You must have observed people who are able to take on strong emotional experiences and stay calm in most of the situations. On the contrary, there are people who loose their cool even at a minor inconvenience. The difference lies in how they have processed their past emotions, situations and traumatic experiences.

We all have experienced various form of trauma in our lives, in fact, a report says that 63.9% of U.S. adults have faced at least one adverse childhood traumatic experience, such as abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction. But how we live our lives depend on what extend the healing is done.

In this blog, we will take you through the process, signs and why inner child therapy is important to live a better and most functional life.

What is Inner Child Therapy?

Inner child is the hidden part of our brain that is shaped during our initial years. It’s the vulnerable, creative and innocent part of our subconscious with our memories, emotions and flashbacks from our childhood days. While it carries all kind of emotions, trauma can be one of them which can hold back the person to live his best life in terms of career, relationships and health.

Inner child therapy is a therapeutic approach to handle this inner child with love, care and safety. This builds an entirely new world view for an individual helping him recover from past traumatic experiences.

Understanding the Inner Child

Inner child holds a lot of memories but often has an unhealed part triggered by trauma. This has a direct link to addiction where trauma leaves a lasting impression on our brain and body. To cope with the negative emotions, people often take the path of an external substance and with time, get addicted to it.

Let’s start by understanding how trauma and addiction are triggered in the inner child.

The Inner Child and Trauma

1. Self-worth issues: Early negative experiences can lead to high self-worth issues making individuals prone to self-doubt and insecurity.
2. Challenges in building strong relationships: Once you have seen what a bad relationship looks like, you tend to either stop trusting people or fail to maintain healthy boundaries, in either of cases leads to unhealthy relationships.
3. Suppressing emotions: Childhood trauma make you suppress your emotions, not able to express them and feeling threatened. As a result, you develop anxiety and depression by constantly thinking about the past and the future.

The Inner Child and Addiction

1. Emotional voids: Most of the addictive circumstances come into our lives when we are trying to suppress an emotion. Hence, every time we want to express something, we replace that with the addicted substance leading to addiction. 
2. Recurring cycles of shame and guilt: Addiction makes you feel your emotions even stronger and hence leading to constant cycles of being shameful of what happened and guilty about why this happened to you.
3. Self-soothing mechanisms: We often fear seeking help and try to self-sooth in difficult times. But as you need a doctor to take care of your broken leg, you need a professional to take care of your mental health.

Signs Your Inner Child Needs Healing

While most of the behaviors can go hidden overtime, if something is triggering you for long enough, it maybe a sign that you need to heal your inner child and get past it.

Here’s some common signs you can spot in yourself or in your loved ones:

• You struggle with a constant feeling of being “not enough”
• You find it hard to open up to people, build intimate relationships and fear rejection at all times
• You burnout because it seems impossible for you to say “no”
• You start relying on external substances to numb pain and get temporary relief
• You have a constant fear of getting abandon 
• You feel the need to be perfect at everything
• You get triggered easily leading to intense emotional reactions like sadness, anger or fear

The Role of Inner Child Therapy in Trauma Recovery

Handling the situation with care is important when you are dealing with emotions. Inner child therapy helps an individual recover from traumatic experiences in the following ways:

1. Creating a safe space: Traumatic childhood experiences often make us belief that you can trust no one and have to be self-dependent on everything. Inner child therapy creates a safe space to talk about anything and everything which builds back your trust in people around you.
2. Reprocessing trauma: Unhealed trauma often leads to a individual that is weak and should be dependent on others for everything. Once you start opening up and see you negative experiences again, you tend to accept the same and move on.
3. Re-building self-worth: Once you heal from the past tragic experiences, creating a strong self-image becomes easier and help you lead towards growth and independence.

The Role of Inner Child Therapy in Addiction Recovery

Inner Child Therapy help an individual recover from addiction and help him live a life independent of addictive substances. Here’s how inner child therapy can help you:

1. Identifying triggers: The first step to solving a problem is to clearly identifying the trigger points, situations and instances when it’s happening.
2. Going into the depth: No knowing the root cause of a problem only amplifies it. Inner child therapy help you peel off masks you have been hiding in a completely safe and non-judgmental space.
3. Unlearning and relearning: Therapy helps you get out of your own mind and see the world the way it is. Unlearning past behaviors, and learning new patterns help you relieve your inner child.
4. Breaking patterns: Most of the addiction has a pattern to it. Whenever you are alone, you seek addictive substances to fill a void, hence inner child therapy helps you replace the substances with something more valuable, ultimately breaking the pattern of things. 

Inner Child Therapy at Avisa Recovery

Inner child is the most important yet difficult to heal. We all have some kind of early-age traumas that stays with us for lifetime, hence being our biggest barrier towards growth. As everything else, if we start working towards it constantly, we will be able to heal ourselves and see a ray of hope.

With experts on your side, this process becomes easy and structured. Therapists at Avisa Recovery use professional and easy to implement techniques like guided visualization, journaling, and deep introspection helping you to connect to your inner child and heal. 

We provide a completely safe and non-judgmental space irrespective to your gender, and age leading to increased self-awareness and reduced stress. Read more about it here and let your inner child heal.

Frequently Asked Questions About Inner Child Therapy

Q: What happens in inner child therapy?

A: Inner child therapy helps you reconnect with your subconscious self and heal unresolved emotions and experiences from your childhood. This is generally done through guided visualization, journaling and talk therapy.

Q: What are the 5 inner child wounds?

A: Rejection, abandonment, injustice, humiliation, and betrayal are most common inner child wounds that keep holding us back from becoming the true version of ourselves.

Q: How do you heal a child inside you?

A: You heal your inner child by acknowledging their pain, offering self-compassion, and meeting unmet emotional needs through therapeutic practices.

Q: What triggers your inner child?

A: There are specific instances in each of our lives that triggers negative emotions and often relate to the wounds of rejection, abuse, or negligence.

Q: How to forget past trauma?

A: Forgetting a negative memory is less likely to happen as with time, it becomes a part of you. Although, activities like self-care and therapy can help improve situations.