Has an unsettling experience from your childhood followed you into adulthood? Do you feel haunted everyday by past events that happened to you when you were little? Maybe this memory remains at the back of your mind, left untouched, and you are hesitant to revisit it. Unresolved childhood can significantly impact one’s everyday functioning and wellbeing as an adult. There are many ways trauma can seep into your relationships, work, and family or personal life. Fortunately, inner child counseling can help you heal from a past painful experience and stitch up the wounded parts of your inner child.
What Constitutes as Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma presents itself in a variety of ways. It can range from a catastrophic single event, to a series of repeated events that occurred throughout one’s development.
When working with clients with trauma, I like to refer to Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACES. The more ACES a child experiences, the more at risk that child becomes for threatening conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, substance use, poor academic achievement, etc. later in life.
Experiencing many ACES can contribute to the onset of toxic stress, or prolonged activation of the body’s stress-response system. This is commonly known as living in fight or flight mode. You may feel constantly on edge, restless, and ridden with anxiety.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences consist of the following events:
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Physical neglect
- Emotional neglect
- Mental illness of oneself or a family member
- High conflict households or domestic violence
- A parent or mother treated poorly
- Divorce
- Substance Abuse
- Incarcerated relative
Your ACE score is a tally of the types of abuse, neglect, and other adverse childhood experiences you endured. A higher score indicates a higher risk for health problems later in life.
ACES affect people of all ages, race, ethnicity, religion, income and social levels. If left untreated, they can have a serious, costly impact across the life span. Fortunately, as an adult you can reduce the harmful effects of toxic stress and ACES. Meditation, time in nature, physical exercise, support groups, and working with a therapist can all benefit your inner child.
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Effects of Toxic Stress from Childhood Trauma on the Brain
When the body is surviving in a constant state of heightened stress, many of the brain’s vital systems may suffer as a result. First off, toxic stress on the brain’s stress pathway, involving the HPA axis and hippocampus volume, can lead to anxiety, depression, and impaired learning and memory.
Toxic stress also impedes emotional processing and regulation. This is visible by decreased gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and increased amygdala volume. These changes in brain structure can contribute to hyper vigilance and reduced attentional control.
Additionally, toxic stress can impact the brain’s reward system. A decreased reward response in the ventral striatum can lead to difficulty in experiencing joy.
The connection between the amygdala and the PFC pathway also becomes disrupted. The brain on toxic stress displays decreased mode activity. These changes lead to difficulty understanding the relevance of situations and how to respond.
How Childhood Trauma Shows up in Adulthood
If left untreated, trauma from childhood can leak into our everyday lives as adults. The CDC-Kaiser ACE study found that adults with an ACE score of 4 or more were at greater risk of developing behavioral, physical, and mental health issues later in life.
If you grew up within domestic violent household with lots of high conflict fights, you may see how these harmful patterns make their way into your own family now. Oftentimes, we repeat behaviors we are accustomed to seeing without any conscious awareness. Maybe, you notice that you repeat actions and behaviors that you watched your parents display. Despite efforts to change, your relationship with your significant other may be a reflection of your parents relationship. You may argue in a similar fashion as your mother or father did. If you watched your father get angry and leave the house, you may often do the same.
An unresolved sexual trauma or history of sexual abuse can significantly impact your adult life. You may find that you have difficulty trusting romantic partners. Maybe you struggle to communicate your needs or develop intimacy with your significant other. It is also common to struggle with self-worth after experiencing sexual abuse.
What is Inner Child Work
As adults with unhealed, emotional baggage from childhood, we often carry within us a wounded inner child. Our wounded inner child may not have received adequate love, care, and nurture when we were younger.
If you were never granted the opportunity to resolve emotional turmoil and distressing events from childhood, that part of yourself will remain wounded until you are able to work through and process these events.
Inner child work originated in Jungian therapy. Carl Jung proposed the notion that the child archetype is the first step in accomplishing individuation, or the formation of the self. The cornerstone of inner child work is that all adults were children at one time. As we grow and progress through life, the child inside of ourself does not cease to exist- it navigates life’s challenges with us as well.
This type of therapy blends together components of attachment theory, somatic therapy, shadow work, internal family systems, and psychodynamic theories.
Trauma-informed counseling and inner-child work may be just the healing journey that you need to resolve past painful experiences and restore the wounded pieces of yourself.
Inner child counseling can help you heal from past trauma. Click the button below to get started.
How Do I Know if my Inner Child is Wounded?
The perceptions we developed about ourselves during childhood ultimately may have followed us into our adult life. You may believe that you are unworthy of healthy relationships or love, or that you deserve bad things happening to you. Maybe, you find that you develop insecure or anxious attachments to people, or that you attract unhealthy relationships. These patterns oftentimes point to unresolved childhood trauma or a wounded inner child that needs tended to.
There are some telltale signs that your inner child may be wounded. Signs of a wounded inner child include:
- Intense emotional reactions to unmet needs
- Childish outbursts that include crying, yelling, saying things you do not mean
- Difficulty explaining your feelings
- Low self-esteem
- Seeking validation from others
- A harsh inner critic
- Destructive coping behaviors
- Mental health concerns
- Patterns of self-sabotage
- Fear of abandonment
- Commitment issue
- Anxious or insecure attachment styles
- Trauma bonding
- Challenges with setting boundaries
Forming Protective Factors
Fortunately, measures can be put into place in childhood that reduce the risk of maltreatment and prevent recurring abuse or neglect. Utilizing family strengths and acknowledging the impact of traumatic events can help form protective factors.
Protective factors are conditions or attributes present in families that increase the well-being of its members. Identifying and utilizing protective factors can help families find resources, supports, or coping strategies that allow the individual or family to function effectively, even under stress.
The six protective factors include:
- Nurture and healthy attachment styles
- Knowledge of parenting and child development
- Parental resilience
- Social connections or community
- Supports for parents
- Social and emotional competence of children
As an adult who has endured childhood trauma or any of the ACES, it is imperative that you develop and implement protective factors into your life. Protective factors can not only enhance your individual well-being as an adult, but they can also help you to be a better parent to your children. As noted above, children are impressionable and vulnerable individuals. Protective factors can ensure that children receive the support and care they need to grow and develop in a healthy way.
Trauma Therapy for Adults Can Help You Identify Protective Factors
Through working with a therapist that specializes in childhood trauma and inner child work, you can begin to identify which protective factors may already be present in your life. For example, you may tell your therapist about your family dynamics from childhood
Additionally, your therapist can provide you with appropriate resources to form new protective factors. Your therapist can connect you with community supports and outside resources such as groups for single moms, events in your area, or childcare centers. A therapist can also provide you with new tools and skills such as education around child development, ways to promote resilience, and information about attachment styles.
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Benefits of Inner Child Work
Engaging in inner child work can heal old wounds and help you develop greater self-awareness as an adult. You can begin to understand how past trauma infiltrates your life and affects your personal behavior and relationships. In addition, you can develop healthy coping mechanisms.
Exploring childhood trauma also allows you to reconnect to old parts of yourself that you thought were lost forever. During the process, you may uncover passions, dreams, and talents that you have put aside. This can include dancing, playing soccer, scrapbooking, using chalk outside, or jumping rope. Returning back to these meaningful past-times can help you feel like the best version of yourself again. If you are struggling with depression, anxiety, or PTSD as an adult, engaging in activities you once loved as a child can bring simple joy back into your life. It serves as a reminder to be playful, even as an adult.
One of the most profound benefits of inner child work is improved emotional regulation. By understanding old patterns of thinking and behaving from your childhood, you can recognize how these patterns have carried over into your adult life. You can begin to depict which behaviors are harmful versus beneficial.
Ways to Support your Inner Child
You can begin to support your inner child in a variety of creative and nurturing ways. First and foremost, self-care is critical. When our needs are not met as a child, we hold onto those patterns in adulthood. Listen to your bodies’ emotional and physical needs and begin to. It is okay to take yourself off the back burner for once.
Journaling is one technique you can use to access your inner child. Write a letter to your younger self. What would you say to them? What do they need to hear in that moment?
You can explore elements of your inner child by talking with loved ones. Reach out to an old friend or your sibling and reminisce. Ask them questions you may not remember, and share fond memories of each other. You may even look at old photo albums together.
Be playful. Our inner child is within each of us, and it never stopped wanting to play. You can remember how to play by engaging in creative, fun activites and games. This may look like jumping rope outside, doing a puzzle or coloring book, playing music and dancing, or even going through old boxes of toys you saved from childhood.
Honor your fearless inner child at Wisdom Within Counseling
At Wisdom Within Counseling, our team utilizes a trauma-informed approach to support children, teens, adults and families. We help adults reconnect with their inner child and heal from their past in a safe, nurturing way. We offer evidence-based art, music, yoga and nature therapies to provide a positive and profound experience for clients. You can engage in inner child work by creating a family tree, journaling, or painting symbols of emotions with your therapist. Maybe, you want to listen to your favorite song from childhood together.
Inner child counseling will help you to process past painful events and emotions, and ultimately help you to develop lifelong coping skills.
