You Were Taught to Survive, Not to Thrive; Unpacking the Layers of Inner Child Healing
- Elaine Elizabeth
- Mar 31
- 10 min read
A picture is worth a thousand words and we look back at pictures and typically feel a flood of emotions, warmth, security, happiness, sadness, anger, it can be a complex thing and what we don't realize is that this is the gateway to an aspect of Inner Child Healing
love and Prescence was bought
Sundays was our special day, the new sales flyer would come out for Kmart or Kohls and Grandma would get herself and I ready to go out shopping, she would have her Diet Pepsi, a Marlboro Light and country music on in the background and I would watch as she meticulously curled her lashes and applied her lipstick, as a child the whole process seemed to take hours and I would get antsy to leave and when we finally did I enjoyed every moment of it
While this was a happy memory what was really being built here was far more complex, I lived with my Mom and Grandma and my Grandma mainly took care of me because my Mom was still growing up herself, my Grandma was an over worker and a perfectionist and was emotionally absent and angry most of the time unless we were shopping, I learned that love is conditional and transactional, emotions live in things, and that affection was only allotted for a certain time frame of the week. I grew up with an insatiable shopping habit and a desperate hunger for emotional nurturing and I knew that if I wanted to change the way I was in relationships, or my addictive personality, I would need to look at how they started, what void or core need they were meeting and how I could begin to meet those needs within myself.
It's Not necessarily about going back, its about being able to do for yourself what you needed then, in order to begin to rewrite the way you respond today. It's and integration process, softening each of these armored parts of yourself, to reveal the inner truth of you.
Think to your childhood, were there any times where you felt that love and affection needed to be earned?
This Is Not About blame or not having it "bad enough"
Before we go any further, I want you to know, that you do not have to have a childhood filled with dramatic pain for this to be true for you, children have enormous emotional needs and parents are human, they are busy, they are parenting from what they were taught, they are doing what they think they should do rather than what the child in front of them actually needs, and that is not about blame, it is about understanding that unless a parent is deeply emotionally aware and regulated, they will miss things, they will miss you sometimes, and those moments of being missed are where the fractures begin
For me, that is how it was, and every time I was dismissed I absorbed the message that I was not worthy of being heard, or felt like a burden, every time I was told to stop crying I learned that my feelings were too much, that I was too sensitive, that the safest thing I could do was feel less, every time my mom chose to leave instead of stay I felt the specific weight of not mattering, and I did not have words for any of this then, what I had was a child's logic, and a child's logic builds armor and molds to get their needs met in the way their parents respond to.
That armor is not a weakness or a brokenness, but the most intelligent way a nervous system could do
And this is where the ongoing process happens, not in finding the one wound, not in locating the single moment everything went wrong, because it was never one moment, it was an accumulation, it was the morning after morning of small dismissals, the slow learning that certain feelings were not safe to have, certain needs were not safe to voice r felt like it didn't matter, and each one of those moments created a version of you that made a decision about how to survive, and that version is still in there, still running the same strategy, still trying to protect you from something that already happened
Inner child healing is the process of finding each of those versions and letting them know the moment they were built for is over, you are not integrating one child, you are integrating every age you learned to go quiet
This work is not just about finding where you got hurt, it is equally about finding where you got lit up, because most of us have been on autopilot for so long that we have completely lost touch with what actually fuels us, and I mean beneath the obligations, beneath the roles, beneath everything you are supposed to want, if you removed all of it and someone asked you what brings you joy, a lot of us would go quiet in a way that has nothing to do with peace
The things that made you come alive as a child, before you were taught to be practical, before you were told that was not a real career or that you were too much or not enough, those things were not phases, they were data, they were your essence showing itself before the world had a chance to talk you out of it, and that essence is still in there, it did not go anywhere, it just went quiet the same way you did when you learned that quiet was safer
So when we talk about going back, we are going back for all of it, we are going back to dissolve what was never true about you, to reclaim what always was, the innocence, the curiosity, the particular way you loved things before you learned to second guess yourself, that is not childish, that is the most real version of you that exists, and integration means you get to bring all of that forward into the life you are living right now.
What is something that you loved to do as a child, but as you got older you stopped- or was there anything that you loved doing, but people didn't understand so they told you to stop?
The origins of inner child healing
The concept itself has been around longer than the language we use for it, Carl Jung was one of the first to name it, writing that inside every adult lives an eternal child, something that is always becoming, never finished, always asking to be tended to, and he also identified what he called the wounded child as part of the deeper work of becoming whole, the work of integrating what we have pushed into the shadows back into a conscious and unified self
In the 1980s Richard Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems, which is a framework that maps the inner world as a whole system of parts, each part carrying its own history, its own role, its own way of trying to keep you safe, and what IFS makes so clear is that none of these parts are bad, even the ones that self sabotage, even the ones that shut down or rage or people please, every single one of them was trying to protect something tender underneath, and that tender thing at the center is what Schwartz calls the Self, the part of you that was never actually broken
Then in the 1990s John Bradshaw brought the phrase wounded inner child into the mainstream and gave people permission to look back not with blame but with understanding, what all of these frameworks keep arriving at is the same truth, the parts of us that did not get to complete their story do not disappear, they wait, they show up in our relationships, in our patterns, in the quiet ways we abandon ourselves without even realizing that is what we are doing
Barriers that arise from doing this work
One of the biggest places people get stopped before they even begin is the belief that they do not have the right to do this work. What this usually sounds like, is something like "my parents did the best they could" or "I did not have it that bad"- both of those things can be completely true AND there can still be places inside of you where what you needed, and what they knew how to give, simply did not match. We are not here to put anyone on trial, we are not excavating your childhood to assign blame, we are simply getting honest about the dissonance, because that dissonance regardless of anyone's intentions is where the fractures formed and where the armor was built
Some people avoid this work because life is full and there is always something more pressing, the kids, the job, the endless list of things that feel more urgent than sitting with yourself, I understand that completely AND what I also know, is that the unmet places do not wait patiently, they show up in every relationship you have, in every moment you abandon your own needs, in every time you feel a reaction that seems bigger than the moment in front of you, the work finds you whether you go looking for it or not.
And then there are people who start to sense how deep this goes and they pull back, because it is deep, this is not a weekend workshop that fixes everything and sends you home lighter, this is a living practice, it asks something real of you, AND what it gives back is also real. It is not the performance of healing, it is the actual feeling of coming home to yourself, and that is worth every uncomfortable moment it takes to get there
The benefits of healing your inner child
When you begin to integrate these fragmented parts of yourself something shifts that is very hard to describe until you have felt it. It is not a dramatic transformation that happens all at once, it is more like a slow returning.
I spent years quieting my voice, shrinking my reactions, apologizing for feeling things deeply, and telling myself that my sensitivity was a problem to manage, and now I feel without the shame attached to the feeling. I am not too sensitive, I am accurately sensitive- my voice needs to be heard, I have things to say that are worthwhile- and I am worthy of love that stays, not emotionally unavailable people. There is a profound difference between those two things that you can only understand once you have felt it in your own body.
I used to live waiting for the next thing to go wrong, always scanning, always preparing, always one foot out of the present moment because the present moment never felt safe enough to fully BE in. Now here I am, a messy human that, appreciates the full existence of life- not just the polished parts- I have compassion for myself and know what my needs are and how to get them.
I create now because it feeds something real in me and not because I am performing productivity or proving my worth, I have stopped doing things that felt heavy and inauthentic and I have replaced them with actions that have actual purpose behind them and that shift alone changed the entire energy of my days.
And then there are my kids, I am a different mother because of this work. I can be playful and anchored and genuinely present with them in a way that I could not access before. I can meet them where they are instead of reacting from where I was at their ages, and what that has created between us is a trust that I do not take lightly. My son and my daughter both trust me in a way that did not happen by accident, it happened because I was willing to go back and meet the little girl in me so I could actually show up for the people in front of me who needed me most.
This is why the work matters, not just for you, but for everyone you love and connect with- it gives you a broader scope of humanity and a shared lived experience. Inner Child Healing gives you not just an abstract concept, but an actual felt stability within you- a way to manage your responses and way to feel the most authentic version of you that you have ever felt and a fulfillment that allows for you to connect deeply with your loved ones and with life- your relationship to everything becomes a a bit lighter and more vibrant.
You were never broken, you were never taught how to be fully you, and there is a difference between those two things that changes everything. One is a verdict filled with shame and one is simply an incomplete story, that is waiting to be rewritten. The parts of you that went quiet, that learned to need less, that built walls so intelligent and so subtle you stopped noticing they were there, those parts are not your damage, they are your history. You have always been whole, you have just been waiting for someone to remind you, and maybe that someone is you.
If any of this brought up some physical or emotional response, or it just got you curious- that is not an accident, that is the part of you that has been waiting for permission to be met. And I want you to know that you do not have to figure out how to do this alone, because that is actually the pattern we are trying to heal, the one that learned to do everything by herself.
I have created two ways to walk this path depending on where you are and what you feel ready for
is a month long program built as a creative pathway back to yourself, moving through four distinct phases, Safety, Spark, Self Compassion and Reparenting, each week building on the last, using somatic awareness, art journaling, breathwork, childhood photos and daily reflection to gently trace where you learned to go quiet and begin the process of coming back, the destination is not becoming someone new, it is coming home to who you always were.
If you are not quite ready for the full journey
the Inner Child Sound Medizen Session is where you begin, it is a single guided sound experience using sound vibration, breathwork and gentle imagery to help you meet one version of your inner child from a grounded and safe place. Sound softens the body and quiets the mental noise that keeps us defended and in that softened state emotional clarity becomes possible without overwhelm, after the session we sit together and talk through what came forward and you leave with tools to continue the process in your own time.
Both of these are an invitation and neither requires you to have it all figured out before you begin, the only thing required is a willingness to turn toward yourself with a little more tenderness than you did yesterday
What you are searching for isn’t "ahead of you"… it’s within the parts you learned to leave behind.
Sending infinite love to all parts of you-
Elaine
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