**Inner Child Work: What It Is And How To Do It โ€” Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/inner-child-work-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it/ Heidi Priebe explains the concept of the inner child, using it to bypass rationalizing and feel raw emotions, and balances it with the inner parent for healthy growth. ## Key Takeaways - The inner child represents raw, emotional, and creative parts of the self that need validation rather than rational dismissal. - Visualizing an inner child can help people give themselves permission to feel emotions their rational mind would rationalize away. - Healthy self-development requires balancing the inner child's spontaneity with the inner parent's discipline and protection. - Depression, burnout, and anxiety can signal a neglected inner child or an overly dominant inner parent. ## What the video covers - Heidi Priebe introduces the term 'inner child' and explains how she personally uses it in healing and shadow work, distinct from definitions in IFS, transactional analysis, and John Bradshaw's work. - The traditional view of the inner child is the parts of self arrested in development due to trauma or early wounding. - Heidi uses the inner child as a way to bypass the mind's tendency to explain away or deny feelings like anger or hurt. - Avoidant attachment and cognitive rationalization can cause people to suppress emotions without consciously recognizing it. - The inner child is characterized as emotionally vulnerable, impressionable, creative, curious, and in need of protection. - The inner parent is the practical, disciplined, future-oriented part of self responsible for protecting the inner child and maintaining long-term safety. - Imbalance is common: some people let the inner child run everything, while others over-parent and suppress joy and creativity, which can lead to depression, burnout, or anxiety. - Heidi offers five practical ways to work with the inner child and inner parent, such as asking how one would treat a child in the same situation. - Healthy integration means striking a balance where the inner parent and inner child work together, like good parents guiding a child's growth. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction to the Inner Child Concept 2. 01:17 Inner Child in Different Psychology Modalities 3. 02:30 Using the Inner Child to Bypass Rationalization 4. 03:52 Qualities of the Inner Child 5. 05:12 Understanding the Inner Parent 6. 07:12 Balancing Inner Child and Inner Parent 7. 09:00 Five Practical Ways to Work With Inner Parts 8. 16:00 Closing Reflections and Invitation to Comment Answers ## Questions about this video What does Heidi Priebe mean by the inner child? She uses the inner child as a visualized younger version of herself that feels hurt, anger, and raw emotion even when her adult mind tries to rationalize those feelings away. This lets her give herself permission to acknowledge emotions she might otherwise dismiss. How does the inner parent differ from the inner child? The inner child is emotional, impulsive, creative, and vulnerable, while the inner parent is practical, disciplined, and future-oriented. The inner parent's role is to protect the inner child and make decisions that keep the person safe and stable long term. What are signs of an imbalance between inner child and inner parent? If the inner child runs the show, decisions may lack foresight. If the inner parent dominates, joy and creativity get suppressed, which can lead to feeling depressed, burnt out, or anxious. Heidi suggests balancing both parts to support healthy growth. ## Full Transcript โ€” Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here today on this channel I want to talk about the term inner child so if you've watched at least a couple of my videos there's a very high chance that 00:13 Speaker A you've already heard me use this term but I've never made a whole video where I just break down what I mean when I say inner child as well as how I personally like to work with the concept of an 00:24 Speaker A inner child and how I apply it to my own healing work Shadow work whatever it is that I'm trying to access internally so the term inner child means a lot of different things depending at what modality or what field you're looking at 00:36 Speaker A internal family systems has one definition of an inner child transactional analysis has another definition I personally first came across the term when I was reading John Bradshaw books so he has a book called homecoming that is all about using 00:49 Speaker A visualization techniques to help you integrate your inner child but the way that I use this term is not necessarily identical to any of those modalities what a lot of those different modalities look at as the inner child is 01:04 Speaker A the parts of ourselves that have become arrested in their development so parts of ourselves that didn't kind of grow up chronologically at the same speed that the rest of us did because some form of trauma or early wounding kept parts of 01:17 Speaker A ourselves stuck in our emotional or intellectual development so a lot of the time when you hear people in the psychology space talking about an inner child that's what they're referencing the parts of ourselves that are kind of young and naive relative to the rest of 01:30 Speaker A us or the parts of ourselves that are stuck around some form of trauma now all of those are great ways to use the term inner child but I found that for myself there was another way I found to use 01:41 Speaker A this term that became very helpful particularly when doing Shadow work so I like to use the idea of an inner child the idea of a kind of younger version that lives inside of me as a way to bypass the the parts of my brain that 01:55 Speaker A try to explain away my feelings so for myself and I imagine this is definitely not unique to me there are a lot of parts of my brain that try to kind of Reason away the idea that I might be 02:07 Speaker A feeling something so I'll have let's say a bit of anger come online and some part of my brain will go oh no no you must not feel angry about that because I can understand why that's happening and if I 02:18 Speaker A can understand it it must mean that I'm not actually angry and then my body's feeling one thing but my mind is telling me another thing so now I have internal incongruence and I have to do something kind of weird with that anger in order 02:30 Speaker A to get it to go away from my conscious awareness but chances are I never actually process it and so it shows up at another point in time and it maybe causes more trouble when it does show up because now it's one step removed from 02:43 Speaker A the actual situation it originated from another way we can deny or distort our emotional experience is refusing to acknowledge when we are hurt or in pain and this is often something particularly if you're on the avoidant side of the 02:56 Speaker A attachment spectrum that your brain might do without even consciously Consulting you so someone might do something that hurts your feelings and consciously your brain is automatically going to come online and go that doesn't hurt my feelings I just think that this 03:10 Speaker A person is emotionally immature they can't control their own emotions this has nothing to do with me Ergo my feelings are not hurt so the way that I like to think about an inner child is I like to visually represent this kind of 03:24 Speaker A kid who lives inside of me who still feels hurt and pain and anger and all of these very raw emotions even in the situations where my adult brain thinks that it knows better so picturing a little child living inside of me allows 03:40 Speaker A myself to give myself permission to feel things that my cognitive brain would otherwise try to rationalize away so to recap I think of the inner child as the part of the self that is emotional vulnerable and not particularly 03:52 Speaker A responsive to reason the inner child is going to feel whatever they're going to feel no matter how hard you try to convince them they don't need to feel that and the inner child is also the birthplace of our creativity so the 04:04 Speaker A parts of ourselves that feel really enthusiastic and energetic and curious and open-minded about being alive are all qualities that are generally a sign of a healthy inner child which once again just means an integrated person who allows the full spectrum of their 04:19 Speaker A emotions to exist now the last quality of the inner child that I'm going to talk about in the introduction here is that they are vulnerable and in need of protection so inner children are very trusting they're very impressionable and 04:32 Speaker A some part of them is kind of taking everything in as true even if our adult brains are telling them that something is false so if someone says something really mean or unkind to me in my adult mind I might go I know that thing's not 04:45 Speaker A true but it's still going to reach and hurt my inner child even if I know rationally that that is not the case so when we start thinking about inner children we also need to start thinking about how to protect those parts of 04:57 Speaker A ourselves as well as how to push them towards growth and both are important in different scenarios so if our inner children are the kind of raw impulsive emotional parts of ourselves we also all have an inner parent so an inner parent 05:11 Speaker A is the part of myself I like to think of as being responsible for protecting my inner child whereas the inner child wants to run and explore and find out all of the time the inner parent is the part of myself that knows about what's 05:24 Speaker A important and needs to be prioritized even if it's not fun in order to keep myself safe and emotionally secure long term so the inner parent is this practical disciplined and future oriented part of ourselves that knows how to do things like delay 05:39 Speaker A gratification set meaningful goals and discern when it's time to indulge in an inner child's emotion versus when it's time to push them a little bit so our inner parent is a part of ourselves that is very focused on self-preservation so 05:52 Speaker A making sure that we stay safe and stable in the world and most people tend to err on one side or the other when it comes to which part of their internal experience they listen to more sometimes people will have their inner child 06:04 Speaker A running the entire show so you'll have this kind of emotional impulsive version of yourself making all of the decisions with very little foresight about how that's going to play out down the line and if that's the case it's likely that 06:17 Speaker A the development work you need to do is actually more around your inner parent than your inner child maybe you have some wounding around the idea that a parent could be nurturing and caring as well as disciplined and so you're trying 06:29 Speaker A to just run away from the entire parenting process not realizing that there's a way to be loving and healthy in that parenting process and on the other side of things we have people who do a lot of inner parenting 06:41 Speaker A but they kind of stifle the inner child in the process so not giving enough value to things like joy and excitement and curiosity and creativity and instead doubling down on only what makes practical sense which can often lead to 06:55 Speaker A feeling kind of depressed and dead inside depression burnout anxiety are very frequently signs of a neglected inner child so again for some of us the qualities that are more inherent to that inner child are what we find in our 07:08 Speaker A shadow if growing up it was not adaptive for us to be explorative and emotional and creative and playful those might be the parts of ourselves that we now need to learn to allow ourselves access to or if when we were growing up it was 07:22 Speaker A actually very adaptive for us to be vulnerable to a fault and to not develop the skills of discipline or self-regulation those are going to be the traits that you find in your Shadow and that you need to start making 07:33 Speaker A conscious for yourself in order to step into a more adult role in your life so with that kind of introduction and once again this is mostly just how I look at the term inner child and inner parent it 07:44 Speaker A is not the way to look at it and there are a lot of different people who look at it slightly differently I'm going to go over five ways that I like to work with my own inner child inner parent 07:54 Speaker A dynamic in order to help me kind of bypass the critical filters that normally Shield me from seeing what's in my shadow and make that shadow content more conscious so that I can start to integrate it so the first way I 08:06 Speaker A recommend working with your inner child is to improve your relationship with self-protection the question that I like to frequently ask myself in the presence of other people is if I had a literal five-year-old child so five-year-old is pretty emotional pretty vulnerable and 08:22 Speaker A pretty susceptible to believing whatever they're told what I feel comfortable leaving my five-year-old child in the temporary care of this person and this person could be a new romantic interest it could be a friend it could be a 08:35 Speaker A family member but this question would I become handing over a five-year-old to this person and trusting that they're going to be able to take reasonably good care of them and that they're not going to abuse them in any significant way or 08:48 Speaker A make them feel unnecessarily bad about themselves I use that as a barometer for whether or not it's safe for me to be vulnerable with a given person because there is a part of me whether I like it or not that is five years old and that 09:01 Speaker A will feel hurt if I'm insulted or will feel confused and distressed if I'm vulnerable in the presence of someone who is completely non-regulated themselves and so what this doesn't mean is that if the answer is no I wouldn't leave a 09:15 Speaker A five-year-old child alone with this person we have to cut them out of our Lives entirely what it means is that that might just not be the right person or the right time for us to let our guards down around somebody when we are 09:28 Speaker A vulnerable when we are allowing ourselves to be kind of raw and messy in front of another person it is like we are letting the five-year-old inside of us directly interact with another person so we need to be reasonably sure that 09:39 Speaker A that other person is able to do things like handle delicate topics with maturity and respect to us when they come up so if I'm ever in a situation where someone is speaking to me in a way that is very rude or disrespectful what 09:52 Speaker A I try to ask myself is would I be comfortable with someone speaking to my five-year-old child this way and if the answer is no what would I say to that person to let them know it's not okay to 10:04 Speaker A speak to my child that way because if I had a literal child I would see it as very important to stand up for them and for them to to know that I care about them and I'm not going to let other 10:13 Speaker A people speak rudely to them so if there's ever a situation where someone is speaking to me in a disrespectful or rude way and I think ooh I would not let them speak to my child that way I know 10:23 Speaker A that I now have the responsibility as my inner parent to stand up for myself towards that person or else I'm going to lose the respect of my inner child and I'm going to lose my own self-trust I need to prove to myself that I matter 10:38 Speaker A and that I deserve respect the same way I would want to prove that to a five-year-old child and so this is kind of the first area I like to look at when I'm thinking about doing inner child work if I have trouble accessing and 10:51 Speaker A giving credit to my own vulnerability I try to think of the part of myself that is small and vulnerable and impressionable as a literal child that I am responsible for protecting and it gets a lot easier to figure out what 11:03 Speaker A type of boundaries I need to have in place when I can think of myself in that way the second place that the inner child inner parent Dynamic comes is in really handy is when we're examining our relationship with growth and 11:15 Speaker A self-development so again most of us fall a little bit more on one side of the spectrum we either tend to let our feelings and our inner child run too much of the show or we push ourselves too hard and don't listen to our 11:28 Speaker A feelings of pain and burnout when they come up and so this can be another helpful question to ask the self if let's say I'm up against a challenge I'm facing something at work or interpersonally and the adult part of my 11:39 Speaker A brain feels like I should just power through but I'm starting to feel really depressed burnt out whatever it is I can ask myself the question if I had a child in this situation and I were trying to teach the child how to be a healthy 11:52 Speaker A productive person in the world in this situation would I push them to try a little bit harder and give it another go or would I look at that kid and go they are absolutely exhausted and I think they need some time to rest before we 12:06 Speaker A get back at this and sometimes just thinking about it in that kind of externalized way can help us get a clear picture of where we're at there are absolutely in life times when we need to push ourselves to grow past our comfort 12:19 Speaker A zones there are very important types of struggle and Challenge and pain that we all need to be able to coach ourselves through in order to get to the places we want to get to in life but there's also 12:31 Speaker A a point where pushing ourselves hits a kind of point of diminishing returns where our inner children are going to start throwing Tantrums they're going to start doing bad work they're going to zap our ability to be creative and so we 12:42 Speaker A need to be looking at what the right balance is if you err on the side of ignoring your feelings when you start to get uncomfortable or distressed doing this kind of visualization can help you recognize that actually tending to that 12:54 Speaker A inner child giving them rest giving them Comfort giving them support giving them either alone time or time with others if that's what they need is ironically going to be the thing that makes you more productive in the long run because 13:07 Speaker A inner children have Boundless Energy when we treat them right they're able to accomplish a lot more than adults are able to accomplish in a shorter period of time so when we can recognize those moments when they're getting burnt out 13:19 Speaker A and give them what they need to feel replenished again we're ironically making ourselves more productive and successful in the long run and on the other side of things you might have a sense in your life of having just given 13:30 Speaker A up like you don't care you don't want to try for things Everything feels pointless and when we're lacking a deep sense of self-love it can be easy to just feel perpetually like we don't care if we fail but a lot of us would care if 13:44 Speaker A our children failed if they never developed the skills that they needed to persevere and get what they wanted out of life and so thinking of ourselves in that way once again as a child that we are responsible for raising with the 13:56 Speaker A values of kindness and empathy and self-compassion but also the values of discipline and self-esteem suddenly pushing ourselves starts to feel like a greater Act of self-love good parents know when it's not time to give in to their inner child and they know when 14:11 Speaker A it's time to support and encourage them to tackle a challenge rather than giving up on it prematurely the third way I recommend working with the inner child interparent Dynamic is to address your relationship with your body so a 14:23 Speaker A question that I found it increasingly useful to ask myself in my adult life is if I had a child who I fed groomed and dressed the way that I feed groom and dress myself what message would I be 14:36 Speaker A sending to that child about their importance and self-respect so if I'm neglecting my body that child might feel frumpy and unimportant but on the flip side if I'm over fixated on appearance my inner child might be learning that 14:49 Speaker A nothing about me matters but my looks and of course like most things there is a happy medium right in the middle where we treat our bodies with respect but also leniency and when we're able to strike that happy medium we're telling 15:01 Speaker A our inner children that they deserve to feel nourished and valuable and that they deserve to take a certain degree of pride in the way that they present themselves to the world and why shouldn't they there's absolutely nothing Noble about having a terrible 15:15 Speaker A self-image no matter what our body looks like no matter how much of a symmetrical face we were or we're not born with all of us have the opportunity to treat our bodies with care and respect to give them healthy nourishing foods to dress 15:28 Speaker A ourselves in a way that actually showcases our unique personalities and to take some pride in the way that we show up in the world that doesn't mean that it needs to be the whole of our personality but we do need to teach our 15:38 Speaker A inner children show up in the world in a way that sends the message to other people hey I respect myself I treat myself well because I think I'm deserving of that fourth way I recommend working with the inner child inner 15:50 Speaker A parent Dynamic is to improve your relationship with self-regulation so again a lot of the time I see inner child work being approached from the angle of go fly a kite or eat a Popsicle or do something that a seven-year-old 16:02 Speaker A would like but you know what else seven-year-olds like that they're never going to tell you in their own words but that they deeply intrinsically need in order to feel safe in the world they need discipline they need to know that 16:14 Speaker A there is a responsible adult watching out for them who will take care of their needs which sometimes means telling them that they can't do things they want to do so a question I find useful to ask myself to work with my inner child 16:26 Speaker A interparent Dynamic is when I am feeling fussy impulsive out of control in some way what might a child need in those circumstances what might help kind of settle their nervous system and get them back to a place of Regulation and very 16:41 Speaker A often the answer is that I need more structure a big part of emotional regulation is being able to kind of relax into that which is predictable in our lives so if we are just following every feeling as it comes up we're 16:55 Speaker A actually denying ourselves the opportunity to feel calm and relaxed on the whole because we're just kind of elusively chasing some sort of positive feeling but when we know that no matter what there are things I'm going to do 17:06 Speaker A for myself that I might not love in the moment but that will bring me closer to the kind of life I want to have and the kind of consistent emotional regulation that I need then the times when we're 17:17 Speaker A feeling kind of fussy or emotionally bad don't feel as scary because we know that we've created a life for ourselves where to some degree we're able to regulate our own emotional experiences so those deeper feelings are safer for us to 17:31 Speaker A access in the first place once again sometimes what we need is more play and more joy and more excitement but other times what we need is more discipline and self-trust and it's our inner parents job to assess when it's time for 17:45 Speaker A what feeling kind of dead inside maybe time to let the inner child out to play more but if you're feeling kind of emotionally out of control that might be the time for the inner parent to step in and give you more structure and 17:57 Speaker A discipline in your life so that your inner child has the predictability they need in their lives in order to feel safe and relax and the last way I recommend you start working with your inner child which is kind of the direct 18:08 Speaker A inverse of what we just talked about is to improve your connection to your life force energy so the part of yourself that is enthusiastic that is curious that wants to understand and interact with the world in a dynamic 18:21 Speaker A ever-changing way all of that energy comes out of your inner child so if you're feeling creatively drained if you're feeling burnt out if you're feeling overwhelmed very often those are signs that your inner child hasn't been prioritized enough that you haven't been 18:36 Speaker A giving them enough time and space and permission to be playful and curious and unencumbered by adult responsibilities so again we're always going to be trying to find that balance between figuring out which parts of our lives do need to 18:49 Speaker A be controlled and kind of tightly monitored in order to give ourselves enough safety and how spontaneous and curious and adventurous we're allowing ourselves to be because those are the traits that end up pushing our lives forward but at the end of the day all of this is 19:04 Speaker A about striking a balance between those two things just like parents and children need to work together in order to figure out what is going to help the child grow up in a healthy way the more rational and the more impulsive or 19:17 Speaker A emotional parts of us also need to work together to figure out how to stay both engaged with our lives and excited about them and responsible and capable of taking care of ourselves so what this turns into is a dialogue between these 19:29 Speaker A parts of ourselves That Never Ends one week our inner parent might really need to take the reins and then the next week it might be time for our inner child to come out and play some more this is 19:38 Speaker A going to fluctuate constantly based on the conditions of our lives and what's important for us at any given point in time but in kind of plain language all this is about is balancing our short term and our long-term wants and needs 19:50 Speaker A the inner parent is looking out for us in the long term the inner child is telling us what's going to make us feel vital and engaged and invested in our lives in the short term and both of those parts of ourselves are Inc 20:01 Speaker A incredibly important to listen to and to take seriously sometimes taking our inner child seriously means allowing ourselves to not take things so seriously for a period of time because very often that in and of itself is the precise medicine we need 20:16 Speaker A all right I'm gonna leave it at that for today as always let me know in the comments what you guys are thinking feeling what's coming up for you as you go through this I love you guys I hope 20:26 Speaker A you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and I will see you back here again soon [Music] Topics: inner child 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