If you apologize when you're not in the wrong chase.
Validation feel the need to people please, when you know it's wrong, that's not necessarily the adult you.
That's the younger you, AKA your inner child, who is trying to come out and gain the safety and love that they never got in their childhood and therefore are still trying to receive on a daily basis, even in your adult life, which will sometimes cause you to get triggered or respond to situations in ways that you don't even fully understand and that, a lot of the times, you know don't make sense, aren't logical and isn't the correct way to behave, but you literally can't control it.
It can be super frustrating when sometimes you don't understand why you might be more emotional than other people or why certain things hurt your feelings, whereas other people just seem to be okay with it.
And it's not something you need to criticize yourself or beat yourself up about.
It's just about showing the right amount of love to your inner child and learning the practical ways in which you can heal your younger self.
That is going to make your adult life 10 times easier.
And it's through understanding what an inner child is, spotting the signs, reparenting yourself and learning all the healing techniques that you can achieve this.
And that's what we're going to be breaking down in today's video the ultimate guide to healing your inner child so that you can thrive in your adult life.
You are literally the best person for the job of loving and parenting your inner child, because it's you.
You know exactly what you need.
You know exactly what you went without.
You know exactly how you need to be communicated to, what your feelings are and how to take care of them.
The adult version of you is exactly who your inner child needed to be able to be the best version of themselves.
So yes, it's all well and good going through your adult life and trying to do all of your responsibilities now, but just taking out some time to go backwards and show up as this grown-up stronger, more self-assured version of yourself and revisit who you were as a child, that everything can change.
The younger version of yourself still exists inside of you, in your mind, because the ways that you might have been hurt, abandoned or rejected as a child is still showing up in your subconscious mind, which is running what your current reality looks like.
And that part of your subconscious mind can't change and heal until you go backwards and change the parenting that your inner child received, that caused them to receive that hurt and that abandonment that wounded your subconscious in the first place.
But the good news is this is literally all in your control.
Before we get into it, I want to give a quick mention to the self-love guidebook I wrote last year.
It's called Buy Yourself the Damn Flowers.
There's actually a whole part in this book all about healing, and it also talks about inner child healing reparenting, looking after yourself, how to heal after a breakup, after a tough time in your life.
I highly recommend you read this, especially if you clicked on this video.
It will definitely resonate.
You can check it out below in my description, along with all of the other things down there that I do for self-improvement, like my vlog channel, my guided journal, business and so much more.
This video is also a paid partnership with BetterHelp, an online therapy service that I've been using over the last year and a bit, and absolutely loving.
It has definitely aided in my own personal journey with inner child healing, and I know it can for you too.
I'm the biggest advocate of therapy and i just love that.
This service makes it more convenient, more practical, more easy to access and honestly, gives you real results because of the way that they match you to therapists that actually best suit your needs and the fact that the experience is completely tailored to you in the fact that you can message your therapist via text, phone call, a video call.
It's all about what makes you feel comfortable and you literally have no excuses not to fit it into your schedule when you can take a therapy session at any time in the day.
Therapy definitely helped me see how certain experiences of my childhood translated to me living an adult life where I was chasing goals and validation in order to feel lovable, because it just reflected and mirrored what I used to do as a child to try and earn that respect and love.
And because of those childhood experiences.
That is exactly what got me to my early 20s, where I was extremely hyper independent.
I tried to swear off romantic relationships.
I couldn't even show up as my full confident, happy self in friendships because I was always kind of scared of being rejected or hurt or being let down by people.
Going through therapy helped me realize that being hyper independent wasn't me being mature, it was just my inner child trying to gain control and safety through performance, through academic validation or holding myself back from actually being vulnerable with people because I was scared of being seen for who I really was and being rejected.
There was definitely a lot to unpack, but through each of my BetterHelp therapy sessions it's always made me feel safe.
It's been so easy and consistent because I've never needed to wait to have a therapy session or burn myself out finding the right person.
BetterHelp truly did all of the work for me and it made healing part of my routine, not some separate event that I always had to work to schedule.
I could always mold it to fit my life, not the other way around.
So if you've ever felt like you're too emotional or too needy, or there are some things that still weigh you down, even though they're not a part of your current life, I promise you that is absolutely fixable.
You guys can use my link below in the description to get matched to a therapist that best suits your needs on BetterHelp, and my unique link will get you 10 off your first month of therapy.
You truly deserve this safe space and I can honestly say from my own experience with BetterHelp it will make all the difference.
Chapter one, what is the inner child?
Because once you understand what it is and how it works, you can start to be more aware and evaluate how it's impacting you in your current life.
So the inner child is not this imaginary trendy thing that everyone's talking about on social media.
It is a very real thing that exists in your subconscious mind.
These are where you store subconscious thoughts that were shaped from your very early experiences as a child, mostly before the age of seven, where your brain was highly programmable and absorbed any early childhood experiences as core truths about the world, about yourself, about life and about people.
So some examples of this is if your parents weren't around a lot or they played very hot and cold with you and you didn't have consistent love and affection, then that is then internalized into the subconscious belief that you must earn love.
You have to do in order to have people show up for you.
If you were shamed for crying or being too sensitive as a child, then that was then internalized into subconscious mind that emotions are unsafe and you can't be vulnerable and feeling hurt or feeling any sort of negative emotion is a weakness of yours.
If your parents are really relied on academic success accolades, always pressuring you to be perfect, then that then translates into the subconscious belief that your worth is not who you are.
It's what you do and you always need to do to receive respect from others, and that's the only way that you're worthy of anything.
You can't just exist and be okay and accepting of that.
So then you can see that abandonment and rejection doesn't start when somebody ghosts you while you're dating.
It really dates all the way back to how you were treated when you were younger, and that then runs your adult life.
For example, if your parents went around, or maybe they divorced or they weren't consistent in their love, then now, as an adult, maybe you're more triggered and more susceptible and pay more close attention to how much attention somebody's paying you.
And if they want their own time or aren't talking as much as usual, you then see that, as you don't love me,
You don't like me anymore.
You're going to leave me.
You just end up being a more anxious person because of those first experiences you had with parental love.
So we need to understand what an unhealed versus healed inner child looks like, so we know what we need to work towards and where we currently sit on this scale.
And of course, I'm going to bring in our favorite girls, Lola and Athena, to illustrate this.
Now Lola has an unhealed inner child.
How that's now showing up in her 20s is she's constantly overthinking everything she does and says and she never thinks anything is quite good enough, or that she might be hurting people's feelings, or she's never coming across in the right way.
She just holds herself to this impossible standard.
She also really struggles to be vulnerable and always thinks she's too sensitive, so she never wants to open up to other people because she's scared she's going to be seen as too sensitive and too over emotional, with too many feelings.
Lola also relies really heavily on external approval and validation to feel good, and this is shown through her serial dating habits, her excessive posting on social media and always worrying what everybody else thinks about her and has to say about her.
Lola is also a workaholic and cannot rest without feeling guilty.
She is constantly burnt out, because she feels that she constantly needs to be doing just to feel stable and okay with herself, because that was the kind of chaos that showed up in her childhood.
She constantly had to be up about and doing things in order to be seen as a worthy human being.
And lastly, Lola freaks out and panics whenever she notices that somebody's a little bit quieter than usual or having their own time.
Rather than seeing that as somebody just needing their alone.
Time she equates it with she's too annoying, they don't like her anymore and maybe they're going to leave her.
Essentially, her nervous system and her subconscious is still living in the past and she hasn't been able to move on from those early childhood experiences, which is now wrecking her current relationships.
Athena on the other hand has a healed inner child.
Now.
Athena has not had the most perfect childhood, but she has put in the healing and the reparenting work which has now allowed her to have a really healthy relationship with her inner child and to be in a more healed place in her life.
Athena was able to overcome her people-pleasing tendencies that she learned as a child and now holds boundaries confidently and calmly, knowing it doesn't make her a bad or a mean person.
She can confidently show up and say no and actually look after her energy and her needs without having to feel guilty about it.
Athena constantly journals and goes to therapy and holds her emotions and can healthily vent to her friends without spiraling or thinking that it makes her an annoying person.
Athena loves her playtime.
She is always going back to things and hobbies that she loved as a child, and she doesn't feel bad about it.
She's never rushing herself to grow up or be more productive or be a version of herself that she just doesn't connect with, because she's learned to accept the most authentic core version of herself that she's always been, since she was a child.
She's also taught herself how to ask for help from others without any shame, because she's done with her hyper-independent tendencies.
Chapter two, how to heal your inner child.
And no, this is not just about being nicer to yourself.
It's about practically reprogramming your emotions and your subconscious beliefs so that your inner child stops ruining your adult life.
Step number one is understanding neuroplasticity.
This is an amazing thing that you can use in your favor, because your brain is constantly adapting meaning.
Whatever is stressing you out right now, whatever belief or blockage is holding you back, it's not forever and you can easily change it.
Neuroplasticity basically means that your brain can adapt the more that you feed it and the more new beliefs that you input.
AKA the more beliefs you choose that then contradict the trauma you received as a child, or the more new things you immerse yourself in that you missed out on as a child, the more your brain rewires and you get a healed inner child.
The easiest way to achieve this is to ask yourself, what did your parents not do enough of?
Or what did they not say enough of?
Or what did you miss out on as a child?
So an example for me is I grew up in a family where anytime you showed just a little bit of emotion, you were loudly and verbally called sensitive and too emotional.
And it was always seen as this big weakness, to the point where you couldn't be vulnerable and you couldn't rant or express yourself without basically being insulted for it.
So now, as an adult, it has been a process of one, surrounding myself with people that understand that it's healthy to vent and to be emotional and hold space for me, because if I'm not associating myself with people like that,
I become the average of them and I can start to adopt those beliefs as well.
Two is knowing that that's my weakness or my inner child trauma.
I can now read books on it and watch videos online about how to hold space for your emotions, how to process them yourself.
I also journal a lot about my emotions.
I have been for many years and that just helps me create a more comfortable relationship with myself, where being vulnerable is allowed and being sensitive is never really a thing.
Now I've reprogrammed my belief to go from me being emotional is just me being sensitive and a weakling to that's literally my superpower.
It's how I show up for myself.
It's how I look after my mental health is literally so necessary to me thriving and being the best version of myself.
And now I love being emotional.
It's no longer this scary thing that defines me as the kind of person I don't even wanna be.
So figure out what your parents didn't say enough to you and start granting yourself permission to be, or say what they didn't give you.
EG, you're safe now.
You've always been beautiful.
You've always been enough.
You're worthy as you are without having to do anything to achieve it.
You have never had to be perfect.
You've always done your best.
Another specific example of this is let's say you're out in the street and your subconscious belief is anytime someone looks at you, it means it's negative, or it means they're judging you, or it means that you're in danger.
If you find yourself in that situation and your subconscious is going back to that old belief you want to get rid of, it's just about repeating to yourself you are safe, that person could be admiring you, nothing bad is going to happen to you.
Just because people look at you does not mean they're judging you.
You look at people all the time.
You don't judge them, And the key with this step is all about repetition.
The more you form this habit of these new beliefs, the faster that your brain is going to be able to let go of all of these old blockages and bring in these more loving beliefs that help you really connect to your inner child in the healthiest way possible.
The second technique for healing your inner child is to do inner child journaling or shadow work.
If you guys check out my guided journals on selfobsessedjournalcom, I actually have shadow work prompts built in to the growth journal that you guys can check out.
But essentially what this means is, when you are journaling, you're not gonna write in first person and say I feel really sad today.
You're gonna write in the voice and in the perspective of your younger self slash inner child.
So my inner child or she feels sad today because she felt invisible or like she wasn't understood by others.
There's actually been so much research behind this technique and why it really works and basically just from writing that perspective, it helps you kind of see your younger self and your inner child, who's obviously already inside you as like this other person, So you can be a little bit more compassionate and understand their perspective a little bit more, rather than just talking about yourself.
This leads me onto my third tip.
I actually did this years ago, when I was just filled with self-doubt, when I was trying to build up my social media and just nothing was working.
And this is all about seeing yourself as your inner child.
Sometimes I think as adults we put so much pressure on ourselves and we always forget to be empathetic and compassionate to who we are.
But if you look regularly at pictures of your younger self or, better yet, place a picture of you as a child for five years old and put it on your mirror or wherever you're gonna look every single day and look at that I did this about five years ago and it reminded me who I'm speaking to every day, who i'm criticizing, who i've been belittling, who i've been putting such high expectations on, and it forced me to be kind to myself every single day when i caught a glimpse of that picture, because i remembered i'm still that girl, i don't deserve the harsh way that i speak to myself.
And it really helped me step out of that self-doubt because i thought If that inner child, if that younger version of myself was my child and was standing in front of me right now, would I speak to her like that?
Absolutely not.
I would think that all of her dreams are going to come true and I would speak that into her belief system.
So why am I not doing the same for myself right now?
And then the last technique is inner child mapping.
This is essentially all about learning more and understanding more about your younger self, things that you've probably forgotten by now.
For example, what did the 10-year-old version of myself love doing?
What was I most afraid of as a child and what held me back?
What were my biggest dreams and what would I hope for the current adult me to be like or to do in my life?
What did my younger self need to hear every day but didn't get to?
What would have made my younger self feel the most loved?
Thinking about these answers journaling about them is even better is all about you responding directly to your inner child and really building a relationship with her.
But also the more that you're aware of these answers, and what is going to make you feel the most loved and secure is how you can show up for yourself right now.
Because just because it's been a decade or 20 years since you missed out on that treatment doesn't mean that now you're okay without it because such a big amount of time has passed.
Your younger self is still yearning and aching for that love and acceptance.
Once you understand what's missing, you can give it to yourself immediately and close that loop and that blockage within you.
And lastly, chapter number three, the homework chapter.
If you guys are new here, I have a homework chapter at the end of all of my videos and podcast episodes self-himself podcast, if you don't know.
But for this week's homework, I want to center it around the routine.
So I'm going to call this the reparenting routine.
I haven't talked about reparenting so far in this video because I really wanted chapter three to focus on it.
This is such a powerful way of healing your inner child. and is basically all in the name.
It's about being the parent that you wish that you had, and doing that right now, because it's not too late.
So I'm gonna run through a few different habits or steps that you guys can input into this routine.
You don't need to do all of them.
You can select just a few and choose to do them either daily, weekly, or monthly.
So the first idea is to regularly incorporate it into your journaling routine.
So either daily or weekly, you can ask yourself, how is my inner child feeling today?
Or how could I show up for my inner child today?
What is something that my younger self would have loved to do today?
Is it drawing a picture?
Is it spending time in nature?
Is it talking to a loved one or a family member?
And once you've journaled about what your younger self needs, it's time to action that and make time for it in your day or your week.
Whether that's rest, compassion, a hobby or an action, you need to make time for it.
Another idea is to have some sort of mantra or affirmation that directly connects to your inner child.
I've noticed that with all of my self-improvement routines and habits, all of them connect to my future self and who I want to be.
And that's all great.
But I think it's really special to have something that directly represents and mirrors who you were when you were younger.
So if you know that your biggest struggle around your inner child was the fact that you felt like you needed to earn love or prove your worth, then maybe your daily mantra or affirmation that you meditate on or that you repeat or that you script is I don't need to perform for love.
I am worthy as I am, et cetera.
It's all about catering it to whatever problem you're trying to solve.
And I know, I know some people don't like affirmations and you might think that it's pointless, but remember what I said about neuroplasticity repetition equals rewiring.
The more that you are repeating this belief and putting it into your mind, whether that be verbally or by writing it down, the more that your brain can adapt to start internalizing these new loving beliefs rather than holding on to the unhealed version of your inner child.
Another idea is playtime.
This is something I've seen on social media so much, and it's what got me into learning about inner child healing so many years ago.
And this is all about having an hour, maybe a week or a day once a month where you engage in your inner child favorite activities.
To be honest, it doesn't even need to be an activity.
It could literally be watching, like your old shows that you loved as an inner child, or going to the places that you used to go to as an inner child if you're still in your hometown, or whatever you loved back then.
One thing i regularly do is i will re-watch my disney channel shows.
I don't know why.
It just connects me to that part of my life and it just makes me feel grateful for how far i've come, but also just reminds me of who i used to be, so i don't forget about her.
It could be painting drawing cycling baking, whatever you used to like.
Remember, it's not always about being this grown-up, responsible adult.
Sometimes it's just about feeling joy and playing, because that's what life was like when you were younger.
And finally, this is my personal favorite, writing a letter to your inner child.
Every week or month, I want you to think about your younger self and write a letter to her.
I think this is a really nice thing, especially because you can actually save it and maybe once a year you can open them all up again and read them in order.
And it's a great thing to see how you've been healing your inner child, one letter at a time, and how far you've come and you've grown with every letter you wrote.
It's a great like progress journey.
But in this letter you can write about how you're feeling, any thoughts that have come up, maybe about your past and your childhood, what your inner child did well that week, the relationship that you're having with her, how you plan on reparenting her and looking after her and how you want to show up for her, how she's influencing your growth to be the parent and the grown-up that you wish she'd had, but also who your inner child always wanted you to be, and the growth and the action you're putting into that journey to really show up for her in your current adult life.
But if you want more ideas, there are so many on google.
You can literally just google shy work prompts, inner child prompts, and there'll be so many.
But that brings us to the end of this video.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
If you did, please comment down below and let me know what you thought.
I would love to read through your comments and respond to you guys.
Definitely let me know what you guys are going to be doing to start this journey.
It's such a wholesome, amazing thing you can do for yourself, your self-love, your mental health and just your happiness moving forward.
It is truly such an amazing healing exercise that everyone needs to invest in.
Thank you so much for being here and watching.
Remember to check out all the links below in the description, because I promise you there'll be at least one thing there that's gonna help you on your self-improvement journey.
That's everything for this week.
I'll see you in the next one.
I appreciate you so, so much.
Bye.
