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Healing Inner Child Wounds
( Part 04)
Having now realized the connection between childhood painful experiences and its affect on adult life stability and security, here are some useful ways to heal inner child wounds:
1.Aknowledge your Inner Child Pain: This is considered as the first step to start healing. One has to be open to explore one’s past pain, and accept and recognize what caused the pain which would help in understanding their impact.
2.Listen to what Your Inner Child has to Say: After connecting with the past, listen to the feeling that surface such as: anger, rejection, anxiety, guilt, shame or vulnerability. It is painful but one has to re-experience these feelings again in order to work through them.
3.Write a Letter to your Inner Child: One would try to write a letter to one’s inner child about the past painful memories but with an adult perspective in order to provide explanations for distress circumstances that one did not understand at that time.
4.Meditate: Meditation would help in paying more attention to one’s feelings. It helps in trying to understand why you feel angry or ignored today and look for their connection with negative experiences in childhood; perhaps your dad never listened to you so now you feel rejected when your partner is too busy to pay attention. Therefore, It helps in validating inner child feelings by sending messages that it’s OK to have such emotions.
5.Visualization: At present, as an adult one can visualize visiting himself when he was a child and open a dialogue with him/her and comfort and hug him/her.
6.Bring Back the Joys of Childhood: One can devote some time for fun such as playing games with partner, laughing with friends to heal the pain of missing out such fun in childhood.
7.Positive Talk Journal: If one has experienced past wounds it doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be grateful for; here one can write a journal of gratitude for oneself in which messages of self-esteem and love and gratitude are expressed; for example, what am I grateful for today? What I have learned in the past that I found useful today? What does my family admire me for? What do I admire about myself? ‘I am enough’, ‘I do matter’…..
8.Talk to a Therapist: In case it is difficult to address childhood wounds, it is advisable to talk to a therapist who will provide guiding strategies to resolve past pain.
References
–10 Exercises to Heal Your Inner Child. Accessed in:
Psycentral.com/health/how-to-heal-your-inner-childidentity-triggers. (2023).
-Jeremy Sutton (2023). Inner Child Healing: 35 Practical Tools for Growing Beyond your Past. Accessed in:
Positivepsychology.com/inner-child-healing.
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