Dear people,
Why does it help to give your Inner Child closure?
We all know that children have big feelings. They still have to learn to understand and regulate their emotions, learn how reality works and balance out the physical hormonal impacts. It's no surprise that we've all been through toddler tantrums or teenager rebellion.
What harms a child emotionally can look really silly from an outside or adult perspective. That makes it much harder to actually to the work we need to find closure (acceptance, forgiveness, letting go etc.). Often the adult, more rational part of us, insist it was 'no big deal' or 'we should be over that already'.
So it can be very healing to step into your inner child perspective and combine it with your adult perspective to give yourself the closure it needs. It will help integrate both energies, making sure you feel more vibrant and alive and it will increase your understanding of yourself and others.
Inner child exercise: Closure
- This exercise is done in 2 parts: the child and the adult part.
- Take around 30 minutes for each part of this exercise - so 1 hour total at minimum
- For the child part, take a pen and paper
- Allow yourself to connect with your own Inner Child
- Write down all the childhood frustrations, pains and disappointments you still remember through the lens of your childhood self.
- Since you remember them, it automatically means you have healing work that can be done. Once things are healed, we tend to not remember what bothered us per se. So don't censor yourself. Allow all child(ish) pain to be named
- Once you are done post the letter to yourself
- Drink a bit of water and do some grounding
- Adult part: once the letter arrives take around 30 minutes to read it carefully
- If the letter arrives quite quickly, you can take a few days before starting, so you have a fresh set of eyes on what you've written
- As the adult: what would you do to comfort this child?
- As the adult: what actions would you take to give this child what they need?
- As the adult: what would you explain to this child?
- By doing these 3 things: comfort, action and only then explaining, you are giving your child self what it needs first and only then start with an adult perspective to closure. By doing it in this order, your child self will find closure. Usually we start with the explanations, meaning we sympathize more with the adults instead of with the child
- Once you've taken the appropriate steps thank you child self for being honest and open with you.
- Send extra love and comfort to your child self or ask Higher Power to do so
- Choose what you want to do with the letter (throwing it out, burning, etc.)
- Drink a bit of water and do some grounding