Inner Child, Where Have You Been?

Inner child work is one of those phrases that can sound a little questionable the first time you hear it. Inner child? What exactly does that mean? Are we supposed to picture ourselves at seven, have a conversation, maybe ask how things are going back there?

As it turns out, there is quite a bit going on back there.

There are entire books and workbooks devoted to inner child work, some substantial enough that when worked through in a group, meeting every week or two, they can take months or even longer to complete. There are ideas like the wounded child, the magical child, reparenting, and exercises that return to different ages and experiences. What sounds like a fairly simple idea can become a much larger look at who we were and what we learned about ourselves early on.

Because childhood isn't only made up of what happened, there is also what we learned while it was happening.

The child who wasn't heard may have learned to stop speaking up. The child who wasn't loved in the way they needed may have become very good at earning love instead. Some children learned to read a room before they had any business needing to; others figured out that being easy helped, being funny changed the mood, getting good grades got attention, or needing less made things simpler for everyone. Children are remarkably good at adapting. The trouble is, nobody tells them when they can stop.

But the longer we spend with our inner child, the more we realize there’s a lot more there than what hurt. There is also the imaginative child, sometimes called the magical child, who played without wondering whether there was a point to it, wanted things before deciding whether they were practical, and knew what they liked before other people's opinions entered the conversation. Those parts of us don't necessarily disappear as we grow up; we just get really good at having grown-up reasons for ignoring them.

Maybe that's why inner child work starts to mean something different the longer we spend with it. What initially sounds like going backward becomes a way of understanding what came forward with us: why certain fears still have such a hold, why we learned to protect ourselves in particular ways, why we love twinkle lights at forty, or why some needs became difficult to admit, and why parts of ourselves we thought we'd outgrown can still feel surprisingly familiar.

And somewhere along the way, understanding our inner child starts to feel a lot like caring for them. Taking seriously the child who wasn't heard, understanding the one who learned to earn love instead of expecting it, and remembering the child who liked what they liked just because they did.

For a term that can sound a little strange when we first hear it, perhaps the surprise of inner child work is how much of our adult life we eventually find there. Who would have thought some of the deepest self-love we find as adults might begin with getting to know the child who was there all along?