Sometimes you react more strongly than the situation calls for. A single sentence from your partner, the tone of a superior's voice or a silence in the house stirs something old, as if you were not in the present moment but in some room from your childhood. Reason says everything is fine, while your body and emotions say otherwise.
This is the moment when what we call the inner child makes itself heard. It is not something that needs fixing or silencing. It is a part of you that, in the first years of life, learned what love, safety and belonging look like, and that still chooses your reactions today, from that knowledge.
When you understand how this part came to be and what it needs, your relationship with it stops being a struggle and becomes a meeting.
What is the inner child
The books Soul Codes and Codes of Consciousness describe how, in the first years of life, a child stores in its personal unconscious all the thoughts and emotions that come from the outside world. From them it forms a picture of itself and of the world: ‘the world is cruel’, ‘the world is good’, ‘life is hard’. These pictures become mental and emotional patterns that later determine reactions and behaviour.
The basis for these patterns is the first experience with mother and father, and that relationship is itself conditioned by the family and collective unconscious. A child, then, carries not only what it has personally lived through, but also what it has experienced through its parents and their ancestors. The inner child is therefore the place where personal history and family inheritance meet.
When a child is born, it is a being of light that has come to us as a gift, but which has inherited the collective quantum burdens of its ancestors. (from the book The Path of Healing)
How early experiences shape adult life
If a child grows up in a family with frequent quarrels, the sentence ‘Mum and Dad love you’ will become linked with the emotions of those quarrels. Its idea of love will be coloured by tension. If the need for pleasant emotions is not met, the child develops its own strategies for attracting attention, and these strategies later become control dramas in adult relationships.
The book Codes of Love says that the first love we experience is love for our mother, and that it lays the foundations for all future emotional relationships. That is why we often unconsciously choose partners who reflect that first concept of love, even when it was painful. Within it we feel at home, and therefore ‘whole’.
From the perspective of systemic constellations, blind love is also at work here: a child's deep need to identify with its parents in order to gain a sense of belonging. In this way a child may repeat not only their good sides, but also their suffering, believing that this will ease their pain.
When a child carries a burden that is not theirs
The book Decoding the Soul describes patterns in which the natural balance of giving and receiving between parents and children is disturbed. Parents give, children receive. When this order of love is turned around, the child begins to carry what does not belong to them:
- the parents' unfinished emotional issues, illnesses or debts
- the expectation of fulfilling the parents' unrealised dreams
- caring for parents, brothers and sisters, as if they were the adult in the family
- guilt at not being able to ‘save’ the family situation
Later, as an adult, such a child readily sacrifices their own needs for those of others, in the family, in partnership and at work. The inner child then does not seek love for itself, but exhausts itself trying to secure it for others.
How the relationship with the inner child is healed
The first step is becoming aware. The process of bringing the unconscious into awareness allows us to understand how early family interactions have shaped our present emotional reactions. When you recognise that your reaction belongs to the past, a space already opens between you and the old pattern.
The second step is restoring order. In constellations, sentences are spoken that give the child back their place: ‘I receive, and you give.’ Along with this, the burden that is not the child's is lovingly returned to the parent. Healing, as the book Decoding the Soul puts it, happens when the child accepts the life received from the parents and sees that they cannot carry the burden of their ancestors.
The third step is accepting your parents as they are. This does not mean justifying everything that happened, but ending the inner war the child has been waging for years. Without this acceptance it is hard to build an identity of your own, unburdened by the past.
The fourth step is integration through systemic self-exploration and exercises in conscious presence. A constellation shows the dynamic, self-exploration helps you understand it before and after the work, and presence directs attention towards inner silence, where we meet the essence of our being.
The child you still are
The book Codes of Consciousness cites the words of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj that ‘the child you are even now is your true Self’. Beneath all the learned patterns there is a part of us that has never been wounded, pure presence before it became burdened with ideas about who we are.
Healing the relationship with your inner child is therefore not only work on wounds. It is also a return to that original simplicity, with the full awareness of an adult who can now be what the child once lacked: present, patient and full of acceptance.
If your early experiences were especially difficult, systemic work does not replace professional psychological or medical help when it is needed, but it can calmly accompany it. Every step towards yourself, however small, changes your relationship with the child within you.