MYTH 11

Your inner child needs a hug

I have a confession to make. When people start talking to me about their inner child I really struggle. It just makes me want to giggle (which I suspect may be largely to do with some relatively immature part of me). I don’t know quite what it is about the whole inner child thing that produces this effect.After all, I regularly work with people in various states of regression in therapy, including severely traumatised individuals who genuinely dissociate into child states to which the adult personality has little direct access. This certainly isn’t funny. I also believe that early childhood experiences, especially the tone of our relationships with our parents, can continue to ricochet through the years ...

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