A child can be born into a life situation with their parents that is traumatic. Sometimes in the case of healing the inner child you are trying to heal things that do not originate with you but your parents. Parents can be emotionally impoverished because their needs were not met as infants, children or adults. (Miller 1983) states that children and infants can be used in unhealthy inappriate ways to meet the parents needs. A child can also empathically pick up a parents feeling tone and build their personality upon the parents emotions.

An example of this would be if a parent had a child that died and then had a second child and that child was born before the parent had proper time to grieve, the second child would have the task of building their personality on the feeling tone of grief.

Your inner child works on an emotional level and when the child is experiencing extreme guilt, shame or fear these emotions often become locked in the body and subconscious mind in “out of time” reality. Because the hurt and trauma is embedded in an “out of time reality,” healing can be less traumatic and stressful in an “out of time” reality such as hypnosis, breath work, or meditation. Remember again the subconscious mind doesn’t evaluate if something is real or unreal so when you visualize feelings or events through hypnosis you integrate the experience as real. When the inner child steps up you cannot reason with it but must acknowledge its anger and fears so your inner child can cycle through to release them. Working with your inner child is rewarding because not only can you heal yourself, you can often stop the generational patterns that repeat themselves.

Sometimes a child can have a toxic parent who shames or ridicules the child. This child hides in shame out of fear of humiliation or ridicule. What is difficult is a toxic parent may appear to be a loving parent. Often they are needy children themselves and expect the child to meet their needs. Healing the inner child is a process and you have to be willing to do the work. The first step to healing is to recognize what your inner child’s needs are and bring your anger and fear into awareness so you can complete the cycle of releasing stuck emotions.