- Inner child work is something
that is so often misunderstood
or maybe thought of as being
a bit out there for most people,
but it's actually something we can all benefit from.
And if you're new here, welcome.
My name is Kati Morton,
and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
I talk about depression, anxiety, eating disorders,
and really anything mental health related.
So if you'd like to subscribe, we would love to have you.
I promise you will always leave
with some helpful information for you
or for someone you love.
Okay, let's jump into today's topic:
the seven signs you are suffering from an inner child wound.
(chill upbeat music)
Many of these are highly stigmatized
and misunderstood issues,
so I hope this educates people
about why we can use these maladaptive coping skills
and why it's not as simple
or straightforward as we may think.
With that, let's get into number one:
overreactions or being reactive.
When we don't seem to have any way
to prevent ourselves from lashing out
or being hurtful to those around us,
chances are that this is linked to a need
for inner child work.
And what I mean by overreactions or being reactive
is when something happens in our life,
there's no space to decide and respond.
There's a huge difference between reacting and responding.
Just think of like if someone asks me a question,
and I react, I can be like, "Why would you ask that?"
That would be a reaction, right?
I'm lashing out.
There's no time, boom, between them asking
and me saying the thing.
Your response could be,
"Oh, I need some time to think about that.
I'll get back to you."
Or we take a pause, we consider,
and then we say, "You know what?
I don't really like that.
Let's try this again," right?
It's just giving it breath, giving it space,
instead of being kind of that knee-jerk gut reaction.
And when we're overly reactive,
meaning that this is happening all the time,
I like to think of this as,
you know those days
when it just seems like everything's going wrong
and everybody pisses you off?
Like, on your way to work somebody cuts you off.
You ordered your Starbucks and they made it wrong.
And everything is just going wrong.
And by the time we get to work, we're just like,
"If one (beep) person doesn't blah, blah, blah,"
we just like have no tolerance left.
When we need inner child work desperately,
we can find ourselves always feeling like that.
I've talked about this in the past
about like having a certain number
of poker chips in our day.
It's kind of like our, I don't know,
good old fashioned resilience, right?
And everything that tests us or takes a little patience
costs us some of those poker chips, right?
And those of us really needing inner child work
wake up with like no poker chips,
and so everything is just too much.
Does that make sense?
I hope so.
Which is why I'm offering a two-part Inner Child Workshop,
and you can catch it live August 12th and 19th
via livestream,
or watch the recorded version after the fact anytime.
Click the link in the description to sign up today.
Sign number two is us having attachment issues,
and I call it attachment issues
because this could mean that we're overly attached,
meaning we meet someone for the first time,
we can overshare,
we can think they're our best friend
or the love of our life.
We can quickly, oh, attach.
I wanna fill that void, right?
Or we can struggle to attach at all.
We can isolate, push people away.
I don't want anybody getting too close
'cause if they get too close, then they could hurt me.
These attachment issues are a really clear indicator,
what I'd call like a red flag,
that we do need to do some of that inner child work.
Because if we think about inner child work,
it's really us acknowledging a younger version of us,
like going back in time, you know?
Like, (imitates time machine), we go back in time,
we get to connect with our younger self,
and see what they're going through, hear their struggles.
And maybe our parents weren't reliable,
or possibly they were like helicopter parents.
Both of those extremes
can lead to us having these attachment issues later in life.
And so it's gonna be key for us to go back in time
to hear us out at that younger age.
I know that's kind of woo-woo, but it'll make sense.
We'll keep moving through it,
and if you have any questions,
feel free to leave them in the comments.
The next sign we may be suffering from an inner child wound
is having difficulty in relationships with others.
When we don't heal from these early relationships,
this is usually with a parent,
or maybe our grandmother,
whoever our primary caretaker was,
when we don't heal from those relationships,
we can keep acting out of those same patterns or narratives,
hoping it's gonna turn out differently the next time.
And unfortunately it's not.
And when I say patterns or narratives,
a really important part of this work
is going to be looking back
on old relationships that we've had.
This could be with our parents or close family,
but that might be a little too triggering.
It can be helpful, really, to look back
on friendships that have ended,
or people we've dated where it didn't quite turn out right.
Can we look back on those
and see if there is a pattern to it?
Like, let's say my pattern
is that no one in my family ever expresses upset,
and we stuff it deep down,
and we act in passive aggressive ways to kind of navigate.
Okay, so if I look back on my relationships,
do I see those same things happening?
Do I act in passive aggressive ways?
Do I struggle to communicate what I'm feeling?
Going back and looking at those relationship patterns
can help us acknowledge them
and then work to not keep repeating it.
And other ways that this can show up in our relationships
is through things like people-pleasing, right?
If we have an inner child wound, we can often think...
If you don't remember, I had a video a while ago
about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn,
and fawning is one of those stress responses
we don't talk about a lot,
and that's essentially when we people-please
with the hope of not getting harmed again.
And so that could be part of, you know,
if we grew up in an abusive household,
we could have fawned as a way to protect ourselves.
And even though we might not
be in an abusive relationship now,
we can find ourselves
like knee-jerk people-pleasing around others
because it's the only way we know how to feel safe.
So notice if you're doing that.
We could also find ourselves trying to fix other people,
thinking that our only way to earn love
is to be helpful, right?
A lot of people feel like,
"If I'm not helping others,
or offering up some kind of service,
then I don't deserve their care or attention."
And like rolling right into,
we could also just think that we don't deserve
to be treated well.
A lot of people struggle being in an abusive household
and then find themselves
in an abusive marriage or relationship later on,
and think, like, "Why did that happen?
Like, it's not like I like being abused.
Why does this keep happening to me?"
And it can happen because deep down,
we can believe that we don't really deserve
to be treated well.
And if we happen to find ourselves in a relationship
where someone does treat us
with love and care and attention,
we can be like, "Wait, I don't trust this.
This feels weird.
They're just trying to get me all comfortable
so they can hurt me later," right?
And so we can sabotage those relationships
so that we don't have to acknowledge
that we're just used to being treated poorly
and think that that's what we deserve.
We can also feel like we have to earn love from others,
meaning that, again, like I was saying,
just by being us, it's not enough.
We have to be giving something else.
We have to be offering a service
or be doing something to help them or to fix them, right?
We have to do that in order to receive.
It's not just that we, as a person,
we all deserve to be loved, right?
We don't have that belief.
And so just consider how some of your old past relationships
have affected you,
and notice how it's playing into your relationships now.
I hope that makes sense.
The next sign that we might be suffering
from an inner child wound
is that we struggle with addiction.
As you guys know,
I've talked about eating disorders, self-injury,
and addiction is another one
of those maladaptive coping skills,
meaning it's not like we do it just because I love to drink
or I love to do drugs.
It's because we need to numb out.
I don't like who I am when I'm sober, right?
I don't like the thoughts that I think.
I don't like the way that I feel
or the memories that pop up.
And so we can use this
as a way to numb out from the past pain
or experiences that we wish we could forget.
There could be a lot of reasons why we might wanna numb out
or shut down from our our life or what happened in the past.
And just remember that using any substances of any kind
that alter our reality or coherence
isn't gonna help us tap in and process what we went through.
Instead, it's gonna cause more problems for us,
and it can push our pain further down
only to have it erupt at a later time.
I saw this meme a few weeks ago where someone said,
"If you don't take a break,
your body's gonna take the break for you
and it will be at a really inconvenient time."
And I always think of that
when it comes to like stuffing our emotions down.
We can think we're getting away with it, right?
I'm ignoring how I feel.
I'm pushing forward.
Look at me being so productive.
I don't need to deal with that stuff,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I think we all can recognize
then you end up crying randomly,
or lashing out at someone when you don't mean to.
And whether we want to admit it or not,
our body is going to, it's like, "Out with it,"
it's gonna come out with all the stuff
we've been stuffing down or running away from.
It will come out,
and it'll be at a time when we really don't want it to.
Another sign is if we have any memory,
even just flashes like photos
or like a still frame image of abuse
and we haven't processed it yet,
meaning the abuse that we sustained,
or those flashes that come up,
are still really difficult
or possibly something we can't even talk about.
Because remember,
abuse can be the withholding of things as well.
I think that's really important.
We often think of abuse as being physical or sexual,
like it's something being done to us, which is abuse.
However, we often overlook and minimize
when things aren't there,
the withholding of things that we needed,
like the neglect of children.
Or if we're older, if we're a dependent adult,
meaning if we depend on people in our lives
to take care of us
because we have a physical or mental illness,
if they're not giving us,
they're not changing us as often, or feeding us,
or supporting us, right?
There are certain things that could not be there
that are just as abusive
than if someone were to hit us or harm us in that way.
Does that make sense?
It's because emotional abuse
doesn't leave marks that people can see
that we often try to play it off
as if it's not that big of a deal.
And I'm here to tell you it is a big deal,
and it is still abuse.
So if someone is verbally putting us down, calling us names,
if a parent never showed us care,
like if we cried and we came to our parent,
did they act like we were in the way,
that that was too much?
Like, "Stop crying. You're making a big deal.
You're being too loud."
Like, was it not okay to be ourselves?
Were we not supported in that way?
Do we think we were emotionally neglected?
That's abuse.
And if we have flashes or memories
or ways that we act because of that,
that's gonna be a sign
that we're suffering from an inner child wound.
The next sign is that we struggle with self-injury.
Like I was talking about with relation to addiction,
we can use self injury as a way to express something
that we don't have words for,
or it can be done as a way to numb out.
I've even heard from people that it's a way
to physically feel the pain we're experiencing emotionally.
I've even had patients use it
as a way to care for themselves.
Like, let's say our parent was neglectful, right?
When we cried and came to them,
they wouldn't pick us up,
or they wouldn't clean our wounds and put a bandaid on it.
A lot of us can feel like we need that care and that love,
and so we can injure ourselves
so that we can then clean the wound and care for it
in the way that we wish our parents
or our primary caregivers had.
So it's very common that those of us
who were emotionally neglected as children
turn to self-injury as a way to feel something,
because it may not have been okay to have those feelings
and express that when we were growing up.
Another sign is that we have, or have had,
an eating disorder.
Again, these are coping skills for other things going on,
meaning that they're used to hide the real issue.
Most of my patients who have eating disorders
have experienced some wound or trauma
that they experienced in childhood.
And we use food as a thing that we can control, right?
When the world around us feels completely out of control,
what can we control?
Our bodies.
So this can come in the form of not eating enough,
eating too much, binging and purging, over-exercise.
There's a lot of ways
that we can try to like take that control back
because we have full control over ourselves,
and we'll use that to the fullest extent.
Also, if our brain is spending 99% of its energy
thinking about food or exercise
or getting food, restricting food,
it doesn't have time to think
about all the pain that we might feel.
Again, it's just another way to like stuff that pain down.
(chill upbeat music)
So how do we heal?
Well, along with joining my Inner Child Workshop,
you can pick up various books on inner child work
and get back in touch with younger you
with the goal of letting him or her
feel seen, heard, and understood,
and most importantly cared for.
We can't go back in time and change what happened,
but we can make sure
that we don't accept our past as our present
and work to change our behaviors
to get us out of those patterns.
Like I was saying earlier,
taking a minute to look back on relationships that failed
or situations that we didn't like the result of,
if we can take a minute to reflect
and notice our role in that, like,
"What are the things that I keep doing over and over
that keep maybe fueling that fire
and making things turn out poorly?"
If we can acknowledge that, then we can change it, right?
Maybe, like I was talking about,
being passive aggressive, right?
Let's say our family didn't express upset.
Can I practice communication
so when someone does hurt my feelings,
even though I hate doing this
and it's really uncomfortable
and it'll take some work and some practice,
can I try to say,
"Hey, that hurt my feelings.
I don't really wanna talk about it now,
but I just want you to know
that's why I'm kind of withdrawing," right?
We can still not engage
or still do part of the behavior that we used to do,
but that little communication is gonna be key.
And it's like we're slowly building this bridge
to new and healthier behavior.
It can also help to get a photo of ourselves
at an age when things were particularly tough.
Take a minute and consider
did you have to move as a kid?
Or did your parents get divorced?
Or was there a really tumultuous time
in your family growing up?
How old were you?
Can we try to locate some photos?
Or maybe even have video of yourself at that age.
It can help to see ourselves
as how small we were and how little,
and also how limited our resources might be, right?
As an adult, we sometimes forget
how few choices we had as a kid.
We can look back and judge younger us and be like,
"Why didn't you get the hell out of there?
Why'd you let them say that to you?
What were you thinking?"
And we can be mad at ourselves and that's okay.
That's part of the process.
But sometimes getting those photos and videos
can help us realize, "God, I was just so little," right?
When we look back as an adult,
if I was looking at eight year old Kati, I'd be like,
"Oh my God, she is so small."
And sometimes we need that like slap in the face realization
to help us remember how we felt at that time.
And we can also journal or write letters
back and forth from adult us to child us.
That's another kind of way in
to help us heal from any inner child wound
that we might be suffering from.
I hope you found that helpful,
and if you feel I overlooked something
or you wanna share your own experience,
feel free to do it in those comments down below.
Have a wonderful rest of your week,
and I will see you next time.
(chill upbeat music)