Is Your Inner Child Sabotaging Your Mental Health?

Hey there, everybody. I'm Doc Snipes. And today we are going to answer the question, is your inner child sabotaging your mental health? First, I want you to imagine caring for a child who feels very anxious. They are often acting in ways that are restless, impulsive. They have difficulty communicating their thoughts, wants and needs. They're just like, ah, make it, fix it. They may be irritable. They may be easily set off. They have difficulty stepping back and seeing other people's perspectives or ways to solve the problem. And they are hypervigilant to everything. When we feel unsafe, we tend to be more aware of everything around us because we're trying to protect ourselves from threats. And that's called hypervigilance. When all of these things happen, it's exhausting. And if you're taking care of this child who is just constantly on the move and impulsive and can't focus and easily set off as a caregiver, you can feel exhausted at day's end. You towards them, you may feel resentful, you may feel frustrated. You still love them, but you don't like the behaviors and you wish the behaviors could get under control. And then towards yourself, you may feel like you failed as a parent. You may feel like you're not able to control the situation. That child is you. That's the part of you that was formed when you were young, through the experiences you had when you were young and you felt unsafe and powerless. And there are things in the present moment that may be continuing to make you feel unsafe and powerless or trigger those feelings. Maybe you feel good most of the time, but there are certain things that trigger your inner child to come out, and they come out with a vengeance. When your inner child feels unsafe and powerless, when you are reminded of that chaos that you grew up in, or maybe you still continue to feel unsafe and powerless, unable to get your needs met in daily life, your stress response is triggered. And this results in a whole cascade of negative effects that will impact your mental health and your physical health physically. Your autonomic nervous system becomes disregulated. Your autonomic nervous system is the combination of your stress response and your relaxation response. When your stress response is activated by a whole lot, if not all the time, it becomes much stronger than your relaxation response. Kind of like muscles. If you don't use them, you lose them, and the ones you use a lot become much stronger. When that imbalance happens, then the rest and digest the relaxation response has a hard time turning down the stress response so you can get back to baseline after a stressful situation. As a result, cortisol, which is your main stress hormone and one of your main anti inflammatory chemicals in your body as well as your gonadal hormones and your neurotransmitters start to get out of balance. And as those things happen, you're going to see changes in your mood. There's just no way around it. You're going to see changes in your mood and your sex drive and your motivation and your ability to focus on all of those things are impacted by your hormones. Your gonadal hormones like estrogen and testosterone and your neurotransmitters. And when they are out of balance, your mood is going to suffer. We also see muscle tension. Well, it makes sense. If you're feeling unsafe and powerless, you're probably not going to be chilling on the beach somewhere. You're going to be a little tense. You're going to be kind of scanning and waiting for that next shoe to drop. All of this stress and this persistent cortisol causes systemic inflammation. That systemic inflammation causes inflammation in the brain which is part of the system and can cause you to actually start losing brain cells. It can become very toxic and that again will increase the stress response even more and cause the neurotransmitters to get out of balance. Intra and interpersonally, you may have difficulty with self esteem. Feeling good about yourself, that's intrapersonal how you feel about yourself because you were were rejected as a child because your caregivers were inconsistent when you were a child. You may not feel like you are efficacious as they say. You might not feel competent because you were criticized a lot as a child. So you may not feel powerful, you may not feel empowered to keep yourself safe as a child. You couldn't. A 5 year old can't keep their themselves safe. A 25 year old has much better tools and much more resources. They can keep theirselves themselves safe. But it's important to understand that you still have the memories of that child who felt lost, who felt alone, who felt scared. Then that can get triggered and make you question yourself and question whether you ever became competent. And your ability to trust others is negatively impacted. When you're not able to trust your primary caregivers, which create what some people call your love map. It becomes hard to trust anyone else. When the people you interacted with in your formative years as you were forming all of these core beliefs, when they were inconsistent and rejecting and unsafe, then you start to expect that everybody's going to be inconsistent Rejecting and unsafe emotionally. You may experience a lot of distressful emotions like anger and depression and anxiety. And you also may experience what we call dysregulation. And that is when you experience a feeling. You go from flat to furious or flat to frantic like that. There is no middle ground. There is no kind of irritated. You are either not feeling much or you are furious with what's going on. And that again is the result of that nervous system becoming dysregulated and the. The rest and digest the relaxation part of your nervous system getting too weak. One of the things we do in inner child work is help the person differentiate between what's going on right now and what they can control in the present versus what memories are being triggered so they can separate and understand. This is reminding me of a time when I felt unsafe. However, right now I am safe. Once they recognize they're safe, then they can use what we call distress tolerance skills to down regulate, to turn on, if you will, that relaxation response and turn down the stress response during this process, during this healing process. It's essentially like forcing yourself to do a manual override because your stress response is not automatically clicking off when the, when the stressors passed, but because you're constantly looking for stressors in inner child work. Strengthening that vagus nerve, strengthening your vagal tone and your relaxation response is really important cognitively. When you feel unsafe, when you feel powerless, you tend to be. People tend to be more rigid in their beliefs. This is the way I see it. This must be the way it is. It's harder to take multiple perspectives when we're stressed. Again, it makes sense when you look at the neuroscience behind it. When you are in fight or flight, when you're in that stress response, your brain's saying, I don't have time to think about all the permutations right now. I just need to get the heck out of here. When you are feeling calm, then you can access all the stuff in the prefrontal cortex and all those good thinking neurons that are up there and evaluate beliefs. But when you're feeling unsafe and powerless, when that inner child inside of you is triggered and active and back in the background screaming, you're not safe right now. It's hard to think clearly. It's hard to evaluate what's going on. So as an adult, you may become more rigid. You may have more difficulty with planning, with organizing, with problem solving. And that inner critic just becomes so loud in, in your own mind because you're repeating to yourself all of those things that you were told as a child. All of those beliefs that you developed as a child, they're coming back. You're hearing your, your caregivers, you're hearing your friends, you're hearing whomever criticize you. And then that can make you start thinking, feeling in the present, feeling unsafe, powerless, stupid, Whatever word or situation is, is appropriate. And again, it's important to separate. This reminds me of this time in my past when all this stuff, stuff happened. And yes, I was powerless and I'm not powerless anymore, and these are my beliefs in the present. And environmental triggers are often more prominent for you when you're under stress, when you're feeling stressed, your body naturally pays attention to the threats. It says, okay, you're stressed. So we need to make sure that nothing else happens. You know, we need to stay on high alert. We. When you're calm, when you're not stressed, when you're relaxed, your body's paying attention to more things that are out there, the good, the bad, whatever. But when you're on high alert, then you're scanning. You're like the soldier in the foxhole. And again, that's exhausting. It makes it difficult for you to get good quality sleep and it's hard to relax when you've got muscle tension. It's hard to relax when you're hypervigilant. When you have poor quality sleep, it impacts your mood, it impacts your ability to control your thoughts, and it impacts your ability to problem solve. Until you can turn off your autopilot, turn off that inner child that jumps into action every time you feel triggered. Until you can turn off that autopilot and recognize those feelings, thoughts and reactions as artifacts of a traumatic past and that you are safe and empowered in the present. You're going to maintain the anxiety, anger, depression, guilt, difficulty focusing, ADHD type symptoms that you developed over the years. Many people find it beneficial to respond to their younger selves as a healthy, supportive caregiver would envisioning. When you start feeling like that little child that was terrified when your dad would come home and start screaming, okay, recognize how you felt back then and then say to yourself, whatever you think a caring, supportive caregiver would have said to you to help you feel safe in that situation, say to yourself whatever you think a caring, supportive caregiver would say to you now. Something like that was really scary when that happened and you felt very powerless and you're much more powerful now and that threat is gone. Reminding yourself that you are safe and as the adult, you are in control, you're the primary caregiver now. To learn more about your inner child, you can join my community@docsnipes.com aura where I have self help courses with videos and worksheets, live events and even group courses. Our Past Programs Our autopilot IT programs how we respond when we are under stress, when we're using emotional reasoning, not wise mind reasoning. That autopilot can include beliefs, memories and lessons learned in childhood. You can't erase or change the past, but you can change how you respond to it and similar events. How you respond to similar events in the present. As you begin to feel safe and empowered, you're going to see positive effects in every piece of your life. Physically, your hormones may balance, your mood may improve, you may have more energy. You may start sleeping better, your pain may be reduced. Interpersonally and intrapersonally, your relationships may change. Emotionally, cognitively you're going to start seeing improvements. And environmentally you'll be able to go places and be around people. And you won't feel as triggered as easily. You'll feel safer in your own skin, wherever you are.