The Cambridge Dictionary defines your inner child as the part of your personality that still reacts and feels like a child. So this is not just some hippy concept of peace, love and mung beans but a psychological construct that can be incredibly useful in healing, as well as changing the direction of our lives. 

Last week we asked you to have a think about what your inner child truly desires from the perspective of the things you would love to do, but of course it’s not all rainbows and lollypops when it comes to our inner child. Have you ever seen a two year old have a tantrum when she doesn’t get what she wants? We also have that little-ahem- angel, within us. 

Have you ever had a reaction to someone or something, that in retrospect seemed completely out of proportion to the situation? You might have been left wondering, “Where did that tsunami come from?” Most likely it was your inner child, expressing her unmet or unhealed needs from all those years ago. 

So it’s worth having a bit of a look at this stuff, lest we find ourselves having melt-downs or metaphorically sucking our thumbs in supermarket carparks because we were denied a packet of gummy bears. (Yes, your inner child can sometimes wants weird stuff to soothe itself).

Right now we would like you to cast your mind back over all the times when you can now see you might have gotten really triggered by something that was happening in your life. It might have been when someone didn’t do what you expected them to and you got quite cross, or perhaps it was when you weren’t able to complete a task or succeed at something and you beat yourself up. Maybe you found yourself making up stories about how someone would or wouldn’t behave before they even had a chance. 

When it’s your wounded inner child running the show, you’ll probably find the reaction was quite charged, and maybe filled with language like “they always do that” or “I never do this”. For most of us, when we are able to look at the situation with adult eyes, we see that (maybe) we were a little hasty.

Your task this week is simple (!): once you have identified your adultrum (adult tantrum) we want you to go back to the earliest time in your life where you can remember this feeling showing up. Look at yourself back then and think about what you needed. Was it compassion, love, understating, acknowledgment? 

Whatever it was, give it to you. 

Give it freely, without conditions and with love. 

Because you deserve it.

And then give your inner child a great big hug. 

You are both in this together, and guess what? You’ve got this.