Finding Your Truth: The Healing of Your Inner Child

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Everyone has a child within them. It represents the innocence, awe, and joy reminiscent of our youth. However, our inner child also carries the accumulated baggage of hurt, trauma, and fears from our early years.

As we grow into adults, we carry this inner child with us, and from time to time, it resurfaces to remind us of our childhood scars. Some choose to look the other way and continue living their lives. While this coping mechanism might work for a while, it may lead to destructive habits. Indeed, it’s uncomfortable to deal with childhood trauma, but you can address this by practicing inner child healing.

In this episode, Elise talks about mending the emotional scars left from our childhood through inner child work. She also shares ways to overcome trauma and negative self-talk and explains why it’s crucial to face our fears. Lastly, Elise imparts how we can truthfully connect with our mind and body.

If you’re interested in starting your journey to inner child healing and finding your truth, stay tuned to this episode!

3 reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Uncover the meaning of inner child healing.
Discover the modalities to healing your inner child.
Learn the importance of mind-body connection in mending your emotional scars.

Resources

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
Listen to previous episodes of Returning Home:
- Episode 1 | Returning Home to Yourself From Childhood Trauma
- Episode 6 | Uncovering the Hidden Strength of Self Compassion
Slow Down To Speed Up: Visualization Masterclass
Sign up for Elise’s Newsletter and receive a FREE PDF to start your self-compassion journey!
Connect with Elise on Instagram: @elisekindya

Episode Highlights

[03:33] Defining Inner Child Work

Inner child healing is about loving that part of yourself who felt alienated.

It addresses the emotional wounds attached to your early years.

When your inner child is wounded, it can reflect on your current behavior.

[06:30] Healing Childhood Trauma

People who experienced childhood abuse could seek refuge in inner child work.

Reflect on who you are beneath your pain.

Psychological scarring could happen at birth or be inherited from previous generations.

[07:42] Our Body

Everyone has an innate personality who wants to give and experience love.

Infants have an unobstructed relationship with their bodies.

No one needs to be ashamed of their body.

We must unlearn the maladaptive ways ingrained in us.

[10:23] On Self-Compassion

It’s not selfish to love yourself.

Elise: “I believe that when each person on this planet is appropriately loved and resourced, then we can stop hurting ourselves and each other and get to living the life we’re meant to live.”

It’s your birthright to feel happiness and contentment.

The ripples of self-love can reach your community.

[12:12] The Mind-Body Connection

Inner child healing starts with your body.

Your body contains your entire existence and memories.

Everything you’ve been through was first experienced by your body.

Reflect on your thoughts and understand the monologue happening in your mind.

[15:18] The Internal Family System (IFS)

The exiled child learns to hide their emotions after constant rejection.

The proactive protector prevents the exiled child from flooding our feelings. It often shames us for showing emotions.

When the proactive protector fails, the reactive protector comes. They use extreme measures to go back to equilibrium.

Your true self is what you want to uncover; it’s connected to your higher qualities.

Elise: “Our psyche is not meant to be fragmented. We’re meant to have all of these different experiences and not have one be judged as disgusting or unacceptable. All parts need to be able to be welcomed and be here in order to have a balanced and blended life.”

[21:16] Eye Movement, Desensitization, and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR is a form of therapy that uses bilateral stimulation. Listen to the full episode to know more about how it’s done!

The logical brain takes time to process trauma.

EMDR helps with inner child healing by analyzing and repairing the less accessible parts of the nervous system.

[25:07] Facing Your Fears

Reclaiming your traumatic past raises your level of consciousness.
Face your fears to find your truth.

Elise: “You don’t have to live without shining a light on the event that took your power from you. When fear is exposed, it loses its grip.”

Emotional scars lose their power over you when you confront them.

[27:25] Return Home to Yourself

Inner child work reclaims our worth and place in the world.

Inner child wounding happens when others don’t recognize our feelings.

Permit yourself to connect with your mind, body, and spirit.
Healing from within takes dedication and commitment; it’s not an overnight process.

Enjoyed this Episode on Inner Child Healing?

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Have any questions or lightbulb moments? I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to hit me up on Instagram or send an email at elise@elisekindya.com.

Thank you so much for listening! For more episode updates, visit my website.

Transcript

Elise Kindya: Welcome to Returning Home The Podcast. My name is Elise Kindya, and I am a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist. This podcast is a space that I have created for you to discover a deeper understanding and love for yourself, which leads to expanding what you think is possible in your own life. My goal is for you to feel excited to live your life as your full, authentic self. By listening to these episodes, you will learn things like how your brain works, my favorite resources for healing, stories from my own life, practices that you can press play on to add to your healing toolkit, and so much more.

I invite you to return home to yourself, in big and small ways, to live the life you desire on your terms. You can live connected, empowered, and aligned. When you return home to yourself, anything is possible. I can’t wait to share all of my insights with you. Now let’s begin.

Hello! Happy New Year and welcome back to Returning Home The Podcast. I believe that this is the first episode being released in 2022, and I’m so excited to be here with you today. My name is Elise Kindya, and I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I’m the host of this podcast, and I’m really excited to share this topic with you today.

So, I recently put a poll on my Instagram story and had people vote on the topic and there were a couple of front runners, but this one is the one I wanted to do, and also was one of the front runners. So it sounds like you all will be interested to hear this as well. So I’m really excited to delve into today’s topic. I’m going to talk a little bit about my approach to inner child healing. I’ll be talking about some modalities that I use that helped me with this, how I conceptualize inner child healing. And yeah, I’m excited to share my insights on this with you. It might be a little bit unconventional in terms of — when you think of inner child healing, what you might think of, so I want to give you my definition of that as well, just so you’re on my same page here.

So this podcast is kind of geared more towards people who have experienced trauma in childhood. Of course, as being a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist, that is my specialty and my area of most expertise. But really, anyone could listen to this episode and learn something. If you know someone that’s experienced childhood trauma and is experiencing difficulty, or wanting some resources, maybe wanting some ideas for how to get started with inner child healing, share this episode with them. That could be a help for them and give them some direction.

The name of my podcast is Returning Home The Podcast, and this name is even a tribute to the work of inner child healing. My definition of inner child healing is showing up that part of yourself that feels like the black sheep, that feels alienated or left out, being your own best friend and biggest advocate, taking really good care of yourself. Even communicating with this inner child, maybe doing a meditation on it, and really seeing — getting a clearer picture of what your inner child looks like.

Sometimes I’ll ask my clients if we’re doing some inner child work to draw a picture of this person. Sometimes people might think of —- if you’re doing inner child work as an adult, that maybe you lack a certain amount of maturity, or you lack emotional intelligence. Sure, maybe sometimes our reactions are — for lack of a better word, childlike. But for me, I believe that all behavior is a — it’s like our psyche, like trying to communicate with us. What do we need right now?

Babies communicate by crying to get their needs met. But I don’t think that inner child work and inner child healing always has to be about you lacking this sense of maturity or emotional intelligence. It’s really about showing up for that part of yourself that has been alienated. And we’ll get more into that in a little while. A therapeutic modality that delves really deeply into that and it’s about treating yourself like somebody that you actually love and care about.

This is why I say that this episode is really geared towards people that experienced trauma in childhood. It could have been abuse, it could be neglect, it could be emotional abuse. If you weren’t treated well, and you’re used to poor treatment, inner child healing is going to be something that can really help you. Because it can help you raise your standards for how you allow other people to treat you. What you expect from other people, what you allow them to talk to you like or treat you like.

I really think that inner child healing — we can start to ask ourselves some questions. Who are you underneath your trauma responses? Who are you underneath your pain? What if you returned home to your true place of belonging, a place that’s already within you all the time? It’s within your own mind and your own body. So if you experience trauma in childhood — really, at any time in your life, it might be hard to connect with this image — this image of returning home to yourself, in your own mind, in your own body.

It can be hard to imagine more for yourself when you don’t feel available to hold that. If it’s not in the realm of your possibility, then it’s really difficult to imagine more and better. But this is why inner child healing is so powerful because it can help to shed some of those older stories and step into who you were kind of meant to be. And this kind of goes back to Episode One where I talked about The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, and unpinning these parts of your nervous system that had pins in them. This is going back and like taking those pins out and becoming who you were kind of always truly meant to be underneath it all.

We were born into this world, mostly without psychological scarring. We’ve talked about this before. Trauma can happen in utero; it can happen during birth. And this is, again, like from Episode One where I talked about those pins in the nervous system. Psychological scarring can result from these things and there’s even evidence saying that it can be generationally passed down through biological tissue. With that being said, though, we do have an innate sense of self. We have our innate personality that we’re born with, that wants to love and be loved. It’s part of our biological drive as human beings that we want to belong, we need to be taken care of.

Like I said earlier, babies have to cry to get their needs met. And we learn more sophisticated ways going forward. But, babies need to have their needs met to live so that we want to be loved and we want to love and we want to be connected to other people. I’m going to share with you an excerpt from a book. The book is called The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor and when I read this, it just like, so many light bulbs were going off, like it just was clicking so much because it’s what I believe is possible. And in her book, it’s mostly about the body and I want to kind of expand this to be about more than the body. It’s not just about the body; it’s about our mind, and our community and our spirit as well.

The excerpt is from page seven of The Body is Not an Apology, and Sonya Rene Taylor writes, “Children do not arrive here ashamed of their race, gender, age, or differing abilities. Babies love their bodies. Each discovery they encounter is freaking awesome. Have you ever seen an infant realize that they have feet? Talk about wonder. That is what an unobstructed relationship with our bodies looks like. You were an infant once, which means that there was a time when you thought your body was freaking awesome too. Connecting to that memory may feel as distant as the farthest star. It may not be a memory you can access at all, but just knowing that there was a point in your history when you once loved your body can be a reminder that body shame is a fantastically crappy inheritance. We didn’t give it to ourselves and we are not obligated to keep it. We arrived on this planet as loved.”

So like I said, this excerpt, of course, focuses on the body. I really believe that inner child healing is about getting back to that place of loving yourself, your body, as well as your personality, and the community that you’re in, your spiritual practice, your connection with the Divine—it’s about all of that, and unlearning all of the toxic ways that you’ve been socialized to treat yourself. It’s not selfish to love yourself. I think this is so important to understand. And I talked about this on the previous podcast episode. I believe it was Episode Six, all about self-compassion, and why I think self-compassion is such a powerful practice. Because I believe that when each person on this planet is appropriately loved and resourced, then we can stop hurting ourselves and each other and get to living the life we’re meant to live.

So if you’re having a difficult time, feeling out of place, feeling like you don’t belong, feeling like you hate your life, feeling like something’s wrong, then maybe that inner child within you needs some type of attention. So just taking that in a little bit, taking a breath, and just sitting with that thought of, “Is my inner child doing okay? Like, am I okay?”, and you might have like a visceral reaction, a visceral answer, like yes or no.

Like I had said a few minutes ago, oftentimes, if you experienced trauma, the answer—you’re going to have that visceral response of “No, I’m not okay. And yes, my inner child needs some attention.” If you didn’t experience trauma, and you’re still hearing that, yes. That’s also okay. What’s going on with that? Peel back the layers of that onion a little bit more and see what is the root cause of that. Because it is your birthright to feel bliss and happiness and contentment in this life; you’re allowed to do that. Because the more you do that, the ripple effects of that go out and out and out in your life in your community.

Of course, like all of my work, this is a blend of the bio, psycho-social, spiritual approach—body, mind, community, and spirit. And I’ll go through that a little bit here, I’m not going to outline each part of that so much, but I do want to kind of speak to that a little bit. But I think it all kind of gets interwoven just because this is how I approach all of my work. It can’t really necessarily be, you know, sparse out and disconnected from itself. It has to kind of all weave together for me. But the first thing I want you to focus on here is your body.

Like, look down at your body, feel your body. This is the body that you were in when you were born. There is some science that I’ve seen out there that suggests that we shed and grow new cells at such a rate that you’re in a completely new body after like 30 days. But, I challenged that a little bit like if you go and look in the mirror, you still have the same body, looking for birthmarks, scars, your facial features, your hair color, your eye color. All of that is all the same that it’s been since you were an infant in utero and has been with you throughout your whole childhood and your whole life.

Your body has been through so much, it contains your entire life experience. As you know, the body keeps the score. Episode One of this podcast where I talked about the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. Your nervous system has all of this data about all of your experience inside of you, like under all that skin, inside of your flesh inside of your bones inside of your organs. It’s all in there. Everything you’ve ever gone through in your life was first and foremost experienced by your body, even throughout your childhood and things that you don’t have a mental memory of, there is a physical memory of it.

There is so much to work with. That’s just on the physical level. Then, there is the more mental level. If you were to think about the running monologue in your head, how long has that been there? When did that get implanted? Whose voice is it? Is it your voice? Is it a parent or a teacher? What’s this running monologue going on? Is it positive or negative? So much of healing trauma is about dealing with wounding that happened in childhood. And so there is a sense that there is still this inner child within us who has hurt and needs healing and attention. And this hurt and wounding could have happened on any of these levels of health—bio, psychosocial, spiritual.

So kind of delving into the mind, the psycho part of this — the four aspects of health. I really love this way of conceptualizing it. It’s a really powerful way to conceptualize your inner child, is given to us in a modality called Internal Family Systems — IFS for short. In IFS there is an inner family system, and we think about these different family members, so to say, as parts. And the inner child is normally like the focus of this work because it’s normally a child that is the exiled part of us. This is the first part in internal family systems, the first family member is the exiled part. And we are often — if you experience, well, let me just go through and explain what the parts are.

So we’re told, if you have this exiled part, you might have been told that your emotions were unacceptable in some way, that you were too sensitive, that your feelings were too big, they were out of proportion with what was going on, that you were overreacting, the messages that you were too much in some way. And this was too overwhelming for yourself and for the people around you. And oftentimes, that rejection that you experienced from the people around you is what was so big, and made you exile this part of yourself and shove this part down because it was not safe to express it.

So when that happens, and this happens over and over again, and the part of you that is very emotional or sensitive or attuned to what’s going on, then these other parts end up coming out and like operating for you. And like this exiled part doesn’t get the chance to integrate into your psyche. So the other parts in your internal family systems, one of them is called the Proactive Protector and this is also called The Manager. They try to prevent this exiled part of you the inner child part of you from being triggered and flooding your internal system with emotions.

So these parts, The Manager is very hardworking, task-oriented, and keeps your system focused on achieving. This is the overworking part, this is maybe — this part shames you for having feelings. This is the part that says “Suck it up, It’s not that bad. Just keep working. Just keep focused. Do what you need to do.” We don’t have time to feel these things. That’s just not for us. But what ends up happening is, oftentimes, the exiled part will break through this feeling of overdoing that The Manager tries to put in place. And so we have this other protector that comes in called The Reactive Protector, and these are called firefighters in IFS.

They have a similar goal as The Managers. They want to prevent the exiled parts from becoming conscious, they want to keep them shoved down and not triggered. But the reason it’s called a firefighter is that it’s more of an emergency response worker. When The Manager has quote-unquote, “failed” and the exiled part has broken through to consciousness, the firefighter acts. And they use extreme measures to get back to quote-unquote “equilibrium” even though these actions really can’t bring equilibrium. But it’s just like putting a bandaid on a gaping wound right.

So firefighters resort to things such as alcohol or drugs, binge eating, excessive shopping, promiscuity, and hurting of self or others through cutting, other kinds of self harm, attacking other people, and things like that. There is also a true self in IFS and this is the conscious you. The you that is connected to the higher kind of qualities and transformative qualities such as curiosity, creativity, courage, compassion, presence, persistence, perspective, playfulness, etc. The true you that you like want to be, the you that you know. But there are all these other parts that are happening and they’re pretty disjointed from each other.

What the goal is, it’s to bring all of these parts kind of together and working in harmony. When the system is operating efficiently, this is the true self that we would like to have running the show. Not to say that we can’t have like a bad day here or there, but like turning to drugs or alcohol, to shove down the exiled part, that’s not working. There’s a reason why that’s not working. It’s because that’s not what’s meant to happen. We’re not meant to be fragmented. Our psyche is not meant to be fragmented. We’re meant to have all of these different experiences and not have one be judged as disgusting or unacceptable.

All parts need to be able to be welcomed and be here in order to have a balanced and blended life. To have a life that is well-rounded and whole and full of color — positive and negative, like it’s all okay. But in when we’re doing IFS, for a lot of people that need that work, negative feeling equals not okay; it equals unacceptable, unlovable. And so, they try to cut that part off by any means necessary, but it’s not possible. So using IFS to bring everybody back together, bring the true self on as like the one in the driver’s seat, I think is a really beautiful way to do some inner child healing.

But one of my favorite modalities that I like to use to do inner child healing is EMDR. EMDR stands for Eye Movement, Desensitization, and Reprocessing. It’s a form of therapy, where the client recalls distressing memories, and then I as the therapist, direct the client in one type of what’s called a “bilateral stimulation”. So having them move their eyes from side to side, and I invite them to tap either side of their body. We also use auditory stimulation in either ear. The purpose of using bilateral stimulation is to bring your logical side of your brain on line to witness this distressing memory. Because like I’ve said earlier, your body is always the first thing that’s experiencing anything in life, and the logical part of the brain takes some time to process and experience events.

When we are experiencing trauma, our logical brain does not experience it, because of this process, kind of like I talked about in the first episode of the podcast, the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. So if there are pins in that part of your nervous system because your brain was like, “Ah, this is pain, this is trauma, we’re not going to be awake to experience this. Let’s just shut it down and not remember this very well.” So EMDR helps bring the logical part of the brain back to witness the event and make it more logical, more categorical — able to be categorized, able to name it, put words to it.

Because the right side of the brain is like the more emotional part of the brain and also like the physical body. So there’s not a lot of language there; it’s more about feelings. It’s more about creativity. It’s more about non-3D, whereas the left side of the brain is very 3D, very much like grounded, here and now. So it helps to kind of take that emotional drive out of some memories. I believe that EMDR can help with inner child healing by going back through the deeper and less accessible parts of the nervous system and doing repair work on that nervous system level.

When I prompt my clients to use EMDR, I asked them to create a protective or a nurturing figure. That’s one of the beautiful things about EMDR, too. So you’re watching this memory, as the client, and instead of letting it play out all the way through, you can put things in the memory to help keep you safe. What’s really cool about this and what helps with inner child healing is when I do this work with my clients, and they have a childhood memory that we’re reprocessing, I asked them to kind of make themselves that this current adult version of themselves as their protective figure or their nurturing figure, to help either get in between them and the thing that’s causing them harm or to nurture them, to be there for them to comfort them. During the harm or after the harm has been done, to even tell them like”Hey, you’re a kid. It’s not your fault, right?”

I believe that when we do this inner child healing, and especially through EMDR, in any way that you can do inner child healing, it’s like, when you can reclaim this past, this thing that happened to you in the past, show up for that inner child version of you. You’re like raising your own consciousness. You are stepping up and out in a new and different way. You get to step into your true form. You get to be your true self. You get to be that strong person that you never had. You don’t have to live without shining a light on the event that took your power from you. When fear is exposed, it loses its grip.

So if you’re afraid to go back into those memories, because you’re afraid of looking at them, I totally understand that. Oftentimes, what we fear, or fear itself can sometimes blow things into this really out of control, unmanageable story. When we can actually go back and look at it, and see it. What I really like about EMDR, letting yourself with a safe person in a safe setting, go into this memory and rewrite it. It shrinks it from this completely overwhelming, huge, enormous problem into this like, “Oh, that happened on this day at this time for 15 minutes. And it doesn’t mean anything about who I am as a person.” It really can be helpful and it can start to rewrite some of the negative connections and beliefs that you might have about yourself after having gone through something like that.

I really do believe that inner child healing is possible and there are some therapeutic modalities that can help you with that, and they all do tie into bio, psychosocial, spiritual, body, mind, community, and spirit. A lot of times when you’ve experienced trauma and kind of like I said earlier I believe that inner child healing is something for people that do feel like they don’t fit in, that do feel alienated, that feel like they’re the black sheep, and you feel so disconnected from your community. But if you can do some inner child healing, return home to yourself, then you’re kind of reclaiming your place in community and reclaiming your sense of worthiness in the world.

There is a sense of fitting yourself back in like putting your own puzzle together, that is you. Maybe it feels like there are some missing pieces, but maybe they’re just in the wrong place, or you thought they fit over here, but they really fit over here, and that’s okay. I think a lot of times, inner child wounding, kind of like we talked about with internal family systems, it comes about because we’re told that something about us is wrong by people that really don’t know who we are on the inside. Something that I — it can be really hard as a child. But what I think that — if you’re an adult that’s embarking on this journey, what can be exciting is saying, “You know what, somebody told me that that was wrong, or that was too much. But I get to decide that it’s actually really cool and I really like it about myself. And it’s something that I want to highlight as one of my strengths, instead of it being a liability.”

So I’ll say that even me doing my own inner child healing, it’s led me on this whole journey of connecting to my body, and feeling more part of a community and exploring my spirituality. Because like I’ve said, I’m an Aquarius, I want to live in my mind, my mind is the safe place, and but once I started giving myself permission to be who I really am, then I was able to feel more embodied, and more of a whole person in the sense of being connected to my body, mind, community, and spirit.

I believe that it is possible. I believe that a lot of times we do forget, like I said, we get socialized in these ways that make us forget. If you — I don’t know what your Instagram feed is curated, like, but mine is all about spiritual awakening and things like that and taking the veil off and going through a dark night of the soul and coming out on the other side. And I believe inner child healing is something that can lead you down that path of like, “Oh, the veil is totally off. I know who I am. So I don’t need to go out into the world to try to find validation or the definition of who I am, because I already know who I am on the inside.”

So, if that’s something that you’re interested in, I highly recommend you starting that journey. Wherever you are, ask yourself, “Where am I on this journey? What feels right to me what feels comfortable to me? What feels true to me? And where where could it be better? Or where could I show up more for my inner child? Where could I approach healing my inner child more? What messages that I hear as a child that repeat over and over in my head that I’d like to stop?” And this isn’t really like snapping your fingers and it’s all better. It does take some dedication and commitment and showing up over and over again.

You don’t make a friend just by doing one nice thing for somebody and all of a sudden, you’re best friends. If you have been exiling your inner child for a long time and not feeling your feelings for a long time, then it’s going to take some real showing up for them to want to integrate back into the system. And like I said, with IFS, The Manager part doesn’t want the inner child part to even be acknowledged. That would be something to consider. How much work is it going to be in? Do you want to do the work? I mean, it’s not required that you do.

But if you’re listening to this podcast, I would imagine that it is something of — at least some interest to you. So, that’s pretty much what I’ve got for you today on inner child healing. I so much appreciate you being here. If it’s some work that you’re interested in doing, definitely reach out to me. Send me an email or DM me on Instagram or something. I could talk about this all day. Trying to keep it to a half an hour, but I’d love to give you some resources if you need, or if this is something you’re looking to do, and you’d like some coaching on it, definitely reach out to me.

This is work I love to do, because like I said, if people are awake and willing to love themselves, and integrate this inner child into their life, then we’re all on the right track to living the life that we’re meant to be living. And I think that’s good for everybody. So again, I’m so happy you are here. Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to catching you on the next episode. Bye!