Healing Your Inner Child
What is Inner Child Therapy?
Ego States Therapy or “Inner Child” Therapy is a form of psychotherapy helping individuals to heal their inner child “parts” from childhood trauma. We do this through the exploration of the childhood emotional parts or themes that have impacted them and are no longer helping them in their life now.
Unprocessed trauma stays with us in different ways and can manifest as beliefs, emotions, and sensations. The goal of inner child work is to give space for the child and their feelings. Through combining EMDR and ego states therapy we begin to process the traumatic feelings held and developed at the time of trauma. We then free the child part so it longer feels “stuck” or impacting the person’s life in an unhelpful way.
When are Child Parts Created?
Child parts are created at the time of trauma when the experience happening to the child was too overwhelming for the child to process or able make sense of at that time. The child separates from those feelings in order not to feel the pain of the experience of hurt, abandonment, or fear and allowing them to function. This separation from emotion is helpful at the time of trauma because it gives the child a way to survive and get through the difficult experience.
Why are Emotional Parts Created at Times of Trauma?
By definition a traumatic experience is a life threating event. Emotionally when a parent is unable to meet the emotional needs of the child, he or she feels this as on an emotional level as a threat to their life. From an evolutionary perspective, children are dependent on their caregivers for survival and to not be able to depend on them is a threat to survival.
There are relatively few ways that a child can manage such difficult feelings. A primary way is “splitting off” the feelings and, in some cases, dissociating from the feelings completely. In this situation, the child holds and feels the good feelings of love and safety from the parents a majority of the time. When an unpleasant experience or traumatic moment happens the feelings of pain or hurt are “split” or sectioned off to the emotional part where it gets stored away. This is a helpful coping skill at the time of trauma, and allows the child to function in day to day life. However, later on in life, the unprocessed emotion continues to impact the person into adulthood and is no longer helpful for them.
At that time, their life may be safer, but the child parts are still causing them to feel unsafe, anxious, depressed, or fearful. That is where the work of inner child therapy can be so helpful.
The Healing of Inner Child Therapy
In inner child therapy we will start by reaching out to the child part in a loving and safe way to allow the child part to express itself. By giving a loving space for the part he or she will feel safe to recognize the feelings they never processed. With time and support, the part can process through the traumatic feelings and the emotional energy is released.
Allowing our child self to heal frees us to live our adult life in an authentic way free from the emotional triggers, shame/guilt, and reactions of the past. Many behaviors and feelings are actually younger parts of our self that are unhealed, and when processed, the intensity and emotional burden are freed. This leaves us free to choose how we want to feel and what we want out of our lives giving control back to the individual.
Mendel Toron, LCSW, CCTP, EMDR is a certified EMDR and Trauma therapist specializing in inner child therapy helping individuals to heal from childhood trauma. For more information about Mendel and his work click here.