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Parenting Your Inner Child

Michael Todd Fink

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“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” -Carl Jung

We often think of the inner child as a sentimental image of a younger version of ourselves waiting to be hugged.

Psychologically speaking, we can also understand our inner child to be our current nervous system running a program based on its earliest education in safety.

Before we had language, before we had philosophy, before we had a coherent self, the body was learning and the brain was developing until 25 years old, based on inherited and formative experiences. It was coding whether love was reliable, whether anger was dangerous, whether needs were welcome, whether silence meant peace or threat.

In this sense, the inner child is not the past. The inner child is the past still firing through the present as psychological reflex.