THE INNER CHILD WORK: OUR UNIQUE APPROACH

 Creating Awareness
Essential therapy and the inner child work helps us to become aware of the different parts of ourselves that influence how we think, feel and act. Although we live in an adult body, we are not always responding from our present-day adult self. Often, old feelings of our inner child that we have pushed aside, emerge from our unconscious and can cause us to react disproportionately strongly without understanding why. We might make choices based on our unconscious beliefs; the beliefs of our wounded inner child. Through working with the inner child, these patterns start to become visible, we bring transparency. This makes it possible that we start to recognise what belongs to the past and what belongs to the present. With this awareness comes choice — instead of reacting on automatic pilot, we can respond in a more conscious way.

Teaching Self Love
Another crucial goal of the inner child work is to help us cultivate genuine self-love. So often, we find it hard to be kind to ourselves. If, while growing up, we were not seen, understood or appreciated by our parents, we learnt to be harsh, to criticise and to reject ourselves instead of appreciating and embracing who we are. Through essential therapy and the inner child work, we slowly start to develop self-compassion, instead of self-judgement. Self-love here does not mean self-indulgence or ignoring responsibility. It means being able to embrace our vulnerability; to look at our inner child with eyes of love and recognising our true value.

Bonding and Becoming a true Adult
In therapy and in group work you experience a different kind of relationship than what you might have been used to: a relationship where you are listened to, understood with compassion, and mirrored with care and respect. Through this relationship, you can learn what safe connection and emotional intimacy feel like. Gradually, you can begin to relate to yourself and your inner child in the same way — with true care, support and understanding. We can become the loving adult, the loving parent that takes care of the inner child. From this place of openness and compassion, extending this loving presence to others feels natural. Learning in this way again about the nature of bonding, healing the wounds of what we missed in childhood, is an important part that supports our emotional maturation.

Creating structure and finding out who we are
Essential therapy and the inner child work also helps us to understand how our structure has developed.
As children, we naturally adapted to our environment. We developed ways to psychologically cope when we got wounded in different ways: maybe we were neglected, demanded upon, we felt unsafe, threatened. We coped by pleasing others, by trying to control, withdrawing, performing, hiding our needs and feelings, and more. As children, these strategies helped us to have a place in the family environment and survive psychologically. In every point of our childhood development, where we got wounded and we had to disconnect from our true Self and adopt a defence, a coping mechanism to survive, we were deprived of our ability to mature, to develop an intact and mature structure. Around our wound, we created a ‘false structure’ instead of the ability to respond appropriately. In this way we were not supported to develop a healthy ‘structure’, an ‘inner wiring’ that consists of healthy connection with our Self and ability to respond appropriately in different life situations, that enables us to function in life in the most optimum way. (In the Buidling Inner Structure groups we also work with this)
In the therapy, we begin to see which parts of our character have developed in response to childhood wounding, or simply by imitating the example of our parents, and which parts of our character are innate, so we can build upon the latter, and slowly we can cultivate structure.
Gradually, we discover a clearer sense of ourselves — not only who we learned to be, but who we truly are.

Working with the Body including appropriate catharsis
Emotional experiences do not happen only on the level of ‘thoughts’ — we experience them through the body. Stress, fear, old hurts, held back emotions, often appear as bodily pain, tension, tight breathing, fatigue, numbness or physical discomfort. Sometimes we feel disconnected from our body altogether. For this reason, in our approach we involve the body and working with the body in the therapeutic process.
Appropriate catharsis (emotional release) supports our process of emotional unfoldment, because we can express and release our pent up emotions in a safe and contained way. As We no longer have to suppress, to deny or push away our feelings, our emotions can move through in a natural way, our body naturally softens, we relax, and we regain a sense of pleasure, of ease, flow and vibrancy in our system. This has been researched and documented for instance by scientists like Dr W Reich and Dr A Janov.