The Loop We Live In
The significant people in our early lives — parents, caregivers, role models — were themselves navigating their own struggles, wounds, traumas, and defence mechanisms. The programming they passed on to us, often without knowing it, formed the foundation of how we came to see ourselves and the world. Much of that programming was not sustainable. It did not always model healthy, grounded ways of growing into adulthood.
Many of our earliest internal belief patterns are based on what we were told about the world and about ourselves. Added to this, the influence of television, media, cinema, and the internet layers further experiences and narratives onto what we already carry from our environments.
Information or experiences that impact us negatively in early life lead us to formulate beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs may not be true — but they can, if not addressed, taint the rest of life.
For example: if our parents show us a great deal of love in early life, it becomes relatively easy to believe that we are loveable and worthy of good things. But if we are not shown love — if we are made to feel abandoned, unimportant, or lacking in attention — we may grow up carrying a very different truth about ourselves. One that was never accurate. But one that functions as though it were.
The Truth We Don't Want Anyone to Know
Physical or psychological hurt may leave marks that are easy to forget on the surface. Who wants to remember? But these experiences can lead us to live lives in which we genuinely believe we are unworthy — or, in some cases, that we deserve the kinds of relationships that reinforce that belief. We magnetise what we believe. And so the loop continues.
These patterns reinforce harmful core beliefs and behaviours which grow alongside us, becoming part of the programming with which we navigate daily life. Our minds, scrambled by this conditioning, sometimes lead us to abandon ourselves — to act from anger, shame, or the quiet despair of someone who does not believe they deserve better.
What the Inner Child Actually Is
We have, in many cases, been dis-empowered, sabotaged, and lived in a kind of inner chaos — shaped by the conditioning of environment, society, religion, and circumstance. This has created an Inner Child: a part of you, very much alive inside you, who simply needs an explanation. Who needs someone to sit with them and help them understand what happened.
Unconsciously, we carry that child with us always — because that child is, in a very real sense, us. The part that formed before we had the words or the wisdom to understand what was happening.
As children, we are in deep and continuous contact with the subconscious. Everything that is learned in those early years goes directly into the subconscious mind. And the subconscious, crucially, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is imagined, between what is true and what has merely been experienced as though it were true.
But this can be changed. And it can be helped — through Inner Child Therapy in the context of Clinical Hypnotherapy.
In this work, we do not excavate the past for its own sake. We return to it with the compassion and the understanding that the child within you deserved — and still deserves. We offer that child what was missing. And in doing so, we gently free the adult you have become to live from a different place.