To be honest, my mental health hasn’t been the best in the past few years. But now, as I’m growing into a young adult, I feel it’s finally time to heal and embrace a new era of my life. Working on healing from mental health issues isn’t easy. It’s a daily struggle and can often be debilitating and exhausting, but one thing I’ve found helpful is healing my inner child. Like most people my age, I’m chronically online, and of course, I heard about this concept through TikTok. Here are a few ways I’m healing my inner child, and hopefully, they resonate with you too.
Embrace your feelings
For the majority of us, showing our true feelings around family or friends while growing up must have been hard. Whether we were demonized for being too emotional and pressured to suppress them or make sense of emotions we didn’t understand at an early age, working on emotional openness can be the first step to healing your inner child. In my case, I often spend a lot of time analyzing my feelings rather than actually feeling them. If you can relate, try letting yourself feel. Clear your mind and erase any thoughts you may have about your feelings. Instead, just embrace how you feel and the consequences, whether that’s crying your heart out to music or getting up and dancing because of overwhelming joy. Sometimes you don’t need to make sense of what you’re feeling right away for it to be valid; sometimes, you simply need to feel it first.
Express yourself
I think many young people growing up, especially in the age of social media, deal with societal expectations of how we should look and act. It affects everything we do, from the clothes we wear to the phrases we use when interacting with others. Learning not to care about these societal pressures of what is expected of me has helped me heal. I find expressing myself authentically through my clothing, hair, music, or even my mannerisms has proved to heal my inner child. If you aren’t exactly ready to change how others perceive you, you can work internally by expressing yourself through art or writing.
Don’t be afraid of independence…or dependence
Our childhoods may vary depending on how attached we were to those around us. Some of us may have been forced to grow up too quickly and into independent situations, whereas others felt too dependent on family or friends. Once you become a young adult and find yourself in the opposite scenario, it may become daunting. Independence for those who depended on others for our whole lives can be healing once we find ways to be happy with just being alone with ourselves. For me, this comes in the form of quality time with myself. It can just be walking through Aldrich Park alone while listening to music or getting coffee and reading at a cafe. For those forced to be independent at an early age, know that it’s perfectly fine to ask for help from those around you and depend on them when you need to. Learn to express your boundaries and emotions with others. It’s also good to have people in your life that deeply care for you and your thoughts and feelings.
Many of these methods I mentioned aren’t easy to do or may not even work for you. In fact, I’m still working on a lot of these methods to see if they impact me or not. No matter what you decide to heal your inner child, remember that healing takes time. Healing isn’t linear, nor is it quick, but it will be worth it in the long run. It may take a complete rerouting of your mindset, but you’ll be more at peace with yourself because of it.