In recent times, inner child healing has become one of the safest and most widely accepted forms of therapy. Inner awakening and emotional independence through such healing have brought unbelievable changes in the lives of people. It has, thus, almost started a whole new era of holistic healing and inner awakening.
Inner awakening is like waking up from a deep slumber. You see more, you hear more, you sense more, and you see the bigger picture. You can see situations from a bird’s eye view – even those that involve you. You begin to become neutral and therefore less drained from what is happening outside of you. It is a state of self-awareness and emotional independence that remains, whether you are going through the ups or downs of life. It is more of a being state than a doing state.
If you seek growth, transformation, and personal development, then inner child healing will help you attain tranquillity and inner peace. However, it is difficult to grow, transform, and heal without healing the emotions that weigh you down. Our family and romantic relationships commonly trigger us the most, but if we pay attention, these triggers can reveal how reactive we are to other’s opinions of us.
Being emotionally independent means being balanced in any situation and with anyone from your unhealed environment. An inner feeling of emotional security is one that that reflects your inner confidence and elevated self-esteem. It is driven by self-awareness of healthy boundaries that you draw with everyone without feeling violated, pushed, or victimised.
Let’s Talk Trauma
‘E-motions’ by holistic definition means ‘energy in motion’. Internally, we are all chemicals. Every emotional state we feel is nothing else but a neurohormone flowing through our bloodstream to make us feel different feelings such as anger, guilt, hurt, sadness, victimisation, lust, and even helplessness. Everything we think influences our emotional state. Our feelings produce a particular chemical from our hypothalamus or endocrine glands that, in turn, influences our energy and the important energy centres that we call chakras.
Each situation that we go through where we feel heavy or light can make us feel low or high on energy as it’s all connected to our meridians. What we feel is what we focus upon repeatedly in our thought space. Generally, these thoughts come from our unhealed, hurt, neglected, abandoned, or abused past.
Each time we feel sad, bad, or unpleasant, there is something within us that got triggered due to a past association that we had been through as a child – trauma that is held as an association by this inner child. To heal this hurt, we can regress in time to re-parent the inner child and integrate them with the healed adult, both vibrationally and behaviourally. With that said, here are five common situations that we often get stuck with due to unhealed past trauma.
1. Self-Sabotage Due to a Passive-Aggressive Inner Child
When critical and harsh authorities control or criticise a child again and again, it makes them angrier and creates a rebellious attitude against those authorities. In most cases, these harsh authorities are parents or grandparents who made them suffer and caused pain associations with them. The adult person in the future will then – at no cost – want to follow any system at work or even in a social environment, hence attracting failure, rejection, relationship crises, and other interpersonal issues. They might even get addicted to substances as they aren’t able to manage the chaos in their head. They enjoy the thrill of beating the system and breaking the rules that a particular authority had set for them, and this lands them in trouble all the time.
2. Lack of Self-Confidence and Self-Doubt in Decision-Making
When someone has a tremendous amount of self-doubt, they’re unable to decide on anything. This confused and vulnerable mindset makes one think, ‘I am not good enough.’ Such people attract relationships that disturb them and leave them emotionally drained. They face a lot of anxieties in life – especially in their career. Other effects of such a damaged past include loneliness, social anxiety, a lack of confidence in moving forward, and indecisiveness in career and relationships.
3. Pre-Marital Anxiety and Trust Issues in Broken or Difficult Relationships
We grow up with a basic idea of how relationships work based on how our parents lived with each other. How did our mother respond to our father? And how much does our father respect our mother? What degree of functional or dysfunctional relationship did they have? This would have impacted our mindset and how we see others in a committed relationship. Trust issues, breaking rules, infidelity, an inability to draw boundaries with others, and being unable to end an unhealthy relationship – all of which eventually lead to depression in the absence of emotional support – are very common today as a result of this kind of trauma.
4. Depression and Anxiety
With feelings of hopelessness and no support from anywhere, it is quite natural for us to worry a lot about our fate and future. We might constantly think about a future that seems bleak, with no resources to cope with the resulting anxiety of the unknown. On top of this, the pandemic has triggered anxiety attacks and a lot of uncertainty about work, relationships, and many other things for a lot of people. The unhealed and unresourceful inner children in the adults of today seek answers and clarity from pillar to post. They join webinars, read books, and meet people to see if they can get answers from somewhere.
5. Patterns of Pain Due to a Loop of Aggression, Guilt, or Helplessness
When our environment is beyond our control and our past issues (with oneself and others) have left us either angry or guilty, it often leads to us taking it out on other people, things, or even ourselves. We struggle to let go of emotional outbursts and end up imitating the behaviour that we were exposed to in our childhood. We reflect that unhealed self to become a bully towards others, and then feel regret and remorse to which we don’t have an answer – leaving us to just keep suffering. This loop continues as a pattern from person to person, environment to environment, and situation to situation – and all the while we’re unable to do anything about it as there’s no clarity on how to break out of the loop.
The Truth? All the Answers Are Within!
If we consider our conscious mind as a processor that is constantly seeking answers and solutions, then the subconscious mind is the hard disk where all our past painful associations and events – which we have repressed due to the pain we feel each time we visit our past – are stored. We, in our practice of inner child work, strongly believe that if we know what the problem is, then we in our inner awareness (from the stored memories in our subconscious mind) would also know when and where the problem started.
We can help reconstitute and reintegrate that inner child who went through trauma or an unhappy memory. To revive and make the present work for such individuals, we have to revisit the past under hypnosis and speak to this inner child who is stuck under a memory and then make this individual’s child-personality walk their highest path to reconstruct the self-esteem or emotional resource that they lost. This helps to turn them into an adult of today who has positive qualities such as assertiveness, patience, calmness, confidence, equanimity, courage to draw boundaries, and faith.
All of these resources come from within us as we have all these values in our subconscious mind. Once we reconstruct our past and grow out of the part of us that suffered, we won’t ever go back to the same behaviour or discomfort. Once healed, we then become emotionally independent individuals of today who are awakened. We can move on and create possibilities with our renewed healed attitude of life and take our best foot forward with clarity.
