Inner Child Healing Therapy for Parents in Miami
Do you ever notice the younger version of yourself coming out when you are in parent mode?
You're at the park and you see another child push your 1-year-old child. This can make your hurt inner child who other kids teased come out. You become defensive of your child around other kids.
You're watching your 8-year-old perform in the school show. Suddenly, your inner child remembers your parents never made it to your school shows. Remembering how you felt as a child, you become upset. You have a hard time being present while watching your child perform.
Your 12-year-old child is going out with friends on her own for the first time. Your inner child who faced unwanted advances comes out. You become stricter with your daughter, causing a rupture in your relationship.
As you grow older, you gain more perspective. Parenting is a whole new vantage point. Parenting gives you a new understanding of what you lived through as a child. It becomes harder to push aside your own painful childhood experiences.
Inner child healing therapy for parents in Miami helps you heal from your pain as a child. This healing helps you be the parent you want to be.
What Does “Inner Child” Mean?
We all have an inner child that lives within us. Your inner child remembers what it was personally like for you in childhood. Your inner child may remember your more innocent, carefree, and joyful times.
But, no one’s childhood is perfect. Your childhood may have included very painful experiences. If you never had the chance to heal, your inner child can still feel the hurt today.
How Your Inner Child Gets Hurt
No one comes out of childhood without an experience that upset or hurt them.
An unmet physical, social, or emotional need can hurt your inner child.
(Remember that, as a parent, it’s impossible to meet a child’s every single need. To learn more about this, check out our post on feeling like a failure as a parent).
The type and intensity of needs that go unmet vary quite a bit from person to person. Some examples are:
A family dynamic that left you with an unmet emotional need. Your parents and family didn't allow you to express emotions like anger, sadness, shame, and guilt.
Classmates teased you for no good reason. You felt lonely. You had an unmet social need.
Childhood emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse left you with unmet emotional, social, and/or physical needs.
Your inner child remembers what it felt like for you as a child when your need went unmet. If you never had the chance to process and heal from the hurt of your unmet need, it can lead to an inner child injury. An inner child injury means that the hurt of your unmet need can emerge anytime as you are going about your life. This includes parenting situations that remind you of your unmet need. Inner child injuries are addressed in inner child healing therapy for parents.
Types of Inner Child Injuries
Different kinds of needs that go unmet during childhood create different kinds of inner child wounds. One of the most common types of inner child injuries that parenting can trigger is feeling unworthy, aka a worthiness injury.
The Worthiness Injury
Many people learn that they must always please others to be fully accepted and loved by them. As a child, you may have learned that you needed to behave in a certain way - like getting the best grades, never getting in trouble, never showing intense emotions even when you felt them - for your parents or others to be happy with you.
When you acted how they wanted you to, they showed you more love and acceptance.
When you didn’t act how they wanted you to and they believed you let them down, they didn’t show you unconditional love or acceptance.
You learned to believe that love is conditional, that it depends on what others think of you, and that you can please others by acting how they want you to act.
This teaches you that people pleasing, perfectionism, and never letting someone else down is necessary at all costs.
Your personal worthiness gets deeply tied up with what others think of you. Sometimes we have to let someone else down to live true to ourselves and our values. A worthiness injury can prevent you from living by your values and enjoying your life.
Parenting is especially good at activating the unworthiness feeling. A worthiness inner child injury can make you feel like you’re not doing enough as a parent. It can make you feel and believe that you are failing as a parent.
You can check yourself for a worthiness injury. Ask yourself: “can I let another person down to stay true to myself?”
Other Common Inner Child Injuries
Guilt Injury – You have an extremely difficult time setting boundaries with other people. You often feel “bad” for your actions. You don’t like to ask things of others.
Trust Injury – Your priority is to avoid getting hurt by someone else. You often feel lonely. You don’t let others in for fear of getting hurt by them. It is also difficult to trust yourself.
How We Deal with Inner Child Pain As Children
As children, we survive. We are wired to gain acceptance and love, especially by parents.
We all deserve acceptance and love that is free of rules and conditions. But we usually try to get any acceptance and love we can as children, in accordance with the way it is being offered to us.
We may find ourselves playing by our parents’ or friends’ rules and acting the way they want us to act. Along the way, we may develop people pleasing and perfectionistic tendencies and an inner child injury.
How We Deal with Inner Child Pain As Adults
Without inner child healing, your inner child harbors the hurt of your unmet needs into adulthood.
Inner child pain can show up in different ways as an adult. Inner child pain can make it hard to…
… feel content with your truest self
… know what you most value in life
… take care of yourself
… have satisfying relationships with others
… feel accepted by others
… choose and stick with a career direction
When your needs are going unmet day-in and day-out as a child, your mind convinces you it's better to tuck away the pain. This is your mind’s default survival strategy. Your mind activates this strategy automatically and without asking you.
When you’re not living in the situation anymore, your inner child pain can hit even harder. This is because you have a new perspective on it. Becoming a parent does exactly this – it gives you a new vantage point on how you were parented and reminds you of what that unmet need felt like for you. Your mind may still resort to tucking away the painful thoughts and feelings, trying to push them back into your past, like it did when you were a child. But, this survival strategy doesn’t work anymore because you are no longer in the situation. Without inner child healing, the hurt tends to hang around.
How Inner Child Pain Affects You As A Parent
Becoming a parent and actually parenting has a way of bringing new light to our inner child wounds, making them feel even more painful and harder to neatly tuck away.
Whether or not you agreed with the way your parents parented you, their parenting style automatically becomes a parental model for your mind. As a parent yourself, you may want to improve upon it or you may want to replicate it.
Stepping into the parent role for yourself can make you suddenly have a new perspective on your own experiences growing up and being parented. Motivated by the deep love you have for your own child may make you question how your parents, how any adult, could possibly do this parenting thing differently than you.
Alongside trying to figure out your own parenting style, you may be feeling a whole range of emotions around the way you were parented.
How could someone not parent with as much love as you are parenting with?
How could someone have not stood up for an innocent young child in the same way you would for yours?
How could someone put limits on giving an innocent child love?
Being a parent to your child makes you more aware of what you went through because you see it through new eyes, the eyes of your child.
Signs Your Inner Child Is Coming Out and Hurting
You can ask yourself a few questions to check if your inner child is coming out and hurting.
Begin by asking yourself, “what in my current life really gets me upset and is hard to let go of?”
This could be feeling judged or a serious hit to your self-confidence when others give you parenting advice. Or it could be difficulty setting boundaries with other people like friends, at work, or with parents and in-laws. Or it could be trusting others and letting them in.
When you find yourself really harping on something and you can’t let it go, it could be a sign of an inner child wound that is unhealed.
Next, ask yourself “what did I need as a child that I didn’t get?”
See if there are ways that need is still going unmet in your relationships as an adult.
Inner Child Healing Therapy for Parents
Healing your inner child involves getting curious about and better understanding those moments that really get you worked up and are hard to let go of.
Inner child healing therapy can include:
Going back to those critical childhood moments, getting in touch with your inner child and their unmet needs, and finding ways to give your inner child what they never got but needed
Cccepting that the pain you experienced as a child happened, no matter how much it shouldn’t have
Understanding the effects of those critical childhood moments on yourself as an adult and as a parent now
Checking whether your parenting decisions are driven by your inner child and your inner child’s hurt or by your personal values
This healing is best done in a safe, comfortable, private space that is dedicated to you. This type of healing is often done with a therapist who deeply understands how one’s inner child can impact parenting and to whom you feel connected.
As an example, in therapy with me, we create safe space for the feelings you couldn’t feel as a child to let them out, begin healing from them, and get on the path to being the parent you want to be.
How Do I Stop The Cycle?
You may be wondering how you can make sure your child doesn’t experience the same injuries you and your inner child experienced.
As an adult, you can teach your child the skills that were never taught to you for how to handle moments when our needs go unmet.
Just considering these topics, reading this article, asking yourself questions to see if your inner child is coming out and hurting, or being in inner child healing therapy is enough.
Healing is a journey. The goal is not to be healed vs. being unhealed but rather a gradual process of healing. You may find it helpful to instead view this as a journey of self-discovery.
When the decisions you make as you go about your life are driven by your personal values and not by your inner child’s wounds, your inner child is experiencing significant healing.
Online Therapy for Moms in Miami, FL Who Want Inner Child Healing Therapy
If you’re a mom in Miami who’s struggling with the issues mentioned in this blog, you can reach out for therapy with Natal Counseling. Clinical psychologist and Miami-based therapist Dr. Marisa Perera, PhD, is a maternal and parental mental health expert. Dr. Perera specializes in therapy for parents in Miami and wants to help you be the parent you want to be. You deserve fulfillment and enjoyment, and we can help you get to a place where you find it.
Additional Counseling Services at Natal Counseling in Miami, FL
Counseling services curated for you to help you access a happier, more fulfilling, and calmer life. As one of the few reproductive psychologists in the country, Dr. Marisa Perera, PhD, has years of training and expertise in fertility, perinatal, and maternal wellness. Natal Counseling specializes in infertility counseling, therapy for fertility stress, and therapy for miscarriage and pregnancy loss. We are also experts in helping you with healing from anxiety, postpartum anxiety treatment, postpartum depression treatment, and birth trauma and postpartum PTSD healing. No matter where you are located in Florida, we are available to you with online therapy in Florida and in-person therapy in Coral Gables, FL. We know how stressful and unpredictable life can be. We would be honored to support you through your journey.
