Healing the Inner Child: Unearthing the Past for a Brighter Future

Since I have seen the Logo Brick exhibition by Nathan Sawoya I started explaining to my clients the potential idea of how our mental body is structured - from numerous small bricks.

Our mental body does have a  structure and in some places bricks might be a bit loose - these are the places where we have been hurt, abandoned, ashamed, bitten... Very often it was when we depended upon adults to survive. Within each of us resides an inner child—the part of ourselves that carries the memories, emotions, and experiences from our early years. In this blog post, we'll embark on a journey to explore the concept of the inner child and delve into how acknowledging and healing this aspect can lead to profound personal growth and emotional well-being.

The inner child represents the sum of our childhood experiences, including both the joys and wounds. It's the part of us that still holds onto memories, feelings, and beliefs formed during those early years. I usually tend to be a child when I have high temperature - despite the fact I can make myself a tea or some food, I am laying in bed and asking for those to be prepared for me by my family.. we can turn to act like kids in so many different ways and usually we are somehow "stocked" in child position in those situations and for some reason.

The experiences of our inner child can significantly influence our adult lives. Unresolved childhood issues may manifest as emotional struggles, relationship challenges, or self-limiting beliefs. If we could imagine our mental body as brick sculpture, when some stressful event happened to us in adulthood, in a place where bricks are loose and these are the spots of our inner child wounds- our mental body will not be stable.

Healing the inner child involves acknowledging and addressing past wounds with compassion and understanding. Therapeutic techniques, such as inner child work, can facilitate this process. EMDR therapy is focused on separate inner child trauma processing and then sheltering and integrating into the adult part of us. When we adress inner child wounds, bricks of our mental body should strengthen and we are getting a layer of emotional stability.

To heal the inner child, individuals must reconnect with the emotions they experienced as children. This may involve exploring past traumas, grief, or unmet needs.

A crucial aspect of inner child healing is reparenting oneself. This means offering the care, love, and support that may have been lacking in childhood, fostering self-compassion in the present. As adults we should strive to find ways to take care for ourselves and provide care for our children and people in need and base it on our emotional maturity. In order to get there, we should give our inner child what it needs to heal wounds.