inner-child work

On a recent episode of our podcast, Joe and I talked about inner-child work and the benefits we’ve felt from practicing these exercises especially from the standpoint of growing up in an evangelical home. 

Regardless of the kind of home you grew up in, this kind of work can be super healing! So I want to share a little more about my experiences from it. 

Inner-child work has to do with reconnecting with your childlike self or essence in an attempt to heal or nurture her now as your current, adult self. The first time I heard about this, it sounded super trippy and weird. What?! I have an inner child self who needs to be comforted and has unresolved wounds?!

Yes. 

Once I got over my initial reaction to the concept, I saw the truth to it. If you stop and think for a second, you can easily recall times recently where you behaved like a child. We all have times when our inner child controls how we view things and how we react to things. 

Understanding the value of this work comes with trying it out. So let’s begin. 

Find a quiet room, play some calming music, and get into a comfortable position. Make your dog lay down and stop staring at you in that creepy way and close your eyes. Imagine yourself outside in nature and visualize your current self walking up to your child self playing. You can choose any age. Choose the age that you immediately see. Sit down and talk to that child. Listen to her, play with her, hold her in your lap. What would you tell her? What would you say to her? What does she say to you?

This exercise can be very powerful. The first time I did this, I started crying merely at the sight of little me playing under a tree. I took this to mean, my child self needed some love and attention from my adult self. 

Another thing that I took away was how weird this was. The first time I experienced this, I was half in and half out. It was cool, but it was strange to imagine talking to my younger self as if I were a crazy person. “I can never tell anyone how transcendental I’m getting…” (oops)

Because of this, it was a little while before I tried it again. About a couple months later, after a particularly relaxing evening where I was laying on the floor listening to spa music, I felt the desire to talk to my inner child again. I was feeling great and indifferent to how strange such a conversation would seem to anyone else because after all, it was silently occurring in my own head. 

I thought, “what if I revisited some uncomfortable memories of myself when I felt shy or unworthy?”

Instantly a memory popped into my head. I was 11 or 12, and I was at a small-town hair salon shadowing a hairstylist for Shadow Day. Did you have that at your school? You were supposed to think of a career you might enjoy, reach out to someone who already had that career, and see what it was like. It’s actually a really cool concept. I was into fashion, makeup, and hair at the time, and the career I came up with was a hairstylist. Here is my memory of it:

(Welcome to the deepest, most insecure corners of my brain)

I got to the salon early in the morning before everyone’s shift had started. I don’t remember the name of the woman I shadowed, but let’s call her Diane. One of the stylists was drinking a can of Pepsi and said, “I need to get this taste of toothpaste out of my mouth” which even as a 12 year old, I thought was a dumb thing to say. “You want to replace the fresh taste of clean teeth with the taste of chemical syrup?!” I remember feeling super shy, awkward, and in the way the whole day. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do there. I was so worried about being quiet, shy, and not having any questions to ask that I was quiet, shy, and didn’t have any questions to ask. Soon into the day I realized I didn’t want to do this job. I have to be honest here, even as an insecure child, I had a lot of judgements of people. I could sense that the people working at this salon were small-minded and ambition-less so became uninterested in it as a career. I didn’t want to grow up and be them. I still had to be there through the whole day, and I hated it. In the afternoon, a girl who was a little older than me came in to get her hair done. She was cool. In my memory she was popular and everyone thought she was so pretty. She was wearing a denim jacket and had beautiful long, thick brown hair. As the stylist cut her hair, I remember her looking at her phone (did cell phones exist then?) and looking effortlessly calm and chic. At the end, her hair was even cooler (can you believe it?!) with layers and volume. I remember her looking at herself in the mirror completely satisfied with the way she looked as everyone around her cooed and complimented her. And I stood behind feeling like a loser with stringy hair, round Harry Potter glasses, crooked teeth, and yesterday’s style. 

“There she is!” I thought in real time. There is that little, insecure girl. And that’s how I still view myself, even though I know it’s not true, even though I have changed so much. There was still a part of me that uses that to define myself today!

In my mind, I entered this memory again. I stood by my child self and talked to her all day as if I were her older sister.

“Okay, don’t worry about a thing. I’m here with you now. You can talk to me. You’re not alone.”

“Yes, you don’t realize it yet, but you live in a small town. You probably don’t want to work in a place like this, but that’s okay that these people do.”

“It sucks that you had to feel so small and awkward; nobody wants to feel like that, but I’m sure everyone experiences it at some point. You don’t have to feel like this your whole life, though; there are ways to learn how to be comfortable in your own skin.”

“That girl is really pretty, but that doesn’t mean she’s better than you. She has confidence and you can learn to have that, too.”

“Come with me! We’re going to go get some fun things. I’ll help you with your style.”

And then I visualized my adult self taking my younger self shopping, styling her, painting her nails, talking to her about confidence and being there for her. 

Self care on a deeper level…

It sounds so simple, but in the moment, picturing my older self talking to my younger self was profound because my younger self felt such a deep connection and felt fully understood (because it’s me, duh!) and therefore, felt way more cared for than if it was anyone else comforting me. I needed attention from myself! 

I entered another memory. This one wasn’t as significant, and I’m not really sure what brought it to my mind. It was the day after I had picked out my first pair of glasses in fourth grade. My mom had helped me pick them out. I tried on a metal-rimmed, round pair that my mom thought was cute. I remember not being sure about them, but my mom kept saying, “You look so cute! You look so cute!” I didn’t want to look cute, but was too easily influenced to choose this pair. The next day at school, I remember walking down the hall, around the corner to my locker, setting my books on the floor, and a friend excitedly asking me to show her my glasses: “Let’s see!”

I took them out of the case quietly and showed her. I don’t remember the reaction, but I remember I felt so self conscious. 

This time, with adult me by my side, I told my child self that I’m allowed to choose what I want. I let myself pick out the pair of glasses I thought I looked best in. I helped myself not pick one that was too cutsie because I knew that was the opposite of what I wanted. Once we picked the best pair, I styled my younger self again. I gave her a really good pep talk, treated her like a best friend—an adult and not a child—and walked her down the hall. I told her how proud of her I was and sent her off to class with a wink. 

I’m not sure what made me think of these two memories, but they popped into my head at the time, and I lightly followed them along replacing the bad bits of memory with encouragement from myself. I may not have remembered these past events accurately at all (in fact, there is a good chance I didn’t), but they were still being used to inform my current self and life for better or worse. 

I forgot about this exercise and a couple days passed. To my surprise, when I thought back on the memories, they no longer existed in the same way. I didn’t have the same feelings attached to them; I didn’t feel a pang in my stomach thinking back on how insecure of a child I was. I remember my adult self with me the whole time. WHICH IS CRAZY! I didn’t intend to produce this effect, but it makes sense to me. What is a memory? It isn’t concrete; it can be altered apparently. And altering it can affect your future. My memory was telling me a story about myself. But if I go back and reframe past memories, I can change the way I remember them, and alter my current story.

Trippy.

grasping onto stress

Honestly when I started writing this post, I was only interested in expressing a certain amount of exasperation and humor that my mind (and I’m sure others’ minds) love being stressed so much. But since starting this, I’ve read some things that have helped me move beyond the annoyance of desiring stress and have given me an extra boost of hope to change. It turned out being a lot more positive than I thought which surprised me because I am (use to be?) a very cynical, jaded, pessimistic, sarcastic person in every area. But now am somehow becoming annoyingly positive haha (but let me keep some sarcasm tho). Hope you enjoy. 

Lately I have been noticing how annoyingly attached I am to stress, worry, and anxiety. A bunch of times over the last few months I have found myself wanting to come back to and remember a previous thought spiral. I’ll sit down to relax, and think, “now…what was I just worrying about? I need to think about it a little more…”

NO!

It’s almost laughable. Like I said, I’ve caught myself doing this multiple times already, and that just means I was probably doing it unconsciously before! 

My mind is trying so hard to grasp onto thoughts and memories that make me feel stressed/upset/embarrassed. Recently I was peeling the sticker off of a nectarine and tried to throw it into the trash. It was almost like slapstick comedy—it kept sticking on another finger; I couldn’t get rid of it! It’s like my brain and stress. I’m trying to shake this stress sticker into the garbage, but it keeps getting stuck on me again. I’m addicted to feeling this way.

It makes sense. Now that anxiety is more widely talked about and happens to be such a hot topic in the self help industry, I’ve read more and more about it. You can be and probably are addicted to anxiety. You can get addicted to any emotion for that matter.

The first time I realized I had a problem with anxiety was a year into our move to Portland. Every day I was waking up with an “anxiety belly” as I liked to call it. Maybe you would call it a “pit in your stomach.” I would wake up with the pit almost every day, but at the time, I didn’t think it was unusual. I was going through a career change, going to meet new people, and be a part of new photo shoots. So on meeting days, conference call days, and shoot days, I would get an anxiety belly right away in the morning simply anticipating the discomfort of those things. This seemed normal. It’s okay to be nervous, right? Nerves just mean you care, right? Hmmmm.

It became a problem for me when I would wake up with the pit on days that nothing was happening—on a weekend or an off day. I didn’t understand it then, but it was definitely a learned reaction by repetition and association. What is happening to me most mornings? I’m waking up with anxiety in my same bed, my same home, my same mind. So why wouldn’t I wake up every day with that same pit in my stomach? My body was used to it.

I finally went to see a doctor—a naturopath. She probably told me I was addicted to anxiety, but I wasn’t ready to hear and understand that yet. 

(Does that ever happen to you? You look back and realize you “heard” something long ago, but it didn’t “take”?)

I do, however, remember my blood test results came back showing very overworked adrenal glands. I had never heard of adrenals before, and I’m about to give you some googled wisdom about them. Adrenal glands produce hormones that help regulate your body’s metabolism, immune system, blood pressure, and response to stress. I think they are best known with regards to the stress response because they are in charge of secreting adrenaline and cortisol which, put simply, gets you ready to take fast action in a stressful situ. In this scenario, your body is is fight or flight mode. But instead of running from a bear, we are running from the stressors of our modern life. Money, work, deadlines, social situations all can cause the fight or flight response. 

Okay so what happens if your body doesn’t calm back down from that fight or flight response? What happens if you are stressed all the time? To put it simply, your adrenals are constantly producing adrenaline and cortisol, your body thinks those hormones are the priority, and so it neglects the other important processes in your body.

At this point, I get it. Yes, long term stress is bad, but now I’m stressed that I have long term stress. I don’t know how to react to this other than being stressed because I’m addicted to being stressed. 

I’m looking back at this right now and thinking… “I’ve known this for so long; why has it taken me so long to take it seriously?” Learn from me.

As you may know, I have a small meditation practice. I’m not in the habit of doing it every day, but I have seen dramatic improvements to my headspace from regualr meditation. I’m very interested in the mind and what makes us who we are and what we do consciously and unconsciously, so naturally I was interested when my husband started reading a book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

The book is along a similar vein to what I’m talking about now. There are chemicals secreted when you think a thought that signal your body to match your thoughts with a feeling. If you think an anxious thought, your body will feel anxious:

“You do not think in a vacuum. Every time you have a thought, there is a biochemical reaction in the brain—you make a chemical. And as you’ll learn, the brain then releases specific chemical signals to the body, where they act as messengers of the thought. When the body gets these chemical messages from the brain, it complies instantly by initiating a matching set of reactions directly in alignment with what the brain is thinking. Then the body immediately sends a confirming message back up to the brain that it’s now feeling exactly the way the brain is thinking.”

In turn, a repeated process of thinking anxious thoughts and producing matching anxious feelings can result in a chemical addiction to your stress. 

(In this next quoted block, I substituted the author’s example emotion of ‘guilt’ with our example emotion ‘stress.’)

“It’s like living for years near an airport. You get so used to the noise that you no longer hear it consciously, unless one jet flies lower than usual and the roar of its engines is so much louder that it gets your attention. The same thing happens to our cells. As a result, they literally become desensitized to the chemical feeling of [anxiety]; they will require a stronger, more powerful emotion from you—a higher threshold of stimuli—to turn on the next time. And when that stronger “hit” of [anxiety] chemicals gets the body’s attention, your cells “perk up” at that stimulation…And when each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher threshold of [anxiety] to turn them on. Now the body demands a stronger emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to [anxiety] by your own doing.”

An initial response to learning that you may be addicted to an emotion—or that (like I learned before) prolonged bad emotions such as stress can be very unhealthy for you—could be more of that same emotion. When I found out I was too stressed, that caused me more stress.

But if you think about it, stress is an emotion I have memorized so well that it has become my reaction to almost any news, so why would I feel any differently? When you see your unwanted emotional reaction as simply a learned response because of years of repetition, you can better understand that it’s not you. It is only a part of you. If you can learn this emotion, then you can unlearn it. 

Once I realized stress was not an integral part of who I am, it made it easier to see hope for change. I think one of the biggest lessons I have learned over the past few years is that there is hope for change. If you believe—like I used to—that “I am this way, and I can’t change,” change becomes almost impossible.

It’s a very simple message but can be difficult to truly apply to your life. It took me while to get it, and there are still some things I’m struggling to believe can change. I’m still working on it, too.

I am continuing “breaking the habit” of stress in my life. I no longer want to grasp onto it when my mind tries to relax and rest. And the first step to that is waking up and becoming conscious to what is ruling my life. When you start to separate yourself from your stress, you can start to practice different reactions and responses, and reframe the way you view the world. 

I’m not an expert yet in changing my emotional addictions, but I believe change starts with awareness!

For more practical purposes, there is a meditation practice at the end of the book quoted above designed to break you out of unwanted habits. I just started this process, so I’ll let you know how it goes!

Here are some extra quotes I loved from Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself if you are interested in reading a little more! 

“There’s a certain synchronicity that takes place moment by moment between the brain and the body. In fact, as we begin to feel the way we are thinking—because the brain is in constant communication with the body—we begin to think the way we are feeling. The brain constantly monitors the way the body is feeling. Based on the chemical feedback it receives, it will generate more thoughts that produce chemicals corresponding to the way the body is feeling, so that we first begin to feel the way we think and then to think the way we feel.”

“…years of thinking certain thoughts, and then feeling the same way, and then thinking equal to those feelings (the hamster in the wheel) creates a memorized state of being in which we can emphatically declare our I am statement as an absolute.”

“It is one of the many masks of your personality that you have memorized. It started from an emotional reaction to an event in your life, which lingered into a mood, which developed into a temperament, which created your personality. This emotion has become the memory of yourself. It speaks nothing about your future. Your attachment to it means that you are mentally and physically bound by your past.”

“…that seems normal to you now. You don’t even have to think about feeling [anxious]—you just are that way. Not only is your mind not conscious of how you express your [anxious] state by way of the things you say and do, but your body wants to feel its accustomed level of [anxiety], because that’s what you have trained it to do. You have become unconsciously [anxious] most of the time—your body has become the mind of [anxiety].”

“The body becomes addicted to [anxiety] or any emotion in the same way that it would get addicted to drugs. At first you only need a little of the emotion/drug in order to feel it; then your body becomes desensitized, and your cells require more and more of it just to feel the same again. Trying to change your emotional pattern is like going through drug withdrawal.”