A Spirit-Focused Guide for How to Heal Your Inner Child

It’s no secret that our childhood experiences shape who we become as adults. Unresolved and unhealed traumas stunt our spiritual growth, leaving us to age physically and remain fixed in time emotionally. The way to tell if you have unresolved or unhealed trauma from your past is if you’ve ever encountered “something” that made you feel like a past version of yourself and/or made you realize you weren’t over something you experienced and physically moved on from in your past.

What is a Trigger?

That “something” is called a trigger. Triggers shatter the illusion of your physical experience and push your existing inner child to the forefront of your existence. When you are triggered, you literally become the unhealed version of yourself – the 6-year-old, 8-year-old, 13-year-old, etc. child – that experienced the origin trauma because you never learned how to properly process the trigger and move past it.

A Guide to Moving On

Healing your inner child is the key to being able to heal within yourself at large – you have to teach the stunted version of yourself how to heal so that your spirit can catch up and offer you real-time healing in the present. Healing in the present will allow you to be the best version of yourself, a version that can relate to and support the people you care about. 

Below, I’ve created a quick guide to help you understand who your inner child is, what reparenting means, and how you can reparent your inner child and achieve a relationship with yourself that will allow you to cultivate more meaningful relationships with others.

Who is Your Inner Child?

Your inner child is the raw version of who you truly are, preserved from childhood before you grew up and received and adopted the projections and stories imposed upon you by family, friends, colleagues, society, and the world at large.

Think of it this way: when you were born, you came into the world. You grew, developed, and began to engage with your surroundings. Language allowed you to identify what you were engaging with, and at a young age you remained curious and open to developing your own ideas and feelings around these experiences. This is the innocence of childhood.

As you got older, instead of simply engaging and following raw positive feelings and intuition, you developed opinions and beliefs – some of them your own and others were influenced by the beliefs and opinions of others. This influence usually manifested as the concept of what is right, and the moment when you distanced who you were becoming from your true self occurred when you followed what you were told was right when it was at odds with what felt good to you.

So, your inner child is your truth – who you are, what you like, what makes you feel good. Your inner child tries to communicate with you as your intuition, often a whisper that isn’t always clear, that you sometimes follow and sometimes reject in favor of what others have led you to believe.

To achieve balance and peace within yourself, and live a life where you are seen, loved, and heard, your physical self and inner child have to exist in harmony. And to discover what that harmony looks like for you, you have to reparent yourself.

What Does Reparenting Mean?

Reparenting is the process of becoming the parent you needed as a child so that you can provide the care, protection, and love that you didn’t receive and still need. Below, I’ve broken down the three key elements of reparenting:

1.    Reparenting is Connecting with Self

In order to reparent your inner child, you have to understand who your inner child is and what they need. That’s why reparenting creates a pathway for you to gain a deeper understanding and relationship with your true self.

2.    Reparenting is Finding the Family Within You

As a human, you exist in a living relationship between your physical body, your inner child/spirit, and your ego/mind. The way these three elements of who you are come together is similar to that of a family: you exist as parent and child in one, as innocence and knowledge together. You can exist at odds, arguing and constantly experiencing discomfort, or you can work to understand the members of your family, give love and grace, and find ways to come back together.

So, in order to reparent your inner child, you have to recognize and participate in the family that exists within yourself and create space for that family to be abundant awareness and love.

3.    Reparenting is Curiosity Over Defense

Stop defending your limitations. Period.

The reason you are struggling to move beyond who you are right now, the reason you’ve found your way this far into a blog post about reparenting your inner child to change your life, is because you’re holding onto negative stories and defending the discomfort you exist in.

Accept that the path you’ve been going down is wrong. Doing what’s right doesn’t always feel good, and when it doesn’t feel good it’s wrong for you. Stop defending your limitations and get curious: investigate beyond who you’ve been and who you are so you can create space to discover and become who you’re trying to be.

How to Reparent Your Inner Child in 3 Steps

Now that you understand what reparenting is, here is a quick guide to how to reparent your inner child in 3 steps.

Step One: Unlearn What You Rely On

You live according to what you believe is right. You rely on what is “right” to solve problems, ease discomfort, and overcome obstacles. But it’s never enough. Even when you physically move past a negative experience, there’s an emotional part of you that can’t get over the hurdle.

Unlearn what you rely on and follow what feels good. Rely on something deeper than the stories you’ve been told: rely on your individual, self and spirit-serving truth.

Your current relationship with yourself reflects how your parents related to you. A parent who doesn’t follow what feels good when it comes to their child will often invalidate the discomfort by saying…

-      “Because I said so.”

-      “Because I’m the adult.”

-      “Because it’s my house.”

…instead of embracing and nurturing the truth. Unlearning the patterns and stories you rely on, that exist in the idea of “what is right” will create space for you to reparent yourself with an accepting and nurturing nature. This acceptance will validate your inner child and help you get closer to your truth.

The more aligned you are with your truth, the more secure you will feel.

Step Two: Follow Feeling Over Physical

Have you ever felt like you wanted more money because you believe money will make you feel secure?

Let’s break down this desire: you want money (physical) so that you can feel secure (emotional). The money is a gateway to what you truly desire. The physical manifestation is what most people latch onto and pursue for their entire lives, never feeling truly satisfied and never entering the actual emotion they seek.

Stop pursuing physical manifestations and follow what feels good. If you want money so that you can feel secure, focus on finding ways to make yourself feel secure right now. Once you achieve a present state of security, you’ll become a vibrational match for the physical manifestation and it will seamlessly integrate into your life.

When you pursue physical manifestations first, you’ll get bad things because you lead your life from a bad place. When you pursue emotional truth first, you’ll get good things because you lead your life from a source of true abundant positivity and security.

Using our money-security example above, when you feel more secure in yourself first, you will be more confident and focused, two qualities that will allow you to bring more intention to your work and create pathways for welcoming fiscal abundance.

So, as you work through your reparenting process, remember to follow what feels good. If you find yourself chasing physical manifestations, pause and think about what you believe that physical manifestation to symbolize and pursue more direct, self-actualizing pathways to achieving the emotional state you seek.

Pro Tip: every emotional desire can be boiled down to three things: you want to feel okay mentally, secure physically, and loved spiritually. So, reparenting can boil down to learning what it takes to make your inner child feel these things so that you can successfully reparent and find these levels of satisfaction in your present and ongoing life.

Step Three: Receive Love

So far, we’ve talked about how reparenting is connecting with your true self, offering space for nurturing and acceptance, and breaking away from following what you think is right in favor of what feels good. All of these things translate to having a more loving relationship with self, and creating more space for love in your life is only effective if you’re prepared to and capable of receiving that love.

When you open yourself up to the truth of what you are, you become more of it.

When you open yourself up to receive love, you become love. And what is love? Love is patient, present, and supportive. When you open yourself up to receive the patience, presence, and support you needed from your parents in childhood, you heal those vacancies within yourself and become that love (you become the parent who sees, hears, and supports your inner child). 

And when you feel seen, heard, and supported, when you give yourself the nurturing patience to make mistakes, grow, and find balance between your mind, body, and spirit, you begin to close distance between the three and lead your life in a more balanced, and unified way. And when you align the three elements that make up who you are, there are no negative stories, there is no ignoring your intuition.

There is abundant awareness of the truth that you live in and as.

Abundant Living

Reparenting your inner child is important because you have to model and experience the type of loving relationship you needed in your developmental years to be able to grow into an adult who is capable of fostering and maintaining the deeper, emotionally connected relationships you seek.

The reason you struggle to show up in various areas of your life is because you don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like to be shown up for. You do what you think is right, but it fails you. When you connect to your inner truth and find what feels good, you’ll be able to lead with that good feeling and transfer it to the relationships you’re cultivating with yourself and with the people you care about.

The Reparenting Alliance

Hopefully this post has given you valuable insight into who your inner child is, how you can grow closer to them/yourself, and what the foundation of a reparenting relationship would look like.

The reparenting process looks different for everyone because it’s deeply rooted in your individual experience. While these core elements and steps find their way into every healing process, your unique journey might feel like an uphill battle at times as you go through it alone.

If you want support and guidance, I gotchu! My name is Guruji Chastity, and while I specialize in helping women heal their Mother Wounds, I myself had to undergo the reparenting process as a part of my spiritual healing journey. I had to unlearn the model of love my mother gave – and in some cases, didn’t give – to me as a child to create space to provide and receive the love I needed and deserved.

The Reparenting Alliance Step-By-Step course transforms reparenting into a structured process, developed by someone who knows what you’re going through (me) and has the knowledge and experience to guide you through to the other side.

Between this quick guide to how to reparent your inner child, the step-by-step course, and my contact page, you have all the tools you need to start your transition from feeling worthless to worthy. No more excuses, no more defending your limitations.