Is Your Wounded Inner Child Acting Out?

Every person on this planet has within them a wounded inner child. It is next to impossible not to have one. What I mean by the wounded inner child, is that part within us that felt helpless and dependent on our parents when we were small. Inevitably, we wouldn’t have gotten our needs met – whether it’s from a parent who made us cry to sleep by ourselves because they were too tired, or something worse like touch deprivation or physical abuse.  Everyone has some scar of abandonment, shame or neglect imbedded into their psyches – the level of intensity and trauma is based on the scale of how a person was treated consistently.  

The wounded inner child is the part of us that acts out, sulks, rages, and becomes overly emotional or reactive to our adult situations.  This is the area that most therapists try to address tenderly in their sessions.  It is necessary to feel and process the wound out in order to gain inner strength. Often, though, we have no idea where to even begin to address the issues.

From a spiritual perspective, I believe we are all here to grow in giving and receive loving presence, first towards ourselves and then towards others. We incarnated as souls full of love, peace and harmony, born into a world of chaos and violence. As little beings, we had to face our families which were full of subtle and overt rejections, making us believe that our needs don’t matter and we are fundamentally flawed or unlovable.

Our spiritual job here on Earth is to make our ways back home to ourselves as beings of love and peace, and to share that with others. Unfortunately, many of us have severe wounds from growing up that have made us forget our true, divine nature. We treat ourselves poorly and then treat others poorly. This is how intergenerational trauma happens and extends itself in warped and unexplainable ways.

For example, a grandfather may have been an alcoholic and toxified the house with anger and abuse. The son looks to the father and says “I will never be like you” and becomes perfect in all areas of his life – except he walks around with the wound of bitterness and seething anger. Then his son internalizes it, believing he is a bad kid and ends up taking drugs and dropping out to prove that it is true. On the cycle goes.

When we do the inner work of facing our inner child, we are taking great leaps of courage to face our souls and discover how many illusions of feeling small we have been living under. When we dig in and see the false beliefs and perspectives we have been carrying about ourselves, the world and other people, then we are effectively liberating ourselves from an endless cycle of suffering. We can then open up to a new reality and really experience life in a fuller and more enriching way.

For example, I knew a woman who had severe trauma in her childhood. Her parents were abusive in the worst ways. Her traumas were deep and huge. Because she hadn’t unpacked her pain and stuff, she kept attracting men who would abuse her and deny they did it, making her the crazy one. She then became suspicious of everyone – of course because that’s the way of protecting herself from getting hurt again. Her world was a terrifying place to live. The sad part, though, is she pushed away and blocked out people who wanted to help her and support her. She ended up in a life of loneliness and isolation.  She hadn’t grown up emotionally because the traumas were so deep and she really didn’t seek or get the help to face that lonely little girl inside of her. Her life would have been very different if she had done the inner healing to break out of the illusion that everyone is a monster working against her. Many would say she has mental health issues, she needs psychiatric help, etc.  That may be the case as a short term solution, but they aren’t helping her with getting to the bottom of the problem – deep down she believed that she deserved this treatment and she was a bad person because these things kept happening to her. When the truth is that she just had to learn to set healthy boundaries and to love and care for herself first. It is not her job to be a servant to her parents or to others in life.  It is so unfortunate that many therapists don’t help their clients find that inner void of loneliness, fear and feeling unlovable. They will listen, advise and help release emotions. But they won’t face the very obvious and simple question: “what did you believe about yourself because of this?”. To me, this questions is the foundation to help the client self-empower and break out of the prison of their own suffering and unhealthy relationship patterns. Once a person realizes they don’t deserve to be mistreated, then they can naturally create healthy boundaries, be assertive, and sense their own self-worth.

Many people have become mistrusting of therapy because they feel like it is going to cost them a lot of money and they have no idea what it is they need to work on.  I have gone to therapy myself and I would say that a true therapist is one who understands the importance of trauma processing, inner child work and is not afraid of emotions.  Therapists who can’t or won’t go there are just dealing with the superficial and you will waste your money. That said, even with a great therapist, it is important to do the self-empowerment work that coaches and transformation facilitators offer. Otherwise you can wallow in your past pain without moving forward.

When you get into the heart of the issue and really uproot what is going on from a perspective of being loved or not, it is actually quite easy to see the solutions that are needed.  Asking a few simple questions can do wonders for awakening us from under the spell of confusion and inner child wounds. One of the questions I like to ask someone struggling with relationships is: “What do you need to feel loved?”  Sitting with that question can bring up remarkable insights and aha’s for someone.

When I was asked that question, I responded: “I need to be believed.” That was a shocking response for me – I had no idea that because of a childhood wound of not being believed about abuse, I had felt unloved. The truth is that the adults had their own issues going on with denial and they didn’t have any emotional availability to take my fear and anger seriously. They just saw me as a cute kid who was upset.  Even though my truth was my truth, I took in the way the adults around me responded as deep emotional abandonment, believing that no one in the world will ever hear me or get me – I am all alone with the pain. To this day, if there are people around me who don’t believe or validate me emotionally, I detach from them quickly. Yes, there may be deeper emotions I need to process with a therapist around this, but the simple awareness that I have a fundamental need of being believed and validated, has helped me understand how much I have created my whole world from that wound. Who I chose as friends, enemies and causes I took on, came from that place of the wounded inner child. If I could have just simply validated myself and just believed in my truth, I may not have had to spend a ton of energy feeling lonely, abandoned or betrayed.   

I invite you to really examine your inner child’s wounds and needs whenever you notice yourself over-reacting or under-reacting to something. As the Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families program says: “We need to take a blameless inventory of ourselves and our parents. We can become our own loving parent”.