Healing Your Inner Child

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome back. Today we're exploring a topic that's gotten a lot of attention recently, but also has its roots stretching back to the early days of psychology, inner child work. If you're listening to a podcast like

ours, there's a good chance that you've heard the phrase inner child before. It refers to the part of ourselves that still carries the emotions, beliefs and experiences from our childhood. It's a playful, interested, creative part of who we are, a creative part of our personality. But it also might be carrying around some wounds that can be leading to thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that are causing some problems for you these days.

Being with their inner child can be very fruitful for people. It can also be pretty challenging. So today we're going to be exploring what the inner child really is, how it shows up in our lives, and some practical ways to work with this part of ourselves. Whether you're already familiar with this or are just skeptical about the whole idea, I think there will be something here that you could get some value out of. So to help us out, I'm joined

today as usual by clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing? I'm great. I wanted to ask you, Dad, have you done this kind of work with people in the past through your clinical practice? I actually don't know. Oh, yeah. A lot. Okay. Often it's implicit in that when we reflect on the mind, it has both breadth and depth. So we explore

the breadth of what actually is happening in a person's experience right now. And then we can investigate as well down into the deeper and deeper layers, you know, the hurt that's under anger or the layers that go back in time to the earliest strata lay down into body memory, an emotional memory, preverbal memory, based on the experiences we had, even when

we were really, really young. And so taking those deeper layers into account is inherently a way of working with the inner child, or we might even think of the inner children, because there are many different kids in there, and they are at many different ages and stages

developmentally. Two, when you do corrective emotional experiences, or what I might call the linking aspect in the heal framework I've created, in which we connect positive and let's say negative experience together, if you are taking down into yourself, helpful beneficial experiences in the present that are sinking down in and making contact with

those younger deeper layers, that's inner child work too as well. And then third, sometimes there's a place for personifying the inner child or one of the inner children, and then doing some kind of psychological technique with that. Definitely lots of work in that way. And I think in your answer, you've already indicated a couple of ways that people might think about what the inner child is, because this is one of those phrases that has become

kind of a fuzzy phrase on social media in the self-help world. People use it to mean a lot of different things. So it can be helpful to figure out what we're really talking about here. One way to think about this is that this is just the more childlike part of our current

adult personality. This is the playfulness that comes through us, these moments of spontaneous creativity we have, where maybe we're not so bounded to the rules, the regulations, the self-regulation that we might apply in order to be a so-called functional adult working inside of a modern society. So that's maybe one way of thinking about it.

Yeah, if I could add to that, if I could, a quality sometimes of innocence, or even niave a te, that can get us in trouble if we get exploited, in addition to a sense of innocence, a sense of a kind of sweetness. These two can seem like aspects of the younger parts of our self. Another way to think about it is that this is the content that we're carrying from when we were young. And that's how I framed it in the introduction. That's how a lot of people

think about this. And this is the stuff that we're still carrying around today. Because we're carrying it around, it influences how we behave. And it particularly influences how we behave when we're in more stressful situations. And this is maybe more of kind of a developmental approach to psychology. And it's typically how we talk about related issues when we're talking on the podcast.

Then a third way to think about this is that this inner child isn't just the result of the experiences that we remember, or that if we like look back on ourselves from the perspective of the adult, it is actually a fully formed part of our personality. And that's how people like Richard Schwartz and IFS treat this idea that this is a kind of unique sub personality that we have that is housed within us. And it has its own discrete thoughts and feelings about the world.

During this conversation, we're going to kind of fuzz together. These three different ways of thinking about the inner child, I think maybe mostly focusing on two and three, but there's probably going to be a little bit of one in there as well. Is there anything else you would like to add here, Dad? I'd like to build on your second point in that under pressure, people tend to, in the psychoanalytic term, regress. We tend to draw on our go-toes, particularly ones that

we learned when we were very young. And because of the negativity by so the brain, they tend to be the patterns that we acquired when we were young during painful experiences with other people. Because the brain is especially biased to internalize what satisfies those three criteria. And so you can find yourself suddenly in ways that can even be quite shocking to yourself with drawing emotionally in situations that feel so young, you can

find yourself trying to get something from another person that feels very young. It might be presented in a way that seems so rational and believable, but really deep down inside, you're having a tantrum. It's the inner two-year-old or three-year-old that's just demanding something from another person that would have been appropriate when you were two or three, but today, in adult relationships, is not particularly appropriate and it's not usually

well understood by another person. As we explore this, we're going to be in effect, the opportunity is to look inside and look outside. In other words, look inside at your own inner child material. And also consider maybe people you have a deep relationship with, family figures, even consider people that are really challenging for you and ask yourself, huh, how are inner

child dynamics operating in them, too? And can I start to use appropriately some of what I'm learning about healing and nurturing and responding to and making room for my own inner child parts? How can I apply that to being helpful with them to hopefully enable them to feel better and if nothing else enable them to cool some of their jets? You've given already a couple of examples here, Dad, of how the inner child might show

up in our adult lives. I'll give you a little bit of an example of repression there, then a little bit of an example of those under stress-presurized situations. How that can just pop out to somebody. Are there some other things that people could look out for or be aware of that might give them an indicator that this could be helpful work for them?

Yeah, we can recognize normal facts about how little kids are, which is to say how we were and another way into this is to take into account what you know yourself about children. What's going on in them? What do they like? How do they process information? What matters to them? How able are they to cope and to regulate themselves, which is to say pretty limited?

Nereologically regulatory systems in the nervous system, especially the brain, take 20 years or more to develop fully and it's simply a fact that young children feel things really

keenly, particularly more intensely than adults do. All that said, when material starts to appear in your own mind or let's say in other people that has a particular intensity to it or a kind of simplicity, either with kinds of thinking or seems very concrete or has a sort of demandingness that's understandable from a three-year-old or a one-day-old, but it's just over the top in a current adult setting. Those are clues right there that younger

material is coming forward. Or for example, if you're in a situation in which, let's say, in an intimate relationship and here too, the settings that are most likely to evoke inner child material are the ones that were most like what was around you when you were a child. So I've known people who, when they're in a really polished high-level professional

setting, they're functioning full throttle, strictly as a very competent adult. On the other hand, get them into a setting like, let's say, a sports team that they're part of, their own basketball team, and just goof around with friends, or particularly an intimate setting, or maybe they're interacting with the parent of their partner, and suddenly that's like dealing with their own parent themselves. In those settings that kind of tick

those paradigms, suddenly that person is acting really strangely. And sometimes I'm that person, you know, or you are that person. You have occasionally been that person as well, though, absolutely, totally. Yeah, that's right. And so that's an indicator as well. Yeah, I think that's really good there, Dad. Also, if you're somebody who approaches this kind of concept or an idea a little bit more analytically, you really can frame inner

child work through more of maybe a cognitive behavioral lens. So the whole origin story of CBT is that this guy Aaron Beck was a psychiatrist, brilliant guy. And while working with depressed patients, he found that they had what he, what he perceived to be these spontaneous, almost automatic negative thoughts about themselves, the world, or other people. These are where we can find our thoughts and our beliefs. Things like I'm a failure, nobody likes me.

I can't do anything right. They're all just out to get me that kind of stuff, right? And they would then ruminate on those thoughts, which just reinforced them. And he could call it these cognitive distortions that he really focused on how can we replace these cognitive distortions with more realistic and therefore generally more positive thoughts over time, which can help people with their depression, help change their behavior. But

the thing is that as we learned over time, these thoughts are not truly spontaneous. They're coming from somewhere. The negative thoughts were based on negative beliefs the person had about themselves or the world. And then when stuff happens to a person, it gets filtered through the lens of those beliefs, which then causes it to be interpreted in a negative

light. And we talk about this all the time on the podcast. In our recent episode on anxiety, for example, we talked about how the feeling of anxiety when it boils up in the body then causes us to look for something to be worried about in the outside world. So rather than taking outside information and turning it into a feeling, we're taking a feeling and we're turning it into how we're viewing the world around us. And that's why it's a distortion,

right? It's not an accurate representation of reality. So where do those cognitive distortions come from? Where do those experiences come from? They come from evidence, right? Things that really happen to us. And if the things that happen to us yesterday are based, at least in some extent, on the things that happen the day before that, which are based on the things that happen the day before by that, while you follow the chain back and

you get to, hello, childhood for most people. So if you want to, you can think of inner child work as a way of reconnecting with those kinds of experiences and healing the various wounds that a person might have from them and might be understandably carrying around these days, the form that a lot of those wounds can take for people, particularly focus

on what I'll call unmet needs or unresolved experiences that a person might have. I've gotten a lot of value myself in thinking about different kinds of wants and needs and which of those needs were well met when I was younger versus which of those needs were not well met when I was younger and how that might have consequences for my behavior in the here and now. I love how you did the origin story of CBT. And as you know, part

of that origin story connects the so-called cognitive revolution. It's sometimes called to earlier work, such as from Albert Ellis with so-called rational mode of therapy. And even before that, a fair amount of psychoanalytic interpretations are based on surfacing, underlying tacit beliefs or views for the client and over time, replacing them with more adaptive, more accurate views of themselves, the world, the past, the future, other people and so

on. So that's kind of part one. But I love how you did that. That you're exactly right. There was this way in which, and you see this so much in the history of psychology that people operate on the basis of the term from literary analysis and the person who came up with it will come to me in a minute from Yale. The anxiety of influence is theory with that all writers sense Shakespeare and in the English language have engroupling with the

influence of Shakespeare. And how they manage that influence determines their work. Do they resist him? Do they try to fly away from him? Do they try to model him and copy him? How do they work that out? Well, you see that in the history of psychology and the firdian approach, the psychoanalytic approach, including with Jung, is extremely developmental. It really prioritizes the history. Yeah. And these days most people who do CBT work are very much grounded in that.

Yeah, yeah, totally right. I'm not taking a shot. I'm just kind of appreciating the contextualizing here. When we talk about these kind of beliefs that come from childhood, let's be clear. First, they're developmentally situated. And the capabilities of a tenured to form beliefs about the world typically are not as cognitively developed as the capabilities of a sixteenured

or a twenty-sexual to form beliefs about the world. So those beliefs can become increasingly simplistic and absolute as we go down the developmental ladder and they can even be formed nonverbaly, kind of visually, even somatically, particularly as we get down to the conclusions, the decisions, those are examples of beliefs that were made by younger and younger layers in our soul. Yeah. And just as a little, to emphasize something you're saying here, that

never and always are great indicators. If the world is always a certain kind of way or people are never fill in the blank to you, great indicator. That's right. I'm just, I'm hearing a difficult child voice. You never bring kids to home. You know, you always break my toys. Yeah, classic black and white thinking stuff totally. That's right. Additionally, and it's in what you're saying, I just kind of want to foreground it. Yeah, please pull it out.

Wounds in effect typically happen because something was done to us, something occurred. And alongside wounds, there are, as you spoke about it, unmet needs. There are lax or forms of neglect. And that part is really important too. And in my clinical experience, I think, I would have to say that in my own practice, there's more stuff. There's more suffering related to the absence of the good than to the presence of the bad as a generalization about

the population as a whole. Yeah, that's going to vary person to person, but in terms of the population that you worked with, that was more the case. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really worth looking at, you know, those wounds are hot. We know them. We tend to think about them, but it's very often those neglected needs that then leave us with these unmet longings, which in turn then become often warded off, pushed down, pushed away because they were associated with a lot of pain when we were young.

Yeah. So I would love to get into this in a little bit of detail here, Dad, and maybe give you an opportunity to give some practical examples. Like what do we mean wound? What do we mean lack? Could you just kind of paint a picture for us here? Oh, and also if we could connect that to particular experiences that a person might be having an adulthood, that would be great.

I'll give you a couple of examples. One example, a man I worked with for a while, who as best he and I could gather had a early childhood in which his father was pleasant but ineffectual, and his mother was remote and punishing. And that all landed very important point on his temperament.

So just I want to flag that point in general for people that life happens to a living, vulnerable, sensitive individual who for genetic reasons, irritable factors, and then also due to the impact of lived experience, acquires a kind of temperament that can, for example, lead a particular child to kind of shrug off no big deal, whatever. It's okay. I didn't like it, but it didn't really land. Experiences were, you know, as a sexual that would have been devastating for the other child

sitting next to them in the in the score. So temperament really matters. And this goes to our Tennessee off end, which we can talk about later too, to shame ourselves or be embarrassed about the young parts of ourselves. And as part of shifting in our relationship to the work, those parts, it's useful to appreciate that, hey, just because other people, even in your own family, like siblings sort of shrugged it off, it's understandable given your own particular vulnerabilities,

how all that affected you. So I think he was also particularly vulnerable to the impact of all this. And then fast forward, when he and I were working together, he was a very successful, high-tech executive, very capable, managed situations really well. But along the way, his marriage was characterized by, and I know this to be a fact, a very dominating, critical, dismissive, distancing life. And he would routinely complain about all the things that were missing for him

in the relationship. And yet he could not leave her. He was bound to her. People talk about trauma bounding. And sometimes that happens with the actual perpetrator. Often it actually happens later in life in terms of object relations in which we end up with the person who's a lot like the one who either injured us a lot or neglected us in important ways. And we feel kind of stuck

in the script of all that. And so that is an example in which these very young parts of him, both were highly dependent on this very powerful female mother-like figure that he ended up marrying while at the same time being very angry at her while being utterly unable to insert himself and say what he really felt because he was terribly afraid of abandonment, which would reenact the abandonment and the exile he experienced very often when he was young.

That's a great description of that, Dad. And it also really paints a picture of the kinds of issues that somebody might be dealing with that are not obvious. When people talk about this kind of work and when we wander into the pop psychology world in general, you will often encounter lists of symptomology, people pleasing, perfectionism, feeling triggered by different kinds of stimuli. These can be useful lists. It can be useful to have that as context. But a lot of the time what

happens for people in these real-life situations is that it's not so simple. It's not like there is a thing that you can point to. That is the thing. Sometimes there is. But a lot of the time it's fuzzier, it's a little bit more complicated, it's a little bit more difficult to put your finger on, and you're speaking to a whole complex. That's typically the word that's used. A whole set of connected and related issues that are tied to something that appears to lie at some other point in

time in terms of its origin. Then of course the practical question is how do we start approaching that? How can we work with something that isn't in the here and now, but instead lies in the past? So most people tend to have two different kinds of goals when they enter the sort of work.

First, they want to de-burden themselves from that old stuff that is preventing them from exiting their unfulfilling relationship or is causing them to feel extremely emotionally activated, not in proportion to what's going on around them or to the stimuli that they're experiencing. This can take a lot of steps. For a lot of people, it starts by understanding how their past is shaping their present. A big part of this could be forming a coherent narrative we've talked about

on the podcast a whole bunch in the past. It might include bringing that aspect of personality to light, a lot of people to use some IFS terminology here start feeling very blended. They feel like, what do you mean? I have a lot of parts. I'm just me, man. They don't necessarily have the self-awareness to be able to discern the different voices that can pop up in the mind or the different feelings that pull them in different directions. So we get a little bit more acutely aware of that.

All of this lets us make more conscious choices. If you're choosing to stay in the relationship, it's because you're choosing to stay in the relationship, not because the little kid has to steal the line from Terry Rial, got his sticky fingers on the wheel. You're making the choices here. But then alongside that, there's also just a lot of good stuff in there. When we talk about inner childwork, people tend to focus on who's, they tend to focus on the negative, on the things the

so-called inner child is doing to us that we don't want it to be doing to us. But at the same time, like you were saying, very early on to add, there's all this stuff. There's optimism. All of this connection to strong emotions, positive aspects of that naivete that you sort of mentioned in the beginning, even things like mastery motivation. When young talked about the inner child, he talked about this being a part of the human personality that wants to develop and become whole. So there's

this desire, this connection there that can be very powerful if we can tap into it. So we can do both of these things at the same time. We can both try to work with those more negative aspects and then promote the more positive aspects that are tied to it. And I want to kind of highlight that second one because I think it gets lost sometimes. Well, I'm really glad we're going to be able to talk about that particular part. And I want to highlight a theme running through here.

It's really useful to get a good history. And then you go back and forth. So if you're doing this yourself, and I'll give you an example for myself, you go back and forth between a sense of something inside yourself that you're aware of, let's say, or maybe you're just beginning to get

a sense of it. If I can use a little metaphor here in the streaming of consciousness, and as we the observer are observing the flots of magetso, swirling along in that stream, sometimes it's as if we observe this stream and there's this little tiny thing sticking up above the water line, like a little bit of a leaf on the end of a twig. And we go, what's that? So we pull at it. We start focusing attention there. We start investigating further and we gradually pull that twig, which is

connected to a branch. And we get more of a sense of it. Oh, there's some intuition that this is important that branch becomes the limb of a tree. And then wow, we start to surface that whole floating log of important inner material residues of significant lived experience that maybe we were not aware of when we were really quite young. Then that inner work can be really complemented.

And sometimes this happens in the context of a therapy, often we do it on our own. It can be really complemented by a clear-eyed understanding of what happened and what happened when to take that into account. And then you can kind of go back and forth, like I'll give an example. I learned that I was fed on a schedule when I was very young. And my mom was unable to breastfeed.

So I was fed with a bottle. And she told me, you know, a few years before she passed away. And so therefore my late middle age, she said, well, when you were a little Ricky, she would call me Ricky, when you were a little Ricky, you know, we were fed you on a schedule, but you cried all the time. So I just kind of threw that book away and fed you whenever you wanted. And I thought,

wow, great for you, mom. And also what? And when she said that, I started being able to access this deep, subtle, but powerful part of me that felt kind of resigned to being unseen, unresponded to, ungone to. A kind of a slump, an emotional slump, a sense of resignation, maybe with a little associated anger, but mostly that sense of resignation and despair even. Wow. And then that's that's the way to go back and forth. And then that led me to forecast some

of the stuff we'll be talking about here. That led me to deliberately visualizing and imagining reparative experiences that I knew did not occur, that I know did not occur, but still are healing deep down of being that little toddler, that little baby rather than that little baby to whom in my visualization that's healing and reparative, a nurturing parental figure would come with food and love and soothing and all the rest of that, which I could then internalize into myself. And I,

which was really quite helpful for me. And I, but I couldn't do that until I was able to connect knowledge about the history with internal experience, even extremely subtle, nonverbal internal experience. I think that's a really interesting example, dad, because you, you're talking mostly again about a lack there, something you didn't receive that that would have been, would have been helpful or might have led to more of a sense of the people around you as really being supportive

and caring for you, which could then possibly lead to different experiences as a kid because you're just kind of assuming that people are going to be supportive and caring for you, which then lead to you taking bigger swings, trying things on, have kids get up through life, that's how we can kind of connect the dots between then and now. So this is the part in the conversation where we start

talking about what to do about all of this. But because inner child work can be a little fraught for people, you're often touching more vulnerable material whenever you're working with younger parts or exiles and IFS terminology, you could be interacting with some experiences, some memories,

even that could be potentially difficult for a person to hold on to. So I'm wondering, Dad, what you think some of the things people should be aware of or some of the capabilities they should try to kind of develop or think about before they start engaging with this sort of a process. This will repeat briefly some of the things we sometimes talk about. First point, being aware of internalization into yourself of how you were treated, such that how you were treated way back

when can become how parts of you today treat other parts of you. I think this is a huge point by the way. Huge, great. Yeah, great. Being very aware of the internalized critic or the internalized pusher aware, the dismisser, the ex-silver, the internalized down player, minimizer, especially of

very vulnerable, upsetting feelings. Being aware of that and really establishing inside the more kind of executive processes of yourself, establishing in yourself a deep kind of loyalty to the inner layers of yourself and that inner child based on principle, based on understanding and based on lovingness. You are giving to yourself today, which is so healing that which could well have been a short supply when you were young. Yeah, and we learn how to adult by watching other

people adult. So we get behavior that's modeled to us and then we replicate that behavior. That's how the brain works, just bottom line. Very good. So we've watched our parents as a young person do certain kinds of things to us when we were in that role. And so we learned this is how adults act. So then when we're in adult mind and we are faced by child mind to put it that way, how do we treat child mind? We treat child mind the way we saw adults act toward us. It's a very natural process.

It's really understandable. And it's how a lot of these issues get perpetuated over time because they're not really punished out of us. You can't punish your inner child into not doing the things that are bothering you. It's about nurturing the inner child out of it. But that's not a model that people often carry around about how to interact with themselves or even frankly how to interact with kids broadly because it just wasn't taught to them that way. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So based on this understanding and based on a kind of allegiance to the younger parts of yourself, a commitment to them, I'm visualizing and imagining a nurse or a physician who's committed to their patient and will protect their patient from the annoying administrators who are saying, oh,

denying care, send them home, who cares, or even worse inside the healing setting. There needs to be a kind of clarity about the parts of the self that are going to put down the inner child or minimize its needs or laugh at it, laugh at it, dismissively or ally with others in your life today who are kind of dismissive of the inner child. And so that's that's very fundamental right there. Then second, we need to be able to tolerate sometimes the intensity of

those younger parts. They can be shocking when we're not used to them. They can just come roaring forward. They've been really, especially if they've been really suppressed and have not had healthy opportunities to kind of leak, if you will, and disperse some of that energy. So it's not so intense, you know, when the lid finally comes off. So that's important to be able to suit

yourself and also contain based on what's happening here. And then the last thing I would say is that it's also really important to have clarity that as you said earlier, just because you love

the inner child doesn't mean you let it drive the car. As Plano of Terry Reels comment. And note to yourself that you can really open to the volcanic sometimes passions and intensities and demands of these, you know, young parts of yourself while taking a breath and tracking your long-term best interests in realizing that something that was completely understandable in a six year old is just not realistic to expect from trebund from others today.

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motion for kids. Kids are extremely shame prone. It's one of the earliest emotions that we develop because it's tied to social belonging and learning how to fit in was an essential survival scale back in the day. You can apply some evolutionary psychology here. It remains an essential survival skill for us these days. It is very, very important. And so when we talk to somebody, you talk to an adult 55 year old, you know, sturdy guy, about, hey, it's time to work with your

inner child. Eesh, there can be a lot of material embarrassment. Like what do you mean? Isn't that way in the past? Like I don't need to deal with that shit. Like all of that kind of stuff, right? And those feelings that shame that embarrassment for starters, these are extremely strong emotions that are often quite difficult for people to process. And then also they again get in the way of what that part of you actually needs, which is acceptance, comfort, and support.

And so it's sort of another way that we kind of turn onto ourselves what was done to us. If other people treated us by embarrassing us or trying to shame us for a normal child-like behavior, whatever that was, it's very, very easy again to internalize that and then turn it back on ourselves. A little point here that a lot of this inner child work is not about the relationship of the child with caregivers. It's about the relationship of the child to siblings

and other kids, peers in school. And that's a lot where the real action is. We're getting drawn into doing this work ourselves, just talking here, just simply turning toward and being present well. The younger parts of yourself is itself reparative nurturing and healing. Just the turning toward and being receptive. It's beautiful to know that. And in that, how would you be with a little kid who is hurting here as an adult here and now? Well, can you be that way with yourself?

And that's by the way a very useful little bit of a diagnostic skill. Imagine a kid who's actually resolved four years old, let's say, and who's really disappointed about something, or a kid who's 13 years old and is feeling really hurt about not being included for some party. How would you be with that young child? How would you be? And then ask yourself, how do you want to be with that same young part of yourself, same situation, that same four-year-old

inside or that same 13-year-old inside? And if there's a breakdown, if there's a divergence between how you would naturally be with a real kid like that in your life today compared to how you would tend to treat yourself inside, that's really worth observing. And using that insight to help yourself not have a double standard, but to treat the inner children inside yourself much like you would treat outer children today. This is kind of an example of a word people might have heard.

It's called reparenting. It's one of the many approaches to inner child work that's out there. Would you mind kind of explaining what that means, Dad? It's a broad term. There are people who might use it more narrowly. Yeah, it's another one of those fuzzy words. Yeah. But it's a good one, I think of it just in terms of face value, that we have opportunities to bring to our deeper, more vulnerable childlike layers, as well as bring directly to the wounds and the lax,

deep inside the lower strata, the structure of the psyche. We're the opportunity today to bring to those parts of ourselves what was missing when we were young. That's reparenting in a nutshell. So we can stand up for ourselves. I'll give you an example about myself. For myself, I've realized that hidden, this is important too, often what is really true in our character as a young child is hidden out of sight for different reasons. Maybe it was not

safe to reveal it, to express it. Maybe we tucked it away even out of our conscious mind to protect it in like a secret cave. It's still there. It's still part of ourselves. This really important underlying part. And it's sometimes really quite helpful to open the door or to recognize like that was in the mix. And so one of the things I realized about myself some time ago was that

as a being, I was naturally a very warm and caring child. But because of different circumstances, I became quite withdrawn and withheld and uptight and in my head and not very expressive of that kind of caring. And so a kind of reparenting for myself is to value that part of myself. A certain amount of reparenting is about valuing, cherishing, pricing, right? To bring that to

ourselves. Anyway, in that celebration, I've been just more able to integrate that truth about myself and to let it be more natural and woven into the ongoing fabric of my consciousness and my way of being in the world today. I might be interpreting the word, reparenting a little too loosely even at this point, but kind of roll with me here. I think a big part of this for people can be giving themselves the kindest of experiences these days

that they are a part of them wishes that they had had back then. So if we think about what's life like for most children? And when I use the word children, I mean, essentially before the age of like 12 or 13, 13 years old, certainly, but like really all the way up until 18. You are essentially an appendage. You are being moved through the world by other people. Things are always happening to you. And you do have some agency. You get to make some choices.

You get to choose. I want to play with this toy rather than that toy. But your real operational agency is pretty limited. You're basically an external organ for the parent that they're schlepping around all the way to the examples of the kids on those like harnesses, delicious, that the parents are like walking around or whatever to make sure that they don't who knows what run into traffic or whatever it is. But that's really the experience.

So the world is big. It is confusing. It's scary. And all of this stuff is happening to you. You get very little choice in it. And then we start talking about inner child work and how do most people initially approach it? All right. Well, I guess that my adult self is going to have to drag up this kid material that's going to be really frustrating to interact with. It's so exhausting that I have to deal with this child again. All of that kind of material comes in right.

Again, stuff is happening to that inner child. And so for me, a big part of this I think was understanding that there were things that part kind of wanted or wanted to express. And then seeing if I could put my more adult parts or adult self in the position of receiving the communication from the younger part. So it was no longer about dictating to it. It was about putting it in that position where it really could affect the world around it. And that for me was very productive.

I'm not sure if that totally connects to what you were talking about dad, but just kind of came to mind there. That just overall model that we have of more dictatorial control and what we can do to kind of break it down a little bit. Yeah, that's very cool for us. It relates to in a way, four categories here of reparenting. One is in which you are nurturing the younger layers. You're soothing them, you're feeding them, you're nurturing them. A second category is you are

celebrating them. You're valuing them, you're pricing them, you know, you're cherishing those parts. Third, really important aspect to reparenting in many people is guiding the younger parts. Because sometimes what happens for different reasons is that we don't get good guidance when we're young and we can become somewhat dysregulated. We're not, for example, comfortable with hard work. We shy away from mildly to moderately uncomfortable experiences, which are just part of life and

necessary to be able to get to the other side to where it's really good. And so there's a place for guiding. And then there's a fourth one I was just thinking about that for different reasons again, sometimes various developmental challenges are not really met or we don't have opportunities

for certain kinds of successes as a kid. That would have been really great to have. We don't have opportunities for social successes or being able to be really instrumental, successful about making something, building something, making something happen, or successful athletically or artistically intellectually. And so then as an adult, we look at that young version of ourselves who had a fair amount of let's say untapped talent artistically or untapped talent in terms of being able to

be a leader. And then we do the things with our dull mind that set up circumstances and situations and relationships and step-by-step procedures that enable that younger part of ourselves to have a success or kind of success that was really not happening when we were young or maybe in high school. That's a very cool thing. A person listening could ask themselves, what was a kind of unfulfilled capacity or a thwarted success when I was younger? And really, how could I help

myself have that kind of success today? And related to that kind of success today, really internalized experiences of that kind of success. So they tap into and go down into those younger parts of myself. We've talked about this sort of generally so far, Dad, in a way that I hope is helpful for people. And we do, to some extent, need to talk generally because everybody's experience is going to be really different here. And for anyone person listening, what we've said

so far may or may not really overlap with what you individually have experienced. But hopefully there's something in here that you can find and use to your own benefit. But I'm imagining

somebody right now who's going, okay, this all sounds well and good. I can look back through my history and imagine there being experiences in my past that I'll get some some value here out of doing some combination of reconnecting with and working with and kind of taking the sting out of to some extent, maybe given that that inner child inside some of the things that it didn't

receive back then. But I look inside and I have a hard time doing what you're describing. Maybe I don't have that kind of self-awareness that you're describing where you can really hear that younger part. Maybe that younger part's kind of quiet. How do you how do you do this? And that then takes us to something a particular kind of approach that people can do, which is called voice dialogue

is what at least it was originally called Dr. Richard Schwartz and IFS. I think caused this more direct access where you're trying to directly speak to a part that a person has or allow that part to directly voice how it feels. Do you have much experience with this dad? I have a lot of experience. Yeah, so that was a leading question. I know that you've done this a good bit. But like, how would somebody do this? Oh, well, that's great. And you can do this in conversation with another

person. Be careful. You can also do it by things like writing a letter or you can kind of create some distance here if that's appropriate. Yeah, that's right. So the basic idea and we find versions of this technique as you know in things like the stalled therapy and in other forms. Even psychodrama where you deliberately take on different roles, those are examples. Essentially, these parts of ourselves are imagined as or regarded as sub-personalities where voice says.

It's very often the sense of them that they are one particular flavor. They are a particular thing and they have a particular view and they have a particular function. So there's also not an attempt to get them to change. The framework here is to give voice to them and in the process of giving voice to them, shift somewhat the inner ecology of the mind, the inner equilibrium. So to be specific, this is basically how it's done. So if I were doing it with you for us,

so you're our willing victim here. Okay, good. I only base it. We would identify the part. And so we don't have to do it for real because you would put you really on the spot. But we could kind of sort of imagine that. Sure. Yeah. And I can kind of play a character to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So knowing you really well, I have any idea what I want to go after a couple of parts. How about we go after a theoretical listener here, dad, as opposed to your your

son sitting in the chair in front of you? Oh, no. Well, you were like, you would love it if you went after you saw it. Yeah. No, I did. So actually an example of this. If you're interested in this, I record an episode with Amritur Chord's creator of IFS. He's also a lovely guy. We also talked with him just two of us. But in the one that I did with him, he actually did direct access with me. You can find that in the podcast feed. I don't actually know if that's on YouTube or not,

because it might have been from before we were doing YouTube videos. I'm not sure. But you can definitely find it in our podcast feed somewhere. So anyways, that go ahead. Oh, it's a great conversation. So let's suppose that there's a part of you, remember, typical parts that is critical for us. Sure. Here's for us. This great guy. But there's a critic more of a self-critical part. Sure. So we would say, okay, so is it okay with you for us if we talk to your critic?

And you would say yes, self-assass. And okay, how does that feel? Aren't you? Yeah, sure. Cool. And so then as part of the voice dialogue protocol, I would say, okay, why don't you move literally physically in your chair or on the couch or something and settle into letting yourself be the inner critic? And at this point, sometimes people have a hard time getting in touch with that. Other times, it can really feel quite remarkable as if a whole other kind of energy or

consciousness comes in. Now, therefore, this is not something you want to do if you're prone to fragmentation, psychotic process, dissociation. You want to stay away from trauma material unless you're really on top of it. But let's suppose that with you for us, very saying, well, regulated person, good, good reality testing, as we say. Yeah. You'd imagine, okay, the

inner critic. So now, let's, for example, now we're talking to the inner critic. My role in talking with the inner critic, in the back of my mind, I have a little bit of an agenda because I'm thinking about the role this part of the person plays in the overall psyche of the individual. But I'm also being very careful not to get caught up in that agenda to try to change the inner critic or push on it because then it'll go back into the shadows. So I say, well, thank you, first of all, for

being willing to talk with me here as for us inner critics. So we would always speak of you in the third person as an important point. Thank you. And are you willing to speak with me? The inner critic would let's say, yeah, for sure. Great. I'm up for that. And I say, well, as I understand it, your job in a way with forest is to keep them on the straight and narrow to make sure he doesn't mess up. Is that totally? Yeah. Would you want to add to that? What your job is as you see it?

To improve performance, to make sure that, you know, there's some safety in there in terms of trying to encourage, encourage away from situations that are maybe a little bit more dangerous, particularly kind of social situations, things like that. What kind of trouble do you think he would get into or does he get into without your guidance? Well, you know, he can be a little lazy. That's one thing. I mean, he can kind of, you know, he sees good from time to time, but tends to fall

off in terms of consistent effort over time. That can really be the case. Also, sometimes, you know, gotten some feedback in the past about like talking to much in groups or kind of just being a little annoying in terms of soaking up a little bit too much of the light in the room. And wow, that wasn't so fun. So really try to kind of make sure that after about 30 seconds of talking, there's a certain amount of, all right, buddy, it's time to wrap it up. Yeah, definitely. So it

sounds like you're really helpful for him and trying to be helpful for him. Yeah, I think so. How do you try to affect him? How do you criticize him? It's normally pretty verbal. Mm-hmm. Like I'm a, you know, a forcedist got like a good internal monologue and it's pretty verbal in nature. Some people don't have that, but he does. So I can normally just kind of talk to him that way and come through, you know, strongly enough to get his attention and then normally

he stops whatever it is. He's pretty good about it. Sometimes he gets a little, you know, a little sad about it, but it is what it is. And yeah, would you be willing to give me an example of being really, let's say, strong, forceful about sometimes needing to get him to do the right thing. Yeah, I avoid the bad thing. Sometimes there are days where he just kind of doesn't do anything, or I, you know, that's how I feel at least. And there's a lot to do. And man, it's, you know,

it's one o'clock or whatever and we just haven't produced very much. Yeah. And look, like there are things I have deadlines, like we got a schedule. And when that happens, you know, I will get pretty critical. And I don't think it's inaccurate. But, you know, it's, it might come forward a little bit more strongly. And do you yell at him? No, I don't think so. I don't, I don't really, would you like to? Oh, sometimes, sometimes. I think I'm a pretty well regulated

part of the system. But, you know, there are times where I kind of feel that way. I feel like mad about it for sure. But generally, it's more kind of incisive and sort of cutting as opposed to more loud and explosive. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. And then we'll just be talking here for a few more minutes. So I do want to ask you though, so far we've been talking about how you criticize forest and keep them on the track, including particularly related to kind of safety

issues, avoiding harms, including in social settings or related bad outcomes. Yeah, like that thing's happening. Getting stuff done. You sound the alarm and it kind of merr. Attention eventually is paid most of the time to you. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes it takes a little while, but we get there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you need to yell louder, I don't know. Yeah. That's I see I ask myself this question, sometimes, right? I got to tell you. Yeah.

Okay. So then what about other parts of forest? Is there maybe another part or two of forest that really frustrates you? Because you think they're dragging them around by the nose, you know, making them drop the ball, be lazy or say dumb stuff in social settings.

Yeah. There are other parts of him that really bug you. That's a good question. I hadn't really thought about it, but if you if I, if I kind of think about it a little bit, and I'm a pretty I'm a pretty logical part, you know, I really you know, see the goal, and I want to get us there and I want to get us there as quickly and as safely as possible, good go. So we're going

after it. And sometimes there are parts of forest that are, you know, I think just like a little silly or a little embarrassing or a little, you know, exuberant, like I was saying, like a little too much space in the room. And, you know, frankly, my experience is that people just don't really have reacted super well to those aspects. And so, you know, I try to kind of, when those things start going, I try to kind of keep them under wraps a little

bit. Well, you sound kind of frankly really nice about this. And I just kind of wonder if you to try to get your job done would really like those, let's say, other parts of forest, you know, those kind of flaky or impulsive or slack or parts of them, right? When you like to kind of give them a good whack or make them go away. I mean, yeah, I know that they're

exhausting. They irritate me for sure. And I, you know, like at this point, I think, I think forest has gotten to a place where there's, there's a little bit more self-awareness about stuff. You know, we're a little friends who used to be. But honestly, though, and I think that there are, yeah, look, I think you're kind of right about this. There are definitely ways in which I'm just very frustrated by those aspects. And I feel like I'm doing all

the work. And they're just running around. And like I don't, you know, who else is going to keep the trains on the tracks here? Exactly. It's a hard job you have. And it sounds like you don't feel sufficiently appreciated for it. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, at least to next then, yeah, we've had sort of a tricky relationship in the past. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've really appreciated talking with you. And I know forest has been

less thing. So that's really a good thing. And I want to thank you. Is there any last thing you'd like to say before we shift back to forest? No, I mean, I think that this was really good. I appreciate that. It's nice to, you know, have the stage every once in a while and be able to just kind of communicate some stuff that I feel like I just wish people took it a little bit more seriously sometimes, you know, the people inside forest, you mean?

Yeah. And forest himself. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's tough to feel unheard or not listen to, especially when you, when you're right. And you know how it ought to be. Well, thank you very much. Now let's shift back to forest. Sure. Forest once you move a little and we're back into the forest. I was to sub extent flag roll there, but there were aspects of truth to it as well. Yeah. Yeah. So either, you know, playing the role and watching your

mind or being in it itself, do you have any observations? And I totally applied you forest. I'll thank you for how you were just kind of go there. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you're well, you're like, God in there. So I was like, all right. Sure. We're doing it. So this is kind of an example of direct access or form of voice dialogue. That was with more of a self critical part. I tried to throw in a younger part into the mix, the mix, the

part that wants to be more gregarious present in a room, that kind of thing. And so we got into a little bit of the, the dialogue that can emerge between aspects of personality. We all have parts of us that want to be a little bit more regulated or a little bit more together and parts of us that are more like screw it man, be who you are. You know, this is very, very natural, normal stuff. But you can imagine doing that kind of thing with

those more quote unquote young parts. In some ways, we were actually accessing not so much an inner child part, but a very adult, very hyper manager part in the IFS terminology that that keeps the trains run in, keeps the body regulated and sort of can suppress those more childlike aspects. Yeah. To actually answer your question, dad, in terms of like,

in doing it, what is it like? It's really interesting. Initially, when you start doing that sort of stuff, it feels, it can feel quite fake initially or quite like I'm just sort of playing a part here. But as you get into it, particularly if you, I think if you're doing it with some, or if you're like writing from that perspective, something people could do by themselves, journaling, things like that, like journaling from a part.

Once you get to like the third sentence or the second paragraph, shit gets real pretty quickly. Like it starts to feel pretty pretty, pretty legit, pretty fast. Yeah, absolutely. And so you can really get some mileage out of it. I thought it was really interesting how you were talking about how you were validating the part and talking about the concerns of the part, which can then of course also help the part chill out a little bit. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And for me, I was sort of embodying

an aspect of myself that was much more true 10 years ago than it's true right now. It was sort of funny when you went to the self-criticism place because I was like, I've actually done a lot of work around myself criticism. So this might be interesting. So I kind of like reverted to be circa, I don't know, 20, 20, 16 or something. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I'm choosing. I didn't want to get it stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is appropriate here. And just to

highlight some of the how of this, you said exactly what was happening there. Yeah. People have really liked some of the demos that we've done in the past. So I hope that wasn't too long and that was interesting for people. Okay. Good. Yeah. Complete validation

of the part. If anything, revving it up a little bit, I think that if you were not in a podcast, if it was not being publicly recorded and you actually wanted to work on this, I might have done a few things to try to get at more of a kind of harsh demanding, more critical. Even punishing intensity in the in the critic that kind of just doesn't give a damn about how people feel when it drops the bomb of criticism because this job is to get them to do the right

thing. God damn it. Once and for all, etc, etc. You know, and you were very, you know, the critic, you were portraying this is also a mellowed out part of me at this point of time. Like that your results might have varied if we had done this exercise a little while back. But no, totally. And I think that essentially you were speaking to the repressed aspects of the part, which is like a really interesting kind of kind of turn to the screw, you know, like the idea that these aspects

of ourselves can themselves have these things that they're pushing down a repress. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit about the neo-Jungian approaches that have to do with the gods and goddesses within these different aspects of ourselves in that framework, particularly, you know, informs the mythology like Mars or Juno or Venus, you know, in Roman mythology or Agni, fire. Each one of those characters is singular. They are have a specific nature.

They are a particular kind of thing. They're not a composite. They are very essential. In the same way with subpersonalities, the way to explore them, and especially in voice dialogue, at least classic technique, is to recognize that they are each very much their own, very, very much their own. And when you're doing this work sometimes, you'll see people who start slipping out of one

subpersonality into another. And it's technically useful to mark that slippage and to go back to the original one until you actually go through the transition where you typically you would go from the subpersona. You would start with the core ego process like we did. You'd go to the subpersonality. You'd complete with that subpersonality. You'd go back to the core ego process and then you'd go out to the next subpersonality if you want to do it. It's actually, you know, we're easier to do

it in writing where you might imagine a kind of dialogue. Like we might do a dialogue between the critic and whatever we want to call them, the playful, the playful child. The playful kid. The younger child part. Yeah. Don't want to do anything. Peter Pan, I don't want to grow up. Okay. And then you'd have a third character, which is more core process that can make room for both of these voices and subpersonalities, let's say, but it's kind of managing and regulating between

them and forming balance compromises and so forth. Writing that out can actually also be really helpful. Yeah. There are a lot of different approaches to this. And if that kind of direct access feels a little thorny for you, understandably, it either feels like it's kind of too much or you don't really have somebody to do it with or you're uncomfortable doing it on your own or whatever. There are a bunch of other ways into this. Visualization practices can be really helpful here.

Thinking of yourself as a young person, picking a specific age, visualize them, seeing what they're doing, can you see them in a room? What's their behavior like? How are they acting? This all itself can be helpful. From that third person perspective, maybe it even slips into a kind of, okay, is there anything that they want to say? Is there anything that they want to say to you? Kind of again, can you listen to them, giving them that sense of kind of agency and connection and

worth? Can you write a letter to your younger self? Can you write a letter as your younger self? Other approaches that people might have, if you tend to be like pretty logical rational, which is definitely where I go, you could explore some aspects of this maybe through art or through play or through other things that tend to kind of loosen up the more logical mind. I really recommend here, if you're comfortable with them, a lot of somatic practices.

You're literally rolling around on the floor, can be helpful for people, if your body is capable of doing that. Dancing, moving, if it doesn't matter if you have no idea what to do, the point isn't that you know what to do, the point is that you're moving your body. Adopting different kinds of postures can be helpful for people. There's this notion called character armor, the basic ideas that we kind of fuse ourselves into a way of holding the body that is representative of more

psychological content. So even just doing things like stretching before doing an exercise like this, trying to touch your toes if you haven't tried to touch your toes at 10 years can I be a be humbling, but be I could actually literally help you physically get into a different kind of posture that might help these parts be a little bit more accessible. Another thing if you're somebody who's having a hard time with this, figuring out the reason why you're having a hard time with this is

is a really big part of the process. For some people, the reason that they're going to struggle with that is because they are very intellectual people, very top down, they're very rational, they're very processed driven. I am this kind of a person. So I speak from some experience here. It's

important to remember that that is not how a child's brain works. Very important. And so when we're trying to essentially go back in time to the feelings or the personality of this younger version of the self and we're trying to talk to it in this kind of hyper rational, very cognitive way where we're almost trying to reason with the part. The part doesn't, the part is not considering context in that way. It is not necessarily thinking about the fact that, you know, mom has a tough

job. It just knows that it feels lonely. It's not really thinking about the deadline in two days. It just wants what it wants to some extent. It can kind of know those things, but they're just fuzzy and not as important as the feeling a lot of the time. And this is sometimes why people struggle when they start trying to reason what their parts in that way. I'm so glad you said that. And one thing I want to flag too is sometimes what comes out is rage. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Incredible anger. Anger at caregivers, anger at other kids. What's the kind of thing you would yell at the school assembly if you really could with no consequences when you're 12 years old or yell at others in your classroom or, you know, act out even violently to people, toward people who bullied you or abused you. And making room for that. Actually, I don't mind going public with

this. As someone who suppressed a tremendous amount of anger as a kid, a lot of my own journey has been finding ways to allow that volcanic lava to come out in ways that don't hurt myself or others and then release it. That's very important because anger is the one emotion of the so-called negative emotions. Sadness, fear and shame being together. Three of the four. It has a lot of reward in it and it feeds on itself. It feeds on itself. So be careful with this. But

if you can, if it's this is relevant to you, this can be really helpful. I'll let that out. I wanted to add a couple other methods that I've used that have been really helpful. Yeah. One is to do what you can to find pictures. You talked a little bit about this already. Pictures, your books, old movies of yourself as a kid. And look at them through fresh eyes. And what do you see? What are the subtleties that you see in the micro expressions around the eyes of the people?

What was going on inside you while that kind of picture was being taken? So that's very helpful. And I've had clients come in with pictures going back, younger ages. And you can both get a more clarity about the objectivity of what was actually occurring. The facts that could be very useful as well as get more clarity about what it felt like on the inside. And then another one I want to say is it's quite an exercise. But if you want to do it, you can do it.

It's to create an autobiography or you can even do a third person as a biography of yourself. And you can even structure it year by year by year by year. That might seem like too much, especially if you've got more than 20 years under your belt. It's probably most of our listeners too. I certainly do. But it can be quite really quite powerful. Or you could do it even by decade. So you might be writing it in the voice during the 12th year of my

life after I turned 11. We lived in a flea well avenue, West Covina, doing myself. I went to Holland back to your high school. And I was having a wedding like the eighth grade. And I did it out of the day. I like doing this. I was scared of that. Like you said about getting into the subpersonality of the inner critic within a sentence or two, just even the prospect of it. It gets real. It can get very real. Very quickly.

Which is wonderful for you. Be careful about it. But still it can be really quite powerful. And in it, keep finding the appreciation. Keep appreciating yourself as someone who was coping, keep celebrating your strengths. So often unacknowledged and seen because it's just what you did, just how you were. See if you can keep finding your way into, wow, if I had known that kid, who was me way back when, I would have thought I would have liked them. I would have thought,

that's a pretty cool kid. Keep helping yourself into that attitude towards yourself. Unsurprisingly, this has run a little bit long. It's for the longer one of the episodes. It's just, it's a deep topic. It touches so much other stuff. And I feel like we could just kind of keep going here almost endlessly. But I do want to bring us toward a close. I do want to also ask you one more question though, which I think is a really normal thought that people

might have as part of this process. There's a kind of balance between the needs or the desires, the wants of this part of ourself and the reality of now being hello and adult. And there are times where this part really does kind of need to understand, you know, hey, little Ricky, hey, little Timmy, hey, little whoever. I appreciate where you're coming from, but you got to send the passenger seat here. And that might not feel great, but it is just the reality of life.

And I'm wondering about approaching the balance inside of that process and how you've thought about that in general, Dad. Yeah, excellent. Key question. One part is grieving and mourning. And realizing that you will never get back those years. And things that were lost, opportunities that were lost, roads that were untaken, doors that you never opened, because of all that happened. And the consequences for you will not have been the case. You will never have

had a holding nurturing childhood to the extent that that's true. And so there's a grieving. There's a mourning. Sometimes that happens when we're breaking with, wow. So we need to make room for that grieving, make room for that mourning. First, second, it is really possible to give yourself today to the extent you possibly can or be on your side today in ways that should have

happened more when you were young. And you can repair it yourself today in lots of ways. And as part of that, even if you can't today get the whole quote unquote pie of a completely loving, highly skillful, attuned parenting that's appropriate for a three-year-old. Today, you can still get

most of the slices of that pie in their adult forms. And you can help those experiences of those existing here and now slices of the pie to sink down into and touch these younger parts of yourself and heal and repair them through processes of linking in various techniques, including voice dialogue, again and again and again. You can also, third, deliberately imagine experiences

that you will never have actually had. And yet, as you help yourself imagine them richly, like I did with my story about people coming to me as a little infant with food and comfort and responsiveness, you can help yourself into experiencing that with kind of an adult part of your mind that's directing the show. But the youngest parts of you that are watching the show or experiencing the show, they have no idea and they don't care where the show is coming from. The experiences

are real. It's made up, but it's real as it is occurring and can be internalized and received by those younger parts of yourself. All this is incredibly helpful. And then I would just say last in our life today, we can just, in ordinary life, make more room for the goofy, unmet, unpremeditated, somewhat impulsive, maybe sometimes a little awkward, parts of ourselves and just make more room for them. And to make more room for playfulness, for curiosity, for adventure, for passion,

for all that stuff, you know, that is natural in kids. And we can also make a lot more room for that another people. And as we make more room for it in them, that makes more room for it inside ourselves. I thought that was a beautiful reflection. I really appreciate it. And thanks for doing this with me today. This was like really great, a really interesting one. Well, I love your inner child. And I love your, and I love your outer adult. So appreciate it. And it is so funny to have

this conversation with your dad to some extent, right? You know, I mean, you saw the actual child. There was no, no intervout it. And maybe that, hey, maybe that's a reflection at the end that we didn't talk about at all, which is if you have the kind of relationship with a parental figure that you can have that sort of talk about them, some version of what was I like? You know, what were things like? What do you remember from that? What do you want to tell me about that

can be, you know, kind of fraught for people because relationships with families vary. And sometimes the parental figures are the people who cause the experiences that you're now dealing with, you know, not everybody has access to that resource. But hey, if you do, great way in. Yes, I know a number of people who've taken up, we would call them a tape recorder in years past, to talk with their parent. Yeah. Or sometimes an older sibling who has a pretty good recollection

of what actually was the case. And you know, take it with a grain of salt, but it's a nice way in. And sometimes you're dealing with a parent figure who has poor memory or selective memory or they're motivated in their memory. They want to edit out the number of times they actually spank you. Sometimes you can be doing this and learn something that just stops you in your tracks. I'll tell the blows of mine, yeah. And you're quietly appalled. Like what?

Really? I'll give you a lot of insight. Yeah, or even, you know, how your parent was impacted by other events. Like, like, what? Dad moved out for a year and a half when I was two years old. What? You know, then he came back and they were married in my conscious memory. But suddenly, you realize all kinds of impacts on your mother in this example, which then cascaded to your mother to affect you too. Totally. Yeah. Great. Man, so much here. We can just keep going. But I got to

let people go. I got to let you go. Thanks so much. If you listened to the whole episode, we really appreciated it. I really hope you got something out of this one. And we'll talk to you soon. Beautiful. I really love today's episode with Rick, which focused on working with our inner child. So we started by talking about what the inner child is. And there are a lot of different ways to approach this. On the first level, we can think about it as the more childlike part of our current

adult personality. This is the part that is more playful or curious, maybe a little bit more sensitive, or the part of us that isn't as governed and regulated by those more top down adult aspects of our personality. Second, we might think about our inner child as the content we're still carrying around from back then. And how that content influences how we behave. And this is maybe more of a developmental approach. And then third, we might think of the inner child

as a fully formed unique part of our personality. And this is how IFS or other forms of parts work tend to approach it. It's also how people like young tend to talk about the inner child and the psychoanalytic tradition. And the idea here is that this part is its own fully formed aspect of personality. It exists within us as a child. It has its own thoughts and feelings about the world. And because we push this aspect of ourselves away, it tends to pop out when we

least expect it. And often when we least want it to most of the time when people talk about working with their inner child, the frame is that there's some kind of a wound that needs to be healed. Some kind of an experience that the child didn't have. Some unmet need, some unresolved material, whatever it is. And we can think of these wounds as anything that's left a mark that's affecting how you show up today. These might be beliefs about ourselves and other people. We talked a lot

about that during the episode. It could also be stuff that comes out through your behavior with others. Tendencies like people pleasing or perfectionism. A great indicator is if you have a disproportionate emotional reaction to something. In other words, if you're triggered, a lot of relationship issues can show up in this kind of work when people have something of a repetition

compulsion. In other words, they're trying to recreate old situations or they find themselves drawn to a particular kind of partner who isn't very good for them over and over again. That could potentially be affected by different kinds of inner child work. That's normally the frame working with these kinds of wounds. But another thing that we really wanted to emphasize throughout the episode is all the good stuff that you can get out of this work. It's not just about

healing old wounds. It's also about reclaiming aspects of personality that are themselves really beautiful parts of who we are. The interested parts, the curious parts, the parts of us that view the world in a more magical lens that are a little bit less tied to the monotony of our everyday experiences. Just think about being a seven-year-old or being an eight-year-old. All of the sense of openness and possibility that a child has would be great to reclaim some aspects

of that in your life these days. We try to do both of those things when we engage in inner child work. On the one hand, we're trying to do what we can in the here and now to repair experiences or repair feelings that we held onto from back then. Then on the other hand, we're trying to promote all of those positive aspects associated with that inner child. I then asked Rick about

what a person needs to develop in order to do this work safely. Because when a person is doing inner child work, they're often touching some of the more vulnerable aspects of their experience. Old memories, young parts, things we've pushed away, all of that kind of stuff. It can really stir up a lot of material. You do need some basic self-suitant capability here. Another great thing is the

ability to let go of the rope for lack of a better way of putting it. In other words, to be able to cut off your engagement with a thought or a memory and to step back from it without being totally overwhelmed by it. Rick also mentioned how we tend to strongly internalize criticism. We have ways of being with kids that are modeled to us by the adults who are around us. Then when we become adults ourselves, when we develop more adult parts, we then tend to treat our inner child in the same

way that we were treated. We've internalized that criticism and we start to perpetrate it upon ourselves. This means that we then need to be able to regulate those more self-critical aspects, those more self-critical parts in order to give the inner child what it really needs, which is that nurtured, accepting energy as opposed to just a lot more self-criticism.

Then we also talked about working with the shame and embarrassment that can come up for people, particularly if you're an older adult, the idea of going back in time in that way and dredging up the past can feel like an eye roll, it can feel like regressing, been there, done that. The shame that we carry around today related to those parts, related maybe to things that happened to us or experiences that we had, can really get in the way of what those parts actually

need, which is comfort, acceptance, and warmth. We then moved on from there to talking about how to actually do this kind of work inside of yourself. A lot of options here. We talked about reparenting, which is essentially learning how to give yourself the love and support your younger self needed, Rick talked in some detail about that, and then we did a whole role play of direct access. This is also known as voice dialogue. It was created by Dr. Hal Stone and Dr. Sidra Stone

in the 1970s. It's a way that we can give direct voice to our parts. It can also help us manage the different aspects of personality that we might have in a more deliberate and intentional way. We did this working with more of a self-critical part of me as opposed to per se an inner child part. I think that Rick probably chose to do that for a whole bunch of different reasons, including that accessing the inner child of your son in like a public forum in a therapeutic way is probably not

super appropriate. So we danced around it a little bit and I was, you know, to some extent playing a character, but I got to say most of what I said during that was pretty real for me and was certainly real for me if you would ask me maybe five or ten years ago. If you're not able or not interested in doing that kind of direct access work, which very understandable, maybe you don't have access to a therapist to do that with. Maybe it just feels like a lot. Maybe you're

uncomfortable doing it inside of yourself. There are a whole bunch of other ways in here. One is various visualization techniques that people will do. You could think of yourself as a young person, pick a time in a place, ask them how they're doing. Maybe they want to say something in a room, just knowing the setting that they're in could even be helpful. And something that I spent some time talking about is the experience of kids, right? Kids feel very dictated to by their parents,

by their environment. And so when we just do more dictating to them, when we're engaged in this kind of inner child work, wow, it's no surprise that they don't really want to have much to do with us, or they're pretty resistant to that. So something that can be very healing for people is giving themselves the experiences that they wish that they had had back then. And one of those big experiences is often agency, feeling like they can actually affect their environments,

feeling like they can say stuff, and somebody will listen to them. So a great lens for this work as a whole is not can you talk to your inner child, but rather can your inner child talk to you? And can it at least to some extent feel like it can actually affect your behavior? There are many other versions of this. There are journaling prompts you can follow. I'm sure you can search for some of them on YouTube, maybe. You can try to write a letter to your younger self.

Can you write a letter as your younger self? We can explore this through movement and play different things that kind of loosen up the conscious mind or get us out of that hyper rational top down approach that we often fall into as adults. I'm very familiar with that myself. And something that Rick really talked about a lot was the importance of validating the child parts experience. He really did that with the self critical aspect of me. You probably heard him say things

like you'd feel like you're providing a really good service here. You're in a really important role. Isn't it frustrating for you how you need to do this job and nobody else like takes this as seriously as you do? I thought that that was really interesting. And that's also a way that we can approach those younger parts. At the very end of the episode, Rick also talked a lot about appropriate forms of grieving. You're an adult now. It's true. You can look back on your child part.

You can have a conversation with it. You can do some voice dialogue stuff. You can reflect on it. You can try to give it what it didn't get back then and you're still going to be an adult. And as an adult moving through the world that we live in, there's some stuff that you just got to do. And there are some times where that inner child, sorry, it just can't really show up here

right now. And of course, we know that. But that's often something that's like a cudgel that we wield against our inner child as opposed to it being an emotion that we experience as our inner child. There are things that probably should have happened when you were younger that did not happen for you. And there's no going back in time. There's no getting that as the child self. And it can be very appropriate to go through a real process of grief around that. And for many people

as they start to do this work, they can do it in kind of a superficial way. And then they get to the point where it's really about the experiencing out. It's really about the emotional aspect of it. And it's when they're able to do that that they can get down to those deeper layers. This isn't true for everybody. Everyone's journey is going to be different with this kind of stuff.

And of course, please be thoughtful and take some care with it. If that's the direction that you choose to go, but speaking personally, that was a big part of it for me. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. This was a really interesting one for me. I would love some feedback on the roleplay we did. The whole like voice dialogue bet. Maybe leave a comment on the podcast in iTunes Spotify. If you're watching on YouTube, that's great.

You can just leave a comment down below. Let us know how you felt about it. What did you think about it? Did it seem kind of hokey and over the top? Was it really great and helpful for you to have that sort of an example? Really good for us to know. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please subscribe. It really helps us out. You can also leave a rating and a positive review

on iTunes or Spotify. That's really good for us as well. If you'd like to support the podcast in other ways, you could find us on patreon patreon.com slash being wild podcast for the cost of just a couple dollars a month. You can get transcripts, the old expanded show notes that I used to do for the podcast. Those are there's a ton of great stuff in them. I've been going back through those recently. You can also find Rick or me pretty much everywhere on social media. And again,

really, thanks for listening to the show. It means an enormous amount to us. I've just been reflecting a lot recently on what a big part of my life has become. I feel so blessed to be able to do this kind of work and have so many people who are interested in it. So again, thank you and we'll talk to you soon.