S2 EP318 – The Most Common Mistakes People Make in Inner Child Work
Episode Summary:
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul and I’m very glad you’re here with me today. Today’s episode is about the common mistakes people make in inner child work. Be sure to stay to the end because I’ll be sharing how you can learn more about learning a powerful process for inner child work.
Inner child work has become very popular — and for good reason. Healing our wounds from childhood is essential for emotional freedom, healthy relationships, self-worth, and spiritual connection.
But because there are misconceptions about what inner child work really is, many people are doing inner child work, yet they’re not healing. So often a new client will tell me they’ve been doing inner child work but are still suffering from anxiety, depression, shame, anger, or relationship problems. They journal, visualize, meditate, dialogue with their inner child, read books, attend workshops, and still, they feel stuck, overwhelmed, or emotionally dysregulated.
That’s because inner child work, when misunderstood, can actually reinforce the very wounds it’s meant to heal. I want to help you avoid the mistakes that actually reinforce self-abandonment instead of healing it.
I want to start by talking about how Inner Bonding® defines the inner child, as opposed to the wounded child. The inner child is the wonder child – our true soul self. This part of us doesn’t need healing, because this part of us is a spark of the Divine, imbued with our individual gifts, and often communicates with feelings. Our soul, our inner child, lets us know through our feelings when we are loving ourselves and when we are abandoning ourselves, and when something or someone is safe or dangerous, or when others are open or closed.
One of the mistakes people make is confusing our soulful inner child with our wounded inner child. It’s this confusion that’s part of what can lead to people getting stuck in their healing process.
We all have multiple ages of wounded inner child and wounded adolescents. The age of our wounded self, which is what we call all ages within that are operating from fear and false beliefs, depends on when we absorbed a false belief or learned to turn to a particular addiction to numb painful feelings.
It’s our wounded self that need healing. Our inner child needs us to learn to be the loving mom and dad with our feelings so that we can heal the false beliefs of wounded self and fully express the soul gifts we’ve been given.
Another common mistake is to believe that your inner child wants to control you, but it’s not your inner child who wants to control you – it’s your wounded self. Our inner child was created by God, but we created our wounded self as part of our survival to try to have control over getting love, avoiding pain, and feelings safe.
A big mistake occurs when we give our wounded child too much power. Just like with an actual child, it’s the adult who needs to be in charge, not a demanding child. Just as with an actual child, we listen to our feelings and needs and, as a loving adult, we take loving action on our own behalf and on behalf of others, and we gently explore the fears and beliefs of our wounded self, but we do not allow that part of us to be in charge.
Since your inner child is a spark of God which is love, this isn’t the part of you that acts out with anger or demands. It’s the wounded self who can be violent and do harm to yourself and others, not your inner child. You don’t want to allow this wounded part of you to be in charge of your life.
What we do want to do is listen to the guidance of our soul – our inner child, and the guidance of our higher self, and learn to take loving care of our feelings, while exploring the false beliefs and unloving behavior of our wounded inner child and wounded adolescent. This is what the practice of Inner Bonding is all about.
When you let your wounded self make adult decisions, you are allowing a young wounded child or adolescent to lead, and you are staying stuck in controlling and avoidant behavior.
Healing happens when the loving adult is present – when you take responsibility for learning to love, protect, and comfort your inner child, creating the inner safety that your wounded self cannot create. In fact, your wounded self creates fear, not safety.
The goal of inner child work is not to let the wounded child lead, but to heal the false beliefs of the wounded self and develop your strong loving adult that can create an inner sense of safety for your inner child.
Before we move into the next mistake, this is exactly why I created my Love Yourself 30-Day Video course. If you’re looking to learn this powerful inner child work, this course is for you. You can learn more in the description below.
Another common mistake is confusing love with indulgence. For example, your wounded self might say, “We’ve had a hard day so let’s reward ourselves with a donut.” But feeding the house of your beautiful soul, your wonderful inner child, sugar and junk food isn’t loving, it’s indulging. Or your wounded self says that you have to have that new pair of jeans, even though you are in debt. This isn’t loving, it’s indulging, like permissive parenting, and it’s not what a loving adult would do. It what the wounded self does.
True love includes appropriate limits and responsibility regarding your health, finances, being organized such as paying bills and taxes on time, and speaking your truth
Indulgence may temporarily soothe anxiety, but it does not create safety. In fact, indulgence often makes the inner child more anxious because putting a wounded child or adolescent coming from false beliefs and devoted to control doesn’t create a feeling of safety.
Inner child work is not about avoiding or trying to control pain. It’s about learning about what your inner child is telling you through feelings and healing the false beliefs that is motivating self-abandoning behavior.
Another mistake is to believe, from your wounded self, that you need to fix the inner child rather than be in the process of developing your loving adult who can take loving care of your inner child and heal your wounded self – all of which is a practice and takes time and conscious effort. Your inner child does not need fixing. He or she needs loving mothering and fathering and limits placed on allowing the wounded self to take over.
When you try to rescue or fix your inner child, you imply he or she is broken, which is a major false belief from your wounded self. But when your wounded self is in charge, you likely feel a sense of pressure to perform well and get validation from others, because you are abandoning yourself. When you try to fix your feelings rather than learn from them, you invalidate your inner child and reinforce feelings of shame.
Another mistake is using what you believe is inner child work to avoid adult responsibility. Some people use inner child work to explain and excuse patterns without doing their inner work to heal their false beliefs and take loving actions for their inner child. They might blame their trauma rather than do the healing work of Inner Bonding to heal trauma.
Insight is important, but insight without responsibility leads nowhere. Your history explains your patterns, but it does not justify continuing them.
True inner child work leads to greater self-responsibility, clearer boundaries, more conscious and loving choices, and less reactivity, not to entitlement, avoidance, or indulgence.
Another common mistake is staying focused on pain, trauma, and wounds, without bringing in love, truth, and guidance. Many people have been told to stay with their pain, but there is no point in hanging out in emotional pain. The pain is often your inner child alerting you that you are abandoning yourself in some way, and your responsibility is to learn what the pain is telling you rather than just feel it. Just as with an actual child, you don’t tell a child to just feel their pain. You attempt to find out what is causing the pain, even if it’s you causing it, and learn what would be loving.
If you repeatedly dive into pain without showing up as a loving adult with an intent to learn, they your wounded self might be retraumatizing yourself by treating your inner child the ways you were treated as a child or the ways your parents or caregivers treated themselves. Your inner child does not need endless revisiting of pain. He or she needs to be treated with presence, caring, respect, and loving actions.
If your pain feels overwhelming, that indicates that you likely need professional help in learning to develop your loving adult.
Healing happens when the adult self grows strong enough to lead with love. Inner child work is not about becoming more childlike; it’s about becoming more loving, present, and responsible.
One of the deepest mistakes is attempting inner child work without a connection to something greater than the ego wounded self.
If the loving adult is not connected with spirit – with a higher source of
truth, compassion, and guidance – inner child work won’t lead to healing.
Spiritual connection provides the love, wisdom, compassion, and truth necessary to heal the wounded self. Without it, the wounded self often takes over and masquerades as the loving adult. True healing requires love that is bigger than the fear generated by the wounded self.
So what does healing inner child work actually look like? It looks like learning and practicing the six steps of Inner Bonding, incorporating these powerful steps into your life, so that eventually your inner child feels seen, valued, safe, and not alone because you are learning to be there as a loving adult.
If you’ve made some of these mistakes – and many people have – please be gentle with yourself. Inner child work is a learning process.
An important thing to remember is this: Your inner child does not need you to be a perfect inner parent. He or she needs you to be in the process of learning to be present, loving, open to learning, grounded, and responsible. When you learn and practice Inner Bonding, the wounded self gradually heals, and the inner child gradually become more of who you came to this planet to be.
If today’s episode resonated with you and you’re ready to learn to be a loving adult and heal your wounded child, I invite you to check out my “Love Yourself” course. It’s designed for anyone who wants to heal your pain and move into your peace and joy, and helps you develop your loving adult and spiritual connection. You’ll find the link in the description. Thank you for joining me today, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
I’m sending you my love and my blessings on your healing journey.
Transcription:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul and today’s episode is about discerning false prophets. Be sure to stay to the end because I’ll be sharing how you can learn to stay more tuned into the truth about another’s intention.
One of my listeners suggested this topic. She wrote this to me:
“The topic I thought about suggesting to you is false prophets, how to know them and especially those who’s falseness is not so obvious because they speak very kindly and also have a lot of true knowledge. The wolves in sheep’s clothing. There’s not a lot of good source on this topic and it’s something that is so widespread today, the world is full of spiritual deception and falseness, so many self-appointed priests, priestesses, mediums, “seers” who promote themselves in the world, seeking power in overt or covert ways. I’d love to hear you exploring this topic.”
What I want to talk about here is about developing discernment, strengthening the loving adult, and learning to trust truth over charm, power, or appearance.
Unfortunately, the most harmful spiritual deception is often subtle. It looks loving rather than dark. It may be soft-spoken rather than loud. It reassures rather than threatens.
Being able to discern truth from manipulation is so important today, because we are living in a time of spiritual hunger. Many people feel disillusioned with religious institutions and disconnected from a sense of meaning in life. Many people are seeking healing, guidance, comfort, and hope.
And wherever there is deep yearning, there is opportunity – not only for genuine spiritual guidance, but also for exploitation.
The world seems to be full of self-appointed spiritual teachers and coaches who claim to be seers, channels, intuitives, healers, shamans, priestesses, gurus, and guides – people who claim special access to truth, insight, or divine authority. There are influencers who mix spiritual language with personal branding.
Some of these people are sincere and grounded and are truly gifted in their access to spiritual truth. But some are deeply wounded but might not even be aware of this. And some are coming from greed, seeking power – overtly or covertly – through spirituality. And it’s not only in the spiritual realm that this greed is occurring. In my field many coaches offer quick healing or easy to obtain certificates in some field of healing, but when I go to their website and look at their background, they sometimes have little or no schooling or experience. Doing your research is important, but even that isn’t enough. What’s vital is that you develop your ability to discern the differences in the energy of someone who is authentic in what they are offering, and someone who is manipulative coming from greed and a desire for power over others.
I want to take a minute here to define what really is a false prophet. A false prophet is not defined by whether or not they say some true things. In fact, false prophets often speak a great deal of truth. What defines a false prophet is not content, but intent.
A false prophet is someone who may speak some spiritual truth but isn’t aligned with love or with sharing love. Without love, a false prophet can use spiritual knowledge to gain power, control, admiration, or dependency. If someone places themselves above you rather than fostering equality, or encourages your reliance on them instead of learning to trust your inner guidance, and is more invested in your being a follower than in your becoming empowered and discerning, they are a false prophet. True spiritual leaders or teachers encourage you to become all you can be, and become your own guru.
False prophecy is not necessarily about misinformation, but about misalignment with the love that is God. The danger in following them is not what they say – it’s about the intent with which they are speaking.
True spiritual guidance flows from love, service, and surrender to something greater than the self. It flows from a deep desire to help people learn to love themselves and trust themselves. False spiritual authority flows from their ego wounded self, even when it speaks the language of love. False prophets have an agenda regarding what they want from you, while true teachers want to be emissaries of love and truth. They want to be, as Mother Teresa put it, “God’s Pencil.”
One of the most confusing aspects of false prophets is that they often appear to be gentle, kinds, calm, compassionate, insightful, charismatic, and emotionally attuned. They may speak beautifully about love, unity, forgiveness, and healing. They may have genuine intuitive insight. They may even facilitate real experiences for people.
So how can something that feels loving be dangerous?
Because words and even actions that seem loving but are actually coming from an intent to control you, are manipulative. And truth without accountability is manipulative. We all know about guru’s who were acting out sexually with their followers, or spiritual leaders who amass huge fortunes under the guise of being loving.
When you learn to trust your inner knowing and higher guidance, you can fairly easily tell the difference between spiritual language coming from a place of love, or coming from the ego wounded self performing.
And this is exactly why I created my 30-Day online video course, Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom. If you’re looking to learn to trust yourself and access your spiritual guidance, this is something I walk you through step by step. You can learn more in the description below.
Subtle deception occurs when someone uses kindness and compassion as manipulations to bypass the truth and avoid challenges to their integrity. Are they using spirituality to elevate themselves rather than elevate you? Are they using loving language to suppress your discernment? Do they use fear of negative consequences to silence your questions?
If in questioning someone you are blamed as having a “low vibration,” or coming from your “ego,” or having a “lack of faith,” or being “unspiritual,” that is a major red flag.
Truth welcomes inquiry and love does not fear questions.
At the heart of most spiritual deception, as well as political deception and corporate deception, is the unhealed ego wounded self’s hunger for power over others, such as psychological power, sexual power, financial power, and social influence. The person seeking power over others, rather than the personal power which is what Inner Bonding supports, has not done their inner work to heal from self-abandonment and childhood wounding and trauma. Spiritual authority can become a way to feel special, needed, or superior.
And here is a crucial distinction: True spiritual teachers point you back to yourself, teaching you how to love and value yourself, while false spiritual teachers position themselves as essential to your well-being.
If you are following a spiritual teacher or considering following someone, you might want to ask yourself some important questions:
- Do they encourage your inner authority – or subtly undermine it, leading to a lack of self-trust?
- Do they empower discernment – or discourage it?
- Do they accept accountability – or deflect it?
- Do they welcome disagreement – or frame it as spiritual failure?
Power seeking disguised as service is one of the greatest spiritual dangers. I’ve had clients who were deeply harmed by false, power seeking spiritual teachers.
The harm of false prophets is often subtly psychological and spiritual rather than overt.
Followers may experience increased dependency, loss of self-trust, fear of thinking independently, confusion about their own intuition, shame for questioning, suppression of emotions, spiritual bypassing of trauma, loss of personal agency, or sexual violations.
So let’s talk about discernment, which is a function of the loving adult. It’s not cynicism or judgment, and it’s not coming from fear. It’s coming from trusting your inner experience of what feels right or wrong for you. It comes from your loving adult being aware of your feelings of discomfort when with the teacher, and from what your higher guidance is telling you. It comes from not handing your authority to anyone else, not trusting others over yourself.
Your inner child, your feeling soul self, feels safety in truth. It’s very important to trust that your body knows when something is off. Discernment is listening to that knowing.
True spiritual teachers and guides share certain qualities. They live what they teach, and they don’t claim special status. They admit their mistakes and learn from them. They encourage self-responsibility, supporting you in becoming all you can be, rather than supporting codependence through positioning themselves as indispensable. They are not threatened b your growth. Instead they celebrate it. They welcome inquiry, and they support you in loving yourself rather than encouraging loyalty to them. Rather than claiming to be “chosen,” they recognize the divinity in everyone. True teachers do not shine by dimming others.
You don’t need to fear deception if you strengthen your connection with your inner and higher sources of truth, and you trust what feels right and wrong to you.
False prophets thrive when people doubt themselves. They thrive when they promise to give you what you didn’t get growing up and what you are not giving to yourself. When you trust your inner knowing, manipulation loses its grip.
Discerning false prophets is about recognizing that love does not dominate, and truth does not manipulate. True spiritual teachers do not require worship or even loyalty.
When you live from your loving adult, connected with spirit, valuing your true soul self and wanting responsibility for your own feelings and well-being, you become very difficult to deceive.
If today’s episode was helpful to you and you’re ready to develop discernment, I invite you to check out my 30-Day online video course, Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom. It’s designed for anyone wanting to learn to trust themselves and helps you learn to access your inner and higher wisdom. You’ll find the link in the description. Thank you for joining me today, and I’ll see you in the next episode.”
As always, I’m sending you my love and blessings on your learning journey.
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