personal favorite inner child exercises you can do at home (don't forget to talk to your therapist before you do these to be extra safe.
Acknowledge your inner child - while it can be easy to assumer your inner child is a child-like personality, it is not. Your inner child is a part of your subconscious and it is vital to help it recognize you as you are presently and provide it with your presence. Nothing needs to be said, simply being physically there with them in your subconscious is enough.
Hug your self every day - something we often lack in child hood is physical affection from our parents or from people important to us. On the flip side, maybe our physical space was violated. Whichever way hugging yourself gives you the space to be with yourself and love your self without the icky other people touch.
Think about your favorite childhood memories - It is important to recognize that good things also happened in childhood–even when bad may outweigh the good. So think back to a moment where you felt safe. What made you feel safe in that moment? What was going on around you? What were the smells, sights, feels, and other sensory inputs you experienced? What emotions did these evoke?
Talk to yourself in the mirror - in a previous post I discussed ten types of cognitive distortions we tell ourselves almost daily. Become aware of your negative self talk and dive deeper into understanding why you talk to yourself this way and start replacing negative thoughts, with reframed ones. EX: "My body is ugly, I should start a diet, then people will love me" Replace with: "I struggle to love my body, but I am getting better at it each day by recognizing the things I do love."
Practice self-compassion - we are quite literally our own worst critic. That inner critic is a child part who picked up on the toxic ways you were spoken to as a child and is now inflicting that same pain onto you again. So, when you notice yourself being unloving to yourself, replace those words with compassion and empathy.
Write a letter to your inner child - This requires that you think about what you needed to hear as a child and how impactful those words would be to yourself now. So take your time with this exercise. Start simple, and don't over complicate it. Something I hear often is, "I'm not the person my inner child needs now." Guess what? You can say that to them. You're not perfect and telling yourself "I can't be there for myself now because I'm terrible," is a cognitive distortion. Start with, "Hey inner self, life has been hard and unfair to us both. I haven't taken the responsibility to heal us, but I'm going to try. I love you and myself enough to do that.
Identify your triggers - What sets off your anger the most? What spins you out or pulls you down into a deep depression? Whatever causes a disruptive emotion or an explosive reaction is often set off by a reaction to something in the world around you. So, each time you are set off, take a beat and identify the cause, write it down, and keep repeating this to identify all the things that trigger your inner child to react.
Make time to play - When we think of play, we are often stuck in this mindset of "playing with our kids," or "playing with child toys," but that isn't true. when we say "make time for play" we're talking about getting in touch with your inner child and doing something they never got to do or were constantly being judged for. Maybe that's a massive board game collection. Maybe it's building a massive lego fortress or even playing with beads. Making time for play is all about allowing your inner child to guide you into a format of play that is safe for both of you.
Inner child and infant meditation - Practicing meditation as self-soothing tool is different that this. This sort of meditation allows your mind to be blank, leaving space for your child parts to make their way to you. Maybe you don't know what to say to them, but they might know what they want to hear from you. This type of meditation is a great way to gently get in touch with your system and emotions protecting your inner child parts who need you.
Keep educating yourself - To rely on influencers, people who aren't your therapist, and advocates to share important tips and information is one thing. To take the steps for yourself to educate yourself through media, books, shows, docuseries, classes, therapy etc, is a whole other VITAL part of healing your inner child. The more you learn about how to get in touch with your inner child, the more you will learn about your own self and the importance recognizing and healing all subsequent child parts that come up. We often do not have just one inner child, we have many. Each child part has developed its own emotional system that will take time to see, heal, and love.
Q: Answer on Instagram! Which exercise are you going to try at home?
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SOURCES
10 Exercises to Heal Your Inner Child, Medically reviewed by Joslyn Jelinek, LCSW — By Traci Pedersen and Jamie Smith — Updated on November 16, 2022, https://psychcentral.com/health/how-to-heal-your-inner-child
Course Excerpt: Healing the Inner Child
By Susan Vaughn, Compiled By Katie Vaughn-Kelso
A Therapist’s Journey: Learning the Art of Self-Soothing
By Larry Shushansky, LICSW, June 4, 2018, https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/June-2018/A-Therapist-s-Journey-Learning-the-Art-of-Self-So#:~:text=Finding%20ways%20to%20self%2Dsoothe,we%20carry%20around%20with%20us