What is Inner Child? Understanding How Your Inner Child Affects Your Relationships

What is Inner Child?

There are many ways you may hear the term Inner Child described. It can be referred to as the Inner Child (IC), the little one, ego states, or Parts. While the language differs, they are all referring to the same concept.

The Inner Child represents the younger parts of us – particularly from ages 0 to 7 – that formed beliefs about safety, attachment, connection, communication, and whether our needs would be met.

During these formative years, we were brave, intelligent and adaptive. We learned how to survive and belong within our family environment. However, because we were young, we made sense of our world through limited cognitive and emotional capacity.

Depending on who you speak to or what model you follow, the Inner Child is often associated with experiences between birth and age 3, or up to age 7.

When these early experiences are not fully processed or healed, the “wounded Inner Child” can continue influencing our thoughts, behaviours and relationships in adulthood.

How the Unhealed Inner Child Shows Up in Adulthood

So often when we talk about the IC, we’re referring to the parts who had to make more adult like decisions as a child but through the lens of their limited cognitive and emotional capacity. Often the ways our little ones had to navigate the environments they came from created some really fantastic survival strategies and then when we keep playing those on repeat throughout our life they show up when we’re adults.

Now this is not about putting blame or throwing parents under the bus or anything like that. This is about acknowledging that no environment that we grow up in is ever perfect and our little ones carry wounds from that. Wounds, that at current age in our adult selves we have power, choice, and ability to integrate. We have the ability to choose to behave, relate and connect differently – to ourselves and the people we allow into our lives – often partners.

There are two primary ways the Inner Child tends to show up:

1.       In the relationship you have with yourself
2.       In the relationship you have with your partner

(Note: there are endless contexts where the IC shows up – with:  your parents, extended family members, colleagues, friends, how you parent your kids etcetera).

The Inner Child and the Relationship You Have With Yourself

The foundation of all healthy relationships begins with the relationship you have with yourself. Long before patterns emerge in partnership, they are usually present internally. The Inner Child often expresses itself through self criticism, people pleasing, perfectionism, or difficulty trusting your own needs.

Understanding how your Inner Child influences your self concept is a powerful first step in healing attachment wounds and developing greater emotional security.

The unhealed wounded inner child is expressed through:

• Your level of self-esteem and perceived self-worth
• Your beliefs around what you ‘have to’ suppress, minimise, dull down to be ‘lovable’
• Your inner chit-chat. How do you speak to yourself? What do you say about your worthiness? Your awesomeness?
  • Do you feel like you can be your authentic self in relationship?
  • Are you a people pleaser?
  •  Do you avoid rocking the boat and shrink speaking your truth?
  • Do you avoid connection and/or vulnerable conversations?

• What do you belief and feel you have to do to ‘protect yourself’ when going into relationship? This can be things like:
  • How you put your walls up
  • Your defenses
  • Self-sabotage
  • Holding back being vulnerable and open

Important note:  Whilst I am referring to the wounded aspects of the Inner Child, know that there are unlimited ways the Inner Child is gloriously healed, secure, grounded, and nothing short of amazing.

The Inner Child in Romantic Relationships

You may have heard the language that “relationship is a mirror”’. What this really means is that whatever we are not aware of within ourselves or have not healed in a healthy way within ourselves from our younger years and conditioning, will show up in our partner relationships. It’ll show up as an opportunity to know ourselves more, to heal from old patterns and old attachment wounds, and to learn how to actually lean in and become the most available, most conscious, most present version of ourselves in our relationships.

However, if the Inner Child is running the show when we enter into partner relationships, it can look like repeating of old patterns out of habit, lack of awareness, fear, genuine belief it’s safer and easier to do things like:

•  Keeping people at arms’ length
• Pushing good people away when things start to feel real
• Being attracted to chaos, mixed messages, inconsistency over stability, calm, vulnerability, availability in a consistent way
•  Not speaking up about your needs
• Making assumptions
•  Minimising expressing what is true for you how you feel and what you would like to have in relationship to feel seen, loved,  appreciated, understood, valued
•  Not knowing, setting and/or sustaining healthy boundaries
• Being guided by societal expectations, norms, generational messaging around the role you ‘ought’ to play in relationships
• Being avoidant when a rupture occurs in relationship

 Relationships really are the most fantastic way to heal in ourselves. What we get triggered by,  activated by, nourished by in our partner relationships are the opportunities to truly heal at current time.

In the next section I share some simple tips to get started on healing the wounded Inner Child parts. For a deeper dive into healing your IC, I recommend getting support and resources through trained mental wellness professionals.

Tips on how to be with your Inner Child, now, as an adult

The key to working with IC as an adult, is to be able to discern. This means discerning live in any moment, who is running the show.

Is it your current age wise adult self?  Is it any one or combination of wounded IC parts?

How to tell the difference I hear you ask ….

In very simple terms:

Current age you will come from a place that:

• Is grounded
• Is regulated
•  Takes time to pause before speaking
• Challenges internal thoughts and dialogue that leads to rejecting or abandoning self in some way
• Chooses to think, speak and behave with the intention of leaving the healthiest ripple effect on all involved (yes, that incudes self)
•  Catches self in triggers, pattern interrupts by not allowing the ‘old’ to play on repeat
•  Creates the space to have vulnerable conversations, that seeks repair after rupture
•  Communicates to hear, to understand, to stay out of assumptions

Wounded IC Parts will show up in the following ways (this is by no means exhaustive in scope):

• Dysregulated (either heightened activation such as angry outbursts; or shut down in some way such as silent treatment)
• May take on a child-like voice when talking
• Reacting in a way that sounds / behaves childish
• Defensive, win: lose energy
• Closed communication – assumptions, not listening, closed questions, sweeping issues under the carpet
• Expecting the worst outcome from partner (e.g., if I speak my truth, my partner will leave me)
• Staying quiet, minimising needs, being agreeable, people pleasing, keeping the peace

3 Practical Steps to Begin Working With Your Inner Child

1.   Learn to self-regulate, ground, in the present moment 

This skill is essential as it’s the starting point to being able to create space to think, feel and act in ways that support healthy connection to self, and to others.

One quick grounding tool is to identify 3 things of similarity in your immediate environment.  This could be three shapes, colors, sounds, textures, objects that are similar. For example: 3 green things; 3  round things; 3 soft textures, 3 types of plants.

This orients you to the current moment, where you’ll be in your frontal cortex of the brain, and your current age wisdom is available to you. You are out of patterns in this moment, and it creates is an opportunity to pause and choose an adult response

1.     Honour the Intelligence of Your Younger Self 

It’s important to honor, celebrate, and have deep respect for the intelligence that our younger selves drew upon through the formative years to survive the environment, to belong, to ensure their needs were met, to be accepted.

Remember that young you, used strategies to the extent of your emotional and intellectual capacity at the time, and this is amazing, and we really want to celebrate that level of intelligence, creativity, and tenacity.

It’s easy to cringe at some of our young choices and behaviours, but those behaviours were very protective , so learning to appreciate and love them is a gift

What is one way you can celebrate the wisdom of an aspect of your IC?

1.   Get into the practice of welcoming your IC when you notice they may be up and running the show.

Speak to your IC like a friend, ask it what it wants you to know and ask what they needed when they were little that they didn’t get. Be open to exploring ways you can provide that need now, for yourself, at current time.  That’s where the healing exists, when we don’t wait or hope for someone else to come and ‘save us’ in some way

You’ll learn about your unmet needs and how they may still be showing up for you in your relationships.

Bottom line

The more you get to know yourself, hold space for yourself and all your IC parts, the more opportunities you will have to create what you want for yourself and for your relationships now, as an adult.

Inner Child Case Study: A Push Pull Dynamic in a Relationship

Kylie and Mark had been together for a couple of years , in their early 30s and  over that time Kylie had been expressing the need to really want to take their relationship to the next level and to move in together.  She was feeling the internal pull to start a family soon.

Mark  logically could say that moving in together was what needed to happen next for the relationship to move forward and he also presented as having a sense of pressure and it was something that they had argued about a lot. Mark shared he felt Kylie was clingy, needy and pushy in wanting more time, more attention, basically for wanting more. Kylie explained that she felt every time she leant in for more closeness, depth, commitment, action that solidified their relationship that she felt Mark pull away, make excuses, create distance, shut down, withdrawal and disengage. Mark agreed.

Mark had grown up in a family where he had to perform for attention. He had to get the best grades, be on the best basketball team, be involved in a wide range of activities at school to excel and his parents had high expectations of what he would become. He had little choice over his younger years for hobbies, who he could have as friends, time allowed to be a kid and had a lot of routine and schedule to abide by to keep him focused on being the best. He would be rewarded with praise when he excelled and criticized and shamed when he did not.

Kylie came from a family where she was the middle of 3 kids, and had an upbringing where attention was inconsistent, her father worked away from the home for extended periods and would come back, but she felt disconnected and want sure how to relate to him. She expressed that whilst knowing her Mum did the best that she could because she was running the household and working while dad was working away, that it left little time for attention, play, and attention really came more through practical tasks rather than emotional expression.  She expressed receiving little individual attention as life was busy. She reported not really feeling important and often felt invisible. Kylie believed that she it wasn’t OK to have, or express needs and she shared that she was always worried that if she pushed too hard or said what she really wanted that she would be left or dismissed.

In this situation, Mark had wounded IC / Parts coming up that said closeness, commitment equaled control and his IC young were leading mark as a current age adult to adopt his old patterns of wanting to put distance to create space because that’s something he could control for himself.

For Kylie the wounded IC / Parts that were coming up in this situation were around fear of being abandoned, yet yearning to have her needs validated and honoured and this was showing up as some anxiety type behavior where she would have repetitive conversations around the timing of moving in together and clinging in some way to having to have an answer in a particular time frame.

For both, they were operating from younger wounded IC selves in their current relationship and this led to a push pull dynamic where both felt unstable, uncertain, and in their own way, controlling and this was moving them further away from each other rather than closer together.

In the relationship counselling sessions we worked with the IC through Parts, work, and  supported grounding and regulating, incorporating tools for how to communicate to the IC an integrate at current age. This enabled  the opportunity for more current time presence, vulnerability, current time knowing of what each other’s needs are, and because the nervous system is not hijacked by the younger parts,  it crated the space for Mark and Kylie to communicate clearly, respectfully, to seek understanding, and to negotiate into an aligned space for the next steps for their relationship.

Fast forward six months, and Mark and Kylie had moved in together and started planning for having a baby.  They consistently work with the triggers of the IC as they navigate each step of this new transition and have the tools to come into their adult selves and communicate from that place.

Sources

Jackman, R. (2020). Healing your lost inner child: How to stop impulsive reactions, set healthy boundaries and embrace an authentic life. Practical Wisdom Press.

McKee, C (2012). BE by Design: How I BE is Up to Me. Balboa.

Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.

Scwartz, R. C. (2024). The Internal Family Systems Workbook: a guide to discover yourself and heal your parts. Sounds True.

Ready to Begin Inner Child Work?

If you recognise yourself in these patterns, you do not have to navigate this alone. At The Hart Centre, our experienced relationship therapists are trained in attachment based therapy, Parts work and trauma informed approaches that support inner child healing in a safe and structured way. Book a session with one of our relationship therapists today and begin creating the secure, connected and conscious relationships you deserve.