Are you a people-pleaser? Do you have codependency and want to work on inner child wounding? This article will review six of the top signs of a wounded inner child, so you can determine if you need to do inner child work.
What Is My Inner Child?
Carl Gustav Jung was a pioneer in the psychoanalytic world. Before the psychology world became obsessed with SSRIs and antipsychotics as answers to everything, there were successes with psychoanalytic psychology.
Carl Jung believed that to heal, we must work on our subconscious, which is actually leading the show anyway. He believed that you needed to make the unconscious conscious before you could heal it.
A particular part of his teaching that I use in my own work is the concept of archetypes. He believed we had archetypes that could take the driver’s seat in our lives until we faced the aspects of those archetypes that we were denying.
So, one of these archetypes was the inner child. The inner child is the playful, innocent, creative, and often repressed part of ourselves that represents our early years.
Think of your inner child as all of the aspects of you before the world caused you to become jaded and cynical. The part of you that believed in love at first sight and soul recognition. The part of you that dreamed of going to the moon, the part of you that believed basically anything you were told, especially if it sounded magical.
How Does My Inner Child Become Wounded?
Your inner child began to develop when you were young, and you were vulnerable. A wounded inner child can occur for many reasons, but most always stem from some sort of trauma.
Trauma can include neglect, abuse, abandonment, emotions not being met, teenage pregnancy, harsh judgments from caregivers, and even bullying in school.
How we are treated as children lays the foundation for our inner child’s wounding. So, if we are in a situation where we don’t feel safe, or our basic needs aren’t met, then we will develop a wounded inner child.
There are so many ways this can happen, so let’s look at some of the signs of a wounded inner child so that you can determine if your inner child is wounded.
What Are Six Signs of a Wounded Inner Child?
During our early years, we look at the world from an “ego-ish” vantage point. You know when your parents are fighting, and you blame yourself. When your mother has an alcohol addiction, and you feel like you are the cause of her drinking too much. But rationally, these views of the world around us are not exactly accurate, are they?
Most of us have some inner child wounding going on because no one grows up in a perfectly stable and trauma-free world. But the thing is, once you realize that you are letting your inner child wounding take over your adult life, then you have a chance to work on the wounded inner child and heal so that its control in your life can take a backseat.
So, let’s take a look at some of the top signs that I’ve determined are good indicators of a wounded inner child.
You Have an Inner Critic
If you are your worst critic, then you may have a wounded inner child. When our inner child is hurt, we can become overly critical of ourselves. We may feel like we don’t deserve love or good relationships and sabotage them to “protect” ourselves.
You may never feel worthy of anything, so you constantly put yourself down. Chances are, you have yet to deal with some of your childhood trauma or issues that caused your inner child wounds.
For example, if you were told that you were a sinner as a kid because of something you did, your inner child took that to heart, and now everything you do is not good enough or morally good enough.
Or maybe you were told as a child that your grades weren’t good enough or that you weren’t good enough at sports. This type of communication, coming from the people who are supposed to nurture and care for us, can scar our little inner child.
If you are caught in a toxic cycle of judgmental self-talk, maybe you should work on healing your inner child’s wounds so that you can stop listening to your inner critic and accept who you are as a human being.
You’re a People-Pleaser
You may have a wounded inner child if you are a people pleaser. This symptom can also coincide with codependency. I’ve seen a lot of codependents who have an unhealed inner child who is trying to get their attention.
If you have this trait, you may have some codependency going on, too.
When we were children, and our world was chaotic, we learned that it would be a better world if our parents were happy than if they were angry. So many of us took it upon ourselves to keep Mom or Dad happy so that we could have a good, “safe” day.
So, take a good, hard look at your life. Are you a people-pleaser? Do you put your self-care above others? Or do you bend over backward for people even when they don’t appreciate it or deserve it? If you are people-pleasing, then chances are you have a wounded inner child.
You Have an Avoidant Attachment Style
People who have secure attachment styles were raised in an environment where their physical and emotional needs were met appropriately, and so they developed a secure attachment to their caregivers. As adults, these people can form secure attachments with others, too.
Not everyone can develop these secure attachments, though. So insecure attachments are born in childhood, typically as a baby. So, let’s say that the baby’s emotional and/or physical needs are unmet.
Maybe the parents are feeding them and changing them, but they are not “present” with the child. The child could cry for hours, and no one would come to soothe them. So, the child learns that they cannot trust their caregivers to care for them properly.
An insecure attachment style, or avoidant attachment, is a self-sufficient adult who does not trust others and has a hard time forming loving relationships.
If you have an avoidant attachment style with people in your life as an adult, then you probably have some inner child wounding. As I stated before, this type of attachment style comes from childhood.
You could also have what’s known as an anxious-avoidant attachment. This occurs when the parent doesn’t meet the child’s emotional needs, but the physical needs are met.
So, as a kid, you would cry, and your parents would not ask you how you were feeling and what was wrong; instead, they would say, “Shut up and stop making that noise.” Your emotional needs were not met. You learned that whatever emotion you felt was deemed bad or negative, so you learned to keep them all bottled up.
This is typical when you are in a relationship, and your partner begs you to open up about how you feel about them. You love them, but you simply can’t express it, and sometimes, you even push them FAR away from you.
Any of these attachment styles is a sign of a wounded inner child.
You Don’t Feel “Safe”
If you didn’t feel safe as a child, your inner child would hurt because of it. So, if you don’t feel safe as an adult, you may have a wounded inner child.
So, for example, if you sleep with a gun or three big dogs in your bed because you are always afraid that someone is going to break into your house at night, you may have some inner child wounding that is showing up.
When we don’t feel safe as children, it is hard to feel safe as adults until we work through our childhood issues.
So maybe you lock your doors three or four times, or maybe you refuse to walk down a certain street late at night. Or maybe you live way out in the country, but you are still afraid that you aren’t safe. Then, you could benefit from doing some inner child work.
Your Strive for Perfectionism
Are you a perfectionist? Are you constantly working a million hours, or have you always had to have straight A’s? You may have inner child wounding if you are a perfectionist.
In dysfunctional family dynamics, there tends to be a child who decides that if they are perfect and get good grades, the chaos at home will stop.
This is the golden child, and they truly think that being perfect will keep their parents from getting a divorce or keep their dad from drinking every night.
But really, this is a sign that there was some dysfunction in the home, and perfectionism is a big sign of inner child wounding.
You Were Not Close to One or Both Parents
If you didn’t have a close relationship with one or both of your parents as a child, it definitely caused some wounding. The two people we expect to love us no matter what as soon as we come into this world are our parents.
Even if we get adopted or raised by great people, there’s always the abandonment wound when one or both of our parents don’t give us the life and care that we crave.
So, if you were not close to one or both of your parents, then you probably have an abandoned, wounded inner child.
As adults, this type of wounding can cause us to become codependent. Sometimes, we get into abusive relationships. Still, our inner child sees something in the other person that reflects the missing parent from their childhood and stays in the relationship.
Once you work to heal your inner child’s wound, then you can work on healing the abandonment issues and learn to have stable, healthy relationships with people in your life.
Work With a Coach To Connect to Your Wounded Inner Child
If you have any of these signs and know that you need to work on your wounded inner child, then reach out to Unleash Your Healing Vibes today. My UNLEASH program helps you work on many archetypes holding you back from your best life, including the shadow and the inner child.
Reach out to set up a free discovery call today.
We can help you connect to your wounded inner child so that “they” can finally feel heard and maybe stop acting out so much in your day-to-day life.