Introduction
What’s the secret to maintaining healthy relationships? Why do relationships that start with the best intentions turn sour? Why do people become clingy, needy, and desperate in relationships?
The Chakra that is the home central of your relationships is the Sacral Chakra. And so, any imbalance in the Sacral Chakra will manifest as relationship issues.
Do you know your inner child is intertwined in all your relationships? When your inner child is wounded, the unaddressed pain will unequivocally color your relationships.
The ‘Love’ sculpture, made by Alexander Milov, was first featured in the 2015 Burning Man festival. It represents two humans at odds, but each has an inner child attempting to reconnect with each other.
How do you heal the pain in your relationships? That’s what this article will discuss.
The inner child work will help you change your relationship dynamics for the better. And it will also help in healing your sacral chakra.
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Visual for the Sacral chakra
Imagine your Sacral Chakra’s structure resembles the internal layers of Earth. The four main layer of Earth’s structure are crust, mantle & the core.
Using this analogy, let’s say the outer layer of Earthrepresents emotions. The mantle represents relationships with others. The outer core represents sub-personalities & archetypes. And finally, the inner core of represents the inner child.
There are other themes connected with the sacral chakra. But for the context of this discussion, let’s stick with a basic model and visual.
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What is Inner Child?
Your inner child is the child aspect inside you.And it forever stays with you, no matter which stage of life you are in. The inner child is usually associated with your spontaneity, creativity, intuition & curiosity.Â
The inner child part includes all the stages of child’s life – from newborn to infant, toddler, preschooler, school age, teenager, and young adult.The first seven years are the most critical. This is when your core relationship patterns get formed.
Your inner childholds the blueprint of all your relationships. That includes how you relate to yourself, others, and members of the opposite sex.
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What the Inner Child Needs to thrive?
Unlike animals, a human child can’t survive on their own.  So it makes most sense to talk about the inner child in the context of the parent-child relationship. Children are most vulnerable in the first seven years of their life because they are dependent on adults for their survival.
Like adults, children also have Physical, mental, emotional & spiritual needs. At a physical level, a child needs a safe house, enough food, and clothes so it can grow. At a mental level, a child needs access to books & education to grow at an intellectual level. At a spiritual level, a child needs a connection with the divine & higher power that can guide it through its life.
Let’s say growing up, you didn’t have enough toys, or books. Chances are you’ll have a visceral memory of things that were lacking; mainly because these are tangible things.
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The Emotional Needs of Inner Child
The emotional needs encompass the need to be loved, seen & heard, acknowledged & validated. From a social standpoint, a child needs to know they belong to a family & community.
When the emotional needs go unmet, they are not easy to discern.
When the emotional needs go unmet, the inner child becomes wounded. Same for when a child experiences abuse or trauma, especially in the first 7 years.
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What do these inner child wounds look like?
Abandonment, Lack of Trust, Guilt, Neglect, Rejection, Betrayal, Injustice, and the like. Â
At an energetic level, these emotional wounds weigh you down. They keep you stuck at an unconscious level in destructive patterns and behaviors.
Abandonment wound colors the people you partner with and choose. You’ll likely to choose emotionally unavailable people. Or you’ll end up in codependent relationships.
When there’s an inner lack of trust, you’ll need a lot of external reassurance & validation. The guilt wound will ensure that you ‘feel’ that anything that goes wrong is your mistake. The neglect wound leads to low self-esteem. Together, these emotional wounds make you feel & act like a victim.
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Inner Child & Relationship Blueprint
Your inner child holds the blueprint of your relationships. Including your self-relationship. And as you can imagine, this blueprint gets formed in the first seven years of your life.
When your inner child carries emotional wounds, the relationship blueprint becomes distorted. This is the key reason why you keep replaying old patterns in your partnerships. Â
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How the Inner child gets your attention?
Your wounded inner child gets your attention through:
- Through emotional dysregulation,
- By immaturely reacting in stressful situations
- By choosing unavailable partners,
- By putting on different personalities depending on the situation,
- And by creating chaos in your relationship. (both in familial and platonic relationships).Â
Your inner child will go to all these lengths to meet its unmet emotional needs.
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Case Study: Dr. Gabor Mate
Dr. Gabor Mate is a world-renowned expert on addiction. In his bestselling book ‘The Myth of Normal’ he shares a personal anecdote.
One time he was flying home to Vancouver from a business trip, and expecting his wife to pick him up from the airport. When his plane landed, he received a text, ‘Sorry! I haven’t left home. Do you still want me to come?’ He messaged back, ‘Never mind,’ and decided to a take a cab home.
Dr. Gabor shares how this insignificant event triggered him. So much so, he didn’t speak with his wife for the next 24 hrs. As you can imagine, this wound goes back to his childhood.
Dr. Mate was born in Hungary in 1944 during the World War II. When he was a year old, his mother gave him to a total stranger in the street. Because she didn’t know if she’d be alive the following day.
Dr. Gabor say this one incident birthed a deep sense of abandonment. Of not being wanted in the world.
He says, he doesn’t have a conscious memory of this event because the part of the brain that stores long term memories is not fully developed in babies. And yet, the emotional implicit memory of abandonment lives deep in him.
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Big & Small Trauma of Inner Child
People often assume that the inner child work is for a select few. For those who have experienced abuse, violence, divorce or loss of a parent in their early life. Yes, these are traumatic events that you only wish no child has to experience.
But ordinary events that are less memorable but hurtful can be negative impact you.
For example, being bullied by your peers, or repeated harsh comments from a parent. Or the lack of emotional connection & attunement with nurturing adults.
These experiences are obviously not stressful & yet, can still cause disconnection. We never equate our emotional needs with air/water/food/shelter. But what-if our emotional needs were as important as our survival needs?
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The Journey to healing the Inner Child
The journey to healing your inner child starts with befriending your emotions. Because that’s the only way your inner child can communicate with you. It can’t pick up a phone and explain why it’s hurting.
Where there’s charged memory, there you’ll find heightened emotions. When you deny your emotions, you are keeping the memory of painful experiences intact. Learning to work with your emotions is non-negotiable for inner work.
When I first started working through my emotions, the one emotion that came up the most was anger. And I often wondered if I had an anger problem. At that time, I wasn’t aware of the inner workings of Sacral Chakra. Turns out, I didn’t have an anger problem. I had a wounded inner child problem.
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Wounded Inner Child and Dysregulated Nervous System
Children can’t fight with adults. There is no way a five-year-old can overpower a thirty-five-year-old.
When the instinctual response of fight or flight isn’t an option, what’s left is the freeze response. Their nervous system becomes frozen in time.
When the nervous system becomes dysregulated, it becomes challenging to stay present. Occupying the body means reconnecting with the old emotional wounds.
Most prefer to numb their pain with distractions. Including social media, porn, food, video games, etc.
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Why Inner Child healing takes time?
Reconnecting with your inner child means reassuring the child part in you that you will not abandon, ignore, hurt, dismiss, or devalue him like his biological parents.
It is high likely you treat your inner child like your parents treated you. Yeah, that’ll have to change.
Spend time with your inner child. Shower him with unconditional love and your inner child will respond.
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Reconnecting with Inner Child
- You connect with your inner child by doing things you enjoyed as a kid.
- Reflecting on your adult patterns and discerning your unmet emotional needs.
- By learning to re-parent your inner child. By ensuring your physical & emotional needs are always met. By learning to be kinder with yourself, especially on rough days.
- By engaging in activities where you get to express your emotions. For example, painting, singing, coloring, doodling, or playing an instrument can help you channel your emotions.
- If you are a beginner to the inner work, consider working with a Counselor or a Somatic therapist.
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The Gifts of the Inner Child Healing
When you commit to healing your inner child, the quality of your relationships will exponentially improve. It will become easier to let go of dysfunctional people. You’ll find it effortless to communicate your wants & needs to others.
Best of all, you’ll get to experience healthy and progressive relationships with others.
You might wake up one day and realize, you were never the problem. Or you are not afraid anymore. And, most of all, you are worthy of the same love & kindness you show others.
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A Gentle reminder
The best advice I could offer is healing your inner child is a feeling phenomenon. You can read thousands of books and educate yourself. And yes, that’s a great start. But implementation is where the runner meets the road.
Your inner child lives in the Sacral Chakra. The only language it understands is the language of emotions.
And this emotional work you can’t outsource. Only you can heal your soul and it begins with healing your inner child.
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In Summary
- Your Sacral Chakra is the home of your relationships.
- Your Inner Child holds the blueprint of all your relationships. And it gets formed in the first seven years of your life.
- When the emotional needs go unmet in childhood years, your inner child becomes wounded.
- Healing your inner child means acknowledging the unmet childhood needs. Also, addressing any pain/trauma you might have experienced.
- When you commit to healing your inner child, your relationship dynamics will change. And so, you will also heal your Sacral Chakra.