Parenting the Inner Child: Guided Practice

On this Mother’s Day morning, I was thinking about the concept of the Inner Child, which plays a large role in my therapy work, and I thought I’d share a description of what this means to me along with a guided meditation on connecting to and being a loving parent for your own inner child (listen to audio below for a 13-minute podcasty-meditation hybrid exercise). Here’s my take on this concept:

- We come into the world as complete masterpieces. Nothing needs to be changed about us at all. We are full and complete.
- There is nothing a baby needs to do to be worthy of love and total acceptance.
- However, as we grow, we learn conditions of love and acceptance. In some way, we learn that we need to be “smart,” to be “cool,” to be “productive,” to be skinny, funny, rich, famous, or whatever it may be. We learn that we need to be something different than we are right now in order to be enough. “Maybe someday, if I work hard enough, I’ll finally be enough.”
- Can you imagine how you might feel differently if you were enough right now? Completely and totally? What would it feel like physically in your body?
- You might think of a puppy dog. Does a puppy need to do something in order to be loved by you? To be completely and totally accepted? What makes you different… at your very core?
- Where is your Inner Critic the loudest? For me, it comes up in thinking I’m weird or awkward in social situations. Thinking I’m lazy sometimes. Thinking I’m not as smart or capable as others, and maybe I’ve just been faking it well enough until I’m finally exposed for the fraud I am.
- The Inner Critic operates to keep others at a distance, so the Inner Child isn’t exposed to others and so others can’t hurt you maybe as you’ve been hurt in the past. The Inner Critic is like an internalized parent, telling your more vulnerable, more raw self that it better shape up and keep working on the project of becoming good enough. Who is it going to be good enough for?
- Maybe experiment today or in the future with noticing this Inner Critic harsh parent… just noticing… and then play around with taking the stance of a loving, caring, totally accepting parent, that just wants to be there for the child, to hold the child, to understand how the child feels, and to show the child (beyond any need for words) that they are completely loved and accepted just as they are. You might use a picture from your childhood to help with this practice (see the one I use below).
- This doesn’t mean that you stop growing, stop working toward goals in life. But it might help you clarify what those goals are in search of. I think it’s possible to keep growing/playing/learning every day and simultaneously be good enough from the very beginning.

You could add to this exercise by looking at a picture of yourself from childhood (I have this as my phone home screen as I continue to practice caring for my own inner child).