Healing from trauma can be hard work. It can take dedication, tears, sitting with discomfort. It also requires compassion for your inner child. When you’ve experienced something where your sense of choice has been violated, this is all the more critical! This may mean slowing down the therapeutic process.

I’ve met many people who are eager to be “done” with the pain they’ve experienced, resentful that some injury stillI has an impact on their life, and they want to be in the light at the end of the tunnel already. This makes sense, of course, and they may push themselves hard in order to get there.

Unfortunately, trying to rush the process may actually keep you stuck longer: here’s why.

Like it or not, you have a relationship with your inner child. Maybe it’s an absent relationship; maybe you’re at odds and not speaking to each other. This is a starting point, and part of what I keep an eye on, a main relationship to improve.

If you are driven, if you have learned to deny or ignore your own emotional experiences in order to stay safe or excel, your inner child may feel resigned and listless, or resentful and distrustful of you. By pushing yourself in the therapeutic process, you may be repeating the very trauma of overriding your inner child’s experience that you are trying so hard to heal from!

Listen to your inner child. Become your own ally. If you blame your inner child for what happened to them, we can work on forgiveness. You can’t always give your inner child exactly what they need, but you can at least ask what that is, and start listening. You can building trust that, while their needs weren’t heard before, YOU can start hearing them now. Acknowledgment and respect are important to building trust to come forward to share the big, scary, painful feelings that need healing.