Healing the Child Within

Building a Bridge Between the Past and Present

Do you cry easily, avoid conflict, lack joy, people please, or suppress your emotions? Do you find it difficult to deal with stress, set boundaries, or get motivated?

If you answered yes to any of these, your relationship with your younger self may need some tending to.

Everyone has within them, younger aspects of themselves, by way of (usually unconscious) memories which typically come out when we respond to the world.

These responses may feel rooted in your personality but may be better explained by the part of you that still reacts and feels like a child whose needs are not being met.

Your early experiences (and your interpretations of them) impacts your adult life.

Unpredictability, significant life changes, loss, exposure to violence, and invalidation paired with a lack of support in helping you make sense of these same experiences can lead to the development of harmful coping mechanisms (like negative self-beliefs or avoidance).

The first six years are especially important and is where the foundation for the rest of your life is first developed.

For example, as a young child, if your beliefs and feelings were regularly invalidated (think punished, rejected, minimized, ignored), you might have learned that it was not safe to express (or even feel) your emotions.

To cope, you may have developed strategies like suppressing your emotions and people pleasing—both which can lead to dissatisfaction in adult relationships.

Our relationships with ourselves develop from how we interpreted our interactions within our early relationships. Typically, we leave childhood believing at least one or more of the following negative beliefs:

I am worthless

I am not good enough

I am not loveable

I am weak

I am insignificant

I am a disappointment

Over time, these beliefs feel more like true aspects of our personality as they become reinforced with subsequent experiences. In an ideal world, our early caregivers would recognize their mistakes and engage in repair with us. Realistically, our parents probably lack the awareness, desire, and ability to do so.

So how do we heal our childhood wounds?

Now keep in mind that as a child you did not have control over who your parents were and how they parented you. But as an adult, you now have more control of your life and can give yourself the greatest gift by reparenting (or nurturing yourself) in the way you’ve always needed.

Reparenting involves healing and nurturing the childhood wounds by providing yourself attention, empathy, patience, or care—to name a few. All actions that you needed earlier in your life but probably did not get.

The goal is to learn and truly believe that you are:

Worthy

Deserving

Lovable

Strong

Important

Good enough, exactly the way you are

It’s so natural to dismiss the severity and even the legitimacy of a childhood memory, especially since it happened long ago. But for many people, being this young was a scary place to be. It is never too late to revisit the past and help that younger part of you feel safe.

EMDR is one modality that focuses on improving your relationship with your younger self, which stems from specific, overwhelming early memories.

In some cases, trauma memories may be difficult to retrieve but working with a trained clinician helps clients connect to these memories without directly remembering them and feeling retraumatized.

EMDR can accelerate therapy by resolving the impact of your early history and allow you to live more fully in the present.

Reach out to us at Brentwood Counselling Centre today for treatment with EMDR so that you can heal and overcome your childhood wounds.