Looking At Your Inner Child

A teaching lesson (not a meditation) to help look at your inner child, and reconnect with the emotions of your inner child - thereby having a grasp of organized control over your reactions. When feeling overwhelmed, impatient or reactive, ask yourself: “How old do I feel right now,” “What is the inner child feeling (anger, pain, fear, shame, guilt, joy, passion, love)?” “Where is my inner child?” “What did I need at that age?” “What am I needing today that I also needed as a child?”

Transcript

Hi,

My name is Angela and I'm going to be talking to you today about re-parenting your inner child.

When we are overwhelmed and reactive and we're in a place of imbalance emotionally,

Maybe we notice that we're impatient or lose our temper easily or even get our feelings hurt and take things very personally,

We are regressing back to a very young state and your emotions are taking over you.

So the first thing to start with is asking yourself the question,

How old do I feel right now?

And when you do that,

A lot of times we'll just come up with our chronological age,

Which would be your current adult age.

But if you can guess what feels like that age,

So when you were younger,

If you noticed that you were very reactive and yelling or slamming doors or throwing things or stomping your feet or even uncontrollably crying or being speechless,

Whatever it is,

If you're able to slow down and identify an age where in your mind's eye are you,

Do you remember being in your bedroom?

Do you remember being in the middle of a living room and arguments?

Do you remember being at school where you felt a certain way that feels similar to your present state?

If you are identifying in the younger state,

You are able to recognize maybe where you felt powerless,

Maybe where you needed more nurturance,

Maybe you needed more connection and feeling safe.

And if you were in the teenage regressed age,

Maybe you needed to be able to have your voice and be heard or understood very specific.

What did I need to hear?

What did I need to have happen?

What did I need in my environment?

And get connected with the place of acceptance of wherever you are at that it's okay to have that feeling.

Once you identify your age,

You identify what you needed.

If at the time you identify,

I'm feeling six years old,

I'm throwing my phone,

I'm slamming doors,

I'm yelling,

I'm not listening to the other person,

I'm feeling anger and I'm feeling hurt and I'm feeling out of control.

And what I'm needing is I'm needing to be heard,

I'm needing to be held,

I'm needing things to feel safe or feel fair.

And then you bring it back to the present.

So identifying what I'm needing is for my partner to slow down and actually hear me out.

I'm needing my partner to give me physical affection right now and just hold me.

Being able to identify this will help you feel a sense of organized control around your emotions instead of feeling dysregulated or disorganized and in that reactive regressed state.

Letting any emotion be present.

Look at your emotions on a continuum and no matter if they're comfortable or uncomfortable,

You label them as just feelings rather than these are my positive feelings and these are my negative feelings.

So you end up helping that inner child reactive state.

You help yourself be able to be in a place of acceptance with whatever emotions come your way and being able to recognize them.

So the eight basic emotions are anger,

Pain,

Fear,

Shame,

Guilt,

Joy,

Passion and love.

Allowing yourself to take action around that and nurturing yourself.

So thank you for listening and I will talk to you next time.