What is the Inner Child?

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to today's presentation in which we explore the question, what is the inner child? I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. The inner child is a metaphor representing the childlike aspects of our personality and behaviors that persist into adulthood. It is something that we use to conceptualize what may be going on with us. The inner child is based on memories of feeling safe and loved or unsafe and rejected. As a child, we didn't know what to do with all of these memories, especially if they were memories of feeling unsafe and rejected. So we may have just kind of put them on a shelf because we didn't know how to interpret or handle them. Unfortunately, since we didn't deal with them, they're still out there, lingering. It's important to remember that, like everything in life, it's not all or nothing. There may have been safe relationships and unsafe relationships in your past. In terms of understanding how the inner child develops, as I said, it's based on your memories and your experiences and those people who grow up in an environment in which they have secure attachment with their caregiver, they feel safe and loved. A secure attachment with the caregiver is characterized by consistency. You don't get Jekyll or Hyde. You don't get criticism one day and support the next day. It's very consistent in the way your caregiver responds. You get attention from your caregiver not just when you need them, but because they want to spend time with you. They actually enjoy spending time with you. Your caregiver was responsive in that when you had a problem, they were there to help you understand your feelings and how to process it. And when you had something good going on, they were there to celebrate with you. Your caregiver was encouraging. They were there to support you in stepping outside of your comfort zone, to try things that are a little bit new. The first day of school, the first day of middle school, asking somebody out on a date, trying a particular sport or something. The caregiver was there and encouraging and communicated the message that I love you and you're safe in this relationship. Go out there. Try it. If you fail, all right. If you succeed, great. Either way, I'm still going to love you. Secure attachment helps the child learn how to eventually help themselves feel safe and loved by modeling the caregiver by being consistent and attentive, responsive, encouraging and safe to themselves, silencing that inner critic and being willing to accept that they are lovable even if they're not perfect. When a child feels safe and loved, they can Switch out of survival mode and into fact based reasoning and challenge unhelpful beliefs and behaviors. Now, young children have more difficulty doing this because they think in all or nothing terms. They think in egocentric terms. What I perceive is going on must be what everybody perceives is going on. And personalized terms, whatever's going on is my fault or due to me. And if there's a lot of chaos in the relationship in the home environment, the child is often feeling very, very confused. Some days they're safe, some days they're not safe. It's all or nothing. They're personalizing it, thinking I must have caused this, it must be my fault that this is happening. And it's egocentric. They believe that everybody thinks the way they do. So if they think it's their fault, then they assume everybody else thinks it's their fault. And these are the memories and beliefs about themsel that they internalize. And it sticks with them until those beliefs are challenged. Thinking about how effective are you at seeing different points of view or challenging assumptions when you feel vulnerable, threatened, rejected or disrespected? When you're in that fight or flight mode, you are reacting, you are acting from emotion based reasoning. So a child who is always or or almost always in fight orf flight, almost always feeling unsafe has difficulty challenging any of those beliefs that they formed about themsel because that's cognitive and you can't get into that executive functioning, that prefrontal cortex reasoning when you're in fight orf flight, when you're flooded with adrenaline. So that child stays stuck and those memories go go and in beliefs go unchecked. Insecure attachment leaves the child feeling unsafe, powerless and rejected. They may have had caregivers that were inconsistent. Sometimes they were loving and there, sometimes they were absent or critical, or they may have had very rejecting caregivers. Either way, the child ended up feeling that they weren't lovable and they were rejected and they were powerless to change the situation. And in reality, a 3, 5, 6 year old is pretty powerless to change the situation. And they carry this with them into adolescence and maybe adulthood because it goes unchecked. They continue to see themselves believe that they are the unloved powerless race rejected person. Insecure attachment is traumatic trauma. Attachment trauma is trauma and it's one of those core traumas that really cuts to the heart of how we perceive ourselves, others and the world around us. Trauma itself causes people to feel unsafe and powerless. When the child feels unsafe and powerless, they stay in that constant state of stress. And now they may be in fight, they may be irritable, they may be angry, they may be oppositional, they may be flight where they run away, or they sleep a lot, or heaven forbid, they abuse substances. They may be in fawn. And that's when the child engages in just random behaviors to try to figure out what is it that I can do to make you love me. I will do whatever it is to make you love me, but I feel unsafe. And I'm going to try to get you to. To take care of me. I'm going to try to get you to make that threat go away. Freeze is when the child just sits there and goes, I give up. I don't know. I don't know what to do. If I do this thing, I get punished. If I do this thing, I get punished. So I'm just going to kind of sit here right now and freeze is a very valid stress response. And then floppy flop is when the child has tried everything they can. And when we see flop, we see that the person's stress response, their autonomic nervous system has already become completely dysregulated. They don't have energy for much. They just kind of lay down. They're not motivated, they don't sleep well. It's a really horrible place to be when in a stressed state, when somebody is in that fight or flight, constantly, their sleep is impaired. Inflammation increases in their entire body, including their brain. Brain cells die. The stress response, the autonomic nervous system dysregulates, so emotions and behaviors become more extreme or impulsive. The person's attention, what they pay attention to in the world. Natural nature naturally focuses on threats, and because they feel unsafe, they're hypervigilant. So they're constantly scanning for these threats. As a result of all this, they are. They don't have enough brain power, if you will, to focus on learning and problem solving. They are paying attention to the threats. They're hypervigilant, they're stressed out, they're. When sleep is impaired, we have more difficulty with attention and problem solving as well. As the child grows, they don't magically start feeling safe and empowered, so they have difficulty recognizing their power in the present. And that is a key feature of the wounded inner child. Each day goes by, the person may be gaining more power, more independence, but they don't really realize it. And they still continue to feel like they are unable to keep themselves safe. They are unlovable. They have difficulty recognizing how their perceptions and reactions are often based on expectations they formed in childhood. Their memories from childhood. My caregiver reacted this way, therefore I expect everybody else to react this way. But that is often not accurate. We want to use fit cat or the facts in this context at this time. My caregiver behaved this way in a similar situation. However, do I actually know how my spouse is going to behave in this way or in in this particular situation? Assuming that they're going to react the same way as my dysfunctional caregiver is probably faulty, but that's what the the only knowledge the person has. So we need to help them examine the facts in this context at this time and not force everybody they encounter encounter henceforth and forevermore to carry the baggage of their dysfunctional parent to we don't want to continue to expect that everybody is going to behave the way that dysfunctional person did. The child growing up in a chaotic environment where there was attachment disruption, where there was a lot of trauma, have also likely not had anyone to model distress tolerance, effective emotion regulation or problem solving. These are things we're born with. These are things our parents teach us, our caregivers teach us through that secure attachment. Remember, R is for responsiveness. A responsive caregiver is going to see a child having a meltdown and they're going to respond to help the child feel safe, to help the child down regulate, to help the child get in their wise mind and help the child communicate what's going on. How can I help you to solve this problem? How can I help you feel safe? But when we don't have that, then we don't learn that process. So the inner child is essentially a set of beliefs, expectations and reactions the person developed in response to their environment and relationships. Eric Erickson had multiple stages of psychosocial development. The first one, and this is the infancy period. Trust versus mistrust. And if the child cries and doesn't get their needs met, they're just left to cry it out. Or maybe every time they cry they're given a bottle. Well, just because I'm crying doesn't mean I'm hungry. It may mean I'm wet or I'm cold or I'm scared or I'm tired. So when the child's needs aren't effectively met, they start to feel unsafe because that pain or discomfort continues. The next stage, your toddlerhood, is autonomy versus shame. And this is where children are learning to potty train themselves. They're lear dress themselves and if they're regularly met with criticism about how they're doing it, or they're prevented from Starting to develop this autonomy, it can make them feel unworthy and it can make them feel rejected and self conscious. The next stage is your later toddlerhood. Early, like kindergarten area, the child starts learning to develop initiative. I want to try something new. I want to go play this game. I want to go up and talk to these new people. I want to, whatever it is, they're taking initiative to step outside of their comfort zone and learn new things. If their caregiver environment was such that their caregivers weren't encouraging, then the child may feel guilty for wanting to do something that the parents didn't tell them to do, or didn't give them permission to do, or didn't suggest. The child may feel guilty for wanting to do something different than what the parents wanted them to do. And this can be really problematic. When a child takes initiative and they fail, if they don't have a safe home base to come back to, where the caregiver says, well, you tried, maybe that doesn't work for you, then they feel if the caregiver is critical when they come back after they failed, they feel rejected. Even if they succeed, if the caregiver is critical when they come back, then they're again going to feel guilty and rejected. And then later. Childhood is industry versus inferiority. I've learned how to take take initiative. I've learned how to try new things. Now I'm starting to try to develop mastery over things. And if it seems like every time I try to do something, I can't do it well enough to get the approval of my caregivers, then I may feel inept, I may feel rejected, I may feel insecure and incompetent. As an adult, you may have had feelings or reactions that seem to come from nowhere, just kind of out of the blue. Or you look at it and you're like, wow, that was a real immature way to way to react. We can look at that. I think we've all had those moments. Someone who's connected to their inner child and feels safe and empowered in the present is often able to recognize memories and what's going on when memories are being triggered versus what's going on in the present moment. It's very important to help people when they heal their inner child to not dismiss those memories. They've got to process those memories. They've got to come to terms with those memories. But they've also got to understand that that period where they were unsafe and powerless is not the same as now. We want to help them recognize how they are safe, how they are powerful, how they are lovable now. So for example, the family that I grew up in was very critical about how much you ate and how you ate. And you know, there was a lot of stigma around food. And as an adult, I took me a long time before I was comfortable eating in front of other people because my inner child expected to get criticized for eating too fast, for eating too much, for whatever. But as I grew, grew up, I figured out that, hey, not everybody behaves that way. And the more experiences I had eating in front of people when I wasn't and I didn't get judged, the more I started to recognize that what I experienced as a child was an anomaly that wasn't the norm. And I could expect from most people to be non judgmental about how much I ate or how fast I ate. If you want to learn more about your inner child, you can also join my community@docsnipes.com aura where I have self help courses with videos and worksheets, live events and group courses. Reconnecting to your inner child means mindfully recognizing the feelings, thoughts and reactions that are coming from unresolved past traumas. Acknowledging that there's a lot of stuff that you haven't dealt with from your childhood that is still hanging around and causing you to feel unsafe and powerless. Acknowledging that and recognizing what you can do in the present, developing skills to help you integrate those memories into your current understanding of yourself and the world is really important. And learning new effective tools and skills you can use when feeling vulnerable to help you yourself feel safe and empowered is the final step in integrating and connecting with that inner child and moving forward so it can become a part of you that enhances you instead of a part of you that just seems to be completely wild and woolly.