Healing Your Inner Child: A Journey of Self-Discovery

Imagine unlocking the secrets to your past that hold the key to your emotional well-being today. Join me, Kirsty Harris, on a profound journey as we revisit my personal struggles with self-esteem and confidence from 2019, which led me to explore inner child healing. Through this episode, we uncover how both positive and negative childhood experiences shape our adult lives and discuss the significance of reconnecting with and nurturing our inner child. I share authentic stories and pivotal moments from my own healing journey, offering insights into how you too can address and mend the wounds of your past.

Setting boundaries is crucial to our emotional and physical health, yet often challenging to implement, especially when influenced by generational trauma. In this episode, we discuss the various responses to trauma—fight, flight, fawn, and freeze—and the long-term effects of being stuck in a fawn state. We emphasize the ongoing nature of healing and the importance of self-care and understanding. Lastly, we delve into the freeing practice of forgiveness and self-love, revealing how letting go of resentment can pave the way to a more compassionate relationship with ourselves. With practical advice on seeking support through coaching, therapy, and community, this episode is your guide to nurturing your inner glow and living a more fulfilled, balanced life.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Find your Inner Glow. Hosted by me, kirsty Harris, I am a manifestation coach and an intuitive healer. I am here to talk to you all about mind, body and soul and how we can find your inner glow together. So kick back, grab a cuppa and let's get into it. Hello, so today I will be talking about my inner child healing journey.

Speaker 1: 0:27

So I started back in about 2019. There was just so much coming up for me. I knew I had low self-esteem, knew I didn't have any confidence, didn't have any self-belief. I had all of these things in which that, yeah, really were affecting me and my ability to live a happier life. So what's really important to know about all of this is that it's okay if you had an amazing childhood or you had a rubbish childhood. The only thing that matters is your perception. Okay, this is so, so important.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Um, because one of my favorite examples to to like highlight is basically when you were a child, say, dad used to always go out to work all the time. When you're a five-year-old, you don't have the rational and logical brain to go. Oh, I know he's going to get money for the family so we can have dinner, we can have these lovely things that we have. No, you think dad doesn't love me and you feel abandoned. Because you can't rationalize it as an adult, you look back and you can go oh, I totally understand why he did that. But, yeah, you at that time had a perspective that you were unloved and abandoned or whatever it felt like, or you were rejected, whatever it feels like, and that gets stored within us, okay. So this means like, regardless of if you had a wonderful, loving childhood or if you didn't, whatever you are on that spectrum, there will be trauma and there will be negative experiences that impact you on and on your beliefs, on who you are, so much as well. I know I use dad as an example, but we could have the same situation with mum. We can have father wounds, we can have mother wounds and that means that our inner child can be crying out for different things, which means that we will act out those behaviours as adults.

Speaker 1: 2:17

The inner child theory is all about a theory that we have a little version of us inside us that you know is our wounded child and we need to look after them and take care of them, reconnect with them and in order to heal that version of ourselves. I personally feel that we have multiple versions of ourselves. I feel like we have lots of different versions in which that is yeah, we go through life and we have pinnacle times at different ages. So I feel like if, by the time you're eight, you're, you're meant to be totally conditioned by your parents, so that's a really pinnacle age. When you go to high school, that's pinnacle age. Like these are like milestones in your life where you will have younger versions of yourself. Even like sat here today yesterday is a younger version of yourself. So I feel like we have multiple versions of ourselves and multiple chapters in our life in which we go through, and sometimes in those chapters, there can be pain, emotional hurt based on our perspective at that time, not the person that we are now where we can look back and go oh, okay, I understand.

Speaker 1: 3:22

So I started my inner child healing back in 2019. I didn't really know what I was doing. I kind of was in therapy and I was like I don't really know what I'm doing. So I tried out a few different things and some of it worked, some of it didn't, some of it made me cry so much.

Speaker 1: 3:37

And what I want to say to you is at the beginning of this journey. Just even thinking about your inner child can make you cry, because it's about acknowledging that there's a little person inside you that you need to take care of and reconnect with after ignoring them for a long period of time. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means that you just haven't had the time to reconnect. And actually nobody talks to us directly about inner child healing. Like we don't get taught that in schools. We don't get taught it anywhere, if anything. You've probably heard this on instagram and tiktok, which, yeah, that is our learning style now. Like we learn about this stuff on instagram and tiktok and then dive into it, which is an absolutely brilliant tool. But what I'm saying is this is stuff that we should be taught from a young age about understanding our feelings, accepting them, allowing them to come up, because if we did, then we would have a much better chance in adolescent and adulthood of just not developing these behaviours and things like that.

Speaker 1: 4:35

So, with all that being said, I started my inner child healing. I didn't have a great childhood. I had very, very good times, but I also had some very traumatic times as well. And your brain it can be so incredible at hiding things from you. It can be so, so incredible. So there's a lot of my childhood where my memories are blacked out. So not only do I black out the good ones, I black out the bad ones. So, yeah, I have chunks of my memory missing and our brain does that because it hides it from us. It hides us away in like a little vault and just goes when she's ready to deal with it. Then we can bring those memories out to be dealt with and sometimes those memories never come out and that's absolutely fine.

Speaker 1: 5:19

So if you don't remember a lot of your childhood, that could be the reason why. And you might be like oh, I look back at pictures, I look so happy. You could very well have had a happy childhood, but it could just be one traumatic incident or a multitude or an accumulation of small incidents that build up. That means that you don't remember, or you may remember everything, and that is also like a pro and a con to both of these methods that your brain does. When you remember everything, you feel everything. So that means you need to release those feelings to come up. Remember everything, you feel everything. So that means you need to release those feelings to come up.

Speaker 1: 5:53

So when I started, I started talking about it. I started talking about, like, what is inner child? And researching what it is and coming to like the definition that felt right for me. There's lots of different definitions about inner child theory out there but for me, like I said, having multiple versions of myself makes sense to me and I go with that. I started to just go into meditation and meditation didn't really work for me at this time so, as much as I tried, I couldn't connect that way.

Speaker 1: 6:18

So what I actually did was I got pictures out of me as a child and I would talk to her like I needed to be told. I remember it was like this one night at the time my partner had left the house, he'd gone out somewhere, and I decided to do this and I pulled the photo out and I put it down on the table and I started to talk to her and I mean I started hysterically crying like floods and floods and floods of tears because of just so much I wanted to say to her because you are the safe adult that you've always needed. Now you are the person that you always needed when you were young, when you were younger. So being able to be that strong, safe person and go back to that little vulnerable version of me was incredibly heartbreaking and I could just feel so much pain coming up. And there was also a photo of me and my grandmother. So my grandmother passed away when I was 16 and she was basically like a mum, so I would. So I spoke to both of them and, yeah, just that was the way I started to open and start to connect with my inner child.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So I have a meditation that I do now which helps me connect my inner child and keeps that relationship going the way I like to see it is like your inner child. You treat them like a child for a start, but also you treat them like you have a relationship with them. You know you don't ignore your friends or your family for years on end, so don't ignore your inner child, I think as well. Like when you connect with your inner child, it's about feeling like people become safe with you when they have a secure relationship with you. So it's about creating that with your inner child, and how we do that is so different. So for me, I started off with photos and meditation.

Speaker 1: 8:00

The meditation now that I do is just mainly like a maintenance one, where I can go in, say hello to her, keep her up to date what's going on, make her feel safe and then leave, because I find that sometimes, when I'm not feeling safe or I'm feeling very anxious, going back and just saying like nice things to my inner child can actually really settle her down. You may start treating yourself with kindness and practicing self-compassion, because actually not everything is your fault, not everything is because you did something wrong. Sometimes we can feel like that, and I also feel like I speak to a lot of women particularly, who will say oh, it's my fault, why? Because it's easier to take control of a situation rather than blame somebody else. So some of that can be coming to terms with the fact of maybe your parents were good parents and they did the best that they could, but it wasn't good enough, and when we take control, we take ownership of that. So it feels like we're more in control, but actually what we end up doing is doing self-punishment and we don't deserve to be punished any more than we've been punished in our lifetime. Okay, karma does the job. We don't need to do it anymore and nobody is harsher on ourselves than ourselves. So, yeah, sometimes it may be coming to an acknowledgement that our parents they tried their best but it just wasn't good enough to meet our needs. Okay, you may want to journal.

Speaker 1: 9:22

I did a lot of journaling around this. I wrote letters to my inner child about everything I wanted to say to her and then I would burn it or I would kind of put it somewhere safe. I did loads of stuff really. I did lots of reviewing, like my beliefs and where they came from. So why am I so desperate for male attention? Well, it's probably because my father abandoned me when I was a child and I have no good template of male relationships so I needed to work on that. Maybe it was the lack of confidence and belief in myself was because I never really had somebody who was going to be like consistency, you can do it, you can do anything you put your mind to. I never really had that. So I think, yeah, there's lots of different things that you can go into with your belief system. Why do you believe that you can't do something? You know I always say to you over and over again if you're in my podcast, in the membership hub, wherever you are, um, you can do anything you put your mind to. Abundance is all around us. We just put the limitations in, and sometimes our limitations can be generational. You know, we might have something that our mum believed in or our father believed in, our grandparents believed in, but we have the power and control to break those patterns through inner child healing.

Speaker 1: 10:38

You may want to do visualizations. I visualize my inner child all the time and I kind of visualize what emotion she's feeling, how I can help her, what she needs, to ask her, what does she need? What does my inner child need? You don't even need to do that in meditation. Sometimes you might just wake up in the morning and go. What does my inner child need? It might be just to have fun. It might be that she just wants to have cake for breakfast. It might be that she just wants to just relax for a minute. Whatever it is, it's about creating that relationship with your inner child. I don't know how I can say this any other ways, but the minute you start to make that relationship, it will get easier, more solid and you become more settled.

Speaker 1: 11:18

In the beginning everything was painful, everything was hard, everything was really, really difficult and I did find having therapy or having a coach or somebody to talk to, was really, really helpful for me. Also. Also, I found one of the biggest things for me was setting boundaries. So setting boundaries with people who have hurt me before, or even with my parents, or, well, my mum, um, I had to set boundaries because I was going through this phase as well of, like you know, when you're a young person and and you go into a teenager and then, as you transition into adulthood, you start to unlearn the beliefs that your parents instilled in you not the bad, you know. Not the bad or the good ones, it's just more of the beliefs of like, oh, I don't have to live by this rule anymore. What I want to say to you is what you believe are the rules are the rules, and that goes for your existence, that goes for everything. Okay, so right, I had to set boundaries with not being allowed access to all the time by my mum, like I was an adult. Now I'm an adult and we have to transition into that adult child relationship together. So I had to set those boundaries. I had to be like I'm only available to be called this many times, or this or whatever.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Sometimes, when I need space, I need to be able to communicate that and not have her feel like she's rejected. So there's a whole thing as well in terms of, like, generational trauma what your parents went through, your grandparents may have, your grandparents may have. So sometimes, like, you have to be mindful of setting those boundaries because they're good for you, but how they affect other people. Now, I'm always for put yourself first, but put yourself first with kindness. You know, if we can put boundaries in place that are healthy, that are healthy for everyone, but don't trigger somebody else perfect. That is the perfect balance. And sometimes we won't be able to do that. Sometimes we might just have to radically set boundaries and be like I cannot tolerate this anymore, I cannot do the constant criticism, I can't handle all of this stuff. Can you just not like sometimes you need to do those boundaries, because sometimes setting those boundaries can be, can be resisted by other people, especially like our parents, who kind of they feel like they've given birth to us and then now they have consistent access to us. Well, actually, you're an adult, now you need to be able to set those appropriate boundaries, and I found like that would help me feel safe, knowing exactly where I stood, where I was.

Speaker 1: 13:50

Having those solid boundaries makes people feel safe. If you have children yourself, you will know routine and boundaries make the children feel safe and it doesn't change as we go into adulthood, you know. Imagine that, friend, where you never really know where you are with them, because one minute they're all over you, the next minute they're not bothering with you. It's all of this stuff. It all comes down to boundaries, setting healthy boundaries and then maintaining them. And if I'm being totally office, office honest, something I do not see in the coaching sphere enough is about people feeling safe. It like feeling feeling safe is just a fundamental thing. When we are feeling safe, this helps us step out of the fight.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Flight okay, because I know for a long period of time I was stuck in fawn. So fawn in, so fight is obviously you're fighting your resistance, you're angry, you're defensive. Your flight, you run away and avoid situations. You're fawn in okay. When we fawn, we go along with things to keep the peace, which is one of the I always find one of the most dangerous ones, because you don't even realize that you're doing it until after it's done. You just go along with it because you don't want to cause upset, uproar, arguments, anything negative. So you just go along with things. I fawned for so, so long and I was stuck in fawn for a really, really long time, and this is why I believe I have a thyroid issue, why I have physical problems now.

Speaker 1: 15:15

Because I was stuck in fawn so so long now, because I was stuck in form so so long, um, because my, you know, your nervous system is not built just maintain this forever. So obviously, we have freeze as well, where you freeze and you're unable to move, you're unable to make decisions, you're unable to do stuff, and you know, these are not like massive, I don't know, car crash, accident things where you just go right, okay, I'm definitely in this. This can sometimes be things where you where, like, you don't even realize you're stuck in it because it's just your norm, okay, or you might just go along with it and be like, oh, I'm such a people pleaser, yeah, but are you a people pleaser? But are you fawning? Why are you like that? What did you have to do as a child in order to maintain that equilibrium? Yeah, this is all stuff that you can adventure into.

Speaker 1: 16:02

This is why I really advocate for inner child healing, because it's so deeply healing. It's so important. It's really that thing that can massively transform you, because when you a building block, okay, no, let's think of, oh God, I don't know how to describe it but basically, okay, imagine we have a stand, okay, and this is your root problem. Okay, this is the root cause. We have a stand and on top of it we have all these other things, okay, which is like anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, low confidence, da-da-da-da-da. And whilst you can tackle each one of those things individually and give them individual love, what's really important is that, yeah, when you remove the stand, which is the root problem, all of those issues collapsing on themselves, okay.

Speaker 1: 16:53

This is why being trauma informed, working on trauma, working in the trenches of trauma, as I call it, doing the healing, doing somatic healing, which is all about shaking your body, like, well, shake, somatic movement is about shaking your body and getting the trauma out of your body. Like all of these things are so, so important in terms of healing, they're so important to my healing journey. And there's stuff that I do now and I'm still like not 100% healed. I will always advocate that nobody is 100% healed, because I feel like when we think about being healed, we think of that about our perfectionism will kick in and be like well, when am I healed? What does healing look like? What does being 100% healed look like?

Speaker 1: 17:34

The reality is it looks very different for lots of people, but I truly believe that we are never 100% healed because we live daily life. Anything could happen to us us, I could walk out of you, get hit by a bus. Please don't touch wood. I don't want to get hit by a bus, but you see what I mean.

Speaker 1: 17:47

We are open to experiencing different times, types of trauma every single day, especially if we're working a caring role, if we're social workers, if we're whatever. We are open to trauma, trauma every day, which can impact us and leave beliefs in us, and we can internalize it and da, da, da da. But what's really important is that when we start to remove, like root causes, we become more resilient, we become more happy, we become more content in our lives. We're able to deal with trauma differently. We're able to separate ourselves from other people's trauma. We're able to keep our empathy inside us and use it when we want to, not when people pull it out of us without our consent. We're able to empower ourselves. We're able to be really, really in control of it.

Speaker 1: 18:32

So this is why I truly advocate for inner child healing, because that little person just needs to be loved, to be safe, to be secure and once that that little version of you is, or any type of version of you is, you're able to move forward in life and you are able to collapse some of those issues that are, you know, holding you back. They're holding you back so you can collapse them and keep it moving. Obviously like with, maybe, self-confidence you may remove like the root cause, but then you might need to teach yourself on how to be confident. Okay, so yeah, um, I'm going to leave it there for now, but yeah, that's been my inner child healing journey. I still have a relationship with her. I still go back and see her when I'm feeling anxious or upset.

Speaker 1: 19:16

It's a lifelong relationship that you can commit to. But when you commit to that, you commit to making yourself happy. You commit to but when you commit to that you commit to making yourself happy, you commit to forgiving yourself, forgiving those around you, and forget and, like I always say, with forgiveness, people always shrug at me and go. Well, why should I forgive somebody who abused me when I was eight? Well, if you don't, then you carry the anger and resentment. It's like when a snake bites you, you focus on getting the poison out. You don't chase down the snake and go. It's all your fault, you're this, you're that? No, you go. No, this is poison, I need to get it out.

Speaker 1: 19:48

And it's exactly that mindset when we're thinking about forgiveness. We have to give forgiveness so we can have peace. It doesn't mean we condone the behavior. It doesn't mean that we accept the behavior but we go. I understand that whatever you were going through, you took it out on me and I forgive you for that. Don't maybe forgive your actions, but I forgive you and I can move forward from it and again that releases more emotions, more trauma, soft in our bodies, even going back to previous versions of ourselves where we've made some real like fuck ups. Okay, I've fucked up so many times in my life. I've fucked up on this podcast earlier. You know mistakes are a human design thing. We all make mistakes.

Speaker 1: 20:27

But even going back and forgiving that version of yourself, I have done a lot of forgiveness to myself, to the person who was in the relationship last year, being informed for being manipulated, for all of those things where I let myself lose my authenticity and my integrity, my self-respect. I let I let them all go because of this person. There was something magical going on in the background. There's something like very deeply spiritual happening in the background and I will go into that in a different podcast or a different voice recording another time. But there were extra factors that play with that. But at the end of it I needed to forgive me. I needed to forgive him so I can close the chapter and move forward.

Speaker 1: 21:09

At the time I had the thought of I will never forgive him for xyz, but actually I just realized that was me punishing me. I'm carrying it, I you will never know 100% what's going on with somebody else, but I just don't deserve to carry it. I was really hurt over something and in that thing I just didn't deserve to be any more punished than what I'd already been or experience any more pain or carry it around. It just wasn't for me like I didn't need to put myself through that anymore. So I decided to forgive and that let go stuff as well. So I hope that that hasn't been too much of a jumble. I've kind of just spoken really freely about it today, being really open, honest, as I normally am, on this bloody thing, um.

Speaker 1: 21:50

So yeah, if you have any questions, if you want to get in touch, if you want to work on your inner child, like you can either pop into the manifestation hub and look at stuff in there. You can kind of come and have some coaching with me. If you feel like that's really aligned, um, you can re-listen to this podcast over and over again until, like it kind of sinks in what you need to do. You may want to go to a counselor where you can just offload everything and just go blah, blah, blah. You may want to go to a therapist and have some cbt, which I really like because it challenges negative thoughts, which I think is always really useful.

Speaker 1: 22:25

So, yeah, this is not an easy journey, guys, but it is absolutely the journey that you don't want to miss out on this lifetime. If you want to be happy, you want to be content. It's about looking inwards and looking at where we need forgiveness, where we need to feel safe and where we need to feel loved and, as always, you're super loved by me. Thank you so very much for popping in. I hope that you enjoyed this. If you did, let me know and I will speak to you soon, thank you.