075: Healing Your Inner Child

In this episode, I’ll dive into the concept of the “inner child” that resides within each of us. A child is living their life in realtime, but within every adult resides a little version of themselves, a child with specific unmet emotional needs in need of healing. Nicole LePera talks about three steps to healing your inner child: ACKNOWLEDGE your inner child’s pain and trauma, USE your triggers as a guide to your emotional childhood, and ASK your inner child what they need from you to heal. First: acknowledgement. In episode 45, “Your Parents Lied to You,” I discuss how in every aspect — the way your parents thought about you and said about you, how they talked to you, how they showed (or didn’t show) love — their relationship to you was an outward projection of their own self-image. In one way or another, everyone has sustained emotional trauma from their childhood. As you recognize that you are not exempt from this axiom, you will be able to begin to heal and hopefully traumatize your children less. Second: use your triggers as a guide. Brooke Castillo calls our broken ego absent a healthy internal guide to processing emotions an “emotional childhood.” That guide is developed by exposing yourself to circumstances that trigger your emotional response and then retaining your maturity despite these triggers. On the grand scale of catastrophic events, Dr. LePera says getting furious about her spouse’s undone dishes was an irrational response rooted in unresolved trauma. If we can say that of another adult’s foibles, we should be so much more forgiving if our children make mistakes! You may lose your temper when your child forgets a library book, yelling almost to the point of blacking out. (Recognize that, again, this is an inappropriate response to a child’s behavior.) First, become conscious after you’ve been triggered. Observe yourself carefully. Plan ahead to rein in your reactions. Second, become conscious of the trigger while it’s happening, and check yourself immediately. Finally, after much practi