Information and tools for healing one's inner child and awareness of your shadow-self.
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Learning to love and heal our inner child is a significant part of the healing process. To start you must give yourself the love and compassion you've been needing your whole life. Once you've healed your inner child, you will be able to cultivate a healthy ability to give and receive love. And when you know how to love and be loved, you can create the relationships you've always wanted.
It isn't difficult to heal your inner child. There are hundreds of amazing books and workshops that explain how to do it. The problem is that the steps sound simple, but actually doing them is almost impossible. Why? Because our inner child is afraid to be healed. That's why we get all kinds of excuses for not doing anything to heal ourselves.
You cannot change the past, but you can create a new future. Deep within each of us, in the spaces between thoughts and beneath the spoken word, lies our inner child. This is the place where we learned to live and love in our families of origin. There is no handbook to tell us how to parent our own inner child—in fact, we have the tendency to repeat the parenting style we grew up with. Become the parent you always wanted for your wounded inner child.
The shadow is this part of ourselves which is the dark half of ourselves that is hidden or repressed. It is this part of ourselves that is afraid to come out in a lighted form. It is this part of ourselves that causes a lot of suffering, internal conflict, and anxiety.
The shadow actually holds all the things you don't like about yourself, your faults, and your fears. They are the parts of yourself you want to hide from the world. It does not mean that you are a bad person, it is just that many of us have fears or we have some kind of inferiority complex. In this kind of work, you actually come to terms with your shadow if you do not like your own flaws or fears.
Shadow work is a very dynamic way of dealing in and with the hidden part of yourself. It has to do with seeing and hearing yourself as your loved ones and friends see you, to see how they use the word when they describe you. This is how you see your shadow self using mindfulness. Having no judgment and being fully aware of what you've repressed, can make you understand why certain things can make you tick so you can process the subject and let it go.
The work are usually set as journal prompts. There are guided journals for the healer that’s invested in the process. If you just decide to try it out at first, there are plenty of worksheets and sites of shadow book question floating around on the internet. The questions can be mild yet thought provoking to questions that you would normally avoid because min answering, it may strike a nerve or unleash powerful emotions that you’ve spent years to suppress. This journey is not for the weak, but even if you assume you may be- neither are you!
Today with many striving for self-awareness, there are plenty of shadow work journals and workbooks available. I try to put aside time at the end of the week to knock a couple of pages out of whatever shadow work prompt workbook I’m working on at the moment. Below is a link to one I enjoyed a lot and is instructional with guided prompts.
Shadow Work has become more mainstream lately and is a great aid in therapy since you can work at it in the privacy and comfort of your home, then bring your end results to the therapist to help you process the powerful emotions you may experience. If you are one that is currently on a journey of healing, keep moving forward! Have faith in yourself and in the process. The first step usually seems to be the hardest, but remember that eventually it’ll feel like a walk in the park.
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