Inner child: what is it and why is it important?

You often hear in a therapy setting that people talk about the inner child. But what is your inner child and what can you do with it? In this blog, I will take a closer look at the inner child.

Psychology has been working with the inner child since around the 1970s. Since then, it has primarily been used as a technique to help you heal from unhealthy patterns learned during childhood, such as child abuse or neglect[1].

This makes it difficult to be yourself, and you actually develop a “survival personality” instead of being able to express yourself as you truly are. In the long run, this makes you very unhappy, and of course, it’s not healthy either.

Reason enough to work with your inner child.

What is your inner child

Your inner child is the child aspect of your personality. This actually refers to everything your unconscious has stored from your childhood. For example, if you experienced a traumatic event even before you went to high school, your therapist can start working with your inner child.

The core of you is often your inner child. It is your source of what you consider truth, it gives you wisdom and can work as a guide for your life. Your inner child is also something to take care of. When you do, for example, you notice that you are confident and feel valuable[2].

Are things just not feeling right? If so, it may be that your adult self is not properly listening to your inner child and the cues your inner child is giving.

As a therapist , you may encounter a lot of resistance when working with the inner child. For men, for example, this can be difficult, and in such cases it’s sometimes better to refer to it as “inner work,” but the advantage of hypnotherapy is that people are more open to it and less critical. This alone can resolve the linguistic issue surrounding the term “inner child,” thereby reducing resistance to working with it.

Ego and the inner child

I often describe your ego as your Self. It wants all kinds of things. Your ego wants to make more money. Your ego wants that expensive car. Your ego wants to go on vacation. Your ego wants a certain look. The core of your ego is the inner child. Your inner child wants all kinds of things and all kinds of things not.

Your inner child is the core of your true self.

Around that inner child, you all have sub-personalities. Like your inner critic. Your inner parent, the rule-maker and so on[3]. You often recognize those as that little voice that says to you whether something belongs or not. That is also something that your inner child is influenced by and can cause you to get certain emotions from your own thoughts, for example.

Inner child self-education

Once you figure out the problem of your inner child, you can use that other part of your ego to get angry at that child , and that it doesn't understand that the world is different and that you are no longer in that annoying situation from before. But that core of you can't really do anything about that.

This is quite natural, as you don't usually evaluate unconscious beliefs that originated in your childhood.

Sometimes even that self-assessment isn’t enough; you need to have a conversation with yourself—with that inner child. To replace the upbringing you received from your parents or caregivers with the upbringing you give yourself. You can nurture your inner child in a loving way, thereby gaining a guide who will help you and enable you to move forward in life with self-confidence and self-worth .

In hypnotherapy, this is usually not the first technique used to change your perspective on a problem. For example, if regression doesn’t quite have the desired effect, you can often start working with the inner child.

The hypnotherapist will then help you start the conversation with your inner child and allow your inner child to grow up in a healthy way, until the moment you are in the therapist's chair.

This can go a long way in initially solving the problem you are currently seeing a therapist for.

Guided visualization to talk to your inner child

As mentioned, the therapist helps you talk to your inner child. This is usually done by visualizing your inner child and engaging in the conversation with your inner child in that visualization.

You can also talk directly to the inner child and skip the regression. You then go into hypnosis first. You close your eyes and relax. A visualization to get into the hypnotic state and to get to your inner child is to imagine walking into a room. That room has a door and behind that door is a staircase. The stairs go down. You slowly walk down those stairs as you relax. You also repeat the word relax to yourself as you walk down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs you come out you see your safe place. That's where you walk to. You are aware of the sounds, movement and everything you see in your safe place. This is a safe place for connection, where you connect with your inner child.

You see your inner child and watch this child to see if he/she wants to connect with you. If your inner child cannot talk, try to feel what your inner child is feeling.

For example, you can check off a list of emotions, such as:

• Happy
• Sad
• Anxious
• Angry
• Restless
• Hurt
• Enthusiast
• Or maybe there's an entirely different feeling.

If your inner child can talk, ask how he/she is doing and how he/she is feeling.

Listen with love and respect.

When you know what your inner child is feeling, ask what your inner child needs. What can you do to make your inner child feel better?

Perhaps you can pick up your inner child and give it a hug. Take a deep breath and send love and light to your inner child. Let him or her know that you’re there and that you’ll be there for him or her in the future, too. Tell your inner child that he or she is safe in this safe place within you. If possible, bring your inner child into the present moment.

Let your inner child grow up in your mind with the new knowledge and new thoughts. Let your child experience what it would have been like then and allow your child to merge with your present you. If, despite this, your inner child needs something in the future, your inner child can let you know.

Talk about what signal you will receive from your inner child next to determine if you need to do something.

Walk away from your safe place and walk back to the stairs. Walk back up the stairs into the room and take a few more deep breaths. When you open your eyes later, you will feel energized and simply fantastic.

Open your eyes.

This was an example of a guided visualization, but reading can be very meditative and hypnotic. So hence also a small way to get you out of hypnosis, just in case 😉.

Once you master this, it is also a lot easier to check your inner child in difficult situations.

Check your inner child in difficult situations

You just don't run into the same problems every day, and by solving one problem you may run into new ones. So problems you haven't had before, because you are now exhibiting behaviors you haven't shown before.

Then, when the situation is difficult, you can take a moment to check with yourself how your inner child is reacting to the situation and whether it is currently influencing how you deal with the problem; bringing about a solution or blocking the solution.

Paying attention to your inner child and giving them what they need will help you navigate a difficult situation with more confidence[4].

The inner child can be utilized in all kinds of therapeutic settings, including hypnotherapy. Would you like to know how hypnosis works? Then join the free online masterclass on hypnosis.

Or sign up for one of our training programs. The program also covers working with the inner child. This is an advanced technique, so you won’t learn it right away, but later in the program.

The trainings are conducted online from a professional studio and with plenty of assistance for one-on-one attention, so you can help yourself and others in the best way possible.

Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:

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