This year I've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so I decided to commit to dry January to really kick -start 2025 and just test myself.
Heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends, out for drinks, whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals.
I'm a big beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls.
Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com.
You must be 21 plus to purchase, enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with dry January for dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends, out for drinks, whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals.
I'm a big beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls.
Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com.
You must be 21 plus to purchase, enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with dry January.
Are you still quoting 30 -year -old movies?
Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days?
Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted?
If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past.
Discover is accepted at night.
Wife is Miss Casey.
If you wouldn't find out what happened to her, I'll help.
She's still alive. I want to see my wife.
She should have left.
Severance new season streaming January 17th only on Apple TV plus.
And listen, the adults are going to have a ball.
First, we're chilling in the infinity pool, onto massages at Sense's spa, then gliding into Star Wars hyperspace lounge for a toast.
We're even going to kick back with Mickey on Disney's private aisle.
That's how we get down.
Because Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play.
Hello, and welcome back to the psychology of your twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here.
Thank you for deciding to tune in.
This week's episode is essential listening for everyone in their twenties or really whatever age you are right now, wherever you are in your life.
It is such an important concept, such an important topic, and it's also been a long time coming, something I'm personally really fascinated by, but also excited to be able to share and discuss here.
We're talking about the process of nurturing and healing our inner child or re -parenting ourselves, healing attachment wounds by connecting with our childlike wonder, our childlike curiosity and innocence.
So you may be wondering, this is a podcast dedicated to people in their twenties.
Why are we talking about childhood?
That's already happened.
That's in the past.
But reconnecting with your inner child is a fundamental task that I believe every single one of us has to do at some point in our lives.
And we may as well start now.
I think many of us do not take the time to really consider how our early life experiences have changed and altered us and made us who we are and that whatever has happened in our lives, whether you've been hurt, you know, whether you feel all these obligations to do things, whatever society has convinced
you, whatever society has told you about yourself.
At the end of the day, at our core, there is still this tiny, innocent, vulnerable, joyful version of us that really does deserve to be nurtured and to feel safe.
And realizing that can be really life changing.
And I think a massive step in our pin.
I also just want to note that I think that this idea of inner child work, it's been floating around across a lot of platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram.
I see things about it all the time.
And I think with that comes a lot of confusion, I would say, and misinterpretations of the true science and psychology behind this phenomena.
Often when we see psychology kind of converted onto places like Tik Tok, when we see it converted into fast media, the concepts kind of lose some of the validity because, you know, it's social media and we're increasingly skeptical of some of the content that we see on those platforms.
So if you're listening to this being like, this sounds like a little bit crazy.
This doesn't sound particularly scientific.
I understand where you're coming from, but when it comes to healing our inner child, even the existence of our inner child, this is very much a real thing.
It has an evidence base behind it.
Many psychologists have established their entire careers on this idea and on learning more about this connection between our adult selves and our childhood selves on an unconscious level.
So I really want to dispel some of that ambiguity today and also provide a bit of a guide as to how we can actually do inner child work on our own.
So we're going to discuss the origins of this concept, where it came from some of the core elements of what we mean when we talk about our inner child and why it is such a crucial aspect of our identity.
Part of that conversation is also some of the wounds that we do carry from childhood.
Maybe you've heard of the guilt wound or the abandonment wound.
I really want to dive further into that as well because I don't think that the specifics are really talked about enough in this space.
Of course, we're going to dissect some of the benefits of re -parenting ourselves and of course how we can do this from the big practices like psychotherapy to just nurturing our innate playfulness, you know, listening to music from our childhood, writing a letter to our childhood selves, giggling every
now and again, laughing, playing all of those things as simple as those practices might sound.
We're going to see some amazing differences in how we treat ourselves and how we see the world when we take time to really reflect on what is at our core of our identity, how we got to the place that we are, what happened to us in childhood that's made us into this adult version of ourselves.
So there's a lot to discuss, a lot to talk through and so much that we can use in our 20s.
So let's jump into all the information all of the facts, all of the psychology around how we can heal our inner child.
So let's start with the basics.
Where did this idea of an inner child come from and what does it really mean in a modern day context?
So the idea is it kind of stands today, it has its roots in the work of Carl Jung.
So if you don't know who that is, it's essentially perhaps one of the most well -known or most influential psychiatrists and psychologists from the 1900s.
And his work really inspired people like Freud to dive into this idea that we have a subconscious or unconscious mind that impacts our daily decisions.
So Jung, he had this idea, a very in -depth metaphor, that all of us have a child archetype within us that impacts how we behave, impacts our decisions, how we act without us really consciously knowing.
We all possess this inner version of ourselves, no matter who you are.
And like actual children, these inner child archetypes are different.
Some of us have a wounded inner child or an innocent inner child and abandoned or divine or vulnerable inner child.
And Jung essentially explained that all of our adult dysfunctions, all of the problems and the quirks and the trauma and the damage that has been done to us in childhood, that is expressed through this archetype.
And it's because of this archetype that we act in this way.
When we begin to peel back those layers that we've built up to protect ourselves, when we recognize the existence of this subconscious version of us, we're really able to grow, able to heal because we're able to address perhaps what we didn't have as children and the many factors and circumstances and experiences
that have made us who we are.
That's kind of a simplified way of putting it.
And obviously the initial conception has evolved a lot since then, especially as we've begun to understand more about the developmental milestones of children and the impacts of parenting style and trauma.
But I think the thing is that our childhood is the most crucial period of our lives, the most crucial developmental period that we will go through.
Not just physically, in that it's when we learn how to walk and we develop motor skills and we grow significantly, but also in regards to our emotional and our cognitive functioning and development.
We begin to learn our most basic emotions within a matter of weeks of being born.
We learn who to tritexture.
In psychology and even philosophy there is this idea that children are born as a blank canvas on which, you know, our experiences slowly build up image after image, layer after layer until the canvas becomes a lot harder to paint over, a lot harder to erase, impossible to start again.
Essentially what I'm saying is that although we might not always think about it, we might not always acknowledge it, the things that we experienced in childhood are going to be one of the single most important determinants for our adult life and sometimes those childhood experiences, they aren't always
positive and we become severed from our emotional and our creative and our physical and our spiritual needs and we're wounded or detached from that childlike wonder, from that child version of ourselves.
No matter what you've been through though there's nothing that can remove that inner version of you, the inner child remains.
They're always there and they're the ones that have experienced all of those things that have made us who we are.
They're the ones who hold our emotions, who hold our memories, our beliefs, our hopes, our dreams.
This incredible article from a psychiatrist out of the US explained it beautifully.
Our inner child is the one who remembers what it felt like to giggle uncontrollably.
They remember what it felt like to fall asleep in our parents arms and then get tucked into bed.
They remember what it felt like to be excluded, to feel lonely, to feel bullied, to feel rejected.
They remember what it felt like to be yelled at when we were just trying to be good.
They remember what it feels like to be abandoned but on the other side they also remember what it felt like to play for hours, to go to the beach for the first time, to fall down and have your mom, you know, kiss your wound better, to eat warm cookies, all of those things.
Everything that we've learned and felt and experienced since puberty, that hasn't disappeared.
That's still here and sometimes those experiences create negative reactions and negative behaviors and negative habits in adulthood and that's when we would say that someone has a wounded inner child and the way to kind of identify that that might be an experience someone's had and that their inner
child is wounded is by the adult behaviors that they portray.
So things like a difficulty trusting others, emotional unavailability, feeling guilty or undeserving of nice things, even nice emotions like love and generosity, people pleasing behaviors.
That's a really big one.
Abandonment issues, feeling that you need to collect people or collect friendships, difficulty trusting others.
I think I already said that but it is a massive one that comes up quite a bit or you might suppress really hard emotions.
These are all indicators that we have a wounded inner child and that's essentially the basis for inner child healing.
The essential premise is that we've all experienced hurt in some way and in order to heal our adult scars, our adult wounds, our adult beliefs, we have to go back to the root or the cause of that problem which is the foundational experiences that we had as children.
Inner child work like any other type of work involves hard decisions.
It involves time, it involves energy but it also involves creating a safe space where your subconscious, your inner child is really able to take the lead, is really able to express themselves and have a voice and have freedom.
By creating that space for yourself you give yourself permission to explore the significant events that were perhaps uncomfortable or unpleasant to get in touch with your true feelings and parts of you that you've rejected, parts of you that you've suppressed because you thought they were unlovable
or you thought they were too much or you thought they were embarrassing and there are a couple ways that we can do that.
Some of which are more valid or evidence -based than others but before you jump right in I think it's important to understand what kind of childhood or inner child wound you're trying to heal.
I think one of the big misconceptions around this type of work, around this type of healing is that it's only reserved for those with really intense familial and relational trauma and there's no doubt that in those cases it's highly beneficial but I don't think anyone goes through life without a couple
of scars and what we may suppress and see as minor or we may dismiss as being no big deal.
Those events, those experiences can actually be highly influential especially when we consider that as children we were so vulnerable we had such limited coping skills and there's even cases in which we become stuck at the age in which the trauma occurred, unable to really move forward.
A reminder like we always say on the show trauma is subjective.
What may be intense and extreme and severe for one person might not be the same for someone else but everyone is carrying something with them.
We all have different sensitivities, we all have different temperaments and the content of the experience is not something that we should judge against other people's experiences.
It's not some kind of competition.
I think everyone's experiences are valid.
It doesn't really matter what kind of severity level you think it was, it's important to acknowledge that the only thing that really matters in this instance is how you feel and the individual impact that it's had on you.
Once you start on this journey you may find that a lot of the behaviors or habits that you currently have that you've learned can be traced back to childhood experiences.
For example if you tend to lash out, become really frustrated and aggressive when you're rejected it may be because as a child you didn't have the proper coping skills to deal with a caregiver walking out of your life or feeling abandoned by someone who was meant to help you, someone who was meant to
love you, or if you shut down when you feel really intense emotions or really intense sadness it may be because you weren't allowed to properly express those emotions as a child.
Often these reactions stem from what psychologists call childhood wounds and there are four typical wounds that we generally hear psychologists talk about when they talk about inner child trauma or healing your inner child and these are the guilt wound, the abandonment wound, the trust wound and the inner neglect
wound. Each of these have their own origins, have their own indicators but they also have their own exercises and way of healing.
Firstly the guilt wound often comes from childhood experiences in which you felt that you had to take care of everybody, that you experienced way more responsibility at a young age than you probably should have.
Maybe you were responsible for a really ill parent or a sibling and you were made to feel kind of guilty for asking for your needs to be met or undeserving of basic emotional and physical necessities because someone else's needs always took precedence over your own and feel guilty if you ever need to
take a step back. To heal this wound most therapists I would say would probably recommend that you build your skills surrounding healthy boundary setting, that you build up your confidence in being able to demand your wants, demand your needs and set a boundary when those are not being met.
This might look like accountability around how many times you apologize to others, reiterating that you don't need to say sorry all the time, that you have nothing to be sorry for, you're just looking out for yourself, you're just prioritizing yourself and also exercises and work around forgiveness
and self -forgiveness.
I saw this really amazing exercise or really amazing kind of practice that the psychologist was talking about in which you journal the things that you feel guilty for and then at the end of each one you simply say I forgive you and you picture it's your inner child who you're forgiving and you just
sit in front of them in your imagination and just say I forgive you, there's no need to be sorry.
It sounds so simple but if you've never done that before, if you've never addressed that aspect of your childhood before it's going to feel really profound and highly emotional.
The second common wound is that abandonment wound that with years of being rejected you might become very fixated on people but also incredibly anxious when you sense even the slightest indicator that they might leave, that they might walk away.
You find yourself in codependent relationships or also on the flip side find it very difficult to trust others because you've been taught that and primed I guess that you're going to be hurt.
This reaction always makes me so sad and I think when we're talking about inner child work it can make it particularly profound and emotional to imagine that the version of you now that is experiencing those things all of that originated from the experiences that you had to have when you were young
and when you were vulnerable.
To heal this I think you really have to unpack those feelings, you really have to unpack that abandonment with a therapist.
I think that can be highly beneficial.
Repeating positive affirmations is another one that you deserve to be loved.
Reminding yourself that the right person will stay and that your worth is not valued by others' decisions.
The third wound I want to touch on is the betrayal wound.
As a child you may have felt that you could not trust your caregivers, that they failed to fulfill their promises to you.
They would gaslight you, they would put you down or put you in situations in which you weren't safe, they didn't stand up for you when you needed it and as a result you've become hyper -independent and you're unable to trust others.
You find it really uncomfortable and unnatural to allow others to take care of you or to show you generosity just because they want to.
You know you're constantly questioning their intentions because of this experience that you had when you were younger.
I think building your own trust in yourself but also surrendering and letting go and allowing yourself to trust others is really valuable in this situation.
Sometimes it can be really hard to be stoic about it especially when you are expecting to get hurt but stoicism might just be the way forward.
Being like okay I need to remain somewhat detached from the situation, allow myself to float along with this, allow myself to be loved knowing that no matter what happens I will be okay.
Finally we have the neglect wound which often comes from feeling that as a child you were not supported and you didn't receive your emotional needs, your physical needs, your cognitive, your social needs, you were ignored or treated as an afterthought and this can come from parents and family but also from teachers
and mentors. An example of this that I saw from someone who was recounting their experience healing from a neglect wound was a situation in which her sibling was highly successful.
I think they were like a child actor and she wasn't, she wasn't, she wasn't successful, she didn't want to do movies, she didn't want to be the next Lindsay Lohan, whatever it was but what that resulted in was her parents constantly giving preferential treatment to this other sibling and these situations
they can be super nuanced and different for everyone but often this childhood wound results in low self -worth, a pessimistic outlook on life, repressing and suppressing our true feelings and lowering our standards for our relationships.
To nurture an inner child who has experienced this, therapists and psychologists, they've come up with some amazing exercises mainly to do with honoring and expressing our feelings through what they call shameless release.
Be that you know screaming at the top of your lungs in the forest or in nature, screaming the lyrics to a cathartic song in your car or creating art that allows you to bring your emotions to the surface and express them freely and with beauty and without shame.
Additionally I think children who have experienced this type of upbringing they're very used to hearing no, they're very used to hearing people not give them what they want and I don't mean you know giving them junk food all the time but I mean giving them their most basic needs and wants so to heal
that maybe that involves saying yes to yourself.
You're now your own parent right, you're re -parenting that inner child so say yes to the food that you want to eat.
Buy yourself something because it makes you happy even if it's impractical.
Say yes to nice things like nights out with your friends and going to the movies just because you want to.
You're the parent now, that's your role in this healing journey.
You have to look after your inner child and treat them with the love and generosity that you deserved but maybe you didn't receive.
I think regardless of this wound, regardless of whether you uh you know think you had a guilt wound or an abandonment wound or a betrayal wound, it's also about accountability.
When we embark on the journey of re -parenting we recognize that caring for our inner child it isn't just being goofy and silly and giving in to all our whims and wants and desires but it's also about making hard decisions.
We wouldn't allow our actual child to eat junk food all day and say yes to every social event to the point where they were exhausted or continue being friends with people who brought them down so you can't allow yourself and your own inner child to accept that treatment either.
It's just as much about responsibility as it is about compassion and love.
They come hand in hand.
I think it's worth mentioning we listed out those typical childhood wounds and I think that they sound really intense.
Often when we list them out when we dissect them it can really seem that they're rooted in a lot of extreme trauma.
But like I said before, neglect, abandonment, guilt, betrayal, these can all occur on a micro level as well, on a micro scale, even in ways that we don't always recognize because of the subconscious nature of our inner child.
I truly believe that no matter how hard you think you had it or how easy all of us deserve the opportunity to show our inner child love and compassion.
It's just a good practice to have because not only can it help us resolve problematic behaviors that are rooted in our childhood experiences, it can also just let us tap into that joy and tap into that silliness that I think a lot of us lose as we get older.
And how sad is that?
How sad that we're not allowed to be silly and we're not allowed to play.
We become hardened by adulthood and seriousness and obligations and expectations and jobs and bills.
But giving yourself space to release those constraints, it is truly emotional magic.
So I want to dive into some of those specific practices that I use, that I know other people use for reconnecting with your inner child like wonder and joy and how you can make that part of your daily routine.
It always shocks me to think of how many people out there leave their childhoods and never think about it again.
Or how many people are so serious about what it means to be an adult that they are completely opposed to play or to laughter as if those things no longer have value once we reach a certain age.
But activities like playing children's card games or listening to music.
So maybe you're not a big fan of orange slices or board games, but what are some of the ways that we can not only recognize our inner child, but nurture them, love them, heal them, and allow that part of us to live on in how we treat ourselves and how we treat others.
Staying in tune with your inner child's presence, it all begins with acknowledgement.
You cannot have a relationship with this version of you if you don't acknowledge that it exists or you choose to stay ignorant to its influence.
Kim Eagle, a therapist in the U .S.
She made this amazing point in an article she wrote on this and I think it's so important to share here.
Anyone can get in touch with their inner child if they're open to exploring this relationship.
If you feel doubtful or resistant to this idea of exploring the past, if you feel doubtful that this version of you even still exists, you're going to have a harder time beginning the healing process.
I think a great place to start is to reconnect with the things that remind you of the childhood version of yourself and take note of how exposure to these things makes you feel.
For example, the other day I watched the Hannah Montana movie.
I know, huge throwback.
But that movie was released when I was nine years old and I was obsessed with it.
I was a massive Miley Cyrus fan.
I loved that movie.
I memorized all the songs.
I brought clothes like Miley Cyrus.
I think I watched that movie like in the cinema four times and rewatching it at 23 made me so incredibly emotional but also aware of the childhood version of myself.
That positive reaction reminded me that she existed because those emotions I was experiencing, they were derived from memories of that time.
They were derived from the joy that baby Gemma, childhood Gemma had for that movie.
The memories that she had made and that moment, that wonder, that emotion of rewatching because our memories are strongest when they're tied to multiple senses.
So you'll be amazed by how much your mind and body responds to these experiences from a procedural and unconscious place and how in touch you feel with that former version of you.
The other tip I have, and I'm guessing many of us have heard of this before, but change your phone background to a photo of your childhood self.
Right now, do it right now.
Ask your mum, ask your grandma, your aunt for a photo of you when you were five or six years old and make that the first thing you see every day.
I have a photo of me from like when I was in fourth grade.
