1-Take a safe action just for yourself and answer these quiz questions.  For you to benefit from inner child healing or therapy that activates and heals past events in your subconscious mind, you need to make a commitment to yourself to be willing to be open to help.  Next do the following quiz.  You may experience some anxiety or stress taking this quiz but keep going. In taking an action such as answering simple quiz questions you are changing gently just a little.  Choose to approach this 10 question quiz with curious anticipation.  Tell yourself even if you don’t believe it that it is safe to change and grow. Give the question an answer number of 1-10.  Number ten being the most and 1 being the least.  Make it fun and let the first number just pop into your mind.

1. Do you have anxiety?
2. Do you have low self esteem?
3. Do you have trouble with relationships?
4. Have you given up on your dreams because of self doubts?
5. Do you have ongoing physical problems?
6. Emotionally you feel insecure and can’t handle stress.
7. At times do you feel either hopeless or helpless?
8. Do you disassociate?
9. Did either or both parents have mental issues or addictions when you were growing up?
10. Do you have problems with addictions to food, substances, credit card debt, sex, or relationships?

Now go over the questions again and see if you have numbers over four or five in any of the questions.  If you do have a few questions even one or two that have numbers over four or five, be willing to explore inner child healing.  This would be helpful for you. 

Many patients that I work with have found my suggestions to explore the inner child a little frightening.  So I’ll reassure you that it is safe to change and grow.  You can make it safe for yourself to do this kind of healing by finding a qualified therapist.

Being in private practice as a Ph.D. licensed psychotherapist/hypnotherapist, I‘ve facilitated daily healing work for hundreds of my patients for the past seventeen years.  I offer an inner child letter that expresses the fear that was locked in the patient’s subconscious for the purpose of inspiring you and others to change and grow into healthy and more joyful human beings.

2-Self disclosure will set you free: This is a letter that an inner child who was obese and full of pain from shame and teasing at ages eight-nine-ten.  Her name is Pumpkin and she writes to her adult self by using the non-dominant hand.  This is awkward but amazing in that it excavates lost awareness and denied painful feelings from her past. 

You can explore more by reading John Bradshaw and Dr. Charles Whitfield’s work on healing the inner child.

In the beginning of this kind of therapy work if asked about one’s childhood, many times the patient would answer, “I had a good childhood.”  They’d leave the answer simple if asked.  In the very beginning many don’t feel their feelings because of the fear that if they felt their feelings something horrible would happen to them.  When keeping conversations with others superficial there is a denial defense that works to keep them safe in their own minds.  If a person can project to others a perfect life picture, then that can soothe them into thinking that others see and think they have “it together.”
 

Deep inside that person’s subconscious mind they might be crying with depression, anxiety, and/or an addiction or an insidious eating disorder. They are usually good at denial and hiding the truth from themselves. 

The purpose of the inner child writing a letter to the adult is that as the adult you can learn to empathize with the inner child on a deep level.  In other words, as the inner child writes to the adult, the adult begins to learn to re-parent their wounded inner child.  It could be that the adult becomes a new healthy Mommy figure. 

The following letter from Pumpkin occurred after many months of therapy.   Pumpkin who is around eight or nine or ten never knew in her growing up years the healthy nourishing love that is essential for any child to develop good self esteem. 

By taking precious time out of your day to let your inner child write a letter sharing her fears – you can lovingly soothe her and begin to heal your own unknown anxieties.  The source of unknown anxieties hidden in your subconscious mind is where your inner child’s painful memories live. 

By writing inner child healing letters you can slowly eliminate many present day anxieties.  Pause a moment while letting that statement settle into your mind.  You can eliminate many present day anxieties by giving yourself the gift of inner child healing.   The resulting state of mind is called peace. 

3-Recovery -Here’s Pumpkin’s letter.

June 3, 2009

Dear Mommy,

I am so scared deep inside and I am trying to be so brave.  You are going to be speaking in public.  I feel so scared that I will overtake your self confidence and then you’ll forget to tell others what’s in your heart.  So I want you to help me trust you and God as I experience the public speaking with you.

Love you,

Pumpkin

The question to ask Pumpkin is, “what can I do to help you feel safe?’  The answer was to commit to writing back and forth letters each day from now on until she feels safe.   

After Inner Child Healing Therapy a Testimonial:  “I feel like I’m the person that I always knew I could be.  I was that lost little girl with all the hurt I grew up with and now it’s all gone.  I feel like a whole new person.”

C.L. who works in the food industry 

www.mentalhealth-therapies.com/innerchildtherapy.html

Inner Child Therapy- A Path To Freedom And Empowerment

Do you know that you, without being aware of it, may have been living with your past or childhood pain or grief? If such is the case then your past experiences tend to control your present behavior and action, which must be resolved with inner child therapy.

Inner child healing becomes essential where you have a recurring reaction to specific issues, people, places, or even things for a reason and that is probably related to your childhood.

For example, if as a child you were told that you never did anything correct, then as an adult, when that message is again conveyed to you either directly or indirectly, it will bring up the same pain of the past.

Similarly, if in your existing relationship you find yourself too much worried with the fear that your partner will depart you, you may react to an old experience or say when one of your parents left your family.

These examples imply that, if you remember your past or childhood when you were hurt, then the similar hurt in the present would be larger than the hurt for you to bear today.

Thus, it becomes necessary to understand that you react strongly to certain issues for a particular reason. You need to discover the reasons that can heal the situation that caused it. Only then you would be free to act in response to your current interactions and may not react to them because of your past.

Obviously, you cannot change the facts about your past, but you certainly can change the manner you relate to those facts.
For this, you may have to rework each scene of your past incident several times. This repetition will modify the experience and each time you heal your inner children, it will be lesser the hurt. The lesser the hurt, the less they will control your adult life. You can heal your inner child by looking for the real memories of your life, or else create their symbolic images, pictures, sounds, and voices and then restore them with the better ones.

Your inner children are parts of your heart which is the emotional center of your body. It will be helpful to heal your inner children if you picture them outside your body so as to communicate with them more effectively.

The inner child healing process consists of firstly recognizing the bereavement of your inner child and healing your wounded child of the past and secondly nurturing your inner child of the present.

When you grieve the wounds of your inner children, that is, the emotional wounds that you suffered from, you will be able to change your behavior patterns and clear your emotional process.

Thus, inner child therapy involves knowing your inner children and healing them up by releasing the emotional grief so that you may love the person you are. Healing the child within is not some popular psychology; rather it is becoming more conscious of the cause and effect link between your early days and adult lives.

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The following are two Inner Child articles that are referenced as:
www.joy2meu.com/Innerchildhealing.html

Inner Child Healing = a path to freedom, serenity, & empowerment

"It is through healing our inner child, our inner children, by grieving the wounds that we suffered, that we can change our behavior patterns and clear our emotional process.  We can release the grief with its pent-up rage, shame, terror, and pain from those feeling places which exist within us."

"Because of our broken hearts, our emotional wounds, and our scrambled minds, our subconscious programming, what the disease of Codependence causes us to do is abandon ourselves. It causes the abandonment of self, the abandonment of our own inner child - and that inner child is the gateway to our channel to the Higher Self.

The one who betrayed us and abandoned and abused us the most was ourselves. That is how the emotional defense system that is Codependence works. The battle cry of Codependence is "I'll show you - I'll get me.""

"We need to rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling our lives. STOP them from driving the bus!  Children are not supposed to drive, they are not supposed to be in control.

And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned. We have been doing it backwards. We abandoned and abused our inner children. We locked them in a dark place within us. And at the same time let the children drive the bus - let the children's wounds dictate our lives."

"It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around."

(Quotations in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney)