Your inner child is your connection to your child self and she can be playful, child-like and fun. However an injured or traumatized inner child might face many challenges as an adult, particularly when triggered by events that bring up past wounding.
Healing your inner child is one of the most important things you will ever do for yourself. I spoke with Kavita Srinivasan, Conscious Parenting Coach about how to heal your inner child.
Five Steps To Heal Your Inner Child
1 Feel Your Pain
Healing starts with you feeling your pain and taking full responsibility for your healing. It is not about the other. It is about you. You feel the pain.
Our parents had the job of raising us. But they let us down. Not because they are bad people, but because of the cycle of trauma which runs many generations back. You are carrying in your heart and in your soul the pain of so many generations.
So when you allow yourself to actually feel the pain and you go through that dark tunnel, that dark knight of the soul, when you go through that breakdown and you release the pain and you connect with yourself, you merge with your inner child. It’s a beautiful process. This process started for me at 36 with my son.
That is how you align. And then everything in your life falls into place. Everything in your life comes to you and it’s just so beautiful. It begins with just being with yourself. It is the most profound thing in the world. It is only when we connect with our inner inner child that we can parent our outer child.
2 Listen To Your Triggers
For me, my son was my biggest trigger and I think for a lot of people, having a child is our biggest trigger, because you can’t blame the child.
You can blame your husband or your boss. But when you look at your innocent child’s face and you yell at them for absolutely nothing that they have done, that pain is coming from you.
The fact that I could not be there for my son was all down to me. I never once questioned if it was him. It was all me. Parenting is so powerful, at least it has been for me in my personal journey.
I had so many thoughts of killing myself because that pain is just so devastating. You need to have courage. You need to have someone to live for. Because when you are in the throes of that pain, who do you live for? For me, it was my child. I could leave the world, but I will never leave him. I will never leave him.
People don’t talk about this enough but trauma is devastating pain. It’s the kind of pain that makes you not want to live because it is just so unbearable. But when you go through that dark night of the soul, there is a light on the other side.
That is why I find parenting so powerful. It is our ultimate portal of healing. It is our biggest inspiration because we don’t love anyone more than we love our children. We don’t love ourselves enough. Now I have started loving myself enough, but my son continues to be my inspiration.
When I feel myself slipping, is when I’m feeling that pain. My son is my growth. He is my guru. He is my gift, and that’s why parenting is so powerful.
3 Learn To Love Yourself
As children, we need to be loved. We need to be seen, and we need to be heard.
We need connection. Even as adults, we need connection and we need love. And we don’t get it. We run on empty and we don’t get what we need. We run on empty and we don’t know how to love ourselves, because we didn’t get the love that we needed growing up.
That doesn’t mean our parents didn’t love us.
Every parent loves their child to the extent they can. To their full capacity. But we often didn’t get the love we needed the way we needed it. So self love is a very tricky thing. You learn to love yourself through the eyes of your parents and through how loved you feel when you are around your parents.
In my case, I didn’t have that love around me, even though in my heart I knew it on a day-to-day basis. I had no one to hear me. I had no one to see me, and I had no connection. So I didn’t learn how to take care of myself.
I would wear my clothes inside out. There would be a stain on my shirt and it wouldn’t bother me because nobody took care of me that way.
Self love begins with holding your hand in the darkest of times. It begins with that pain and feeling it all. Feeling the pain, holding your hand and just saying, ‘I love you. I’m here for you. I love you. I’m here for you’. And really holding your hand and really being there and doing nothing else.
And then slowly, slowly, checking in with yourself and not ignoring your pain. So for me, it began with not ignoring a trigger. When something triggers you, feel it. I feel it a lot in my throat. You always feel it in your body. So for me, it’s in my throat.
So every time I feel something or I feel a lump in my throat, I always put my hand on my throat. And even if I’m in public with people, I’ll say, ‘I hear you’. I hear something’s happening. I’ll be with you soon. Just give me a few minutes. And I never ignore it. Every time I feel emotion, I always tune in and say ‘I’m listening, I’m here’.
Everyone has a point in their body that really speaks to them. Whether it’s your heart racing or a tightness in your stomach or your back hurting, or a headache. And then as you tune in and you build trust within yourself, when you feel love for every part of yourself…the ugly parts, the unworthy parts, the painful parts, the needy parts, the most beautiful thing happens.
I tell myself I have no boundaries with you. We have no boundaries with one another. We are one. You can call on me anytime because all we really need is someone to be there for us. And we can then stop looking to the outside for love. That is self-love.
4 Allow Yourself To Have What You Need
I will not put pressure on myself. I will do it slowly, one step at a time. Be gentle with ourselves. When I eat that extra piece of chocolate cake, I tell myself ‘you needed that because that was your love for so long. That was your version of love for so long. How could I take that away from you?’ But I will learn to fill you up with love enough that you won’t need the cake’.
You have to stop and actually say ‘I deserve this and I am going to allow this in my life’. Eating became a big coping mechanism for me. Instead of telling myself, ‘I need to stop eating this dessert’ …talk to yourself, and it gets so much less with time. Not because of speaking harshly with myself or putting myself on a forced diet. The more I love myself and the more attention I pay to myself, the less I need the cake.
It happens very organically. And this is what Dr. Shahar says about love, which I think is the most beautiful way of describing love: Love is ‘I will take care of myself for you, and you will take care of yourself for me’. Not that I take care of you and you take care of me.
You have to be whole already before you are in any relationship, whether with food or whether with a person, or whether with a friend, and of course with your child. And that only comes with not being harsh with yourself.
Notice How You Talk To Yourself
I have this friend and she was telling me ‘I just need to get my act together, I need to start healing now. I need to just start doing it’. And I asked her to listen to the way you are speaking to yourself. Is that how you would talk to your child?
Imagine telling your child, ‘I’m done with your tantrums and I’m done with this and that. Would you feel good talking to your child like that?’ So why do you do that with yourself? Maybe you don’t have the career you want, or the body you want, or the relationship you want. But instead of being hard on yourself and thinking of yourself as a failure, just hold yourself and say, ‘I’m here for you. Let’s do this together. There is something that’s not okay within us. And I’m waiting and I’m here for you’.
And that is the kind of self-love that is the beginning of true love. So essentially watch the way you speak to yourself. It’s so important.
5 Release Perfectionism
Children who are taught the need to be perfect are the dangerous children. Those are the ones that are going to have a nervous breakdown. Those are the ones who break. Those are the ones who have huge mental health problems later on in life.
A child who acts out, who expresses, who rebels, who holds onto their authenticity, who says ‘no! You won’t be controlling me. I am my own person’, it’s so different from the good child who says ‘okay, I’ll be everything that you want me to be’ and they end up with no sense of self.
My proudest moments as a mother is when my son says ‘no’. I just love it when he says no, when he acts out, when he holds on, when he holds on to his opinions. I’m like, ‘oh my god, thank you. Thank you for being yourself. I’ll tell him ‘we have to go to school, get your shoes on’, and he says ‘no, I don’t want to wear these shoes. I will only wear those slippers’. And in my head I’m thinking ‘I just want him to wear the shoes’.
But now in my head, I’m thinking ‘you know what? He wants to wear the slippers, let him wear the slippers’. So I say ‘okay, wear the slippers’. And when you do this you will be raising people who become themselves.
Trauma is a disconnection from true self. It is what disconnects you from who you really are. We want our children to be themselves because each one of us comes into this world with a special gift. We all have something beautiful within us, and trauma just delays us connecting with that.
So let’s begin to change the way we speak to ourselves. It’s only love that heals. It’s not blame, hatred, anger, or anything else. Just love.
Kavita is a Conscious Parenting Coach, trained by Dr Shefali, Oprah’s go-to parenting expert. Kavita has come full circle from her own childhood as she now teaches parents how, by embracing ourselves, we can create a beautiful partnership with our child. You can find Kavita on instagram HERE
