The Inner Child Is Real — And It’s Still Shaping Your Adult Reactions (Especially Under Stress)

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Note: This post, originally published on Linkedin, is aimed at stressed professionals navigating work pressure, personal growth, and inner child patterns. It focuses on practical insights and psychological perspectives to support you in managing stress, building self-awareness, and fostering emotional resilience. If you’re interested in exploring the energetic, spiritual, and astrological influences behind these experiences—insights from spirit guides, past-life reflections, or awakening practices—check out our other blog sections like "Welcome to Your Spiritual Awakening", "Astrology and Energy" or "Energy for Emotional Support" for deeper perspectives and actionable guidance for those on the Spiritual Path.

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In last week's post, I discussed releasing the weight being carried by our past selves through self-forgiveness. As previously discussed, many of our current emotional reactions aren’t actually coming from the adult sitting in the meeting with spiking cortisol , or lying awake at 3am looping the awkward rejection from the previous day.

They’re coming from the younger parts of us — the parts shaped by early emotional experiences that never fully got resolved.

In clinical psychology and developmental neuroscience, the term inner child describes the neural patterns formed in childhood, especially around safety, connection, and emotional expression. These early patterns are encoded deep in the limbic system, the brain’s threat- and emotion-processing center.

And unless they’re intentionally revisited and healed, they continue to shape how we perceive danger, respond to stress, and handle uncertainty… even decades later.

How Core Wounds Form (and Why They Don’t Disappear With Age)

During childhood, our nervous system learns what “safe” feels like — and what it doesn’t.

If a child experiences things like:

• emotional neglect

• inconsistent caregiving

• conflict or unpredictability

• being punished for having needs

• feeling like they’re “too much” or “not enough”

• abandonment, rejection, or criticism

• environments where emotions were suppressed or minimised

…the brain adapts.

It creates core emotional templates to help the child survive, such as:

• “I can’t rely on others.”

• “My feelings aren’t allowed.”

• “I need to stay quiet so I’m not a burden.”

• “I must keep everyone happy to be safe.”

• “If someone pulls away, I must have done something wrong.”

These templates become the default settings of the nervous system.

And the limbic system — which learns through association, not logic — doesn’t update these templates just because we grow up, get jobs, or become high-functioning adults.

This is why, under stress, many people feel like:

• they’re reacting disproportionately

• their emotions “don’t make sense”

• they’re ashamed of how strongly they’re affected

• their body is spiraling while their mind knows “this shouldn’t be a big deal”

• they’re reliving something that feels strangely familiar

Because often… they are.

Childhood Wounds Don’t Stay in Childhood — They Live in the Nervous System

Unresolved emotional experiences don’t disappear. They get stored somatically.

The nervous system becomes trained — at a biological level — to react quickly, fiercely, and protectively whenever something resembles the original threat.

This is why two people can face the same situation and have completely different responses:

👨 One person hears workplace restructure rumours and sleeps fine. 

👨🏻 Another spirals into anxiety, hypervigilance, and cortisol surges.

👨 One person handles conflict with ease. 

👨🏻 Another feels their chest tighten, mind race, and body shake.

👨 One person shrugs off a romantic rejection. 

👨🏻 Another feels shattered and destabilised for weeks.

The difference is not resilience as a personality trait — it’s resilience as a developmental outcome.

People whose early environments felt safe have nervous systems that treat uncertainty as “information.”

People whose early environments felt unsafe have nervous systems that treat uncertainty as “danger.”

The body remembers.

Why Suppressing These Reactions Makes Everything Worse

Most of us, especially in professional settings, are told to:

• regulate, don't take it personally

• stay objective, calm down, move on

• shrug it off, be resilient, stay positive

These sound like helpful instructions, but without emotional processing they become internalised suppression.

And suppression keeps the nervous system stuck in a background state of activation.

So when people tell themselves they “shouldn’t feel this way,” they’re not actually calming their system. They’re increasing internal stress load — while layering shame on top of it.

The message becomes: “I’m not only overwhelmed… I’m wrong for being overwhelmed.”

This is how adults burn out, shut down, or disconnect from themselves without realising they’re living in survival mode.

Real Healing Begins With Understanding What’s Really Happening

In my work, I’ve found that the turning point is almost always this moment:

When a person realises that the part of them panicking, overthinking, or shutting down is not “the adult failing.”

It’s a younger part trying to protect them.

True regulation — the kind that actually calms the limbic system — comes from:

• identifying the original core wound

• validating the emotional truth that was never acknowledged

• reframing the belief the child unconsciously adopted

• reconnecting adult consciousness with the wounded part

• processing and releasing the residual emotional charge

• re-teaching the nervous system what safety feels like

When these inner child patterns are integrated, something profound happens:

The nervous system finally updates. It stops reacting from old programming. Your adult self becomes the one driving the bus.

This is what grounded resilience actually looks like.

How I Can Support This Work

Many of the emotional patterns created in childhood are still held somatically — often in subtle but powerful ways.

Flower essences and Reiki can support this process by helping to:

• soften emotional resistance

• surface old patterns gently, while helping the system release stored fear, grief, or shame

• support resilience during integration

They’re by no means replacements for therapy or trauma healing, but rather they complement nervous system work beautifully — especially during periods of emotional insight and change.

Essences can be particularly helpful by empowering you to select for current patterns and observe what arises or shifts as you take each blend. And because they work on energetic and emotional patterns (rather than biochemistry), there is no “wrong” essence. The blend simply supports what is active, and feels gentle if the pattern is dormant.

What Next

Beneath our day-to-day stress responses, many of us carry emotional patterns that quietly shape how we show up: how we connect, protect, retreat, over-give, over-perform, or shut down. These patterns aren’t personal flaws — they’re adaptive responses created long before we had the language to describe them.

And because they’re energetic, not characterological, they can shift.

Over the next while, I’ll be sharing short posts diving into five of these core themes — what they look like in real life, why they appear during times of transition or stress, and gentle practices (including flower essences, journaling inquiries, and grounding tools) to help you soften the edges of these patterns.

If you’d like to follow along, feel free to subscribe to my feed here on LinkedIn so you don’t miss the upcoming deep dives. And if you’re already feeling one of these patterns strongly — or want personalised support — you’re welcome to reach out for a 1:1 session or an essence recommendation anytime.

Healing doesn’t have to be dramatic to be powerful. Sometimes the most meaningful shifts begin with simply recognising yourself — and choosing not to walk it alone.