Picture this: Your 4-year-old child refuses to eat the food you cooked and suddenly, you’re 6 years old again. You feel powerless and unheard. In that moment, it’s not just your child who is having a meltdown but you are too.
Recognise the activation of Inner Child
Maybe your body reacts physically when you get triggered: jaws clenched, breathing gets shallow or you get a sudden rush of heat or cold. You could also react emotionally: losing ‘it’, the urge to over-control or give up, or mental talks like, “I can’t handle this.”
When you begin observing your reactions – you can take that moment to heal. A useful response is usually to pause and simply breathe. If you’re anything like me, my triggering responses can overwhelm me completely. My inner child takes over my whole being and it takes sometime to gain my sensibilities. I usually retreat from the situation. I need space and room to center myself. I ask my husband or helper to step in so I can take that time to center myself.
Two-Child Check-In
I have recently adopted a second strategy which is to talk to both the children – my inner child and my actual child. I find myself saying, ‘stop crying’, quite often and I didn’t like the sound or the tone in which I was doing it. Upon reflection, I realized I never actually could cry or burden my family with my problems. I got so used to being alone in a house full of people that I was having a tough time processing big emotions.
Now my response in a crying situation sounds like: It looks like that really upset you. Can I give you a hug? Or help you figure it out? It’s not verbatim but rather contextual. It’s something that I wished I heard while growing up. A space where I am allowed to feel things even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.
It’s useful to ask yourself: What does your inner child need right now? Do you need to feel safe and reassured? Do you need to be heard? Validated? Loved? Do you simply need to know that you aren’t in trouble but have a companion in your troubling moments? Rest assured that what you need is probably what your child needs as well.
Finding your compassionate response
In the heat of any trigger, it can be hard to find the rightful response that attends to both of you. That’s why it’s good practice to reflect and ponder over our reactions – after or before the moment. Yes, it can be handled before as well. Take a minute to think back to your interactions with your kids, most likely there’s a pattern. Once you see it, you can take the time to fashion different strategies that work for both of you.
Some foundational questions to trigger the reflection process: what did “being in trouble” feel like in your childhood? Did you feel safe as a child? What was the emotional temperature of your home – was it chaotic, controlled, unpredictable or something else? What did your nervous system learn about the world from your earliest caregivers? What did you have to do to get attention as a child? What did you have to give up about yourself to be accepted in your family?
The Healing Opportunity
These questions can be difficult to process. Just writing them creates a low-key wave of sadness that coats me. It’s not easy, but good things are hardly ever easy. Although sometimes our wounds run deep and parenting becomes a constant trigger. This is when professional support becomes not just helpful but necessary. There’s no shame in getting help. It’s one of the most loving things you can do for your family.
When we learn to tend to both children, the one in front of us and the one within us, something beautiful happens. We stop trying to fix or control our children and offer them what they need most: unconditional love, patient presence, and the safety to be fully human. Your inner child doesn’t need to be perfect or fully healed to be a good parent. Most of the time it simply wants to be seen, acknowledged, and gently guided by your own wisdom.