Ever wondered about connecting with your inner child? It seems to be a very popular thing right now and one I find fascinating, but what does connecting with your inner child mean? The following may help to explain Psychology Explains How Reconnecting With Your Inner Child Restores Joy in Life (powerofpositivity.com)
“There is a child in everyone. But sometimes, people forget to enjoy the playful, light-hearted side of life. Reconnecting with your inner child means taking life a little less seriously. It means allowing yourself time to play, explore, laugh, and see the world with both joy and awe.
Studies suggest there could be valuable benefits of learning about the phenomenon of the inner child concerning your health and your sense of well-being. What you learned during your childhood could be significantly helpful to you as an adult. Reconnecting to your inner child as an adult may be beneficial to find healing, restore joy in your life, and help you find purpose.
The summary of the findings showed that the inner child’s phenomenon is: Gaining useful life lessons through childhood experiences are made up of four themes: sharing relationships, playing to heal, being strong or frail, and supporting the next generation.
Reconnecting with your inner child can restore your happiness.
Remember the playful days of your childhood? Restoring that feeling can make you happy again.
1 – Learn practical life lessons by reconnecting with your inner child
Researchers say that useful life lessons during childhood help you adapt as an adult. In essence, your inner child affects your adult decisions and view of life.
2 - Relationships
Strong relationships with family and friends affect you as an adult. Caring for siblings or doing things together as a family affects how you raise your children. Experiencing openness with peers as a kid builds your sense of feeling secure and safe. Your inner child experiences shape how you view your family and friends into adulthood. Many friendships last a lifetime, and you learn to treat others well from your younger self experiences.
3 – Mental health
Your life journey is how you view your life and what you learn about life from your past experiences. This is what people describe as their inner child. Certain strengths and knowledge you carry into adulthood contribute to your inner child. Incidents and events during childhood emphasize the impact of your inner child, either promoting or hindering your health and sense of well-being.
4 – The importance of play
Reading, make-believe play, and fun playtimes help shape your curiosity and desire to learn. Playing outdoors in nature and with animals provides positive mental health experiences in the inner child. Many participants that experienced this as a child today as adults love athletics and being outside. Social competence increases when, as a kid, you take part in sports. You learn how to decide, prioritize and work together as a team. Restoring your inner child could mean joining a sports team to have fun. Revisiting your childhood experiences could regain your sense of joy and laughter.
5 – Spiritual health increases by reconnecting with your inner child
Researchers found a significant quality added to your life when you find meaning and purpose because human beings are a combination of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Experiencing things like these as a child will enhance your spiritual health.
Faith
Optimism
Hope
Inner peace
Wonder
Awe
Your view of the world affects your healthy choices as an adult. Making sound decisions in your everyday life and making sense of it promotes joy and overall well-being. Faith in God, studies show, can enhance your understanding of purpose and meaning in life.
6 – Being strong
Childhood experiences result in life lessons about how to handle situations in adulthood. Learning how to stand up for your beliefs and setting barriers is one way to restore your inner child as an adult. When you were younger, you learned independence and self-confidence during periods of freedom where you had to work things out yourself.
As a child, you had curiosity and weren’t afraid of conflicts. You can learn from this childlike view of life, allow yourself to be curious again, and resist the urge to give in to fear when things are difficult.
7 – Being frail
Perhaps you remember being left alone, separated from your parents. These traumatic experiences can breed insecurities and separation anxiety struggles that last into your adulthood. Looking at these childhood experiences helps you understand today’s struggles and how to react to them.
You may feel frail because of your reaction to stressful life situations. Connecting to your inner child experiences helps you figure out how to deal with these seeming “frailties.” Learn the lessons of your inner child and restore your joy.
8 – Social lessons
Handing conflicts in your relationships as a child can affect you as an adult. Perhaps you didn’t handle it well when you were younger, so today, for instance, you can’t stand up for yourself at work. Of course, negative experiences can make you stronger. Perhaps you didn’t get recognized for things you did as a kid, so today, you’re more empathetic towards others who experience the same thing. You understand what it’s like when someone overlooks you.
Reconnecting with your inner child helps you learn valuable lessons as an adult and overcome negatives that still hinder you. Maybe you learned to solve conflicts with your friends by working out disagreements and arguments. Sometimes kids march home if they don’t get what they want, so you learned that not everyone likes to work together to solve problems. Playing with other kids teaches you to be less rigid and more flexible in your friendships.
How reconnecting with your inner child can teach you life lessons as an adult
Useful studies that illustrate your inner child experiences and their impact include:
Good relationships with your parents, siblings, and friends helps you learn confidence and how to believe in yourself. You understand social dimensions and well-being.
Challenging childhood experiences help you understand how to be kinder and more empathetic towards others.
Role-play and make-believe playing along with reading and listening to stories, showed you the existence of your inner child and helped you have a foundation of awe and curiosity later in life.
Final thoughts on how reconnecting with your inner child can bring joy back to life.
You can have fun as an adult reconnecting with your inner child. Your past experiences teach you many lessons. Your younger self experiences shape how you view the world as an adult. These lessons may include trust, friendship, independence, and being more empathetic towards others.
As you reconnect with the things that shaped you as your younger self, you may find joy, curiosity, and awe. Of course, it’s important to remember that you’re not a victim of your history as a child. Perhaps your growing-up years were full of heartache and neglect. It’s good to know that your identity isn’t wrapped up in these things."
If you’ve read my book or at least the first few chapters, then you will understand why it was important for me to connect to my inner child, we can reparent our inner child and let them know that in no way were they responsible for anything that happened to them or even some of the decisions they made, we were just children, so learning to nurture our inner child and forgiving ourselves is so important.
I have just taken this advice quite literally, 8 days in Disney World in Florida for one of my bestie’s birthday celebrations, such a fun and amazing experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it fulfilled all my expectations and more…
“A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep…”
It really is an amazingly magical place, where dreams do come true – the happiest place on earth! Extremely busy and I thought without any children we might look out of place, but honestly there are people from all walks of life, young, old, families, newly weds and it’s so diverse that we really didn’t stand out at all. Rides, shows, meeting characters and shopping (of course) We stayed at a Disney hotel, highly recommended for convenience and keeping the theme going, apart from gaining early entrance to the parks, it’s also so easy to commute back and forth to the parks at any time of day, like that we didn’t have to pack everything into a limited number of hours and when we were tired, too hot or wet on the one day it rained, we could go back to the room and put out feet up for a couple of hours and re-energise.
My advice – definitely book a Disney hotel your body will thank you! I haven’t walked so much in years, perhaps I’ve never walked that much in my entire life, regularly hitting over 20,000 steps. It really is so convenient; transport is readily available and so you also save on the commute. Think ahead about what and where you want to eat, book restaurants in advance if possible, especially the character themed ones. Meeting the characters needs to be booked now too, silly for two adults I know, but so much fun. You do suddenly revert to that little girl, I heard one lady having a conversation with Mickey and there was an elderly lady on her own queuing to also meet Mickey, see not at all out of place!
Writing to your younger self (your inner child) is a great exercise, (mine can be found in my book) tell yourself how far you’ve come and how much you are loved, your greatest achievement to date. Some of you might have been asked what advice you would give your younger self and this is also a good exercise.
I have just taken a test to see what my inner child is trying to tell me (I find these fascinating) here are the results:
I need to slow down.
Your inner child is trying to tell you that you need to slow down – you are moving too fast in life. Perhaps you are working too much, never taking breaks, or constantly trying to get through a long “to do” list. On the other hand, you might be placing unrealistically high expectations on yourself to achieve, produce, and succeed – to your own detriment. Whatever the case, your inner child feels suffocated. S/he needs space to breathe, to move slowly, and to enjoy life.
Keywords: minimalism, decompression, taking it easy, essentialism, moderation, deceleration, slowness (hmmm interesting and something I’ve been doing this week!)
If you find any of this interesting there is a lot of information on the web, have a look you may find the results surprising.
As always, be gentle with yourself!
Now back to the real world...
Fabulous post Janet. And your inner child description is spot on! 💕💕💕