Humanness and Emotions
Inner Child Quotes
THC Editorial Team November 17, 2021
Contents
What Is The Inner Child?
Proponents of inner-child therapy believe that everyone has an inner child, which is a part of the self that reflects the childhood experiences of the child within and manifests in adulthood as particular internal felt perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs or as external behaviors and actions.1,2
The concept of the inner child is thought to have been present since before the time of Christ;1,3 however, in the psychological lexicon, it appears to be attributable at least as far back as to the work of 19th- and 20th-century psychoanalysts Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung.1,2,3 More recently, the concept was popularized by the work of John Bradshaw and Richard Schwartz (internal family systems).1,2,3
Various psychologists have referred to the inner child as the “child within us who we once were,”4 as child-like aspects of ourselves,5 as our authentic or true self, as our emotions, and even as our bodies.
Quotes On The Inner Child
Here are some of our favorite inner child quotes.
Three things are striking about inner child work: the speed with which people change when they do this work; the depth of that change; and the power and creativity that result when wounds from the past are healed.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildYou can’t heal what you can’t feel.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildReclaiming your wounded inner child is a Zenlike experience.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildChildren are natural Zen masters; their world is brand-new in each and every moment. For the unwounded child, wonder is natural. Life is a mystery to be lived. Homecoming is the restoration of the natural. Such a restoration is not grandiose or dramatic; it is simply the way life ought to be.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildThe process of reclaiming your wounded inner child is a forgiveness process. Forgiveness allows us to give as before. It heals the past and frees our energies for the present.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildFinding and reclaiming the wounded inner child is an uncovery process.6
Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildThe “child” is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificantly dubious beginning, and the triumphal end. The “eternal child” in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality.6
As cited in Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildI want you to imagine what you would do if you had come upon that real child in the original situation.… What’s a reasonable, compassionate thing to do for a child that’s confused and upset? You sit and talk with the child. You listen to it. You find out what’s bothering it, help it understand, comfort it, hold it in your arms; later, you play with it a little, explain things, tell a story. That’s therapy in its oldest and best sense: nothing fancy, just kindness and patience.6
As cited in Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildThe child wants simple things. It wants to be listened to. It wants to be loved.… It may not even know the words, but it wants its rights protected and its self-respect unviolated. It needs you to be there.6
As cited in Homecoming, Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner ChildInner Bonding is a process of connecting our Adult thoughts with our instinctual gut feelings, the feelings of our “Inner Child,” so that we can live free of conflict within ourselves.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThe Inner Child is the aspect of our personality that is soft, vulnerable, and feelings oriented—our “gut” instinct. It is who we are when we were born, our core self, our natural personality, with all its talent, instinct, intuition, and emotion.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildPsychotherapy generally fails when it does not help individuals to discover the place within or without (depending upon the individual’s belief system) where they can go to connect with the spiritual truth.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThe false self, or ego, is who we are when the Adult chooses the intent to protect and disconnects from the Inner Child. The unloving Adult and the unloved abandoned Child are the two faces of the ego.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildWhen our Inner Child is feeling consistently loved by our Inner Adult, he or she is a wondrous being—trusting, creative, imaginative, curious, passionate, playful, energetic, enthusiastic, spontaneous, soft, sensitive, sensual, with an incredible sense of wonder and aliveness. Delighted just to be alive, he or she is open and receptive to new ideas and experiences.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildWhen our Inner Child feels consistently unloved by our Inner Adult, the Child’s false beliefs, adopted in childhood when parents were unloving, are reinforced—beliefs that we are bad, wrong, unlovable, unimportant, inadequate, defective in some way.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThose of us who have suffered from extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have a big challenge trying to create a loving Inner Adult.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildBy reparenting our Inner Child, we can release and heal the pain from the past.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildAll of us face the job of becoming a loving mother and father to our Inner Child.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThe loving Adult is both father and mother to the Inner Child, regardless of whether we are a man or a woman.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildIf we do not accept the responsibility of being both the father and mother to our Inner Child, then our Child will seek elsewhere for someone to do it.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildIt takes time and practice to develop the ongoing consciousness: “Am I being a Loving Adult to my Inner Child?”7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThe most important thing we can learn about loving each other is the paradox that we must learn to love ourselves first.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildFor a strong and lasting partnership, both of us must be connected to our own inner feelings, as well willing to be open to learning about the other’s.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildEven when we try hard to be good parents, when we are not being loving to our own Inner Child, we are teaching our children to be unloving to themselves.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildIt is only when we are willing to do our own inner work and take full responsibility for our own Inner Child that we can change the dysfunctional, codependent parenting that dominates our society. As we become healthy, so will our children and their children, leading to a healthy society.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child… whatever the relationship, whether it be with a mate, a parent, a child, a friend, a coworker, or a professional, the ways we relate with others depend on the relationship we have with our Inner Child.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildOur external relationships are mirrors for our internal relationship. Others will love us and support us when we learn to love and support ourselves.7
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner ChildThe concept of the Child Within has been a part of our world culture for at least two thousand years. Carl Jung called it the “Divine Child” and Emmet Fox called it the “Wonder Child.” Psychotherapists Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott refer to it as the “true self.” Many in the field of alcoholism and other chemical dependence call it the “inner child.3
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional FamiliesNo matter how distant, evasive, or even alien it may seem to be, we each have a “Child Within”—the part of us that is ultimately alive, energetic, creative and fulfilled. This is our Real Self—who we truly are.3
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional FamiliesTelling our story is a powerful act in discovering and healing our Child Within. It is a foundation of recovery in self-help groups, group therapy and individual psychotherapy and counseling.3
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional FamiliesTo rediscover our True or Real Self and heal our Child Within, we can…
1) Discover and practice being our Real Self or Child Within.
2) Identify our ongoing physical, mental-emotional and spiritual needs. Practice getting these needs met with safe and supportive people.
3) Identify, re-experience and grieve the pain of our ungrieved losses or traumas in the presence of safe and supporting people.
4) Identify and work through our core issues3
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional FamiliesOur problem is not that as children our needs were unmet, but that as adults they are still unmourned!8
How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual IntegrationMost of us emerge from childhood with conscious and unconscious psychic wounds and emotional unfinished business. What we leave incomplete we are doomed to repeat. The untreated traumas of childhood become the frustrating dramas of adulthood.8
How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual IntegrationJesus tells us that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That child mind, sometimes called beginner’s mind in Zen, is the innocence of pure being, of unconditional love.9
Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual HeartParental neglect and rejection in childhood can adversely affect self-confidence and relationships in adulthood, as people repeat old, frustrating patterns and then blame themselves for not being happy.10
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature ParentsIf we learn to dissociate from the pain of our reality, we can survive a childhood of tremendous betrayal, sadness, pain, and fear. But dissociation… from pain is not selective; we inevitably disconnect even from the joy of being alive.11
Aware: The Science and Practice of PresenceThere is no such thing as perfect parents. All parents make mistakes and inevitably leave lesser or greater trails of damage. In later life it is often a painful and difficult task for a person to discern and integrate what occurred in childhood; this can be slow work, but it can yield great fruits of forgiveness, freedom, and tranquility of heart.12
To Bless the Space Between UsWhen one is at home in oneself, one is integrated and enjoys a sense of balance and poise. In a sense that is exactly what spirituality is: the art of homecoming.12
To Bless the Space Between UsJust as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others.14
Healing The Emotional SelfWhat a child doesn’t receive, he can seldom later give.14
Time to Be in Earnest… no matter how much the parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with.15
Psychology and AlchemyJust tell me how you judge your childhood and youth, and I will tell you who you are.16
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, As cited in The Quotable KierkegaardJust as the spirit is invisible, so also is its language a secret, and the secret lies in its using the same words as the child and the simpleminded person but using them metaphorically…16
As cited in The Quotable KierkegaardA soulful person trusts his intuitions and other forms of inner guidance, knowing that a stronger sense of self abides there.17
Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
