The inner child
There is a child in all of us who will never grow up.
Or rather, there are many childlike personality traits in us, one at every childish age. Each part in turn has many different aspects: one playful, one boisterous, one shy, one loved, one unloved, one neglected and many more. The inner child is a simplified term for a complex childlike inner world that exists in each of us. Put simply, the inner child is the part of our being that is emotional and vulnerable.
Many books have been published* about the inner child and you could actually write endless chapters about it because, as I said, the term “inner child” stands for very complex inner worlds.
I will therefore only discuss the inner child in general terms here and try to summarize the essentials.
The following image is helpful for me: We are born as purely vulnerable beings who are completely dependent on the loving care of those around us. With each passing year, we develop more abilities with which we can assert ourselves in life. They grow around our vulnerable core, like the annual rings of a tree. The inner core, however, still exists and will never disappear. All the experiences and feelings of the infant are stored in it, just as the experiences of the toddler, older child, pre-pubertal child and adolescent are stored in the rings that have grown around it.
This process of growth never stops, of course, even when we are adults. But I focus on the child that we once were, because as adults we are still the “product” of our childhood. This is where the personality is born with which we assert ourselves in life today, with which we live, love, hate, have relationships, work and unfortunately often struggle ;).
The development from infant or even child in the womb to a truly holistically healthy adult has been able to take place undisturbed for very few of us. Our parents were often overwhelmed by the task of lovingly supporting us physically, mentally and emotionally on this journey. This is not surprising when you consider that they too were once children with parents who were perhaps equally overwhelmed.
Working with the inner child
Why does the inner child play such a central role in psychological therapeutic work?
This work starts exactly where the innumerable sufferings of the soul and their physical consequences have their origin, namely in the injuries of the child.
Depression, addiction, relationship problems, psychosomatic complaints, fears and phobias all have their roots there. The child who was neglected still lives within us. Even today, it still needs the emotional attention that it would have needed back then and which was so often lacking. It needs a loving, safe space where it can show itself with all the feelings that were registered as “wrong” on the way to growing up and had to be hidden, denied and buried deep down. It needs a space where nothing is expected, but everything is allowed to be, where there is neither judgment nor rationalization. Only within such a space can our vulnerable self trust and our adult self experience what it needs to thrive. Old hurts can be uncovered and lovingly nurtured. In this way, a development takes place that was difficult to achieve in childhood: we learn to love ourselves and thus become capable of love. If we lack a connection with our vulnerable core, our being remains fragmented. We cannot become a whole person or have truly healthy relationships, even if we theoretically know exactly how to do so.
THIS NEEDS TO BE TRANSLATED WITH BOOK TITLES
*Empfehlenswerte Bücher zu diesem Thema sind beispielsweise “Die Aussöhnung mit dem inneren Kind” von Erika J. Chopich, Margaret Paul oder “Das Kind in uns” von John Bradshaw