Clips comprised of nostalgic, emotional music atop old home videos of from childhood recently flooded my feed — each video paired with the phrase, “She lives inside me.” This sentimental trend took over TikTok, all seemingly in an effort to better recognize (and love) each person's younger self. This is often referred to as one's inner child...but what is an inner child? We chatted with a mental health expert to understand more about what this all means and how to heal your inner child.
What is the inner child?
@saralufkin she lives inside me
♬ bug collector cover - BEN SCOTT
According to the therapeutic mainstream, we all have an inner child. Your inner child lives within your subconscious and sets the stage for the relationships, beliefs, and habits you have throughout your life. Carl Jung proposed the concept of the inner child, discovering that by tapping into the needs and beliefs from his youth, he could better facilitate his own understanding of himself. Ultimately, finding your way back to your childlike spirit can free you from unhelpful thought patterns and insecure attachments by healing your earliest responses to the world.
Your inner child feels hurt when your current self gets rejected. Your inner child silences themselves when someone’s angry at your current self. Your inner child laughs with joy when your current self explores nature. In summary, everything you experienced as a child lives on in you now. Why is this helpful to acknowledge? We spoke with Ann Odom, Child Therapist & Parent Coach, about uncovering the inner child and how it can benefit you now.
“The inner child is the part of our psyche that was formed when we were limited in our emotional coping abilities and is frozen in time,” says Odom. “The inner child is also the part of us that holds our attachments, our imagination, our creativity, our intuition and our ability to play.”
Why should I be healing my inner child?
Everyone had unique experiences growing up – whether they were good, bad, or both — and what you live through affects you. The things that happened to you or around you as a child can especially affect your worldview. You were fresh to the world, still forming ideas and beliefs about family, friends, strangers, and yourself. Trauma experienced in childhood sets you up for insecure attachments, sensitivities, emotional distancing, nervous system dysfunction, dissociation, and more. If you feel one, or more, or all of these feelings, remember that they’re normal, and healing through the inner child is possible.
Inner child work puts us in touch with our truest selves, but is especially impactful for those searching for the answers behind their behavioral patterns. A lot of us may be holding in trauma, shame, and hurtful experiences inside without even realizing, and those feelings can culminate into unhelpful thoughts and actions that can affect others beyond yourself.
“Because our nervous system is being formed in the environment of our childhoods, we unconsciously carry the emotional pain of our lived experience into our adult life without even knowing it,” says Odom. “We shape-shifted and avoided parts of our authentic human expression [as children]; our nervous system stored big, hard emotions for later, and many of us in the therapeutic community are finding this is the root cause of our stress, disconnection, anxiety, depression and addiction in our culture.”
The most special aspect of inner child work is how it can open up a whole world of possibility: gained understanding of how your past shapes your future, raised self-awareness in your relationship with yourself and others, strengthened connection and acceptance with your true self, and renewed insights on using healthy coping mechanisms. More than anything, security is the goal of this work, says Odom.
“Our inner child has the core need to feel seen, heard, safe and unconditionally loved. When they feel accepted, soothed, and loved for all that they are (which now as adults, we are the one to provide that experience for them), they get the message that they are inherently worthy and therefore secure. When security is internalized, the world is viewed as a safe place, and this frees us up to have access to our gifts, our intuition, our ability to connect with others, to grow, explore and to play.”
How to heal my inner child?
Though affirmations, somatic exercises, music, workbooks, podcasts, meditations, and journal prompts all can target your inner child, working with a therapist may be most effective in healing, allowing you to get down to specifics with them. Talking with someone face-to-face can really expedite the work, as long as you feel comfortable around them. Since access to therapy can be limited, there are multiple ways to interact and connect with our inner child on our own. Before you embark on your inner child journey, it’s crucial to view it as a relationship between you (the loving current self), and the younger, more vulnerable inner child.
“I believe that inner child work is beneficial for everyone,” says Odom. “However, if there has been complex trauma or severe abuse experienced by the inner child, this work is best done in the presence of a safe attuned trained professional as part of a more comprehensive treatment plan.”
One helpful self-practice is placing pictures of you as a child in visible places. Think about tucking in a picture by the mirror you look at every day, or hanging it up on the fridge. Frequently visualizing the inner child within you can provide ample space for constructive reflection. And this is exactly what the "she lives inside me" TikTok trend gets at – seeing your younger self, and tapping into their emotions that may impact your current self.
@maddie.comeau she lives inside me #foryou#childhood#childhoodmemories#nostalgia#ontario#foryou♬ The Bug Collector - Haley Heynderickx
“Finding photos of us as children, and putting them in a place we can see them everyday is a powerful symbolic gesture indicating that we see them now, and they are worthy of being seen,” says Odom. “When we show them they are seen, inherently valuable, and safe, the healthy wonderful parts of them come to the fore (playfulness, creativity, authenticity, curiosity, presence) and the wounded parts of them (anger, rage, worry, fear, selfishness) lessen. I think it’s a safe assumption that we could all use more access to the former, rather than the latter.”
Another grounding inner child practice is jamming out to the music you loved as a child. Listening and engaging with throwback tracks can bring out pent-up emotions, or just give you the time and ability to connect more with your ‘little one’ – just remember to keep an open mind in the process!
Affirmations are another transformative method in working with your inner child. Internally telling your inner child “good morning,” “good night,” and other helpful affirmations increases the chance for everyday connection. Further, try continuing the internal conversation with your inner child throughout your days, especially if you’re experiencing a challenging emotion or situation.
“When we’re feeling a strong emotion in our day-to-day life, it’s typically coming from the unmet needs of our inner child,” says Odom. “Take some time to connect with them in your mind, ask them what they need and how they are feeling. I have full conversations in my head with my inner child now. Whatever she tells me she’s feeling, I validate her, tell her I hear her, her feelings matter, they make sense, and I’m so sorry.”
To Ann, another “profoundly healing” practice is meditation. Meditating (alone or guided) while visualizing your inner child physically existing in the same room creates such strong connections between you. You can imagine something as simple as welcoming your wounded inner child in through your front door, with an open mind and heart to help soothe them.
“Most of us naturally see a child as innocent, lovable, and worthy of protection,” says Odom. “When we start to understand that this little one remains inside of us waiting to be nurtured, seen and protected, we can take our power back and give ourselves what the world didn’t.”
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Header image by Claire Shadomy
