6 Ways to Make Your Inner Child Feel Loved | CBT Counseling Tools

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on 6 Ways to make your inner child feel loved. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. We've talked about the inner child in other videos. Basically, the inner child is the part of you that is comprised of all of the memories you have from childhood. You can think back to what it was like being you as a child, and that's your inner child. A lot of times that inner child has been ignored. Either you grew up and you decided that you couldn't be a kid anymore, or that inner child was so wounded that they've been exiled because it was too painful to think about those emotions. And that inner child still feels wounded, feels depressed and feels unsafe. So how can you help them feel loved? That way you can feel loved too. Connect with them. Explore what you liked as a child. Did you like swinging on swings? Did you like writing on the sidewalk with sidewalk chalk? Did you like painting or baking or horseback riding or riding bikes? What is it that you liked to do as a child? Identify five good memories from your childhood. Now, not everybody can do this, so if you can't, don't add insult to injury by continuing to try to find something. But try to think of five good memories. Now, they may not be at home, they may be at school, or they may be, you know, with friends. But what are five good memories? Pay attention to your inner child. And I know this kind of sounds weird, but we as adults tend to get too serious too, I don't know, serious. And it's important to connect with that spontaneous, wide eyed child that we used to be. Have play dates with your inner child. If you want to go hiking, if you want to go to the video arcade, if you want to go play, you know, Xbox or something. Do that not every day, but maybe once a month. Set aside a day that you're just going to figure out, you know, what is something really fun that I would like to do. You can also have fun dinners and you can do this like once a week where maybe Friday night your inner child gets to choose the dinner, whether it is pizza or maybe having pancakes for dinner. You know, what would you as a young child, what would you have wanted for dinner if you could have chosen your dinner and do that, start reconnecting. You don't have to be so stinking serious all the time or adult. Help your inner child make friends. And this one I know. Well, all these may sound a little bit odd to some people, but all of us have an inner child within us. So connect with your Friends and then start suggesting some mildly fun things to do. You may not connect with your friends and go to the park and swing on the swing sets and skip down the trails the first time you get together. That's kind of, you know, you got to work your way into that. But unless they already know their inner child and then that's great. But help that inner child make friends. It can bring out the inner child in your adult friends. And you can help your inner child make friends if you've got children of your own. You know, obviously you're not going to befriend other people's children, but if you've got children or grandchildren of your own, let your inner child connect with them. And when my, when my son was little, I had the hardest time because I had exiled my inner child for so long. Connecting with him and using imagination and creativity and all of those things. I could see him doing it and I was just befuddled at how to join his world. So it can be, it can be an exercise in parenting, if you will. If you try to let your inner child come out, you know, what would your, the eight year old version of you wanted to do in this situation? If you're at the park or if you're playing cars or trains or tea parties, Support your inner child in trying to do things that they wanted to do. Now, you may not be able to do everything if you're an adult now. You can't go back and try out for high school cheerleading, but maybe you can take some gymnastics lessons. If you always wanted to be able to do that, why not try it now? Just because you're 30 and not 13 doesn't mean that you can't try to do something that you thought would have been fun but you didn't get support for when you were younger. Reframe the bad messages. When the inner child starts saying, I'm a failure, I suck, I'm a bad person. Reframing that and helping the child, helping the inner child, helping your inner critic, whatever you want to call it. Recognize the difference between bad behaviors or, or failed failure because you don't have skills as opposed to being a bad person. Help them recognize that they are lovable as a person. They just may not succeed at everything. And that's okay, because nobody succeeds at everything. Explore where those messages of badness came from and try to rewrite those scripts and ask yourself, when this happened, when I failed my calculus test and you know, I brought home that bad grade, what would I have wanted my caregiver to do. How would I have wanted them to respond? And respond that way to your inner child. So think back to that day and respond as you wanted your caregivers to respond and reassure your inner child that they're safe. When children feel safe, they feel loved. When children feel like their caregiver is going to protect them, they feel worthy. So reassure that inner child that okay, you know, you made it through some really bad crap growing up and I've got this now. I'm an adult, I'm much more powerful than you were back then and I've got this now, so I will keep you safe. We all have a part of our brains that remembers being a child. Reconnecting with the inner child means reconnecting with those memories. If they're traumatic, the inner child may have never learned how to feel safe. Healing a wounded inner child requires grieving the losses, processing the traumas, developing skills and tools to more effectively manage emotions and behaviors, and addressing inaccurate beliefs about self and other in depth. Videos on this topic can be found on the YouTube channel@allce.com IC which is short for inner child. Healing the Wounded inner child at allce.com wounded inner child-ic and helping the inner child process grief@allce.com IC grief.