Inner Child Healing Quotes

“Your inner child is waiting for a genuine, heartfelt apology.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

“The more you don’t want to be like your parents, the more you will resemble them.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

“We all have made the mistake of thinking someone else can be our healer, our thriller, our filling. It takes a long time to find it is not so, mostly because we project the wound outside ourselves instead of ministering to it within.
There is probably nothing a woman wants more from a man than for him to dissolve his projections and face his own wound. When a man faces his wound, the tear comes naturally, and his loyalties within and without are made clearer and stronger. He becomes his own healer; he is no longer lonely for the deeper Self. He no longer applies to the woman to be his analgesic.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Healing is never complete until we have been truly heard. May the universe send you someone who will sincerely care to listen.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“When you hate your parents or dislike certain traits that they have, you are actually giving them more attention and directing your energy toward them. They occupy your headspace, so how could it not affect your choices in life.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

“The concept of the best possible version of me is not merely an intention, it is an action. It is the daily practice of taking full responsibility for my thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and actions.”
― Tanya Valentin, When She Wakes, She Will Move Mountains - 5 Steps to Reconnecting With Your Wild Authentic Inner Queen

“The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.

Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone.

Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem.

Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.)

You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not.

Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“Inside of each of us, is just an inner child yearning to love and be loved in return. - Lai Rah”
― Linda Greyman, Soul Works - The Minds Journal Collection

“I choose to let positive attitudes lighten my being today.”
― Maureen Brady, Daybreak: Meditations for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse

“Many of us are guilty of not taking enough time to dial into our inner child's voice.”
― Kim Ha Campbell, Inner Peace Outer Abundance

“Most of us have an inner parent that doesn’t take care of the inner child’s needs properly. They are more focused on the needs of the ego, such as pleasing other people in order to feel needed, or achieving success and getting recognition from others. This makes the inner parent happy for a short period of time, but it doesn’t last. There is always a feeling of not being fulfilled, no matter how much you achieve, because the inner child’s needs are not being met.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

“John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon.

Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows.

Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.”

These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope.

The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days.

We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion.

So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“I bumped into my shadow
on the way to thorny feelings
she whispered to me:
‘You can’t rush your healing
Its time is not measured in seconds but steps
some forward, some backward
then forward again”
― Valentina Quarta, The Purpose Ladder

“Awaken to Beauty.
Get to know you, everyday more. Teach your children the same. The earth delights in her beautiful flowers.
You are a beautiful flower.
Will you bloom?”
― Ulonda Faye, Sutras of the Heart: Spiritual Poetry to Nourish the Soul

“If you stay aligned with your inner child, you’ll always feel forever young.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Transform your future by healing your past.”
― S.M. Weng, Inner Child Healing: Discover Your True Self, Overcome Childhood Trauma, and Deepen Relationships With Self-Love, Chakra Healing, and Twin Flame Connection

“We often behave like we are still children.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

“Here are the twin premises of the inner-child recovery movement:

• Bad events in childhood exert major influence on adulthood.
• Coming to grips with those events undoes their influence.

These premises are enshrined in film and theater. The biggest psychological hit of 1991 was the film version of Pat Conroy's lyrical novel The Prince of Tides, in which Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte), an alcoholic football coach, has been fired from his job, and is cold to his wife and little girls. He and his sister were raped twenty-five years before as kids.

He tearfully confesses this to Dr. Susan Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), a New York psychoanalyst, and thereby recovers his ability to feel, to coach, and to control his drinking. His sister, presumably, would also recover from her suicidal schizophrenia if she could only relive the rape. The audience is in tears. The audience seems to have no doubt about the premises.

But I do.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems, you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled—by any facts I know—to blame the way they treated you.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“Depression, sexual troubles, anxiety, loneliness, and guilt are the main problems that drive consumers into the recovery movement. Explaining such adult troubles as being caused by victimization during childhood does not accomplish much. Compare “wounded child” as an explanation to some of the other ways you might explain your problems: “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” or “sexually dysfunctional.” “Wounded child” is a more permanent explanation; “depressive” is less permanent. As we saw in the first section of this book, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction—unlike being a wounded child—are all eminently treatable. “Wounded child” is also more pervasive in its destructive effects: “Toxic” is the colorful word used to describe its pervasiveness. “Depression,” “anxiety,” and “sexually dysfunctional” are all narrower, less damning labels, and this, in fact, is part of the reason why treatment works.

So “wounded child” (unless you believe in catharsis cures) leads to more helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity than the alternatives. But it is less personal—your parents did it to you—than “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” and “sexually dysfunctional.” Impersonal explanations of bad events raise self-esteem more than personal ones. Therefore “wounded child” is better for raising your self-esteem and for lowering your guilt.

Self-esteem has become very important to Americans in the last two decades. Our public schools are supposed to nurture the self-esteem of our children, our churches are supposed to minister to the self-esteem of their congregants, and the recovery movement is supposed to restore the self-esteem of victims. Attaining self-esteem, while undeniably important, is a goal that I have reservations about. I think it is an overinflated idea, and my opinion was formed by my work with depressed people.

Depressed people, you will recall, have four kinds of problems: behavioral—they are passive, indecisive, and helpless; emotional—they are sad; bodily—their sleeping, eating, and sex are disrupted; cognitive—they think life is hopeless and that they are worthless. Only the second half of this last symptom amounts to low self-esteem. I have come to believe that lack of self-esteem is the least important of these woes. Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness or passivity, however, accomplishes nothing. To put it exactly, I believe that low self-esteem is an epiphenomenon, a mere reflection that your commerce with the world is going badly. It has no power in itself. What needs improving is not self-esteem but your commerce with the world. So the one advantage of labeling yourself a victim—raised self-esteem—is minimal, particularly since victimhood raises self-esteem at the cost of greater hopelessness and passivity, and therefore worsens commerce with the world.

This is indeed my main worry about the recovery movement. Young Americans right now are in an epidemic of depression. I have speculated on the causes in the last chapter of my book Learned Optimism, and I will not repeat my conjectures here. Young people are easy pickings for anything that makes them feel better—even temporarily. The recovery movement capitalizes on this epidemic. When it works, it raises self-esteem and lowers guilt, but at the expense of our blaming others for our troubles. Never mind the fact that those we blame did not in fact cause our troubles. Never mind the fact that thinking of ourselves as victims induces helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity. Never mind that there are more effective treatments available elsewhere.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“We trade authenticity for attachment and this becomes our ideal identity–our default avatar. We try to prove it by behaving in alignment with our ideal identity, that we are worthy of being loved and accepted. We also receive it from those around us, information on what loses us that acceptance, love, and approval, and so these become our shadow selves–our unwanted identities.”
― Tanya Valentin, When She Wakes, She Will Move Mountains - 5 Steps to Reconnecting With Your Wild Authentic Inner Queen

“When we are influenced by the nameless Maiden, we can feel as if we are still
waiting to receive our gift of the eternal wisdom of adulthood. Patiently waiting for
the day where we will feel like a real adult, worthy of sitting at the grown-up’s side
of the table. At times, we can still feel like a child, uncertain, and floundering. An ‘imposter’ grown-up. There comes a time where we ultimately arrive at the moment
in our adult lives that we realise no one is coming. No one is coming to parent us,
to tell us to clean up after ourselves, to tell us to get off the couch, and get our butts
to work or to the gym. No one is going to admonish us if we eat too many chocolate
biscuits, drink too much wine, or stay out all night”
― Tanya Valentin, When She Wakes, She Will Move Mountains - 5 Steps to Reconnecting With Your Wild Authentic Inner Queen

“If your inner child is not healed, you will look for love in the wrong places.”
― Vinaya

“You cannot go back and live your childhood all over again. But don’t forget that there is a child within you, an exceptional child. Cherish and pamper this child. Never, never hurt your inner child.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya