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Healing our inner child helps us essentially re-parent ourselves and sooth wounds that never truly closed. What is inner child healing and why is it important? In fact, he theorised that puer aeternus is one of our archetypes – a core part of our unconscious being. Our purest form – AKA the puer or puer aeternus, as Jungian psychology refers to it.Ĭarl Jung believed our inner child to be extremely important when understanding what brings us joy and creativity. Our inner child is who we once were at our core. It can affect how you process emotions, deal with situations, your mental health, and how you treat others. This is why learning about your inner child is such a massive part of shadow work.
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Your upbringing, cultural background, parent’s values, and life events all play a part in how your inner child is formed, and also have an affect on who you are as an adult. It’s a part of your unconscious mind that has been absorbing and attempting to process events, emotions, and even trauma from when it was first capable of doing so. Your inner child isn’t just a colloquialism for the child-like or ‘immature’ parts of yourself that still enjoy to take part in activities that made you feel good as a kid, although this is part of it. You can then go about looking at ways to nurture your inner child and coax your inner child out of hiding, if you find getting in touch with them a little difficult. They probe and – quite literally – prompt you to sort through your thoughts, take a step back from them, and even look at them through an analytical, objective lens. Journal prompts for healing your inner child are a great place to start as they encourage you to delve into parts of your mind that you’ve buried through shame or denial. However, by feeling them, unpacking them, learning about ourselves through them, and nurturing our inner child, we can find a place of contentment and balance. We may be forced to revisit uncomfortable events and emotions from our past. Like most of our shadow work, healing your inner child isn’t always easy. It can help us heal and be more mindful of our lives and bodies exactly where they are now, increase self-awareness, and grow. While we should therefore ideally focus on the present rather than dwelling on the past or future, revisiting certain life events, feelings, and trauma that occurred in our childhood can help us do precisely that. Similarly, if we spend our days living in the past, we can get caught up obsessing over things that have already happened, but that we can’t change. Personally speaking, I know that fretting over things that haven’t even happened yet is one of the main sources of my anxiety! Oftentimes, we find ourselves focusing too heavily on the future worrying about what’s to come and how we’ll get there. Inner child healing is a key part of shadow work and using journal prompts to heal your inner child is a great way to start your journey.
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