SELF-CARE: 3 Foundational Ways That Inner Child Work Strengthens Your Relationships + FREE Strategy Session

Whether we’re experiencing some challenges in our relationships or generally feel fulfilled in them, most of us would love to enjoy them even more.

After all, if you find that most conversations with your mom end with you feeling frustrated or upset, you’d probably love for this to change.

And even if things are generally going well with your romantic partner, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind enjoying a bit more intimacy and connection in the relationship.

As I’ve mentioned recently, one of the key benefits of doing inner child work and healing your inner child is that it can help you build stronger, healthier, and more fulfilling relationships.

But in thinking about whether inner child work is truly worth your time (which I know you can’t afford to waste), you might be wondering how exactly inner child work can benefit your relationship.

That’s why in this blog post, I’m going to pull back the curtain on 3 key ways that healing your inner child can strengthen and deepen your relationships (both romantic and not).

Because although relationships aren’t the only part of your life that inner child work can improve, when we feel happy and safe in our relationships, we often experience more joy overall, feel less stressed about everyday challenges, have more motivation to pursue our goals, and feel more satisfied about our lives.

So let’s dive in and chat about how healing your inner child strengthens your relationships.

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It Helps You Understand Why You Keep Making the Same “Mistakes”

Have you or someone you’ve known ever experienced chronic physical symptoms that no one has been able to explain?

If you’ve personally experienced this or witnessed a loved one go through it, you might understand how challenging it can be to spend years or even decades going from doctor to doctor and not receiving any answers.

That’s why if a diagnosis comes along one day, it can actually bring more relief than just being told yet again that nothing seems to be wrong.

Most of us don’t want to be diagnosed with a medical condition.

But it can actually be incredibly relieving and validating to finally have an explanation for what you’ve been experiencing. Plus, you might also feel more hopeful that because you have an explanation for your symptoms, there might be some sort of treatment that can help you feel better.

And do you know what, my dear?

Doing inner child work can bring similar relief and validation if you’ve been struggling with your personal relationships for a while.

After all, it can be very frustrating to keep experiencing the same challenges in your relationships and not know why.

You might continuously find yourself thinking something like…

• “Why do I always pick partners who aren’t right for me?”
• “Why do I stay in unhealthy relationships?”
• “Why am I always so quick to lash out at loved ones when they do something that upsets me?”
• “Why do I always sacrifice what I want for the sake of making other people happy?”

You might fully recognize that there’s a pattern in your relationships or how you approach them. And you might even realize that your actions and behaviors aren’t healthy for you, the other person, or the relationships. But you don’t know WHY you keep falling into the pattern again and again. And no matter how hard you seem to try, you don’t know how to stop yourself from doing it.

This is where inner child work can help.

Because when you connect with your inner child and explore your inner child wounds through inner child work, you can begin to understand WHY you keep falling into the same patterns in your relationships over and over again. You can begin to understand why you react in unhealthy ways in certain situations, why you seek out relationships with people who might not be right for you, or why you always seem to get into the same types of arguments with your loved ones.

For example, identifying your inner child wounds might help you understand that you have a habit of sabotaging your relationships because as a child, you learned that the best way to avoid being hurt in relationships was to not get invested in them in the first place.

Similarly, uncovering your inner child wounds might help you recognize that when you’re experiencing a conflict with a loved one, you constantly press or “pursue” them for reassurance about the relationship because your parents would withhold love from you when they were angry with you.

Understanding your behavioral patterns in relationships doesn’t automatically “fix” your relationships. But it can play a powerful role in strengthening them.

Because when you understand that your unhealthy behavioral patterns and habits are because of childhood wounds and NOT because you’re “broken” or incapable, it can make you feel hopeful about being able to change. And when you truly believe that you can change and transform your relationship as a result, you’re more likely to take the steps that will help you strengthen your relationships.

It Takes the Pressure Off And Recalibrates Expectations

Doing inner child work can also strengthen your relationships by recalibrating the expectations that you have for relationships.

If your needs weren’t met by your parents or caregiver when you were a child, you might unconsciously expect your loved ones to fulfill these needs for you now as an adult. As a result, without necessarily realizing it, you might count on your partner, older sister, or close friend to be the parent or caregiver that you didn’t have as a child.

When you’re in a close relationship with someone, it’s normal to expect to receive love, care, and time from them. But the reality is that another adult can’t replace the parent or caregiver that you didn’t have as a child. After all, the relationship between two healthy adults is very different from the relationship between a parent and a young child.

When you were a young child, you didn’t have the capacity to fully take care of yourself, so it was your parents’ or caregiver’s responsibility to help you with the needs that you couldn’t fulfill on your own. This meant helping you eat when you were a newborn, stay safe around the house and regulate your emotions when you were a toddler, and get to swim practice or piano lessons as a teen before you were old enough to drive.

But now that you’re an adult, you have the ability to fulfill many of your daily needs yourself. So it isn’t reasonable to expect your parent, sibling, or friend to fulfill your needs the way that a parent or caregiver would.

The problem, as I mentioned above, is that if your needs weren’t fulfilled in childhood, you might still unconsciously expect your loved one to fill the role of a parent or caregiver. For example, you might expect them to drop everything and attend to one of your needs immediately in the way that a parent would. You might expect them to stay up all night to comfort you about something relatively minor. Or you might even engage in childlike behavior (e.g., tantrums) to get attention in the way that a young child would.

And because your loved one can’t be the parent that you’re looking for them to be, it can leave you feeling disappointed with the relationship, place undue stress on your loved one, and strain your bond.

Doing inner child work can help you recognize that your loved one isn’t failing to meet the expectations that you have for them because there’s something wrong with them or they don’t love you. Instead, it’s because the expectations that you unconsciously have for them aren’t ones that they can reasonably meet (and also aren’t their responsibility to meet).

Through the process of healing your inner child, you will also learn that there is someone who can give you the love and care that you’re craving—YOU. An important part of inner child work is learning how to reparent yourself and give your inner child the love and compassion that you might not have received as a child.

In sum, recalibrating your expectations for your loved ones can ultimately strengthen your bond with them by taking the pressure off of the relationship and making it more feasible to feel satisfied in it.

It Helps You Identify What to Change or Address

Lastly, doing inner child work can strengthen your relationships by helping you pinpoint what you can address or change so you can approach relationships in a healthier way.

Specifically, inner child work helps you uncover problematic behavioral patterns that you engage in when you’re in relationships (e.g., shutting down whenever someone tries to get close to you). It helps you identify the specific unfulfilled needs that are at the root of these unhealthy patterns (e.g., as a child, people kept coming into your life and then abruptly leaving, so you didn’t experience consistent, unconditional love). And it can give you clarity on the specific limiting beliefs related to relationships that you’ve developed as a result (e.g., “I’ll just be abandoned and hurt again, so there’s no point in investing emotionally in relationships.”).

Identifying your problematic behavioral patterns, unfulfilled needs, and limiting beliefs can be emotionally challenging. But it can also be incredibly empowering.

Because when you know what barriers are standing in your way of engaging in relationships in healthy ways, you know exactly what you need to address to change the way that you show up in relationships. You know which behavioral patterns you can work on breaking free of, which limiting beliefs you can work on transforming, and which needs you can learn to fulfill for yourself.

Many people think that to improve a relationship, they need to change something about the relationship or, most commonly, the other person. It’s true that in some cases, there may be something that needs to change about the relationship itself or the other person. But what many of my clients are often surprised to discover is that you can see big changes in your relationships even if all you’re changing and working on is yourself.

If you’re no longer resisting your partner’s efforts to get close to you, lashing out at your sister over “small” issues, or expecting your friend to give you a level of attention that isn’t reasonable for your relationship, it’s naturally going to change how your loved one feels and responds in the relationship. And in many cases, this ends up leading to a healthier relationship and stronger bond—even if only one person consciously and actively did anything to change.

Of course, doing inner child work isn’t the only way to change how you approach your relationships. But it can help you pinpoint the specific barriers and unmet needs that you can address so that you know exactly what you could benefit from working on instead of having to guess and potentially spend years playing a game of trial and error.

Get The Clarity and Tools to Approach Relationships in A Healthier Way

Relationships play such an important role in our lives by giving us love, companionship, safety, and meaning.

But they aren’t always easy to navigate. And when something isn’t quite working in a relationship, it can be tough to figure out what to do about it.

As I’ve shared above, inner child work can give you the clarity and tools you need to understand the challenges that you’re experiencing in relationships so that you can take systematic, effective steps toward addressing them.

Specifically, doing inner child work can help you understand why you might approach relationships in unhealthy ways; the specific problematic habits, beliefs, and unmet needs you can benefit from addressing; and the expectations you can recalibrate to feel more satisfied and less disappointed. And when you know what the real problems are in how you might be showing up in your relationships, it’s much easier to feel hopeful and motivated to take the steps that will help you address and overcome them.

As you can see, doing inner child work and healing your inner child can have enormous benefits for your relationships and your life more generally. But it may or may not be the healing journey that’s right for you at this moment in your life.

The good news, though, is that right now, I have a risk-free way to help you decide if going deeper into inner child work is the right next step for you—whether you’re looking to strengthen your relationship, feel happier as a person, or create the life you’ve been longing for.

You see, this October, I’ll be accepting a few new clients into my one-on-one Heal Your Inner Child program.

And right now, I’m offering you a FREE strategy session so you can gauge whether doing inner child work with the help of my personalized guidance and support in this program is right for you.

If you’re ready to discover how inner child work could give you the love, joy, peace, or purpose you’ve been looking for, book your free strategy session with me now.

And if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.

Until next time!

Vera

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