How Healing Your Inner Child Can Bring You Back To Joy

There I was, in the middle of the bustling NYC summer, facilitating a private Psilocybin ceremony for a therapist with her PHD. I supported her as we navigated the terrains of her childhood pains, guided by the magic mushrooms. She released tears and stored trauma from years of unsuppressed emotions lodged in her body. We traversed the realms of her psyche, finding lost parts of herself, reclaiming her youth, and healing her inner child while mending the patterns that were disrupting her peace from her upbringing. As a result, the client was liberated from the scars of her parents with a newfound joy for life and her calling to help others. Inner child healing can be a gateway to creating a life that nourishes your whole self and makes space to keep dreaming big, especially in a world that forgets to play. Can you think of your favorite childhood memory where you were full of joy? For many of us, the past is tangled with both good memories and painful realities. Life is a school of learning, and often, we inherit unhealthy traits from our parents and ancestral lineages. A study found that many adults with issues like eating disorders, trust problems, intimacy struggles, addictive behaviors, compulsivity, and codependency have a neglected or wounded inner child from the emotional climate they received in childhood. Our inner child remains active throughout life, shaping how we love, create, and cope in the long term. Plagued by the unjust systems of colonization, many of us are healing from generational wounds, looking for our personal prescription for peace through therapy, mindfulness practices, and alternative medicines to help us reclaim our roots. One thing is certain: we can’t run from our past, and inner child healing is a non-negotiable way to reconnect with our joy, power, and purpose in life.

So, what exactly is inner child healing, and how does it work? Your inner child is a metaphorical part of yourself that represents your childlike personality and emotional state. It’s a way of explaining the younger parts of ourselves that may need healing from emotional or traumatic experiences from our childhood. This psychological concept was publicized by psychologist Carl Jung. Today, it’s a popular topic as adults explore inner child therapy. The relationships that we experience in our developmental years have a lasting impression on our emotional intelligence and psychological well-being as adults. Inner child work requires us to reparent ourselves, to face our triggers, including the unhealthy patterns hardwired into our lives, and actively provide the care we didn’t receive when we were young. What happens when joy was never safe to feel as a child? For so many of us, especially Black and Brown folks, our inner child never got to play, scream, cry, or be seen. Now, as adults navigating oppression, grief, and collective trauma, we carry those wounds into our relationships, our art, and our activism. Research shows that adults with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) have an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and other chronic illnesses. If thinking about your younger days brings you emotional imbalance, anxiety, or stress, it may be time to embrace your inner child with the love you’re longing for. 

At some point, we all have to take responsibility for our own lives by taking our power back and healing ourselves. For Black and Brown communities, the layers of pain run deep. As Denise Brady, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and creator of the Inner Child Whisperer platform, explains, “We are swimming in our mother’s unhealed trauma in utero. Essentially, we’re born into trauma.” Denise’s own story, growing up with a mother exhibiting narcissistic traits and a father battling addiction, is a testament to how healing is possible even when joy seems far away. In BIPOC communities, childhood trauma often results in hyper-independence and emotional suppression. “Our wounds become third in our relationships; us, our partner, and our trauma,” Denise says. Many BIPOC children were forced into adult roles early on, taking on responsibilities far beyond their years. As adults, they have to tap in and acknowledge the little person inside them needing to feel joy.” Brady continues, “Most people who have unhealed trauma have never experienced true joy. In order to feel joy, you must find safety.” She adds, “We have to learn that the systems in place and our trauma do not define us.” 

I began my inner child healing journey in 2012 through psychedelics, after realizing how unresolved childhood wounds, especially around my father, were shaping my relationships. Raised by a single Black mother, I became hyperindependent, hiding behind pride and unable to express vulnerability. Reconnecting with my inner child helped me release perfectionism, embrace softness, and find joy and healthy love. Today, I guide others in healing childhood trauma through mindfulness, coaching, holistic practices, and plant medicine like ceremonial cacao. One profound practice I use with clients is soul retrieval, an ancestral healing technique I learned from the Tz’utujil Mayan community. Imagine your life as a 100-piece puzzle. Trauma can cause pieces of our soul to go away due to shock from grief, accidents, or heartbreak. Soul retrieval brings those lost parts back, restoring a sense of wholeness. Many of us grew up facing hardships like poverty, emotional neglect, or constant stress, without the tools to process our feelings. School may have felt isolating or unsafe. Healing begins by becoming aware of your inner child, listening to their needs, and offering them the safety and validation they may have never received, for them to transmute the pain. 

Afro-Caribbean breathwork teacher and global facilitator Millana Snow describes Integrative Breathwork as a profound access point for healing. In her sessions, people often experience deep emotional releases of grief, laughter, and even unexpected joy. “We all come into this world as love,” she explains. “But then trauma comes in. Often through family. Often through generations of unprocessed pain. And suddenly, joy becomes dangerous.” When we breathe intentionally, we activate our parasympathetic nervous system. Snow explains, “We use breathwork to get people to a state where fear, survival instincts, and coping mechanisms aren’t in control anymore.” In that state, our inner child can finally be witnessed and held without judgment so that joy becomes possible. “If you were surrounded by adults who didn’t have the capacity to feel, your own feelings might’ve been denied or punished. So you learned to numb. You learned to shut it down. But breathwork unseats those patterns. It calls them out of your body and your spirit,” Snow shares. She intentionally weaves music and language into her sessions to connect people with their ancestral lineages. “You reconnect with the younger parts of yourself that knew joy and play were sacred,” Millana says. “And when those parts remember, healing becomes more than release, it becomes reclamation.” Breathwork can help people feel emotions they weren’t allowed to as children, like joy, wonder, and curiosity. Facing your past can feel overwhelming, especially when childhood wounds resurface as adult struggles with abandonment, workplace shame, or unexplained rage. That’s why compassion is key. These younger parts of you may be hidden, hesitant, or frozen in fear waiting for you to finally see and soothe them. Inner child healing asks us to reassure this part of ourselves that we are capable of protecting them and can provide for them in ways we didn’t receive as children. Denise echoes this: “Most BIPOC communities were forced to grow up and take on parental responsibilities as children. They have to release themselves from the conditioning of being ‘too childish.'” Brady asks her clients, “What are things our inner child wanted to experience or do and never could?” 

The answers become a blueprint for your healing. Practices rooted in ancestral medicine, like microdosing mushrooms, mirror work, journaling, altar building, play rituals, family constellation, and breathwork, are tools to reconnect us to the part of ourselves that still dreams. Denise encourages her clients to let go of the fear that they’ll become their parents. “That fear often stops them from allowing joy into their own children’s lives. You must heal in order to experience true, authentic joy without the joy being attached to fear, criticism, and control.” Brady admits that “Reparenting myself looks like being gentle, less critical, taking positive self-talk with myself. Allowing myself to laugh, eat, and buy things I couldn’t experience.” If you’re ready to start this healing work, Millana offers a simple breath practice: “Do 2 inhales and 1 exhale through your mouth. Inhale into the belly, then the chest. Exhale fully. Set a timer for 10 minutes. While you do it, speak to your inner child. Let them know they’re not alone. That you’re here now. That you’re listening.” It’s time to get back to our happiness and release the past limitations keeping us angry, bitter, or stagnant, unable to move forward. It’s up to you to reconnect with your youth to reclaim joy as ancestral, rebellious, and medicinal. It’s about choosing joy, again and again, even when the world has told you it’s not yours to have.