We hear this phrase a lot, but what is our wounded inner child and how does it play out in our everyday life?
A wounded inner child is a fragment of ourselves split off and frozen at the emotional age we were when we experienced a particular trauma.
Trauma doesn’t have to be ‘big’ or overt to cause inner child wounding.
Inner child wounding can be caused through less obvious experiences such as parents who were too busy to deeply connect with their child, or who haven’t done their own deep inner work and instead parent through their wounds as a result.
Interesting fact – 80% of our programming we live by today, including our inner child wounding, was formed between the ages of 4-7 years old and mostly in response to the way we were parented and our experiences within our family system.
We have many, many inner children each attached to different themes of trauma such as fear of abandonment or rejection, low self-worth, trust, not feeling good enough, lack of confidence just to name a few.
These beliefs form our foundations, and the patterns form the rules that we live our life by.
When our inner child wounds are activated or triggered we respond from the wound and carry out the associated pattern – from the emotional age that the wound was first experienced.
This is why people often seem childish when they’re triggered.
We live our life through the lenses of our unhealed inner child wounds. If we have a belief that we’re “not good enough” we will see ourselves as not good enough and will see other people’s behaviours towards us as confirmations that we’re not good enough. At that deepest level we believe that belief.
Our unhealed inner child wounds sit in our subconscious and they’re responsible for a high proportion of our choices, behaviours, reactions and preferences.
This is why an intellectual understanding isn’t enough – we must dissolve the wound at the origin, deep within the subconscious mind.
Signs of unhealed inner child include:
– shame, guilt, anxiety
– perfectionism
– low self-worth
– hyper vigilance
– co-dependency
– a need to control
– struggles to set boundaries
– fear of adornment
– unavailable partners
– hidden blocks keeping them feeling stuck
– attracts toxic relationships
– unbalanced masculine and feminine energies
– performs, people pleasers, fixers
– weight challenges
– addictions
Read more about Rapid Transformational Therapy.