Inner child work is a compassionate way to address present-day struggles with behaviors and patterns (aka: emotional learning). There are three foundational states for healing: conscious awareness, curiosity, and compassion (three Cs). Inner child work helps facilitate cultivating all three states.

When a child experiences neglect, trauma and/or misattunement their thoughts and behavioral patterns revolve around survival to help understand themselves, relationships and the world, this connects to the inner child's emotional learning. In adulthood, these same behaviors and thoughts become growth barriers and negatively affect the individual in relationship to themselves, the world, and with others.

As an adult, the inner child unconsciously continues to look for internal and external negative reinforcements that connect with the emotional learning, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Adults will start to notice a pattern in relationships and behaviors. They’ll make statements such as “why does this always happen to me?” and “I always seem to get myself into these situations.” Comments like these subconsciously indicate that the inner child's wounds may be at work, looking to prove the negative core belief to be true.

When the inner child is “triggered” by situations or relationships, it will respond in the same survival protections, known as attachment defenses including: flight, flight, freeze, fawn, and collapse response:

Flight: arguing, defensive, talking over others, dominating the conversation, aggressive behavior or talk.

Flight: workaholic, fidgeting or need to move the body, perfectionist behaviors, OCD thoughts or behaviors, excessive cleaning.

Freeze: isolation, couch potato, scrolling obsessively on social media, constantly watching TV, not interacting with others.

Fawn: people pleasing, obsessive worry about how others perceive you, overanalyzing what you say or how to behave, loss of self-identity.

Collapse: zoning out, body numb, emotionally numbing, feeling disconnected from yourself or the world.

To build conscious awareness: Use the attachment defense tracking sheet to start to become aware of your own attachment defenses.