Healing the inner child

Are you in need of more self-love?

Inner child work could be the stepping point to change what is bothering you because it is a great way into the unconscious.

Our guest is Jennifer Nurick, the founder of Psychotherapy Central and a Director of the International Energetic Healing Association. She has a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychotherapy and Counselling. She is a licensed Clinical Psychotherapist, Counsellor, and Energetic Healer.

Self-love and growth

What are the limits of self-criticism? Is it all bad?

Kristina asks this question because some philosophers, like the stoics, think it is good because it makes you grow.

Our guest, Jennifer Nurick, a licensed Clinical Psychotherapist, Counsellor, and Energetic Healer, helps people with different life circumstances, such as self-criticism, sadness, stress, loss, grief, and trauma, and helps them break their glass ceilings and connects them back to a better version of themselves. She is the founder of Psychotherapy Central and a Director of the International Energetic Healing Association and she has a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychotherapy and Counselling. 

Jennifer says that as much as trauma is a powerful way to grow, we don’t want to instill that into our children. 

Is it possible that western societies are not helping to develop self-love? Kristina asks. Jennifer agrees to it and says that inner child healing is a good way to do it.

The boundary to self-feedback is: would you give that to your 6-year-old child?

As a huge advocate of self-love, Kristina wonders: is love enough at some point? Jennifer says that the example would be a chocolate cake.  The inner critic often tries to protect us, so there has to be a negotiation between each of those parts.

How do you start growing through Inner Child’s work

Kristina asks: what is the inner child’s work? Is it advisable to do it alone?

Inner child’s work is the constant negotiation that the parent in you does with the inner child in you. To do that, you need to look at your behaviors and frequent strong emotions. You might find an inner child asking for help!

When that happens, it is advisable to have someone guiding your healing work. So, can anybody be that guide? 

Because Kristina says that maybe you can’t be a healer if you haven’t sorted out your own mess, so to speak! So, Kristina asks Jennifer: is there any way to be a coach or work with your inner child without doing your work?

Jennifer answers that well, we all have unfinished work when healing ourselves, we can never be completely healed, but especially if you help many people as a coach, it is always important to work on yourself. Jennifer does it regularly. 

Kristina asks a really meaningful question, which is: are all your traumas based on what happened to you as a child? Or things that happen to you in your adult life have also a big impact on what you need to work on at a personal level?

Jennifer answers that the thing is that we can work on things that happened to us in adulthood in a very similar way to the inner child work. We can work on those things as they happened to you at another age. People at 60 work with things that they experienced in their 40s. 

We can access those memories and events by working through our bodies and our sensations. Felt sensations bring up memories of things that come up. Jennifer uses focusing on bringing up the memories.

Those memories can be traumatic to the body. Jennifer reminds us that trauma has a different meaning in western psychology: it can be about what you missed or attachment issues that prevent us from having good relationships. 

Experiencing inner child’s work

Getting to know your inner child can be such an experience: different ages, behaviors… Those give you hints on what you need to work on and at what age.

For Jennifer, it was a teenage girl who showed up! And a really rebellious one, not her at all when she was younger! She reckons that she appeared like that because maybe, she wanted to show adult Jennifer a strong wish or value that she would have liked!

Self-love can be tricky when you have unsolved traumas. If you are overwhelmed by triggers from your past, you can feel that you help others too much. And the truth is you might need to pay attention to what’s holding you back!

Also, our cultural background might have helped in this atmosphere of making us not love ourselves. How we parent ourselves is about how we parent our children. There is so much going on culturally about how to parent our children.

Jennifer shows us how working with the inner child is a great way to do that. She says we need to ask two basic questions:

“How are you?”

“What do you need?”

Sometimes, our head would say I need x, y, and z, but our inner child would say something else.

So, that brings up the topic of how you care for your inner (and actual) children. Jennifer is a true advocate of unconditional love! And Kristina asks if it is still ok to give them positive feedback when we do something right. Of course, how you discipline your children with unconditional love is relevant here. Is praise good for the children still? Is it related to unconditional love, or is it conditional to an action?

Jennifer says it’s like caring for a flower: every child is a different flower, so they love to choose what is right for everyone. Listen enough to help them grow, but farthest enough to help them grow. And they would need something different at each time and age, and it’s all about adjusting to that.

Another question was about when you have traumatic childhood experiences that affect you as an adult but only in that context. For example, when you are criticized as a child. 

Jennifer illustrates how she would work with that experience: recalling the scene would be the first step, and acknowledging what everyone in the scene was feeling at that scene. Then we would take what everyone felt at that scene and give the child an inner voice. 

And when your teen and your child don’t answer you, you have your extended family then. And if not, it would look like a prayer: they are good in their well-being. 

Episode resources:

• Jennifer Nurick | Instagram

• Jennifer Nurick | Facebook

• Jennifer Nurick | LinkedIn

• Jennifer Nurick | Website