"Healing the inner child"

#triggerwarning

If you have time, I'd like to invite you to watch the lyric video below here as a starter for what I'm going to write.

This song and a few other YouTube videos that I recently came across reminded me of the topic of "healing the inner child". I've always been curious about what it means and how to heal my inner child.

Do I need to relive my bad childhood memories to heal them? What do I do?

I'm grateful for being able to be near my family and live in my country again. I for sure learned a lot about myself during my time on my own abroad, and I also learned even more about myself during my time at home near my family. A few familiar things have come back up in my thinking/behaviour patterns though, thus I explored the topic of the inner child a bit by watching a few educational videos on YouTube from trusted therapists and professionals and also reading content from (hopefully) trustable sources on the internet.

I don't think I know everything about to what extent our exposure to things and experiences when we were younger could affect our way of thinking in adulthood, I think it does, and I think we have the power and ability to either make use of it (if it is positive) or remove it from our system (if it is negative).

I discussed this for a bit with a close friend. I said something along the line of: "There is a lot I need to unlearn", and what she responded made sense and made me think about changing my way of thinking on this. She said: "We don't need to unlearn, we can just keep on learning new things, and build new habits, and stick to those new habits." That's a good perspective.

I also think that this is good, because, instead of being on the blaming boat and blaming people and experiences that happened, her perspective invites "letting go" and "forgiveness" into the equation, and move forward, so we are not stuck thinking about the past, because we can't change anything about that anymore.

I guess it is still helpful and important to acknowledge what happened in the past and understand how it could have affected how we think/behave now, and it's healthy to not be stuck in the past for too long.

What I like about the song I added above is the fact that the artist Sasha did a great job at pointing out the elements that have affected how she feels about herself now, and I could relate to so much she shared in the song.

So, if you'd like to join me, let's be in the present and focus on the current/next step. And we should be okay. :) Our future self will thank us for continuing to trust ourselves and for working on becoming a healthier self, both mentally and physically.