3 Ways To Heal Your Inner Child Through Journaling

  • Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • 3 Ways To Heal Your Inner Child Through Journaling
heal your inner child wounds with amy bambury youtube cover photo

This article is meant to give you an introduction into inner child work so that you can learn how to heal your inner child.

Your teacher is Amy.

Amy is an adult woman who stood up to defend ethics and her integrity – and got fired.

Her heart was in the right mental place though. Now Amy is doing her life work of helping to heal your inner child wounds.

You can practically see in the video that Amy is simply beaming whenever she’s talking about counseling, inner child, or the wounded child within.

The reason Amy does such greater work with the inner child is because Amy healed her own inner child, her own wounded child.

Nowadays Amy is a qualified Person Centred Counsellor registered with the BACP, and you can watch below in the full interview where she shares how to heal your inner child wounds.

Here are some points this Heal Your Inner Child Wounds article also talks about:

  • How To Help Someone Discover Their Inner Resources When Healing From Trauma
  • Amy’s Specific Technique To Heal The Inner Child Wounds
  • How Amelia Healed Her Inner Child Within Quick Summary
  • How Amy Healed Her Inner Child Quick Summary
  • Why Healing Your Inner Child Wounds Is Like “Big” With Tom Hanks
  • Amy’s Definition Of Acceptance
  • How Amy Got Fired For Standing Up For Ethical Behavior

For more info for Amy Bambury who helps people in healing from all sorts of pain including relationships you can visit https://www.treeoflifecounselling.co.uk/

YouTube player
Full mp3 available here or Eating Enlightenment podcast on Android, Apple, etc

How To Help Someone Discover Their Inner Resources When Healing From Trauma

  • First become aware
  • Ask questions towards your feelings
  • Good idea: use a journal
YouTube player

The first thing that I is to get them to become aware. Then get them to ask themselves questions. Awareness is key.

  • I feel uncomfortable in this situation, but I don’t know why. What’s going on?
  • Why do I feel uncomfortable?
  • Does this situation happen frequently?
  • Why am I feeling this way?

For this type of work journaling is a fantastic resource. Not all people can afford therapy, so journaling is a fantastic second base. Journaling allows all of the stuff that’s kind of going on in the head to come down on paper. It gets it out of view. It’s the same way as talking.

Talking gets it out of your system. Writing does that too. This affords you some clarity in being able to go right to see what’s going on. Now you’ve got a bit of distance from it on.

Specific Healing Technique To Heal The Inner Child Wounds

This section is about how Amy used a writing technique to contact her inner child and heal. Healing your inner child will help you greatly build your confidence around food.

  • Use opposite hand to draw a picture of your “inner child”
  • Write questions with left hand
  • Answer questions with right hand
YouTube player

Before I helped clients with their inner child, I did inner child work with myself.

Essentially what you do is you have a written conversation. You have written dialogue and conversation with your wounded child within. First of all, you use your nondominant hand to draw a picture of your inner child.

For me it would be my left hand, because I’m right handed. And so I draw a picture with my left hand. My left hand connects to a side of my brain where my inner child memories all.

You draw the child, which may also be the first time you’re doing this. When you’re drawing the child, it’s so strange and you have to realize just how weird it is.

It almost feels like you’re possessed by another person because the left hand feels like it’s got a mind of its own.

And so when I drew my inner child, my wounded child had orange hair, I’ve never had orange hair in my life and it drew me with orange hair. My wounded child within was stick woman. And I was very, very long and thin and I wasn’t long and then as a child, but it was representative of how I felt, you know?

And then the dialogue came. You write questions with your right hand. So you as an adult are writing the question and you as a child would write the answer with your other hand.

How Amy Healed Her Inner Child Within Quick Summary

  • Amy’s cut off her inner child “Amelia” at age 11 after being bulled
  • Realizing she is triggered by her inner child Amelia
  • Allow inner child to be anxious/scared while still loving inner child
  • Forgive
YouTube player

The very first question you ask is what’s your name? And sometimes it could be a nickname that comes forward or just your regular name for me. My name is Amy, but my full name is Amelia.

But because of my journey, I had been cut off Amelia at like age 11, because I was beaten up by blackmail and bullied at school and I thought, “I’m never going to be that girl again. Amelia is dead to me.” So I cut her off right at age 11.

And whenever anybody called me Amelia, I would be like, “don’t call me that!”

And then of course I had a journey then to come to terms with that child that I’d cut off. through the inner child work I discovered I was a very anxious child and that led to me being sick, the child.

Now as an 11=year old I started to bury the emotional feelings when I was forced to grow up, which where my wounded inner child stopped getting the help it truly needed. Instead of love, I rejected the mental health of my inner child.

You know we all have experiences like with the historical trauma.

You bury those feelings because you think they’re too big, they’re going to kill you, consume you, overwhelm you. Your younger self when you’re 10 years old or whatever thinks that won’t be able to exist as a person with those feelings.

And so with this inner child work you’re tapping into those feelings. For me there was a tremendous feeling of rejection and anxiety.

Then after you tap into those feelings then it’s about accepting those feelings and loving that child.

This allows your inner child to come out the other side of that so that she can be proud of who she is now, and give her a break for back then. So it’s kind of a lot of love that comes forward for her, which is completed the opposite of what I was feeling before, which was complete rejection, I would reject her at the snap of a hat.

Why Healing Your Inner Child Wounds Is Like “Big” With Tom Hanks

  • “Gotta be grown up”
  • Our inner child with gets wounded when forced to grow up too quickly
  • Healing releases inner child wounds
YouTube player

If you think about the movie big with Tom Hanks. Yeah. So he’s a kid essentially in a grownup world. It gets to the point in the film where someone says to him, “why don’t you just grow up?” And he realized this can’t be a kid anymore. Gotta be a grown up.

His best friend comes along and says, “where have you gone?” You know you’re just suck. Now you’ve disappeared. And that’s what we all do.

We get to this stage in life where we realize we can’t be a kid anymore. We’ve got to grow up. And whatever age we’re at is where our child gets stunted.

Then we start to live life and that child loses their voice at that time. And then we go ahead and live this adult life according to how we think we’re supposed to do it. But we’ve been cut off from part of ourselves.

Amy’s Bambury’s Definition Of Acceptance

  • Emotionally go through the darkness emotions
  • It’s ok to be angry and sad
  • Acceptance leads to you being fearless
YouTube player

Acceptance, if you look at the five stages of grief – you’ve got denial, bargaining, anger, depression and acceptance. But you have to kind of go through all of those stages.

In order to get to the acceptance, you have to go into the fog to come out the other side into the light where the acceptances.

People confuse acceptance with passivity.

And you’re not saying that you’re saying that you can be okay despite what happened. So it’s again about being kind and compassionate to yourself that you’re able to kind of accept that you did the best that you could and that it wasn’t your fault and you can be different forward.

Acceptance of all the feelings, you know? And, and I think feelings lead you to acceptance. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be sad, you know?

And then once you’re allowing yourself to feel those feelings and believe that you’re strong enough to hold them then you’re able to get to the acceptance. This is the stage which brings relief and the release as well.

For example, I have so many people that say to me, “It’s too much. It’s too big.”

And I liken it to I’m a monster under the bed or a monster in the cupboard. You know, the idea of the monster under the bed is terrifying. And when you think about it, you think, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I’ll die because it feels that consuming.”

But then when you finally pluck up the courage and look under the bed, you see that there’s no monster there at all. And it was all, you know, nothing to be worried about. Or you say that there is a monster under the bed and you can look square in the eyes.

It just has the power of fear over you. And people get used to that and they don’t like thinking, well, “how do I even live without this?”

And the tricky thing about acceptance is if I go to acceptance, then it means that I’m not going to be in this space and I’m afraid of not being in this space.

So what coaching really about feeling all of those emotions along the way and what they mean.

How Amy Got Fired For Standing Up For Ethical Behavior

  • Was helping people get jobs
  • Had strict targets
  • Cared about people more than targets
  • Cared “too much” about people, got fired
YouTube player

I was working in employability. So basically I was working for an agency where unemployed people would go to and I would see them and help them apply for jobs.

But the problem is they came to me and I would have targets (a certain number of people I had to get jobs per month) and so I’d have targets to get these people in job and I didn’t meet these targets.

Then I was in trouble. And so they would come to me and say, “Well, I’m an alcoholic.” or “Oh, I’m homeless.” And I think, “Oh, hang on a minute.”

These issues are more important than getting a job, you know? And so my moral compass would be, I don’t care about getting you a job. I need to get you some help. I need to get your house, you know? And so my focus would completely shift and my targets went out the window.

you are beautiful

Heal Your Inner Child Conclusion

  • Use techniques to write to your wounded inner child
  • Talk with your wounded inner child
  • Discover what the wounded inner child was not allowed to feel
  • Allow yourself to feel these emotions
  • This leads to healing your inner child who was wounded within

For another article on healing inner child work that I wrote, see “How To Not Binge Eat Case Study: Intuitive Eating After 140 Pound Weight Loss

About the Author

Jared Levenson is a former binge eating wrestler turned Zen Buddhist Monk, Internal Family Systems counselor and nutrition wellness coach. He's helped hundreds of people through universal meal principles and internal family systems to make peace with food, stop binge eating, and find true health and wholeness.

@jared_levenson

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}