Inner Child Therapy

“We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.”

~ Serina Hartwell

Habitual Resonance with Inner Child Emotions

It is possible to choose your feeling state, and it is also very difficult to do so when you have emotions from the past trapped in your body tissues. It is much easier to go into resonance with an uncleared negative inner child pattern than to go against the grain of your "negative normal" into a new positive state. This is why positive affirmations do not often stick.

Typically, when a negative emotion is held in your body for an extended period, you will get used to it. Over time, you will start to believe that it is your true nature to be depressed, angry, sad, fearful, and so on. If particular parts of your body feel angry, bitter, afraid, anxious, depressed, frustrated or sad, your every waking moment may be filled with these emotions until you firmly decide you want to release them.

Reading the Symbols of Your Emotions

Inner child emotions can lodge in vulnerable areas of the body due to nutritional deficiency, genetic susceptibility, trauma, loss, or injury. Because the subconscious inner child's mind expresses itself through symbols and metaphors, emotional pain will lodge in an area of the body with symbolic significance.

Your trapped inner child's emotions will intensify with time and practice until they feel "normal." Unhealed inner child emotions form destructive internal messages and uncomfortable physical symptoms. Negative emotions from childhood create weakening patterns in your organs, muscles and tissues.

Finding where negative emotions are trapped in your body begins the process of clearing them. A conscious focus on body pain is the first step toward turning the darkness of your childhood emotional pain into light, power and pleasure. Knowing what negative inner child messages are held in your body empowers you to practice opposite, antidotal messages.

Art Journal Exploration - Finding Your Inner Child's Hurt

1. Find the Pain
Locate the part of your body that hurts the most and spend some quiet time observing it. When it feels right, expressively draw or paint a background in your art journal, using colour and line to reflect this bodily pain.

2. Find the Message
Sense if the hurting part of your body holds words, a message, a memory, or a verbal or visual clue to a limiting belief from childhood and if so, write it on your background.

3. Explore Subconscious Beliefs
If you do not know what you believe negatively, randomly cut out a few words or images from a magazine and glue them onto your art journal background. Reflect upon how your words and imagery might symbolize an embedded negative belief from childhood.

4. Honour and Cancel
Honour your expressive art journal page for a moment, then say, "This is not true!" Write the word "cancel" boldly across your journal page.

Finding the Antidote to Negative Beliefs

You might be familiar with Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto's water studies, detailed in his book, "The Hidden Messages in Water." Emoto proved that negative thoughts create distorted water crystals when frozen.

Alternatively, water freezes into beautiful patterns when words of love and encouragement are thought and spoken. Since your body is over 70% water, it is easy to see why you want to speak kindly to yourself to heal your inner child emotionally.

Your will to emotionally heal must be very strong, especially if you struggle with heavy emotions that are impairing your daily functioning. If, for example, you have felt disliked in your childhood by a friend or a family member, you might have internalized a feeling of being hated somewhere in your body. In a childlike way, you might unconsciously say to yourself, "I am worth hating." Or, "I hate myself." Or "When I am not good enough, people hate me."

The Proper Application of Affirmations

Because negative emotions become trapped in the body, you might only be able to keep a life-affirming statement running in your mind for a few minutes before you revert to your habitual negative self-talk. Commonly known as positive affirmations, statements such as, "I love myself," do not often take hold when holding onto trapped inner child emotions.

Finding the "antidote" statement that will change the structure of your emotional body is essential to emotional healing. Yet, you must take care not to simply wallpaper a new positive judgment over top of a negative judgment. It is essential to release negative emotions first to allow new positive truths to take hold.

After releasing negative emotions, an antidotal healing statement will usually arise from your authentic self. Once you find a healing statement with a strong positive energy charge of truth, you will likely need to practice saying this new truth all day, every day, for at least a month or more.

Often, it takes well over a year or more to reverse a lifetime of conditioned inner child negativity. Saying, "I love who I am." Or "I am worthy of love" repeatedly until it becomes a regularly believed truth in your muscles, cells, body organs, and tissues, which takes tremendous time, practice, and effort.

Saying Affirmations in the Third Person

Because you were conditioned in childhood to look outside yourself for love, approval and nurturing, it is sometimes more powerful to imagine someone else telling you that you are good, lovable, courageous, beautiful, creative, etc. See if it feels more powerful in your body to imagine your parent, friend, lover, boss, or God saying, "Your name....you are..."

Finding Your Inner Child's Power Statement

An Art Journal Exploration
Paint a background in your art journal that expresses your inner child's sense of innocence, hope and power. Sense into where your body feels pain and ask it, "What do you need to hear in order to feel better?" You will have one or more inner child "power statements" that fill your body with energy, hope, and strength. Once you hear your body's affirmative message, write it down on your painted background.

Embellish your inner child's power statement with details and images. Spend time repeating it, looking at it, and asking it to find a home within your body. Imagine this new power statement flowing in through the top of your head and filling your body with colour, light, and healing.

Magnifying Your Intention to Heal Emotionally
Without releasing negative, trapped emotions, there will be reservation, hesitance, and even disbelief when introducing a positive affirmation into your body. When you release trapped negative emotions, positive affirmations will take hold more quickly.

Dr. Bradley Nelson, a chiropractor, discovered that because emotions are energy, the most efficient way to release them is through another form of energy. A strong energy of intention to heal your inner child's emotions can be amplified using your hand as a magnetic force.

According to Nelson, you can carry the energy of your intention to release negative emotions throughout your body in a magnified way. I offer you his method to support the magnification of your intentions. 

1. Form a Clear Release Statement
Form a clear, specific intention such as, "I am releasing hatred, self-loathing, insecurity, fear, control, etc., from my body" by passing your hand over your Governing Meridian. Your governing meridian runs from the center of your upper lip, over your head, and down the center of your spine, ending at your tailbone.

Form a clear intention...I want to heal...

2. Magnify Your Intention to Release
To magnify the energy of your intentions, run your hand over your middle forehead, over the top of your head, ending at the back of your neck, several times as you say or think your release statement. Say, "I am releasing...." as you run your hand over your Governing Meridian.

You can liken this "cancelling" process to the magnetic strip on your credit card. When you place a magnet near your credit card, it erases the coded information. This sudden, substantial influx of intentional energy has the same effect of releasing trapped emotions in your body.

According to Dr. Bradley Nelson, trapped emotions will get cancelled through your firm intention to heal. When you pass the magnetic field of your hand over the Governing Meridian, you will create a more magnified intention. With time and determination, your negative emotions will dissipate and disappear.

I am releasing...

3. Fill up the Empty Space with Love
After stating what you want to release, replace the "empty" space in your body with your chosen affirmation or power statement, such as, "I love who I am."

Loving statement…

Excerpted from Inner Child Therapy Worksheets