Could Unmet Childhood Needs Be Causing Issues in Your Life?

Do you ever feel trapped in unhealthy emotional patterns like not feeling good enough? Or get triggered by people and situations without understanding why? You’re not alone. 

These deep-seated patterns often stem from an unhealed inner child, an issue I frequently encounter in my healing practice.   

In this episode, I explore the concept of the inner child and how emotional instability in our lives can often be traced back to our earliest years. As humans we’re all born with fundamental emotional needs. When these are not adequately met, it can lead to issues like low self-worth, insecurity, self-doubt, loneliness and feelings of being unloved.

I talk about the myriad ways inner child issues can impact us and share a powerful client story that illustrates how we can overcome these deep-rooted challenges and find healing.

Thanks for listening!

You can discover more about my work on my website: https://www.harinderghatora.co.uk

Follow me on Instagram for free information on healthy, balanced living: https://www.instagram.com/harinder_ghatora/

Transcript

Hi there,

I hope you’re doing well. It’s hard to believe we’re halfway through the year already. Time does seem to be speeding by.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Bringing You Back into Balance podcast. The topic we’re discussing today is one I know will be relevant to all of you listening, in one way or another. Because today, we’re talking about the inner child.

Did you know that as human beings we all have basic emotional needs? And that when these needs aren’t adequately met in our childhood we can experience a myriad of issues in our adult lives? Through my therapy work, I’ve witnessed over and over again the havoc and unhappiness that an unhealed inner child can create in a person’s adult life. So in this episode, we’re going to be exploring what these essential needs are … and how we can bring healing to this part of ourselves.

This is Harinder Ghatora, Holistic Life Coach, helping you bring peace and balance back into your life.

Right, I’m going to dive straight in this time and share a story with you.

I want to introduce you to Chrissy, whose story we’ll be following throughout this episode. 

Chrissy came to see me because she was suffering from depression. She told me she felt lost, anxious and deeply unhappy. She’d had a string of failed relationships – none of which lasted more than six months at a time. After the initial ‘honeymoon’ phase, her partners would become controlling, demanding and in two instances physically abusive. Chrissy was confused as to how and why she kept getting involved with the wrong sort of men. She was also struggling to come to terms with the fact that she was probably not going to have children now that she was 42 and still single. This was deeply upsetting for her as she had always dreamed of becoming a mum. 

By the time Chrissy came to see me, she’d already been working with a psychotherapist. This had helped her make sense of her history, especially her childhood experiences. Chrissy was born to a White British mother and a Sri Lankan father, the second of three daughters. Growing up in South London in the 1980s, her home life had been turbulent. Her parents didn’t have a good marriage; her father worked long hours and her mother struggled to cope with going out to work and managing the household. Chrissy remembers her mother as being withdrawn and emotionally closed off. At school, Chrissy felt like she never fitted in due to her mixed heritage and was subject to bullying.

Through the psychotherapy, Chrissy had come to understand that she was carrying some deep feelings of unworthiness. She just didn’t feel good enough or that she deserved love, respect and support. These beliefs not only caused her deep emotional pain but had also cast a shadow over her whole life. Hearing Chrissy describe her situation, I had a strong feeling that the issues she was struggling with were rooted in her childhood experiences.

Now, I’m going to pause here … we’ll pick up Chrissy’s story again a little bit later … but I’d like to ask you …

If you cast your mind back, were there any difficult experiences in your childhood?

Your childhood may have been quite different to the story I’ve just related … but if you look at your life now …

Do you ever find yourself repeating behaviours that you know aren’t good for you? 

Do you keep getting yourself into the same unhealthy situations, over and over again, and just can’t understand why?

Or … do you find that certain people and situations trigger you emotionally, so much so that you’re not in control of yourself?

Maybe you have things you want to achieve in your life, but you just can’t seem to stick at them or make firm decisions about anything.

When we’re not able to function in the world as we would like, we tend to think there’s something wrong with us.  But I know from my therapy work, that when someone is struggling with these kinds of persistent patterns, there’s usually one thing that lies at the root of the problem. And that is an unhealed inner child. 

So, what is the inner child and how does it come to be an issue?

The inner child is the part of us that represents the child we used to be; the part that carries the imprint of all our childhood experiences, the good and the bad. 

We each have one living inside of us … it’s a part of our subconscious that picked up messages from our environment and our caregivers way before we could have any conscious recollection.

It’s now widely acknowledged that our early life experiences have a lasting impact on us. The environment we grew up in, the way we were brought up, how we related internally to the events that were happening around us, all these things leave a mark on our psyches – sometimes at a conscious level, but a lot of the time at an unconscious level.

So, how does this happen? Well, in the early years of our lives – I’m talking from birth to 5 years especially – we unconsciously form impressions of the world, beliefs about ourselves, and deep emotional imprints based, amongst other things, on how well our parents were able to meet our most basic needs.

Here’s an example. As an infant when you cried you needed to be picked up and comforted in order to feel safe, right? But what if no one came and you were left to cry in your cot? It’s not hard to see how unconsciously you would have picked up the message that you weren’t safe or loved … because … when you needed someone no one came. And it’s also not difficult to see why you might have grown up with deep feelings of insecurity and be fearful of the world, especially if this happened repeatedly.

This is how limiting beliefs and negative emotional patterns become embedded in our psyches – and without our knowledge, continue to influence our lives.

So … our inner child serves as a tie to past pain, neglect, and trauma. This is why when something happens in our present-day lives that triggers us and we can't fully understand why, it’s not our rational adult self but our hurt inner child that is being triggered.

Now, I have to say, one of the most transformative things I do in my healing practice is to work with a person’s inner child. Healing allows us to access the deeper unconscious programmes and patterns that were formed in childhood, especially before the age of 5 (because none of us have any recollections or memories from when we were this young, we can’t access this information though talking therapies) … and, more importantly, it allows us to transmute the energies that are creating difficulties in our lives. 

My healing work is based on the Human Given’s approach to therapy and healing. According to this approach, as humans we are all born with a set of innate needs, and the fulfilment of these needs is essential to our physical and mental wellbeing.

We all have two sets of human givens: physical and emotional. 

Our physical needs are relatively simple … we need air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, sufficient sleep and shelter from the elements. Without these, we would not survive for long. They are imperative.

We also have other physical requirements, such as the need to exercise our muscles and stimulate our senses. And … we instinctively seek out a home where we can grow, reproduce and raise our young. 

And then there are our emotional needs. Now these are more complicated but at their root is a desire to connect with the outside world and seek fulfilment. When these needs are not met, we can suffer emotional distress in various forms. 

The Human Givens approach says there are 9 basic emotional needs that we all have. I’m going to run through these briefly.

First and foremost, we have a need for security. The minute we're born if someone doesn't pick us up and make us feel safe and secure, we won't survive very long. We need a safe environment…one in which we can develop fully.

Our second need is for attention. We need our primary caregivers to interact responsibly with us and give us positive attention so we can feel worthy, valued and important.

The third need is for a sense of autonomy and control. We need to feel we have some freedom in our choices, in what we think and how we behave. When we're very young and are encouraged to make little decisions…for example, what food would you like to eat today: pasta or rice? Which T-shirt would you like to wear, the red one or the blue one?... then we learn to go inwards, connect with our preferences and desires and trust ourselves to make decisions. 

Our fourth basic need is for emotional connection with others. We all need to know that there are at least one or two people out there who accept us in our entirety and who show us kindness. This makes us feel worthy and connected. We must also learn to use our emotions to navigate our way through relationships. For example, when we first go to nursery, we start to learn to move towards people that we like and away from people that we don't.

The fifth need is for community. We need to feel part of a wider social circle. At first this need is met within the family, but it becomes more prominent when we go to school. We need to feel connected so that we feel fully integrated and a valuable part of society. And that we are making a contribution to a common cause. An example from school would be taking part in an assembly, tidying up the classroom, being part of a sports team. 

Our sixth emotional need is for friendship and intimacy. We need to find a few special people in our lives with whom we can bond. These are people we have a deeper connection with, and, from within this group, we all need to find that one extra special person who can become a true life partner. 

Moving onto need number seven … this is for a sense of status within our social groups. This need is about having our gifts and talents acknowledged, accepted and respected by others. At school this would be our assessment of where we fit into the pecking order. Are we in with the cool kids, or like me with the nerds. Where do we stand in relation to others. This need includes our stuff.

The eighth need is a sense of competence and achievement. We need to know that we are good and successful at something. This allows us to make our unique contribution to the world and instils in us a sense of self-esteem, self-belief and self-respect. What subjects are we good at? What exams did we pass? What skills and talents do we have that set us apart from others? What can we be proud of?

And finally, our ninth and last need is to have meaning and purpose in our lives. Deep down, we all know that we have come into this life with a purpose which gives meaning to our lives, and when we live our purpose we feel deeply fulfilled, joyful, and are stretched to become the best version of ourselves and leave a mark on the world.

If we stand back for a moment, we can see that these needs follow the path of human development. If at each stage of our young lives we are nurtured and given the right opportunities to fulfil these needs, then we grow into healthy, happy, fully functioning adults. But if these needs are not met adequately, then our psyches have to develop coping strategies to deal with the negative feelings that arise, and these distortions carry into our adult lives and stop us feeling mentally and emotionally stable.

Our parents, caregivers, teachers and other authority figures likely did the best they could … but almost inevitably we all have some needs that were not adequately met due to the circumstances we found ourselves in. This is why the inner child work I do is centred on these 9 human givens.

I love doing deep inner child work. It’s truly transformative. It shifts the very foundation of our lives. It opens us up to an array of new possibilities. When we let go of our old emotional baggage, we feel safer and more accepting of ourselves; we discover our confidence and personal power; our relationships improve; and we feel more at peace.

I take my clients on a healing journey through all their young childhood experiences where we systematically clear the negative imprints they unconsciously picked up.  

Okay … so now let’s get back to Chrissy’s story, which I touched on at the start of this episode. If you recall, Chrissy came to see me because was suffering from depression and had a history of short-lived but difficult, sometimes abusive relationships with men. 

I should say at this point that Chrissy is a fictional character because, as always, I have a duty to protect my clients’ privacy, but the details I’m about to share are based on a composite of real client work. 

Rather than talking in an abstract way, presenting a case study is a far more interesting way for me to show you how doing deep inner child clearing can help a person to address issues that may be negatively impacting them in adulthood.

When I first met Chrissy, she recognised that her low self-worth was the biggest issue in her life. She knew these feelings needed exploring and transmuting … and … she wanted to try a different approach to build up her sense of self. She knew that if she could forge a good solid sense of self-acceptance, self-love and self-respect, then she may be able to attract a kind, loving supportive partner.

Now when anyone presents with these kinds of deep systemic issues, issues that have reappeared again and again throughout their life, as I said earlier, I always start with the assumption that the root causes lie in childhood. Chrissy had already done some deep work with a psychotherapist, so we agreed to cut out the talking and get down to the energy clearing.

Chrissy agreed to a comprehensive clearing right at the base of her life. 

I love to use the analogy of a Jenga tower. You know that game of wooden blocks which are placed on top of each other … this is how psyches are constructed (a bit simplistic I know but it’s a good way to view things). When our roots are solid and stable, then everything that sits on top is balanced and robust…we feel settled, resilient, capable. If the foundations of our Jenga tower are wobbly … perhaps a few blocks are missing or not placed properly in relation to each other, then everything that is placed on top will always feel precarious…always be unstable…wobbly. 

We then have a choice to make. Do we start at the top of the Jenga tower and attempt to straighten/balance each block out working downwards? Or does it make more sense to start at the bottom – to straighten out the blocks at the bottom and then work our way up the tower. I encourage my clients to do the latter because as we clear the lower frequency energies at the base of someone’s life, everything that has grown out of these roots automatically corrects itself too. 

Chrissy agreed to start working right at the base of the tower, so we booked in monthly healing sessions to work through the nine Human Givens (needs), with a view to releasing and healing all the traumas and memories from her younger life. 

We started with the first and most basic of human needs…that of security. This is such a core need. We rely on the care and protection of grown-ups for our survival. If this basic need is not adequately met then we can go into adulthood feeling vulnerable, helpless, insecure, unsafe and fearful, and our psyches will distort themselves to cope with these feelings. These distortions end up warping our personalities as adults. The clues to identifying whether there are any distortions or problems related to this need is to look at how a person feels and behaves in their current life. 

In other words, the way we can identify which needs have not been healthily nurtured is by identifying the coping strategies that a person is using in adulthood.  

At the start of our first healing session, I presented the feelings and coping strategies associated with each need to Chrissy, with a view to determining which ones resonated with her. It came as no surprise that our work ended up centring on the security, attention and emotional connection to others needs. 

We knew that for Chrissy the security need was seriously out of balance. She told me how vulnerable she felt all the time. She felt insecure in her job (she worked as an admin officer in social services) … constantly doubting herself … obsessed with not making mistakes and petrified of being criticised. This made her overly anxious to please her boss and colleagues and meant she was often dumped on with tasks no one else wanted to do. She felt trapped and victimised but was too scared to speak up or consider moving to a new job. And … Chrissy also felt deeply insecure in her personal relationships. In all her relationships with members of the opposite sex, while things generally started well, she had wound up feeling intensely troubled and on edge … emotionally, and sometimes even physically unsafe. Her partners talked down to her, took advantage of her, were controlling and disrespectful (a couple of times one of her partners had even flipped out and physically struck her) – but she was so afraid of being on her own that she would do everything in her power to appease them to make them stay.

I asked Chrissy what her early upbringing was like and whether as a child, home had been a safe place for her?

At first Chrissy seemed to freeze as the memories began to surface. But then slowly and hesitantly, she started to tell me how her earliest memories were of her parents arguing. Her mum hated her mother-in-law, Chrissy’s paternal grandma, and would refuse to go and see her. This enraged her father so much he would flip out and get very abusive … he’d shout, swear, slam doors and lash out. Chrissy recalled that several times when she’d been around 6 to 8 years old, her father had hit her mother and left her with deep bruising that took weeks to heal. As a quiet sensitive child, Chrissy was absolutely terrified when the arguments erupted and would go and hide under her bed hoping no one would come looking for her. Understandably, these events were deeply traumatising for her.

Chrissy was now sobbing. We paused to allow her space to process these emotions – the terror, the sorrow, and the anger that was bubbling up; feelings she had buried for a long time.

I then asked her, what had things been like at school? Did she feel safer there?

Chrissy shared how she had attended an all-White secondary school. Being of mixed heritage (White & Sri Lankan) she never felt like she fitted in. Her physical appearance made her stand out and drew unwelcome attention. She was called names and in the playground was subject to nasty jibes, often only thinly disguised as jokes, which caused her deep shame as well as anger. Later, the racism and bullying got worse – and one afternoon when she was walking home from school she was set upon by the group of teenage girls … they kicked and punched her and stole her school bag. 

This was so awful. It was no surprise then that Chrissy had grown up feeling so fearful of the world … that she felt helpless and unsafe. Her hypervigilance now … always being on the lookout for danger … was a coping strategy she’d developed in response to these horrible experiences.

There was clearly a lot of trauma here, so we did a deep trauma release … and we cleared the negative energies associated with not having had this security need met as a small child, and also the negative energies associated with the coping strategies that Chrissy’s psyche had developed in response. 

Almost immediately Chrissy reported feeling lighter, like some deep, dark heavy energy had been lifted out of her being. This was a good sign that a deep release had happened.

Next, we moved onto the basic human need for attention. Chrissy had told me earlier in the session that ever since she was a little girl, she’d had this deep sense that she didn’t have any value. That she didn’t matter, didn’t count, was unimportant. She was always hiding in the background … people didn’t seem to notice her, and if they did it was usually because they wanted something from her. Through psychotherapy Chrissy said she has come to see how some of her behaviours now were linked to these feelings of low self-worth. For example, she was painfully shy and had huge trouble speaking up for herself, especially in intimate relationships. Her partners saw her as a pushover, someone they could walk over. She was so quiet and withdrawn that even when she didn’t like something or needed help, she’d stay silent instead of saying how she felt … sometimes she just didn’t have the words or know how to ask.

Gently, I asked Chrissy, whether as a child she had received positive attention from her parents? Did she ever feel seen and heard? Or, were they too preoccupied to truly notice her?

Chrissy said no, she had rarely felt seen or valued at home. For one, she was the middle child. Things had been different with her elder sister but by the time she came along both her parents were too busy working to give her much attention. Her dad worked long hours in a factory and her mum held down two jobs just to make ends meet. She was left mostly in the care of her older sister, who was only three years older than she was, and by the time Chrissy was 11, the two of them also had to look after their youngest sister. She also recalled how over the years her mum had become more and more withdrawn … she seemed to feel so burdened by life all the time and would have this vacant look about her. Looking back, maybe she’d been depressed. But for Chrissy this meant that if she ever needed help … had a problem, got stuck with homework or even had positive things to share like doing well at school, there was never anyone present enough to ask or to tell. Her young mind came to the conclusion that it must be because she wasn’t important enough for anyone to care. 

This made so much sense. It was no wonder that Chrissy hadn’t developed a healthy sense of self-esteem. As children we all need adults to engage with us in a positive, warm, loving way in order for us to feel valued, validated and of significance.

Once again, we cleared the trauma, and the negative memories and energies associated with this need for positive attention that hadn’t been adequately met in Chrissy’s childhood. 

All of this was a lot for one session, so we agreed to stop there and work our way slowly through the other needs over subsequent sessions.

I’m not going to share the entire process we went through here because for one, it would take too long and two, I think by now you’re probably beginning to see how our early childhood needs, if not met, can distort our view of ourselves and influence our adult behaviours and emotions … But … there was one part of Chrissy’s inner child journey that was particularly eye-opening in terms of the relationship issues she was experiencing now as a 40 something woman … Exploring this need gave Chrissy a much deeper awareness of why for most of her life, she’d felt so lonely and disconnected from others … and why she kept attracting the wrong kind of partners. More importantly, by clearing the trauma and energies around it, she was able to start relating to people in her life in a new, healthier way.

This need was the need for emotional connection to others. 

From our earliest moments, we have a basic need to feel close to others – first our parents/caregivers, our siblings, other family members such as grandparents, and later, when we’re a little older, our friends. When I asked Chrissy if there was anyone in her life now that she felt emotionally bonded with, she couldn’t think of anyone at first. Eventually she said that growing up she’d felt quite close to her older sister, but over the years they’d drifted apart and now there was only one friend, a colleague at work, who she felt any connection with. Chrissy admitted that she wasn’t good at trusting other people, even close family. She’d always been a loner, and in a lot of ways, very independent. On the occasions that she did enter into an intimate relationship, she found it hard to relate to her partners on an emotional level. I reflected to her that maybe this was why … unconsciously … she’d attracted partners who were emotionally unavailable to her and who ended up using – and abusing – her. Chrissy agreed.

I asked what had happened to her as a child. Why did she feel so disconnected from and distrustful of others? Chrissy went quiet and became tearful. She told me that when she was in junior school, around 8 or 9 years old, she got friendly with a new girl who’d joined her class. For the first month or two, they sat next to each other and would hang out together in the playground. She liked this girl who was funny and clever, and at last she felt she had someone she could call a friend. But then overnight everything changed. This girl took up with a new set of friends and stopped talking to Chrissy. Worse still, she started joining the other children in the playground in taunting Chrissy and making fun of her appearance. Chrissy was crushed … and it’s not too strong to say that a little heartbroken.

There was something else too. Later, when she was around 13 and just becoming interested in boys, she met a teenager on the estate where she lived. He was several years older than her but seemed to be genuinely interested in her … No one at home seemed too bothered about where she went and so they started going out. She liked him and was flattered that he was paying any attention to her at all … When he started encouraging her to drink and smoke weed, she was troubled but didn’t dare say anything even though she disliked doing it. She didn’t want him to stop being her boyfriend. Eventually, though, his boy got bored of Chrissy and took up with another girl from the estate. Again, Chrissy felt heartbroken. Looking back now, she was really upset with herself for being so gullible and not listening to her feelings.  As an adult she could recognise that her intuition was saying he wasn’t good for her…he wasn’t good/kind/considerate, but the attention had felt so good. She felt lucky to have anyone showing an interest in her. This, as we have seen, was a pattern that she had been repeating right the way through her adult life – she was still craving that close emotional connection with someone but unconsciously acting on the feelings of distrust and heartbreak.

This was fascinating. It went a long way towards explaining why Chrissy showed up the way she did in relationships. We healed the heartbreak, the distrust, the feelings of shame and isolation and the deep deep unworthiness that had plagued her all her life.

Well, we continued our work together, gently stripping away the traumas, memories, imprints, low frequency beliefs and emotions, and self-defeating patterns and programmes. And, every month Chrissy would show up and report the changes she had noticed in herself and her life. She reported feeling calmer, less anxious. She reported finding the courage to speak up in team meetings. She reported feeling happier about attending work socials. She felt she was making better connections and that others were showing more interest in what she had to say. She was also sleeping much better. 

The effects of divine healing show up slowly. As we shed our negative programming the world around us has no option but to rejig itself to match our new inner reality. This process can take a little time but everyone starts to feel different – more settled, more positive, lighter, more expanded, quite quickly. 

Obviously for Chrissy the ultimate goal was to find a life partner. She felt different within herself, she felt more connected to herself and she felt confident that she could trust her intuition to highlight those men that would be good for her and those that wouldn’t. Our energy beams itself out into the Unvierse and is unconsciously picked up by others so I was confident that the kind of men she was attracting into her life prior to her shedding all this density were not going to be the same as those would be interested in her now. We had to wait and see.

Inner child healing really is powerful and deeply transformative stuff.

Right, so et me ask you a few questions. 

Have you ever felt inferior to others or become aware that you carry around deep feelings of worthlessness?

Do you often experience self-doubt, insecurity or a lack of confidence? 

Do you struggle with feelings of loneliness and isolation?

Do you feel unloved or inadequate in some way?

Do you struggle with a low mood, or feelings of sadness or depression?

Do you feel lost and unable to find joy, meaning and a sense of purpose in life?

Well, maybe these feelings / patterns are signs that your inner child needs healing. It’s well worth exploring.

Right so I’m going to finish off there. If you liked listening, then please subscribe…that way you won’t miss any future episodes…and tell people about it.  It’s all free and it could help someone create a happier, healthier, more peaceful life for themselves.

And, before I go, let me remind you… take really good care of yourself because you and I both know that if you don’t no one else will.

Bye for now…