The inner child

The inner child

There is a child in all of us who will never grow up.

Or rather, there are many childlike personality traits in us, one at every childish age. Each part in turn has many different aspects: one playful, one boisterous, one shy, one loved, one unloved, one neglected and many more. The inner child is a simplified term for a complex childlike inner world that exists in each of us. Put simply, the inner child is the part of our being that is emotional and vulnerable.

Many books have been published* about the inner child and you could actually write endless chapters about it because, as I said, the term “inner child” stands for very complex inner worlds.

I will therefore only discuss the inner child in general terms here and try to summarize the essentials.   

The following image is helpful for me: We are born as purely vulnerable beings who are completely dependent on the loving care of those around us. With each passing year, we develop more abilities with which we can assert ourselves in life. They grow around our vulnerable core, like the annual rings of a tree. The inner core, however, still exists and will never disappear. All the experiences and feelings of the infant are stored in it, just as the experiences of the toddler, older child, pre-pubertal child and adolescent are stored in the rings that have grown around it.

This process of growth never stops, of course, even when we are adults. But I focus on the child that we once were, because as adults we are still the “product” of our childhood. This is where the personality is born with which we assert ourselves in life today, with which we live, love, hate, have relationships, work and unfortunately often struggle ;). 

The development from infant or even child in the womb to a truly holistically healthy adult has been able to take place undisturbed for very few of us. Our parents were often overwhelmed by the task of lovingly supporting us physically, mentally and emotionally on this journey. This is not surprising when you consider that they too were once children with parents who were perhaps equally overwhelmed.