In the 90′s, the concept of healing your inner child was popularized by writers such as John Bradshaw in Homecoming and Charles Whitfield in Healing the Child Within. These approaches were significant innovations at the time, giving people a very personal and relational way to heal childhood wounds. However, they have now been supplanted by an powerful method of psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). In this article, I describe the advances in inner child work that come from IFS.

The older approaches worked well enough for you if all these assumptions were true:

1. It was easy for you to access your inner child.
2. You didn’t get flooded with pain or trauma when accessing your inner child.
3. You knew exactly what healing messages your inner child needed.
4. You truly felt loving and nurturing toward your inner child.
5. Your inner child could take in your healing messages.

Since many people have difficulty with at least one of these areas, there were limits to the healing that was possible.

IFS works with subpersonalities, knows as parts, which include not only the various inner child parts but also a variety of others, each with its own feelings, perspective, and motivation. Since IFS is a fully developed model of psychotherapy, it has developed methods for taking care of potential difficulties in each of the above areas. Let’s look at them one by one.

1. IFS recognizes that we have protectors-gatekeeper parts that prevent us from accessing or healing our inner children. These parts keep many of our inner children locked away and inaccessible. IFS has sophisticated ways of accessing and befriending our protectors so that they will allow us to access our inner children.
2. When you access an inner child part that carries intense pain or trauma, it is easy to become overwhelmed with these emotions in a way that is harmful. IFS has methods for ensuring that you remain in your true Self, a grounded place separate from the pain of the inner child. In this fashion, you aren’t flooded by the pain but you are still open to it, so you can heal the child in a safe way.
3. There are many different inner child parts, not just parts at different ages, but parts that hold different memories of harm, neglect, judgment, shame, or other painful situations. Each one needs something different. The older inner child methods recommend just making up or choosing healing messages or basing them on the development needs of the child at different ages. However, this may not reflect the exact needs a particular inner child has. In IFS, you don’t have to guess at what an inner child part might need. First you witness the memory of what happened to the child, and then the part will tell you exactly what healing it needs from you to redress that situation-love, attunement, protection, encouragement, appreciation, and so on.
4. It isn’t enough to give your inner child the correct healing messages, you must actually feel them. You have to feel loving, nurturing, appreciative, and so on; otherwise, the healing won’t happen. In IFS, you give the healing messages from your true Self, which is naturally caring, nurturing, encouraging, and so on. If you don’t feel that way, it means that there is a block to your being in Self. You work the block through first, so that when you give a positive message, it is grounded and truly felt. In fact, the Self is accessed and re-accessed throughout the entire therapy process, and you learn how to recognize when you aren’t in Self and how to return to it.
5. For healing to occur, you must not only give healing messages, your inner child must take them in. In IFS, we check to see if the child is taking in the healing, and if not, we work through whatever is blocking this, so that transformation can truly happen.