Healing From Within: Embracing Self-Love by Nurturing Your Inner Child

Welcome back, love warriors! This is your heart's compass, Nia, guiding you once again on your journey of self-discovery and connection. In today's soul-nourishing episode, we'll unwrap the layers of affection, fear, and the most intimate reflections from our formative years.

We'll ask the hard questions like, "Are you the person you needed when you were younger?" and explore how our childhood voids shape our search for love and belonging. We'll discuss how facing our roots—the traumas and fears—shapes our quest for connection, and why the math of pain plus fear rarely equals love. And brace yourself, beloved listeners, because today I'm baring it all, sharing my own story of loneliness, loss, and survival—the raw and uncensored path that forged me into a haven for my three amazing daughters.

We'll also dive into a meaningful exercise that marries nostalgia with healing, where changing a simple phone wallpaper can become a gateway to embracing and nurturing the younger versions of ourselves. Because in this community, we learn that to love others, we must first face the person in the mirror, embrace our inner child, and come home to ourselves.

Prepare to feel deeply, challenge your inner narratives, and possibly shed a tear or two. So, take a seat, open your heart, and let's journey together as we turn pain into power, one episode at a time.

Now, let go of those inhibitions, and let's get growing, because here on Love Frequency, we confront our history to shape our destiny. Keep tuning in, and remember—when you know, you grow.

Episode Reflection/ Journal Prompts: 

1. Nia opens up about her quest to find a "home" and a sense of belonging. Discuss how the concept of "home" can be more of an internal than external place.
2. The exercise of changing your phone's wallpaper to a picture of yourself during a difficult childhood moment is an invitation to reflect and heal. If you were to participate in this exercise, which image would you choose and why?
3. Reflecting on the journey of self-love Nia describes, discuss how reconnecting with one's inner child can be a transformative step toward personal healing and growth.

Episode Resources: 

• Change Your Phone Wallpaper; Change Your Life (FB reel)
• Follow me on IG to see my HS Senior picture @L_ve Frequency

Transcript

Nia: 0:00

I don't think we truly realize how much of how we move in love is a direct reflection of what we didn't receive when we were younger. Think about yourself right now. Are you the person that you needed when you were younger? If not, when are you going to make the time to face yourself? Let's talk about it. To face yourself, let's talk about it. You are now tuning in to Love Frequency, where love grows. Welcome to Love Frequency, the podcast that helps you transform your pain into power. I'm your host and favorite love advocate, nya, and on this show we believe that love is not the problem, honey, you are. So join me every other Wednesday as we have necessary discussion that focuses on getting to the root of the problem, because when you know, you grow.

Nia: 1:08

One of my greatest fears has been dying alone. This has been a fear of mine since I was eight or nine. Kind of eight or nine year old thinks about shit like that Me, that's who and I honestly thought that a way to solidify friendships and connections and strong relationships was to become a quote, unquote ideal mate, whatever the fuck that means. I was a genius at eight or nine. What can I say? But through that fear, whether directly or indirectly. Many of my decisions in childhood, into early adolescence, into adulthood, were motivated by me not wanting to be alone, and I called that love for a very long time. Alone for me had nothing to do with solitude. I just yearned for a space where I felt I was wanted, included and respected, a space where I could be, was. I was searching for something that I had never experienced. This fear that I had of being alone, that was created by my pain of not having a place that I felt I could call home, created a void within me to find something. It's almost as if the math is saying being alone plus abandonment equals love. Let me break it down just a little bit further, because I know some of y'all are frowned up. Some of y'all didn't understand that math, and that was the point For many of us.

Nia: 2:57

When we look at the root, the true root of why we get into connections as quickly as we do, why we continue to see repeat patterns in the relationships that we are in, if we take a look at the math, it's often because of the traumas and the pains and the fears in our lives that create that strong craving for love. It's the void that we're trying to fill and all I'm saying is explain to me, sway, how pain plus fear can equal love. I don't care how good your love is, the root will always show up in some form. I don't care what anybody says, you can't run from your root, baby. That's why, when you know, you grow.

Nia: 3:43

And every moment I spent in connections that made me feel like I had to prove that I was worthy of receiving love were not only reflections of the very thing I thought I was running from, but actually was running toward my fear of being alone, but it was also a direct reflection of the love I was used to receiving. My bar was set extremely low. Just attention in my direction was enough. That's why that math don't make sense to me. That math requires you to diminish your value, so I'd compromise and conform until I had become a version of myself that was unrecognizable.

Nia: 4:24

And then we get out of those connections and we say we got to do the work and we have to heal, not realizing that there's not a goddamn thing to fix. You didn't go in broken, you just went in lost, searching for the wrong fucking things and oftentimes with the wrong fucking people. Let's all just quit shit. Throw in the towel. If it's something that happened when we were children and we're still talking about shit we didn't receive and we're grown now, there's nothing we could do about it, so we just might as well give up. Come on, y'all, the fuck you thought you was. This is love frequency, where we turn pain into power and, just like they say, when life gives you damn lemons, fuck that. When life gives you trauma, all you got to do is change your phone's wallpaper.

Nia: 5:24

Have you ever had one of those moments where you zone out and you find yourself scrolling mindlessly on social media, only to look at the clock and several hours have just flown the fuck by? Then what happens immediately afterwards? It's that deep feeling of guilt, like, oh, all this shit I could have got done, but I guess I'll do it tomorrow, and then tomorrow never comes. No, just me, fuck y'all. I know it's you too.

Nia: 5:47

So I was having one of those moments. I'm scrolling on Facebook and I come across a reel entitled change your wallpaper, change your life. Immediately. I was fucking annoyed because I can't stand clickbait. I don't know about y'all, but I feel like it's lazy, albeit effective journalism If the goal is to see how many views you can get and then not how many people actually resonate with the information you're providing, because that's just good journalism. But I digress, it's not what we're talking about. So I see the video. That's not what we're talking about. So I see the video immediately unbothered and I scroll two videos past and then something stopped and prompted me to go back.

Nia: 6:33

As I'm watching this video, the creator recommends that you look back at your childhood and the feelings you had. Were there, times when you needed someone and no one was there. It stressed the point that it's often our inner child's wounds that are holding us back. But what can we do? A solution they offered was to find a picture from your childhood where you remember going through a difficult time. Take a picture of that image and save it as your phone's wallpaper and over the next 21 days, every time you look at your phone, you will not only see the image of yourself, but there are four things that they encourage you to repeat. Now you're going to have to watch the video to find out. The link is in the show notes.

Nia: 7:23

You thought I was going to give it all away, honey. No, I'm going to make you work for it, but did your mind race back to a time when you were younger and needed someone? For most of us it did instantly. How old were you? Why did you select the image that you did, even if you thought about it in your mind and if you chose not to participate? Do you wonder why your pain doesn't want you to face this? I say you should challenge that. For me, the picture and memory that immediately came to my heart was my senior picture from high school. The reason this image stands out so much to me is it captured the last essence of childhood hope and possibility. Everything that happened after this photograph was taken changed the course and trajectory of my life forever. So, in the interest of time, let me spare you all the damn details and just give you the highlights. I also want to preface by saying it's been a very long time since I've gone down memory lane, so some of this shit is going to be a struggle for me to talk about, but we're going to get through it together because there's power at the other end of this story.

Nia: 8:31

So during my senior year, I was living with my father, his wife, her kids and my brother. Midway through the year my father decided to move to a new city within Colorado. I decided to stay to finish high school, while staying with my grandparents. My grandmother had been becoming more and more ill and my grandfather was her primary caregiver, in addition to them having to run a local restaurant. My grandmother passes away that year. I find myself homeless that year because I tell my grandfather after my grandmother passed that I didn't want to live with him anymore. I'd rather live with my mother. Her house was raided. My baby brother lived with her. Her house was raided. My baby brother lived with her the day that she was raided. Thankfully, I had just moved in the day before and decided to take my brother to go hang out with me and a few of my friends and just be kids. We get home and there's yellow tape on the door. So now I'm not even yet fully graduated, but I have responsibility of my nine-year-old brother. My father's moved out of town and my grandmother is gone, and when I go to my grandpa he said you made your choice, so I had to figure out what I was going to do next.

Nia: 9:34

During my time of homelessness I experienced people who said they were friends of the family who came to my grandmother's services and who later tried to barter a place to sleep for sex. I was very naive, very impressionable and scared. These are the moments of your life where you should be celebrating, hanging out with friends, planning your senior trip, packing for college, getting ready to leave for the military or heading off to your job. When I was approaching my senior year, I was very excited and if you told me I would have been homeless, looking for food in garbage cans and sleeping outside, I would have laughed.

Nia: 10:10

But my start into adulthood started with survival. I just had to figure it out. That was my introduction to womanhood. It would take me almost 20 years to get back my grounding, to get back to a place where I felt like I was not surviving, where I felt like I was thriving. I have lived in a balance between disappointment because of what life has shown me and determination to make the best of everything. What I really needed was someone to tell me that I wasn't alone. But I was.

Nia: 10:49

You know, friends, looking at that photo, I realized, when all of the turmoil and chaos was taking place, I was only 18. Now I'm here before you with three amazing daughters all around the age I was back then 21, 19, and 17. And it breaks my heart to think of any of them left to the world just to figure that shit out. I can't imagine that they would go through life unscathed, unharmed, without pain. There was so much I didn't know back then and it made me first realize, god, how hard on myself I've been. I look at my phone now and I'm immediately met with. It's a mixed bag. It feels a little bit like disappointment, but in the same breath that I felt the disappointment, there was a new sense of protection. I don't know if this has anything to do with me being a mother, but I instantly just wanted to hug her and to take care of her and to let her know that it's going to be okay.

Nia: 12:01

When I look at that beautiful, capable, amazing, brilliant, driven, creative, funny little girl, I realized I walked away from her. I changed my first, middle and last name legally so I didn't have to face her. See, all the extremely painful shit in my life happened to her. Not Naya Keisha Janelle Thomas grew up believing she didn't have the same value as everyone else, and growing up without that foundation y'all it made it a lot easier to walk the fuck away, but you can't walk away from yourself. How ironic that the very thing I was afraid of ended up being the very thing I did to myself. Y'all, home has always been inside of me, and looking at that picture it's even crazy. I find myself referring to the photograph as her. I've been so disconnected from me that there is a separation between who I was and who I am. But being home now feels so damn good.

Nia: 13:08

As I said before, I'm not sure if this exercise hit me harder because I have kids, but y'all, it struck a chord. It serves now as a constant reminder that I not only get to truly be who I needed when I was younger, it also has allowed me to see why I couldn't be there for me or my daughters in the ways that they needed. It is crazy how life kind of perpetuates the same cycles, and so what I learned was to give that same very little to that little girl, and then that manifested into the type of mother I became, where I thought very little was good enough. You know the basics Maslow's hierarchy of needs yeah, food, shelter, clothing. I got you on that baby All day. You're going to be taken care of. But the emotional needs, that psychological safety, building trust, I ain't have it, so how could I give it? And this exercise really had me sit with that Y'all. I am more protective of that little girl than I've ever been. I am mindful of how I speak to her, I am intentional about how I take care of her and I love me so much. So now taking care of me is a priority. It is my number one priority, and it's so fucking beautiful to finally be home, love.

Nia: 14:39

You know, we often talk about doing the work, and for many people they're not very clear on what that looks like. The words sound good, but what am I supposed to do next? Right, allow this activity to be a tool that you can use for that very purpose. This is shadow work, baby. As we said before, it is often our inner child's wounds that are holding us back, and this is your opportunity to explore that.

Nia: 15:01

Don't you think your younger self deserves the opportunity to be cared for, looked after, loved on? You might even find that the things you once needed as a child are the things you're still yearning for as an adult, in your relationships, no matter where you are in your journey, even if you choose not to do this exercise, you're still thinking about it, love, and for that I say welcome home. You're already doing the work, whether you realize it or not. Thank you, thank you, thank you for hanging with me today. If this episode has fed your spirit and increased your love frequency, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to come back in two weeks where we're talking about how your skincare routine can help you improve your relationships. Until next time, this is your host, nya, encouraging you change your wallpaper, babe, and finally face yourself, because when you know, you grow. Until next time time, I love you.