YOUR INNER CHILD:
WHAT IS IT, WHAT’S UP WITH IT AND DOES IT NEED HEALING?
Recent online articles have listed the signs that reveal your inner child is wounded, or that your inner child needs healing. But is there any real psychology behind this?
Have you noticed the spate of advice articles claiming to help you tap into your ‘inner child’? Some of them suggest this inner infant could be to blame for your relationship troubles, and there are others that promise to show you ways to start ‘healing the wounds’ your child within may have suffered. Online influencers are apparently tuned into the trend – you can find many of them posting photos of themselves riding tricycles or doing other seemingly childish things alongside boasts that they’re tapping into their inner child. So, what’s this all about – do we really have such a thing as an ‘inner child’? And do you need to heal it?
WHAT IS AN INNER CHILD?
The answer is that it depends on who you ask, and on whether you’re being literal or metaphorical. A hard-nosed neuroscientist might dismiss the idea of an inner child as fanciful. But in other fields the notion of an inner child is long established. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung referred to an ‘inner child’ in their writings, and for several decades now, many serious schools of psychotherapy have taught that, as adults, we have a child within. The late US self-help evangelist and best-selling author John Bradshaw also gave the concept a popular boost with his 1990 book Homecoming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child.
WHAT DO PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY?
The different therapy schools describe this ‘mini me’ of the psyche in various ways. For instance, there’s internal family systems therapy (IFS), developed by the US therapist Robert Schwartz in the 1980s. IFS states that we have a multiplicity of ‘parts’ within us, one of which is our inner child – or even inner children – which is the different aspects of ourselves formed at different ages, each with its own memories and emotions. Crucially, this approach teaches that if you suffer some kind of trauma or abuse early in life, then this experience can wound one or more of your child parts. You carry this wound with you through life and it can potentially cause conflict between the different parts of yourself.
A related but distinct approach comes from what’s known as schema therapy, developed by the US psychologist Jeffrey Young in 1990. It states that we all have various modes for relating to other people and the world, some of which are ‘child modes’, such as the ‘vulnerable child’ or the ‘angry child’. In times of emotional stress, we can regress to these modes, especially if we experienced trauma or neglect early in life.
“A hard-nosed neuroscientist might dismiss the idea of an inner child as fanciful. But in other fields the notion is long established”
These ideas are also connected in various ways to ‘attachment theory’, which sees the way we conduct our adult relationships as being shaped, at least in part, by the ways we were treated by our caregivers as children. So, drawing on attachment theory, a therapist might help a client look back to their childhood relationships, especially if they were harmful, and help them to develop new, more secure ways of relating to other people.
Of course, the most mainstream and popular therapy today is probably cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and this approach can be linked to the concept of an inner child too. For instance, one aspect of CBT is about identifying and challenging unhelpful ‘automatic thoughts’ that spring to mind, such as “I’m bound to make a fool of myself”. In a 2018 article in the American Journal Of Psychotherapy, a pair of CBT practitioners argued that these sorts of automatic thoughts might helpfully be thought of as learned early in life and then incorporated into your ‘child mode’.
CAN AN INNER CHILD BE HEALED?
Psychotherapeutic approaches that believe in an inner child use various techniques to help people connect with and heal this aspect of themselves. For instance, a therapist who practices IFS therapy will help their client or patient improve the relationships between the different parts of themselves – including by bringing the ‘manager’ parts into conversation with the ‘exiles’, which can include the inner child or children from earlier in life. They’ll likely also help clients come to terms with traumatic events from their past – to heal the inner child.
Meanwhile, a therapist using schema therapy might use a therapeutic technique known as ‘chairwork’. This exercise sees them place two chairs opposite each other and invite a client to take one chair and ask them to adopt a ‘healthy adult mode’, so they can speak to and nurture their ‘vulnerable child mode’, which they imagine is sitting in the empty chair opposite.
So, what to make of the online pop-advice articles that promise to help you heal your inner child? In reality, it’s difficult to engage in this kind of deep therapeutic work alone – and if you have experienced serious trauma in the past, it’s especially sensible to take great care and consider consulting a mental health professional. These notes of caution aside, many of the popular articles use the notion of an inner child simply to encourage readers to practise self-compassion (nurturing themselves as they would a vulnerable child) or to think about and challenge harmful selfbeliefs they might have internalised when they were younger – all of which seems fairly innocuous.
Christian is a psychology and neuroscience writer. His latest book is Be Who You Want: Unlocking The Science Of Personality Change (£14.99, Robinson).
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