Whether we are aware of it or not we are carrying around the imprints of everything we have experienced that has not been fully processed or integrated. Addressing the wounds carried by our inner child is part of the work of healing all our younger selves from everything they have experienced that has not been loving, or that has been more than we could handle at the time. This will include our birth experience and things we picked up in the womb. Related to these parts is ancestral work, where we address the pieces that have roots before our lives, connecting with previous generations and releasing the painful experiences that have been carried forward and still express through us, possibly having been imprinted epigenetically in some way. Within all of these different pieces in the systemic abuse and training we have received living in a work of fear and control.
Overall approaching these things can follow the same pattern as facing painful memories, traumas, and shadow work. Watching our patterns, seeing when we seem to slip away from ourselves and react from a different internal part – one that often will be childlike. Observe what is arising, establish safety, focus on it, lean into it, feeling the emotions, validating them and the experience, releasing what needed to be let out, loving the part, understanding the pain, acknowledging the needs or what is being asked for, and then re-parenting it, offering it support and reassurance. We can then reframe the whole experience and integrate it into our whole self. After this process it may not dissipate immediately depending on the depth, severity, and generally just time it takes for integration, but we can check-in and re-assess, thinking of the difficult thing and seeing if it still carries the same emotional weight.
While we carry many former selves within that may show up and react in given situations that remind up of some past troubling event or time, our child selves are particularly powerful as they exist within the time of establishing our basic interactions and understanding of the world, they live within our developmental phases. The inner child selves that are stuck in their development because of some unmet need will show up in how we act and react to current situations. When we start to get to know these inner younger parts we can connect to them by asking to be shown when something began, or by allowing memories to flow about that relate to a particular issue. At each age, whether it be fetus, infant, baby, toddler, child, or teenage, the part will have the internal experiential capacity of the developmental stage and age in question. The infant is not experiencing complex emotions or understanding, but will sense raw and intense things which we can bring sense to with our adult processing ability. Our teenage selves will have strong emotional reactions and a need for independence and the development of a unique sense of self, understanding things more in black and white than the more nuanced view we can hold as adults. And of course every age in-between! It is useful to bring this awareness to inner child work, as essentially we want to meet these different parts in the form of the ideal parent or friend they needed at the time.
When connecting to different inner selves we may find they seem to live in different parts of our bodies, and we may begin to recognize when they are asking for our attention, almost like a child pulling on their parent’s sleeve. Over time we develop a better and better relationship with ourselves so it takes less time and effort to listen and respond to things are they arise. It’s important to keep an open mind and not assume that things will always be the same signal if they’re coming from the same place, but we can learn our own patterns and have them work for us instead of causing hindrance. In all cases these things are asking for our attention because they need to tell us something, or we need to understand something either about the past or the present.
Even when have an easy birth, it is traumatic because it is a traumatic experience by nature. Being ousted from the comfort and safety of our mothers and into a cold, dry, bright, and unknown world is an awfully intense experience and we have no built in capacity at the time. Every single person will be carrying something around from this and can go back and heal from it. Similarly we will all have internalised things during our time in the womb, as it is when we pick up the benefits and downsides of our closest home environment of our parents, and most intensely the we are a part of our mother’s experience in those months. It is hard to get to these imprinted things, and not so simple to understand and parse the amorphous experience of an human that is not yet fully developed, but it can be gotten to through deep concentration which bridges into self-hypnosis.
Ancestral wounds show up all over the place, and we can find them by working on our tendencies and our patterns, but fundamentally they are given to us when we first come into being, so if the root doesn’t arise somewhere in our accessible life memories, it may also be accessible through going back to the womb and meeting them when they showed up for us. Especially things directly carried by our parents may show up strongest here. Other ancestral things may not present most powerfully at our beginning, and we can better reach them by connecting to the experiences of our ancestors, or asking to willingly experience whatever it was that has resulted in what has arisen. Much like birth trauma, every single person is going to be carrying around ancestral wounds to some degree. Every generation heals some things and passes along others. Healing we do is also passed on, a form of intergenerational wealth. Humanity has a long history of violence, war, and oppression, and we see that as a whole we are still playing out these patterns. By breaking the cycle in healing the ancestral wounds from these experiences we help break the world out of these cycles, and directly stop repeating the day to day versions of them.
When we’ve come from abusive homes as children, or even generally early unwelcoming circumstances, we’ll be repeating these patterns too, but they can be very hard to get a handle on. Individual difficult or traumatic events can be easier to find, even if more intense to handle. When the trauma is from repeated abusive things that each may be small in nature, we can’t go find one root and heal it. This takes both addressing some or all, or a few noticeable examples, but also can be done through piecing the picture together. In seeing how something has come from a series of abusive interactions, once we understand the particular flavour of the overall thing that has caused the issue we can send the needed love and comfort ourselves for all of it. This process can sort of feel more like an unraveling than a directed and contained healing experience. It can be harder to notice our progress, and the approach and integration less of a clear in and out spiral.
Working through the imprints of systemic learning, abuse, as well as non-familial experiences is often overlooked while doing healing work. We take for granted that the world is the way it is, we internalise that society is right about things that really are not. The degree of safety needed to address these things, unlearn, and re-embody ourselves fully can be hard to come by. Most people are stuck being forced to participate in these systems, and to be able to face what it has done to us and heal requires some degree of freedom from them. We can help each other find this safety in community and support one another to unlearn generations of societal norms that have harmed everyone, especially relating to hierarchy and oppression. Connecting with nature can help us heal many different things in many different ways, and can have a particular potency when helping us gain perspective and ground us into reality rather than the constructed world we are used to.
There is some overlap between shadow work and inner child work, primarily because child parts are vulnerable, and our shadow and protector parts may have shown up to shield these young ones. They are considered exiles, and we first need to meet the protector parts and work with them before we can gain access to the exiles. Some techniques we can use for inner child work include looking through photos of ourselves at different ages and seeing what comes up, asking questions of our child self and writing out the answers with our non-dominant hand, meeting the different younger inner selves, releasing emotions and whatever comes up which may include things that just need to be said in narrative expression, meditation and self-hypnosis, learning about our ancestors, and asking to be shown the memories we need to see. Remember, always show up with compassion (this is always necessary but with our younger selves doubly so), let things flow out as they need to, and observe what needs come up.