The hashtag #innerchild has near 1.5 million entries on Instagram, and TikTook is equally chock-full of content material associated to the idea. We hear outstanding figures like Kendall Jenner, The Bachelor contestants, and others speak overtly about doing internal youngster work on the common. You’ve additionally in all probability heard about it out of your good friend, your therapist, or your babysitter, as a result of it’s simply that ubiquitous. But why now?
Generally talking, the topics of remedy, self-care, and total wellness have crossed firmly into the mainstream over the previous few years — particularly amongst millennials and zoomers, who not consider these ideas as taboo, and actively preach concerning the significance of this sort of self-work. While that is undoubtedly an exquisite growth that has large potential to carry us as a society into higher therapeutic, Rai factors out the “wellness” motion may have a darkish facet — specifically, the stress to maintain up with seen (and sometimes costly) “self-care” practices being extolled by others.
“Even the wellness industry can have an aggressive edge to it — so much of our pursuit of wellbeing can be driven by low self-esteem and the feeling that we need to better ourselves,” she explains. “It is not uncommon in my experience for our healing to become quickly co-opted by the underlying trauma, turning it into a frantic and shame-fueled process of trying to fix what we perceive as being ‘wrong with us.’”
As such, Rai believes that many people are craving a deeper — and, extra importantly, gentler — type of self-work. That’s the place internal youngster work is available in — a apply that’s firmly rooted in gentleness and self-compassion.
“I think that as a culture we are beginning to adopt a more trauma-informed mindset when it comes to well-being, and in turn we are becoming more gentle in our approach,” she says. “I think that perhaps this is why there is a growing interest in inner child work. It invites us to tend to the underlying cause rather than the symptom, and it invites us to do so in a very tender, curious, and compassionate manner.”