Inner Child coaching
What
is the Inner Child?
Being a child is an adventure: you are born, you grow, you get to know the world, you learn how to walk and talk, you learn how to behave to receive attention, you learn what you are (not) allowed by your parents and other people in your surroundings, etc.
Being a child can be a happy time which can lead to being an overall happy adult. Many adults, however, were hurt in their childhood in one way or another, had to adapt, were unwanted, did not get enough love, etc.
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These experiences can lead to complaints in your adult life, like:
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not being happy
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not being satisfied with yourself
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being a ‘head-person’ (and reducing your emotions and feelings as much as possible)
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relation problems in love and at work
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burn-out
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having the feeling of not being heard or seen
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needs which are not being met
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not feeling well in your body
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an inner critical voice that wants to control your way
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etc.
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If these complaints are related to problems from your childhood, an Inner Child Coach can help you solve these.
How do I work as Inner Child Coach?
In your childhood (we mainly look at 0 to 8 years old) you were not really able to communicate in depth about your needs and wishes. The limbic system of your brain, which contains your emotions, was already evolved in a certain way while the neocortex part of your brain, which contains language and logic reasoning amongst others, was still evolving. On the other hand you were able to feel what you missed and e.g. react in an angry, sad or anxious way. Sometimes you take these feelings with you into your adult life, in which they can stop you from living a full adult life. You go into a survival mode which you were used to living in when you were a child.
Because as a child, you were only able to feel what you missed, an Inner Child Coach work with feelings and emotions to look at the problem or complaint on different levels. An Inner Child Coach helps you experience what you did not get and were not able to solve when you were a child. That way, you can heal the pieces from the past and have more strength and self-confidence as an adult in the present.
Through experience-based exercises in one-to-one coaching you learn more about yourself and how you can deal with your complaints or problems as an adult. We start from the theory of Transactional Analysis and the following techniques can be used: Voice Dialogue, focusing, The Work by Byron Katie, NLP, etc.