Get Your Inner Child Out of the Driver's Seat

'I feel totally ashamed after I unleash. I don’t know how to stop it.'

If I had a dollar for every time I heard those words, in a therapy session, over the years, I would retire a wealthy woman. Frequently the behaviors that people struggle to stomp out can be traced back to an unruly inner child, boldly seated, in the cockpit of their lives.

Rolling up our sleeves and engaging in meaningful inner child work is often a direct path to solving the mental health puzzle, that can elude us. The quest to end exhausting battles with emotional unrest, explosive adult tantrums, and chronic relationship conflict, can eat up an entire lifetime if you're not careful.

Your inner child lives within you and holds all the memories and experiences that have gone into making you who you are—from day one. If your inner child is not healthy and happy, neither are you.

A few years ago, I sat down with a client who described himself as a man’s man. “I’m here because I have to be here. I get heated. This time things went a little too far,” he said. He was a court-mandated client with a sparkling history of military and community service on one hand and a string of broken relationships—set afire by his erratic and temperamental behavior—on the other. He felt forced to deal with me and didn’t want to explore any topics, let alone take a deep dive into inner child work.

A few weeks into our work together, he surrendered to the process—likely to fast forward to the end of it—and found himself carrying a wallet-size photo of the kid he once was, everywhere he went. I asked him to start hanging out with his inner child in an effort to calm and reassure the part of him that has been traumatized, over 30 years ago, by witnessing the abuse of his mother at the hands of his father. The seeds of resentment were planted within him early. Serving as his mother’s caretaker, while enduring emotional neglect from both of his parents, created the ideal conditions for an angry little boy to grow into a man with virtually no tools to manage his unruly emotions.

Physically, he was all grown up. Emotionally, his growth had been stunted. He was functioning at the level of a 7- or 8-year-old child, who had received little, if any, of the vital nurturing required for healthy psychological development.

My former client went further than carrying a photo of himself, as a kid, in his wallet. In the weeks and months that followed he learned to acknowledge, work with, love, and heal his inner child. He began to gain mastery in soothing the upset child that was alive, well, active, and ruining his quality of life. He took control and put his kid in a timeout to learn and adjust—in the same way a firm and caring parent would.

I recall him commenting in amazement, "I see why this kid is so angry. He didn't get anything he needed or wanted to be OK. I can do this! I can fix him."

Inner child work offers us a key opportunity to reparent ourselves and provide our inner child with the stability, compassion, and guidance that may have been lacking during a time when we had no control over our circumstances.

Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Healing your inner child begins with a decision to do better and then accessing the right resources to support you.

We owe it to ourselves to do better and honor the long, tedious, and joyful, journey that our inner child accompanies us on. As we liberate and heal the inner child, we naturally make our way back to the playground of life.