What is Inner Child Focusing Therapy?

I use a method that I call Inner Child Focusing in my one-to-one therapy sessions. This is the method I have used to heal the implicit emotional imprints of my own inner child. Focusing within the body is a profound way to see, feel and say to your inner child, "You exist, you are loved, your needs are important."

It is very difficult to tell a logical, cognitive story about your inner child. The child within is so deeply feeling and illogical. She felt everything viscerally in her body first — visual impressions, colours, sounds, emotional fragments, and sensations — and then, only after the age of seven, did she start creating a narrative from her logical mind.

Psychotherapist, philosopher and founder of Focusing Therapy, Eugene Gendlin, saw that there is a natural way to enter the implicit subconscious mind through therapy. He said, "Therapy is going beyond your ways of being stuck." Your new ways of living come from your bodily self. This is because the body (your subconscious) holds all of your lived experiences, and it will tell you, if you pay attention, what is stuck and how to move forward.

Steps of change are called "felt-shifts" in Focusing Psychotherapy. As we work together in a Focusing way, you cannot know your way forward all at once. Incremental, often surprising steps toward change come from the body when you are ready. Many steps of healing make up the whole journey, and the body's way of change is slow and gentle, right in sync with what your nervous system can handle.

When you sense into your body for what feels stuck or uncomfortable today, you are probably sensing a stopped process - from the past. And, curiously, there are always observable indicators of these incremental steps of change that you need to make as you heal your inner child.

Because you are alive, you are always in process. Life does not stand still, and your living forward does not want to stop. You are constantly preparing for your next step, but sometimes, somewhere back in time, something got stuck. From the inner child, this stuckness often manifests as developmental delays and fears about moving forward in some regions of adult life.

When a stopped process starts moving again, we call this "carrying forward" in Focusing. When something within starts moving in a life-forward direction, you will feel moments of relief, release and even inspiration. You might spontaneously breathe more deeply or sigh with relief. Tears might also come. You might feel more relaxed without knowing why.

Whatever feels bad inside implies its own needed change. Focusing Teacher, Ann Weiser Cornell says, "A problem is a missing of something needed." Every bad feeling holds the potential for a more right way of being. Usually, however, we ignore the vague discomforts our bodies have, or we project them outward, often by blaming our parents and others for our unhealed childhood pain, long after we have grown into adults.

So instead of self-ignoring or projecting onto others, we can turn towards whatever feels uncomfortable with interested curiosity and wait there patiently until it is ready to share more. Waiting on the edge of your subconscious growth is called a "felt sense."

In felt-sensing, you can start by noticing a vague sensation in your body that you cannot quite name. You might sense that an inner child is calling for your attention. Do not go inside this sensation. Do not merge with it. Stand back and observe it. See how it wants to unfold. As you kindly stay with what feels unknown to your conscious mind, it will tell you and show you more.

The willingness to turn toward vague feelings of discomfort can seem pointless to the logical mind; however, this is often your subconscious inner child seeking to bring sensations from your earlier experiences into your conscious mind for kind witnessing and care. As you watch and wait for your subconscious to unfold, it might share fresh and surprising things that you did not know about yourself. This brings a felt shift to the body, a little release, a deeper breath, more ease within, and a greater willingness to move forward.

One-to-One Guidance

It is often difficult, at the beginning of the inner child healing journey, to handle the present moment arising of inner child pain without support and guidance. In the Inner Child Focusing process, it is possible to process emotional pain with grace and gentleness, with kind accompaniment.

I can support you in maintaining a healthy distance from overwhelming sensations as you sort out the tangled dynamics in your inner world. I can accompany you into the scary places so you can complete old inner-child imprints —shocks, shaming, stalled growth processes, and traumas — in a kind and incremental way, at a pace your body and nervous system can handle. Please feel welcome to book free consultation to find out more.

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With Love,

Shelley