Janet Philbin: Courage to Connect Through an Inner Revolution

The core concept of my book, Show Up for Yourself, is that healing is possible. I fully believe that healing is an inside-out job. Due to this belief, I have developed an inside-out process called The Spiral of Healing to help people understand that healing happens continually and in layers. This understanding will help people who are ready to listen to their pain and give it a voice they can hear outside of their own heads. We do this by listening with our hearts to ourselves with compassion and understanding. This relates to the inner child because the pain we feel on the inside is the pain of our inner child. I call that inner child the wounded inner child. It is our job as adults to rescue the wounded inner child. to hear, see, validate, and love them. It is up to us to understand what they went through as children and come to a place of compassion and forgiveness for them. All of the coping skills you developed at the time of childhood trauma were not developed to hurt your adult self but were your survival skills at the time and have become your coping skills as an adult. Therefore, when you become upset, triggered, and reactive in your adult life, you are not responding with the wisdom and experience of your adult self. You are reacting with the emotionally charged coping skills of the wounded inner child. This phenomenon occurs because the unconscious mind has no sense of time and as a result, the wounded inner child becomes activated, taking over your adult life when feelings similar to those from childhood are evoked in the present moment. When we rescue the wounded inner child and bring them back home to our adult-loving heart, then that inner child no longer must keep the old, maladaptive coping skills and can finally rest. It is then that the adult self can learn new coping skills appropriate for the time in your life that you are in now. This healing has the ability to result in an improved mood, less stress, and improved relationships in all areas of your life.