Inner Child work for Creatives explained!

Your inner child is your most creative self.

Your inner child has access to all of the creativity, motivation, inspiration, intuition, and your most authentic expression. They are your key to creating your most fulfilling work with more ease, fun, and flow.

When we talk about inner child work, I like to distinguish your younger self as our pre-verbal self. They are your connection to our intuition, they don't have access to the more analytical part of our brain, because they develop before language, they are more about our gut instinct, and initial programming and are connected to our most primal brain.

So your inner child can access your CORE CREATIVE ESSENCE - but also, they react in fear when you want to share your work or you are afraid of doing it wrong. Your inner child can be worried about performing or fitting in. This is because when trying to make these decisions, your younger self feels that you might not get it right, or won't be loved if it creates in a certain way. This is programming from when you were that age as a child and your coping mechanisms. And these sensations in your mind and body can keep you from creating with ease.

The idea of Inner Child work is that we can begin to reprogram our brain (and all those fears and old beliefs) by RE-PARENTING ourselves with love.

I like to tell my clients that the parental self is the more logical self. Your adult self does have access to your more analytical prefrontal cortex. So when we start to reparent, as creatives, our adult self can create boundaries and can assure this younger self so that it's free to explore, to be as free and creative as it wants to be.

This can look like putting time on the schedule for your inner child to play and create so that they can be free. Your adult self could create a structure in your calendar, then your younger self could just be free to play and explore and create. How amazing would that feel?

This could look like creating a collection. Saying “we're going to create this many pieces”, or “we're going to only use this material.” That creates some boundaries, and kids need boundaries so that your younger self can come in and be wild and explore and really express themselves.

And most importantly, this can look like JUST LISTENING TO YOUR INNER CHILD and what fears are coming up. Don’t try to change them or harshly give them rules without their consent. This is very important because we want to build trust between the younger and older selves.

And also, what we don't want is for that younger self to feel like they need to do adult things. If as a kid, you either had too much responsibility or not enough boundaries, this can happen easily. When you are experiencing anxiety, your inner child might be thinking, ‘I need to create boundaries for myself, I need to figure all this stuff out myself.” It can feel overwhelming for the inner child.

Your adult self can create this safe space, in a LOVING WAY, so that the younger self can come in and have a lot of freedom. We want the younger self to have as much freedom as possible so that it can create from that place of joy, ease and flow.

If you have questions about inner child work or working with me, please reach out via email or check out my offerings.