Do you carry wounds from your childhood? Were you abused or neglected? Are negative childhood memories still very vivid in your mind? Inner Child healing is a therapeutic process whereby you repair the psychological damage inflicted on you in your early years.
On this page I will speak about how hypnotic techniques can help you resolve memories of abuse, neglect, and trauma that you experienced all those years ago. And I’ll be sharing a personal story about how my own Inner Child was healed through hypnotherapy.
As I say to my clients, “It’s never too late to have a better childhood.”
Let’s find out how to heal the past and truly move on…
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What is the Inner Child?
The Inner Child is a metaphor we use to describe that part of you that carries the experiences of your early years. There is, of course, no literal child inside of you, but a pattern of learnings that shaped the way you see the world.
Indeed, it has long been suggested that our personality is largely developed in the first few years of life. Our early learnings help develop our ego and our attitude toward life.
Thus, the Inner Child can be seen as a part of your psychological make-up that, to a lesser or greater degree, still has an impact on your life today. This is more likely the case if you have unresolved trauma from childhood. It is as if you have learned – from early experiences – to see through the eyes of woundedness.
But the Inner Child doesn’t carry only our wounds from childhood. He or she also carries our sense of wonder, a beautiful innocence and heart-felt connection to life as it unfolds moment by moment. It’s this sense of wonder that gets beaten out of us when we experience or witness abuse, anger, violence, threat and neglect.
Indeed, if your childhood was spent in a ‘toxic’ household there’s a good chance you were psychologically damaged in some way. And that damage could well be the foundation stone for your problems today.
What is Inner Child healing?
So, how do we go about fixing things that happened years or even decades ago?
Inner Child healing is a psychotherapeutic process that aims to address the wrongs of your upbringing. It uses a variety of techniques to change old memories, helping you get closure and move on.
Change old memories? Yes, it is possible. For sure, you can’t change what actually happened back then. But you can change the way your brain interpreted what happened. This is what makes the difference. When you re-interpret old memories, the memories shift from being held in the ’emotional brain’ and move up into the ‘logical brain’. In other words, they are processed differently, free of the emotional ‘energy’ of the past.
Am I talking about simply thinking differently? Not in a million years. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy falls short when it comes to Inner Child healing.
RELATED CONTENT: The problem with CBT and positive thinking
Proper healing comes when we use the REM state (that’s what we do in hypnotherapy) to access and work with the emotional content and the meanings you made back then.
In a relaxed trance state you can revisit old incidents (whilst remaining in your Adult-Self) and provide new understanding to the child you once were. When he or she starts to feel better, you also feel better as an adult because you’re no longer seeing life through the lens of pain and suffering.
Are you a therapist? Learn the Rewind technique to help your clients heal their histories
What all children really need
Best selling author, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, tells us that all children need two main things when growing up.
They need love and they need guidance. If one of these is missing, kids are likely to suffer in some way. If both, we can be pretty much sure of it.
In her book, Warming the Stone Child, she shares myths and stories about abandonment and the ‘unmothered child’. Pinkola Estes tells us that ‘we can have love until it’s coming out of our ears’ but if the right guidance is not given (especially in difficult moments) we are likely to be wounded. And the woundedness can last years, if not a whole lifetime.
So, even if you had the most loving parents, there’s a chance you were somehow emotionally affected in childhood through not receiving the right help and support when you most needed it. This is, perhaps, no fault of your parents of course. We’re not playing the blame game here. Parents operate from their own emotional intelligence (or lack thereof). The cycle repeats itself down through the ages.
I would add a third essential ingredient that all children need: to grow up in an environment that feels safe and secure. If this vital emotional need is not met, children are likely to feel anxious, angry and/or depressed.
RELATED CONTENT: If your child or teen is struggling at the moment help them assess their emotional needs right now
The key thing to know is that it’s never too late to revisit old memories (with the help of a trusted and skilled therapist) and provide your own Inner Child with a new narrative to live by.
This is what I did in my own hypnotherapy sessions…
My own Inner Child healing
In my free ebook I disclose how I lived for over 10 years with a condition that doctors were unable to treat. “You’ll have to live with it,” they told me.
I got to thinking that there must be a psychological reason for my symptoms. I studied my dreams, went to counsellors (including a Jungian dream analyst) and journaled long into the night, trying to figure out whether my mind was creating the problem.
Then I stumbled upon hypnotherapy…
I won’t disclose the whole story here, suffice to say that it was in the hypnotic state that an old childhood memory surfaced – something I hadn’t remembered for almost 30 years. It wasn’t a traumatic memory but simply the recall of something my mother had told me when I was 5 years old. Her words embedded themselves deep into my subconscious mind and became stuck like an air-bubble in a breezeblock.
In hypnosis my therapist helped me to process the memory differently. We reframed it, not only on a cognitive level (as in CBT) but also on an emotional level. My brain fully knew in that moment that the memory belonged to the past (and could stay there).
Lo and behold, within days real healing started.
Read the full story in my Free Ebook…
Undoing patterns from the past
So, what we’re talking about here is changing or ‘undoing’ subconscious patterns that have held you captive for years. Unresolved trauma and abuse becomes the pattern you live your life by. Neglect, abandonment and rejection are the seeping wounds that are never dressed properly.
This explains, for example, why you can feel excited and hopeful in a new relationship only to slip into old patterns of emoting and behaving a few weeks down the line. This is because the woundedness hasn’t been (ad)dressed properly. Insecurity in relationships is almost always based on early childhood conditioning.
In typical psychotherapy, you emote in the presence of your therapist, share your story, get things off your chest. In CBT you might learn how to change your thinking about it. This is all well and good. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.
In order to undo those patterns and get real Inner Child healing you need more than just being ‘held’. (By ‘held’ I’m referring to the safe, trusting alliance you build between yourself (as client) and the therapist. This underpins all good therapy and is one of the main problems with AI therapy: there is no therapeutic relationship).
Indeed, my advice is this…
Don’t try Inner Child healing with AI therapy. A chatbot won’t be able to ‘hold’ you and help process those emotions. These need careful handling and attention. Even more, AI certainly won’t help you change those old memories.
Inner Child healing and hypnotherapy
With hypnotherapy we do more than just ‘hold the space’. For sure, sometimes it is enough to share your story, but more often we need to actually do something with old memory patterns. It’s not enough to take the dressing off and have a poke around.
Indeed, this could be seen as abusive therapy. There’s nothing worse than going to therapy feeling depressed and coming out feeling suicidal. Unfortunately, the old Freudian idea of simply uncovering traumatic memories to bring about a cure is still practiced by many counsellors and therapists. It is not sufficient to dig up the past. (Indeed, this approach for treating things like depression can actually make the depression worse).
RELATED CONTENT: How hypnotherapy can help you break the cycle of depression
And it is not enough just to change how you think about what happened back then. (Trauma is not based on a problem with your thinking).
With the use of hypnotic techniques, anything that surfaces in the REM state can be ‘worked with’ (as it was for me). When old memories arise those memories can be altered in some way by yourself and the therapist working together.
Remember, in the REM state your subconscious mind is more open and receptive to new words, new understandings, proper explanations…guidance…and love. All the things that would have made a world of difference in your childhood.
Moreover, in the hypnotic state these cognitive and emotional understandings form a new blueprint in the subconscious mind. A new pattern is established. Your brain suddenly understands that the past really is the past. The trauma, neglect, violence, misunderstandings, and abuse is over.
Start your Inner Child healing journey right now…
The merging of wound and wonder
When a new ‘narrative’ is formed on a deep level – not just a thinking level – you reconnect with your soul, the very essence of your being. Your True Self begins to reform after years in the shadows. From here the sense of wonder can re-emerge. You feel more alive and more present to life as it unfolds moment by moment.
This is like a coming together of wound and wonder where suffering becomes ‘Holy Suffering‘, something deeply meaningful and transformative.
The childlike sense of wonder is the soothing balm that begins to properly heal those wounds. Far from simply sticking a plaster over it, this is when the poison is well and truly removed from the mind-body system. And this process can have a tremendously healing effect on emotional/psychological wounds and physical illness as well.
In the words of Jesus, “Unless ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
My interpretation of this famous quote has nothing to do with an afterlife. What Jesus is referring to is that state of innocence, free from conditioning and indoctrination. When we return to ‘zero point’, wiping the slate of our histories clean, we can feel the sense of wonder and – through this – experience the ‘Kingdom’ – a cosmic state of consciousness.
Indeed, I have long held the belief that an experience of oneness (where your individual consciousness merges with All That Is) is the greatest healing experience you can ever have. The Kingdom can be lived NOW!
RELATED CONTENT: How to experience the healing power of oneness
Inner Child healing – summary and next steps
This is the potential of Inner Child healing. When the wounds of the past are properly healed you open your consciousness to a Bigger Reality. Free to live more authentically, no longer held captive by those words and wounds from your history, you’re able to fully inhabit your life.
And you’ll begin to notice this happening when you become aware that you feel different in some way. More grown up. Perhaps more confident. More relaxed in situations that used to trigger you. Perhaps more present and alive to each and every moment.
It’s as if that little boy or girl inside of you is learning how to smile again. And play. And laugh.
The Wounded Child has become the Wonder Child. It feels like you’re reborn.
I hope you’ve found this page informative and helpful.
If you feel you need professional help to heal your Inner Child please consider booking a Free Discovery Session with me to find out more. No hard-sell. No obligation to book for paid sessions. Just a chance for us to chat.
Remember to check out the hypnosis download to start your Inner Child healing right away.
And dive into these related pages: The Loyal Soldier – how to break free from your history
The Power of Story – how narrative therapy can help you break free from the past
True Self vs False Self – are you being authentic or faking your way through life?
