S2 EP306 – Inner Child vs. Wounded Child — What’s Really Running Your Life

Hi, everyone, Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. And today I want to talk about why it’s not your inner child running your life. Lots of times people talk about, “Oh, you better not indulge your inner child in running your life.”

Well, in order for me to talk about this, I need to talk about how Inner Bonding defines your inner child because different people define the inner child differently. In the Inner Bonding process, our inner child is who we are in our soul, it’s our true soul self.

It’s who we’re born as, it’s our special gifts, our compassion, our love, our creativity, it’s a beautiful, wonderful part of us. And actually, when people fall in love with each other, that’s what they’re falling in love with, that, that core self, it’s not actually a child, but an in Inner Bonding we call it inner child because we need to take responsibility for our own feelings. And our soul, our inner child, often communicates through feelings.

And so thinking about your feeling self as an inner child may help you understand how to take loving care of your own feelings, it might help you understand that you need to learn to take loving care of your own feelings.

Now, there is another child or adolescent inside, which we can call the wounded child or the wounded adolescent or the ego wounded self. This is the part of you that might be running your life, because as we’re growing up, we absorb so many fears, so many false beliefs from our parents and caregivers and school and teachers and peers and media, so many false beliefs.

And those false beliefs might be running your life if you’re not aware of them. If you have a false belief that says, “I’m not good enough,” that might be running your life, that’s not your inner child. In fact, if you’re telling yourself that you’re not good enough, your inner child is going to react to that on a feeling level.

Because the feeling that comes up when you tell yourself that you’re not good enough, or you’ve got to be perfect, or you made a mistake and that means that you’re bad, or you’re wrong, or you’ve got to try and control how people feel about you in order to be okay, the inner child will respond to those false beliefs by feeling anxious, feeling depressed, feeling numb, feeling angry, feeling guilty, feeling shame, feeling jealous, all of these feelings are your inner child letting you know that your wounded self, your wounded child, your wounded adolescent is running your life, not the inner child.

Our job as an adult, and Inner Bonding is about developing this strong, compassionate, caring, loving adult to learn to be a good mom and dad to your own inner child. So if you think, if you’ve got this belief that your inner child is running your life, you’re going to be neglecting or ignoring or judging, tuning out, disconnecting from that part, which is exactly what you don’t want to do, just like an actual child.

The actual child is letting you know with feelings, with crying that you need to be attending to the feelings, attending to what this child needs, what an actual child needs, it’s the same thing on the inner level, that we need to be attending to our feelings.

Our feelings have so much vital information for us about whether we’re loving ourselves or whether we’re abandoning ourselves, which means that we’re judging ourselves, we’re operating out of our false beliefs, we’re ignoring our feelings, we’re blaming other people, we’re numbing out with various addictions, these are all ways that we abandon our inner child and self-abandonment will lead your inner child to let you know with feelings, with anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness that you’re abandoning yourself.

And just like with an actual child, if you’re treating a child with judgments, if you’re ignoring the child, that child will feel abandoned and will get anxious, get depressed, get angry, will act out in various ways, various addictive ways, it’s the same thing on the inner level.

So it’s really important to not be thinking that your inner child is running your life. See if you can remember that we all absorbed so many false beliefs, so many fears, you can call it the ego, you can call it the wounded self, you can call it the ego wounded self, which we often do, but that this is the part of you running your life. This is the part of you that needs to be uncovered and explored. And the way that you become in touch with this is through learning the six steps of Inner Bonding, the first step being aware of your feelings.

Because if you’re feeling, let’s say anxious, that feeling is letting you know that you’re abandoning yourself and then you can go deeper, well, in step two, you can open to learning, you can learn to connect to a higher source of love, and then you can go in and see, how are you

treating yourself? What are you telling yourself from that ego wounded self that’s making you feel anxious or depressed or any of these other painful feelings?

And when you go in, then you can become aware of the false beliefs. For example, if you’re judging yourself and you go, “Why am I judging myself? Oh, I have to judge myself to get myself to do everything right, and then somebody will like me, people will like me and then

I’ll be okay.” Well, that’s a ton of false beliefs that other people are responsible for when you’re okay, that you can control how they feel about you, that if you judge yourself, you’ll get yourself to do things right.

These are all false beliefs and that’s what’s running your life, not your beautiful soul inner child. In fact, it’s so important to get to know who you really are in your soul because that is who you really are.

So I hope that you come and visit us at innerbonding.com. We have a free course that you can take that will begin to teach you the inner bonding process. And we have so many courses and so many books that will be helpful to you.

I invite you to learn to connect with your spiritual guidance with my 30-day video home study course, unlocking your inner wisdom. This course will help you trust your guidance rather than your wounded self.

Thank you for joining me today. I’m sending you love and blessings on your healing journey.