Today I chat with master coach and spiritual psychologist, Christine Hassler. We talk about the impact your inner child can have on your everyday life and how the subconscious programming that is formed during childhood influences your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. She shares practical techniques for cultivating a relationship with your inner child, and emphasizes the significance of reparenting ourselves and meeting the unmet needs from our childhood. This conversation will give you valuable insights and tools for healing and personal growth.
Discover:
🔹How the inner child represents the subconscious programming formed during childhood that influences our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
🔹Why childhood experiences, especially between the ages of zero to 12, shape our inner child and can lead to subconscious patterns and behaviors.
🔹That inner child work does not require remembering specific childhood memories; the body and subconscious still hold the emotional and energetic imprints.
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GUEST EXPERT: Christine Hassler | https://christinehassler.com/
Christine Hassler is a Master coach, spiritual psychologist, facilitator and speaker with 20 years of experience. She is the best-selling author of three books: Expectation Hangover: Free Yourself From Your Past, Change your Present and Get What you Really Want and is the host of top-rated podcast “Over it and On With It”. Christine is the co-founder of Elementum Coaching Institute, a premier coaching certification program. She also holds in person retreats and teaches online courses on relationships, calling in love, healing your inner child and personal mastery.
Find Us: @larkinyogatv and @christinehassler
Christine’s podcast: https://christinehassler.com/podcast/
Inner child work: https://christinehassler.com/innerchild/
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#329 – Heal Your Subconscious with Allison Roman
#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma
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Transcript:
Brett:
Hello, my friends. I’m very excited about today’s guest. Many of you may know her or have read her books. Today I’m with Christine Hassler. She is a master coach, a spiritual psychologist, facilitator, speaker. She has 20 years experience. She’s written bestselling books, The Expectation Hangover, and so many others. She has her own amazing podcast, Over It and On With It.
and she has a master’s degree in spiritual psychology and she implements elements of NLP and science into her own life coaching work. But we’re here today to dive into a topic that I feel like is trending and we’re just hearing it in all of these different healing modalities, which is the inner child. So Christine, welcome. I’m so happy to have you.
Christine:
I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brett:
Well, tell us a little bit about how you, with this diverse background, got really interested in working with the inner child specifically. And I’m pretty sure everyone listening will know what that means, but maybe you can also define that term for us as well, just to get us all on the same page.
Christine:
Sure, well, I’ll define it first. And I think it’s challenging to define something like inner child because it means so many things and can mean different things to different people. So a lot of times when we think about inner child, people think, that’s just my childhood. It’s a collection of experience that summarize my childhood. And that’s perhaps a way to look at it. But the way I like to…
define or explain inner child is that first and foremost, it’s a psychological reality. Meaning this is not some made up term that’s like some woo -woo thing that’s caught on. It’s a psychological reality. We have this, you can think of it as like a part of us. It’s a collection, mostly subconscious, of everything that happened to us in our childhood. And I actually define childhood from conception.
because it begins in the womb, all the way up until our mid -20s, because that’s when our brain actually is fully formed. We’re still very malleable, very spongy -like up until 25, 27 -ish. Our prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until that point.
But I would say that the things that impact us most from childhood happen in that sweet spot from about zero to 12. But man, those teen years can also be really, really significant. So the inner child represents all of those parts of us that hang on to those thoughts, experiences, feelings, and beliefs. And that in turn,
becomes our subconscious programming that dictates so much of our life. So as you probably know, we’re only about 5 % to 7 % consciously driven on a day -to -day basis. Meaning about 95 % of what we’re thinking, feeling, believing, how we’re reacting is subconsciously driven. Meaning we’re moving from programming. As we do the inner work that you and I love so much, it
that those numbers start to change. So much of what we do isn’t subconsciously driven. And so the subconscious and the inner child are very, very tightly connected. So much of our subconscious was programmed during childhood. Now if we look at, sure.
Brett:
And can we give a practical example of that just for someone who’s, I mean, I’m happy to from my life too, but I mean, you’re the expert here. So I don’t know, or maybe one of your clients, like just so someone can like connect the dots here. If they’re like, what?
Christine:
Sure. So let’s say that in childhood, you got the message somehow that you were too much. So maybe you were really expressive, either emotionally or vocally, and you were told to be quiet. Or that’s too loud, or you’re too much, or that outfit is too bold, or that idea is too crazy, or whatever it is. You got a program that you’re too much on some level.
and programs get formed when there’s a feeling and a thought that go together. So if we imagine, if we just use the example of, well, she’s a little girl, comes downstairs, she’s got this outfit on that she’s really proud of, she wants to perform this song, and she’s told, you’re so annoying, or you’re too much, or that’s too loud, or that outfit is just ridiculous. In that moment, she probably maybe feels some shame.
She may feel some sadness depending on her personality. She may feel some anger. But most of all, she’s probably gonna feel a sense of shame. And the belief that’s gonna happen or the thought that’s gonna happen at that time is there’s something wrong with me. Like there’s something wrong with the way I express. And again, if we’re thinking of like a six -year -old, they might not have the exact thought there’s something wrong with me, but that feeling of shame and them thinking, something’s off here, that’s gonna create…
a belief system of I’m too much, there’s something wrong with me, I can’t be who I am. And then that’s gonna become programming. So that little girl who used to be very expressive may start to people -please. She may start to blend, to appease, to fit in, because subconsciously she’s always worried about being too much, that her expression isn’t safe, that she isn’t gonna be accepted for who she is, so she becomes who she needs to be. And lose a sense with that.
expression that was so present in childhood, but because along the line she got a message that it wasn’t okay, then she becomes this version of herself that may feel safer in the world, but is disconnected from who she truly is. But deep down, there’s still an inner child that’s very, very connected to that expressive part. And probably as a grown woman, she’s gonna feel stuck in some ways, she’s gonna feel like she’s not creatively expressed, she might even feel depressed.
or she might feel anxiety because she’s had to push down her expression for so long. She might not be really vulnerable and honest with her feelings because she got the message that her feelings were too much and people couldn’t deal with her expression. So just that one incident, if it matters enough to a child, it can program our life until we do in our child work and we go back and we tell that little girl, you.
Your expression is beautiful. I love how you express. All of your feelings are welcome. I love your creativity. It’s amazing. And help her, one, release the shame. So when we work with the inner child, we work on the emotional level and on the belief system level. So working with her to release that shame and also update her beliefs. And this isn’t an overnight thing. We can get into the nuances of how we work with inner child in a moment, but that, is that a good example of how this can show up?
Brett:
Absolutely. And I think it’s an example a lot of people can relate to of being, you know, just feeling like we can’t fully be ourselves. And even if we have the most well -intentioned parents, there’s, there’s areas where this crops up or something similar to this crops up. Or, I mean, just to give like a counter example, you know, maybe you were, you know, really funny and kind of like the comedian in your family and you were praised for that. And that kind of developed into a program of like, okay, if people…
Christine:
Mm -hmm
Brett:
are going to like me and love me, I need to be making them laugh. And that kind of becomes like a persona or a personality. I’m imagining it can like look so many different ways and textures. And then we want to go in and heal this inner child because if we don’t, we’re kind of operating from these subconscious belief patterns that were constructed in childhood that are potentially, you know, really harming us from having the intimacy we want, the relationship we want, the career we want.
Christine:
Yeah.
Brett:
It’s really funny because when I was listening to you talk, it’s so similar to kind of the Kundalini awakening that I know we talked a little bit about on your show, but it’s like I’d describe that child in their full essence as the Kundalini, their energetic Shakti, their pure energetic blueprint and flow being like full and awakened and orbiting, right, through their spinal column and up and down and then.
Christine:
Mm -hmm.
Brett:
When they feel that shame, that’s when these constrictions come in and we learn these patterns and programs about what’s safe, what’s not safe, what earns us love, what doesn’t. And we actually start to clamp down on, I think, a body level, right? Our body set changes and then the energy orbit isn’t as free flowing or it’s off kilter or at certain chakras, it’s stagnated or stuck. And so, you know, just weaving the body into all of this as well, it’s like so fascinating. And then…
Christine:
tonight.
Brett:
we wake up at age 30 or 35 and realize like, wow, okay, I don’t feel good. Or maybe it’s even like autoimmune conditions, like who knows all the different things that play into like when we’re not being ourselves and who we’re meant to be in the world and there’s constrictions happening, like that is disease in the yogic model. So someone now wants to explore this. What do you find works really well? Because I know some people tell me like,
Christine:
Bye.
Brett:
I just don’t remember stuff from my childhood. They just say they remember nothing or a lot of people are like, my childhood was really good. That’s what I claimed. I was like, yeah, my parents were divorced. There was like substance abuse, but like it was fine. Like we were a fun group, you know, like over like nothing that terrible happened. Right. And, and so there’s also some of us have this sort of denial where we just want to look back and have things be rosy. for
Christine:
Mm -hmm.
Hehehehehe
Yeah.
Brett:
For some of those common pitfalls, how do you suggest people start? Like if they’re not willing to look, maybe they’re scared to look, maybe they don’t remember anything. What’s sort of that first step?
Christine:
Yeah.
Yeah, great. There’s great questions. I want to say one more thing just to wrap up like how we define inner child and then we’ll absolutely go into all of that because those are super important questions and things that keep people from doing inner child work. You know, like I don’t remember my childhood wasn’t that bad. So I’m going to get right back to that. The other thing I just wanted to say about the inner child and what it is like a healthy inner child, the natural child, anyone that’s had children have been around children is expressive.
confident, playful, magical, wise, present, deeply connected. And as I list those things…
For those of you listening, you might be thinking, my gosh, those are all things I want to be more of. Like I want to access those parts of me. And so often the things we’re looking for in adulthood, our inner child is that. Like we have access to that part of us. And one thing I say frequently in our inner child workshops is it’s never too late to have a great childhood.
The mind, especially the subconscious mind, doesn’t know the difference between reality and well -imagined thought.
and so much of the healing that we’re about to talk about, you can bring that inner child into your current reality and that inner child part can help you re -tap into those magical aspects, the joy, the wonder, the curiosity, the presence, the freedom of emotional expression, the curiosity, all of that. And you can liberate that inner child from their past and actually bring them into your life now and give them the childhood you never had. So,
So let’s unpack how to do that. First and foremost, you do not have to remember your childhood to do inner child work.
Most of us don’t remember our childhood. And in fact, if there was a lot of trauma, not remembering is probably one of the ways you cope. So as a coach, whether it’s inner child work or anything else that I’m working with people on, I don’t believe in going back and reliving experiences and talking about our trauma over and over and over again, because I feel like that just keeps us in it. So I want to say that anyone that might feel scared to do inner child work or resistant to it, because…
you either do remember and it was really bad and you don’t want to go back there, or you don’t remember because you’re afraid that maybe you will remember and it won’t be great, inner child work does not require going back and reliving and rehashing experiences and recounting them. In fact, I advise against it. So let’s first talk about…
if you don’t have memories of your childhood. Well, one, that’s not completely true because memories, one, are stored in the subconscious and two, and I know you know so much about this bread, are stored in the body. So your body remembers. Your body remembers what it felt like to be a kid. And you’re probably still holding a lot of that in your body. And for most of you, if you don’t have specific memories, you probably know certain things. You might have known that,
you were given up for adoption or that your parents got divorced when you were four or your one parent was an addict and they left when you were two or you had a new sibling be born when you were three or you moved when you were eight. You may not have the exact memory but you may know it happened and that’s truly enough to have information about why you may be experiencing or feeling or thinking some of the things you’re experiencing, thinking and feeling.
Second, and this is the most important, whatever you need to remember, and I say that in air quotes, from childhood, you’re actually experiencing now in present time. So what I mean by that is whatever you’re experiencing in present time, be it a chronic state of feeling that you don’t like, be it anxiety, depression, overwhelm, a pattern of people pleasing,
of starting and stopping, of procrastination, of perfection, drawing in experiences where you draw in emotionally unavailable people or narcissists or have been betrayed or feel like you don’t belong. Whatever you’re experiencing right now that you don’t like and that you want to shift,
99 .99 % of the time, it has roots to a childhood experience. So all you need to do is use the present moment and ride that feeling back in time to access the inner child that you need to work with. Okay, so let’s use the example. How old were you when your parents got divorced? Eight, okay. Do you remember it clearly? Okay.
Brett:
eight.
yes.
Christine:
Okay. And how was that for you? If you’re open to share about it.
Brett:
Yeah, it was, for me it was a very interesting experience because when they sat me down to tell me, I thought they were going to tell me that I was going to have a little brother or sister. So I guess for me, what I’ve worked with is that I thought my parents were so happy. Like I have this idyllic childhood up until that moment. And so it really felt like having the rug pulled out from under me, like a whiplash that…
Christine:
Mm.
Brett:
I mean, imagine being a child and like, I’m so excited because I can tell like mom and dad want to talk to me about something serious. I think I know what it is, right? Cause I had friends with younger siblings and I was so excited. And they tell me this thing that it was just like a bomb going off. I was like, what? And the way that I coped with it in that moment was I just people pleased. I pretended everything was fine. I could sense my father started crying and I’d never seen him cry.
Christine:
Right.
Right.
Hmm.
Brett:
So that was also a huge alarm bells, right? To see my dad, who’s this big strong guy with like silent tears streaming down his face. So I knew something horrific. Cause I didn’t even really totally get what the word divorce meant. They were just talking about two different houses. And so I immediately said, I’m so excited to have another house or something like that. Because I was just thinking like, what could I say that would be positive? Because this is clearly really bad. And my dad is very sad.
Christine:
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
Brett:
So I went into this kind of people pleasing as almost like a trauma response, it’s the way that I view it in hindsight.
Christine:
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm, yeah, yeah. And for you, this is great, because this is a great example of actually someone who has a vivid memory, so we’ll do this first and then we’ll go back to not having a vivid memory. So for you specifically, you mentioned pupil -placing, but how do you see that that inner child who had the rug pulled out from under her?
impacted? Like for example, did you ever feel like you developed a pattern of bracing yourself? Right.
Brett:
Definitely. Like, the other shoe was gonna drop at any moment. I mean, it just made me really scared to trust reality, right? Because it was so unexpected.
Christine:
at all time.
Bye.
Right. Right. So what belief do you think you formed at eight years old?
Brett:
that absolutely terrible horrific things that you don’t see coming can happen at any time and pull the rug out from under you.
Christine:
Yeah. Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Right, that’s a really big one. That’s a huge one. And so, most likely, that’s gonna create a pattern of hypervigilance, of wanting to control things, because if you control things, then no one can pull the rug out from under you because you’re in control. And again, that doesn’t make someone control lean. It just means like…
Brett:
I’m sorry.
Christine:
When something happens like that, the value we place on certainty and knowing is huge because it becomes a survival strategy. Not trusting, not being able to like really, I’m sure you’ve worked through a lot of this, but not being able to really trust the good, like trust the joy and everything that’s coming in in life. So it’s huge. And for me, like this is a very…
common inner child wound is thinking everything’s going great and then something changes and There’s many ways to define trauma many people including myself at times has have defined it as too much too fast too soon or Or too little for too long. That’s also traumatic, you know not having an emotionally present parent
ever or for a long period of time, that can be traumatic. And another way that we can think about trauma and define it is when literally the rug gets pulled out from under us. We think things are fine. We think we’re safe. We think we’re loved. We think our family is complete and whole and could actually be growing. And then, boom, something happens and it makes us doubt everything.
And so that immediately creates a…
hypervigilant response and that’s a very scary place for a child to be. Because I know you’re a mom, Brett. Children really love structure. They really love knowing what comes next. I have a two -year -old, so I’m knee deep in early childhood development. And I’m getting a whole nother lesson as a parent. I studied developmental psychology to be able to teach in her child, but now as a parent and actually having a child, it’s like, whoa.
This is a whole other level. But one of the things that I really value is something called the Rye Technique. It’s like respectful parenting and really treating even a baby as a sentient conscious being and not just picking up a baby, but actually saying, I’m going to pick you up now, or I’m going to change your diaper now, or you’re crying. I really see that you’re expressing something. And it makes so much sense to me. And when we think about how often children are treated,
just picked up and moved from one place to the next or just told this or their whole world can change in a moment, in an instant like yours did at eight years old.
And we can minimize it, and this brings me to the other point that you brought up, by comparing it to others. Now you might think, okay, my parents told me they were getting divorced. I know somebody who was sexually molested by their stepfather their whole life. I know somebody who was beaten by their mother the whole life. I know somebody whose aunt put cigarette burns on his arm. We can think of worse things that in our mind are more traumatic.
And what we really need to focus on is what happened in our life.
We can be grateful for certain privileges we had, for certain blessings we had, but if we minimize our own experiences by going, someone else had it worse, then we’re in avoidance and we’re not actually honoring the child. And this is one of the things that many parents do to children. Children will have an experience and they’ll go, you’re fine. Or, those girls were just jealous. Or, like, you’re gonna move on. Or, in five years, this isn’t gonna matter to you. And very,
early on the dismissing and distracting techniques of parenting kick in and so we start to feel like our feelings aren’t valid on some level. Now I’m not saying that we have to be completely indulgent in every child’s feeling and not have any boundaries and let their emotions rule the roost. I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that having feelings dismissed or distracted from and kind of being told to toughen up as kids…
really in so many ways did us a disservice. So when we look at inner child wounding, there’s a range of things. You know, on one end of the spectrum, there’s having your feelings dismissed and distracted, or having a parent that was so uncomfortable with your emotions that they always made you feel better, which can look like good parenting, but actually…
didn’t really teach you emotional resilience or emotional intelligence. And then we can look all the way on the other end of the spectrum of kids who are beaten and abused sexually, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. There’s so much that can happen and does happen in childhood, which is why it’s so important to just look at our experience and how it impacted us and not minimize it because…
What that does, like if you, Brett, at any point had said to that eight -year -old girl inside of you, it’s just your parents getting divorced. Other kids have it so much worse. It’s not that big of a deal. Like there were a lot of other fun things going on. In that moment, she’s going to feel dismissed. And that’s how we…
disconnect from the inner child is we don’t really honor what they’re feeling and experiencing. And so many people that coach with me or do any of our inner child workshops, and I say our because I teach a lot of inner child work with my husband so that there’s a healthy masculine and feminine, we sort of become the projected mom and dad in these workshops so that people can have both that male and female really holding space for them. But something that comes up,
so often is I don’t know how, like I don’t have any access to my inner child. And I would say you absolutely do. It just may take some time because your inner child may feel really far from you, may feel really disconnected from you because you’ve dismissed things that were really hard for them that you’ve brushed off as no big deal. Or you keep engaging in the kind of patterns that hurt them.
You know, for example, people -pleasing. Like if you’re still doing it and you keep doing it, there’s an inner child that’s going, that’s begging you on some level, please get me out of this pattern. This is awful. But the more we do it, the farther away they feel because they feel like we’re not fighting for them, right? They feel like we’re not like changing the pattern. So we all absolutely have access to that part of us. It’s really about continuing to show up.
It’s like with any child. I’ll give an example. My daughter, like I said, is two. A friend of mine came and she stayed for a week.
And at first, Athena was like, wanted nothing to do with her, clung to me, like, was like, who’s checking this person out? And what Jill did is she just played with her a little every day and, you know, helped me to bring her some food. And by day four, because Jill kept showing up consistently, she didn’t get triggered if Athena rejected her, she didn’t take it personally, she didn’t say, Athena’s never gonna like me, I’m not gonna even try. She just kept trying, she kept being consistent, she kept showing up. And by day four,
Guess who wanted to play with Jill a lot? Athena, because she’s like, okay, you actually care. You’re actually consistent. You actually are showing up. So that lends itself to the question, all right, well, how do I start showing up for my inner child? There are many ways. I’m gonna give you very simple ways, but effective. So one of the most effective ways to start to cultivate that relationship with the little you is to get some pictures.
And if you don’t have pictures, I’ll get to that in a moment. But get some pictures of yourself from childhood. Pick out a few, especially ones where you’re looking at the camera. And just stare into your own eyes. Stare into your own eyes as a child. Look at that picture. If you feel like you can, and it won’t feel too awkward, you could even talk to that little one and just say, hi, I see you. I know you’re in there.
I know it’s been a while. I want you to know I’m here. And every morning, just start that practice of looking at the picture and just talking to that little one. And once you start to feel a little bit more of a connection, you can ask questions like, is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything you need? Is there anything you’re feeling?
And that, looking at the picture, is a beautiful way to just start that connection. I also really love, I have a picture of myself on my phone when I was about maybe three. And whenever I’m in, because self -criticism, having a fierce inner critic, is an adaptive strategy for me. I was bullied and teased as a kid and so…
I decided if I was harder on myself than anyone else and I disliked myself more than anyone could, then it wouldn’t hurt so much if other people didn’t like me or rejected me. So sometimes that part can still come up. And often what I do is I look at this little picture of me at three years old and I remember that’s who I’m being mean to. And looking at ourself as a child, it can elicit so much compassion. So much compassion. The other thing it can elicit is,
memories and sadness and feeling sorry for this child. And that’s where we don’t want to go. We don’t want to go into pitying our childhood or feeling sorry for ourselves because that puts us in a victim consciousness. And I don’t know about you, Brett, but when I’ve been going through hard times, if someone feels sorry for me, it does not make me feel better. Like that is not what I want at all. And that is not what your inner child wants. Your inner child really wants you to see them and go, I see you.
Like I know that was really hard and I’m here. Like I’m here and we’re gonna get through this together. So we can have compassion, we can maybe feel our sadness and our grief over things, but we don’t really wanna feel sorry for ourself. So I have other techniques but I just wanna pause for a second to see if there’s anything you wanna unpack in anything that I said so far.
Brett:
No, this is so great. And I’m sure everyone listening is just like taking notes like crazy, like I am. And it’s interesting because I’m on to the picture strategy. So I actually am like looking at a couple that I have sprinkled throughout my office. But, you know, I haven’t really been picking them up and looking at my own eyes. And I absolutely love that idea. And of course, adding it to the phone as well. And you went right into it because I was like, well, how do we show up? Like, are we doing a special meditation? Are we doing? So I think the photo is.
Christine:
great.
Mm -hmm.
Brett:
is just such a great, easy idea. I mean, for me, another place that I put photos is like where I put my makeup on because I’m often there just kind of, you know, moving things around. And so I like have that eye contact with little me, obviously also by my computer and my desk. So no, tell us some other ways we can show up. And then I’m sure there’s a few things we can circle back on, but this is just fabulous.
Christine:
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, yeah, and it really is about cultivating a relationship, right? So not just looking at the picture, but actually cultivating a relationship and eventually starting a dialogue because that really is what inner child work is about. It’s about a relationship, a dialogue, tending to the needs that weren’t met. You know, one of our biggest, someone asked me a while ago on a podcast if I were to define personal growth, like what exactly it is.
I said, very simply put, reparenting. That’s what we’re doing in any personal development. We are reparenting ourselves. This isn’t about blaming parents. I definitely think there’s a place for our anger at our parents, not physically directed at them, but there’s anger release and anger work. We can talk about that because I think a lot of people do spiritual bypassing when it comes to forgiving their parents.
But it’s not about blame. It’s about really taking responsibility for, all right, there were certain needs that were not met as a child. I can either try to get them met through the people I date or the people I marry or project that on my kids. And let’s please bookmark why inner child work is so important to do before and during parenting, because it’s huge. But if we don’t know those needs that weren’t met and we don’t take responsibility for reparenting ourselves, we will try to get them met subconsciously.
through external things. And I’m sure people listening can think about, let’s just use the example of having an emotionally unavailable father or maybe even a tad narcissistic or unavailable in some way, and then if you’re a heterosexual woman dating men, you’re most likely…
going to pick men that somehow remind you of that. They’re emotionally unavailable. Maybe they’re super charismatic and charming, but you don’t know where you stand. You feel really attracted to them, but there’s something in your nervous system that never feels really quite settled. They don’t feel totally emotionally available to you on some level. And that’s because there’s an inner child who had the need of feeling an emotionally present parent, in this case the father, like a healthy masculine.
And she’s looking for that. It’s an unmet need. And that’s the thing about unmet needs from childhood. Until we meet those needs, that subconscious, that inner child will continue to seek them out. And subconsciously, you will manifest, you will co -create experiences that keep triggering the same thing until you meet them. Because what the inner child will do if left un…
treated, for lack of a better word, is bring similar circumstances in thinking this time it’s going to be different. Like this, using the dating example, this person seems like my dad. Maybe I can finally get from this person what I didn’t get from dad, and that’s going to heal my dad wound. And it just never works. So, yeah, go ahead.
Brett:
Yeah, it’s like this optimism of like, I’m going to rewrite the story and it’s going to be different this time, right? Yeah.
Christine:
Right. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So it’s just, it’s, this work is just so important. So let me give you some other tools and then we can go in whatever direction you want. So another tool that we teach in our course and that I really like is dominant, non -dominant handwriting. So again, you’re wanting to get to know this child. Let’s go back to the example of my friend Jill and my daughter, Athena.
She showed up consistently. She asked her questions. She engaged with her. She played with her. She took interest in her. She let her lead. And then there was a relationship and there was connection. It just took some time. So another way that you can create this is dominant -non -dominant handwriting. And so I’m right -handed, so that’s my dominant hand. My left hand is my non -dominant hand.
So if I ever want to connect with little Christine, sometimes I’ll have the picture of her and then with my dominant hand, I’ll just write something like, hi, I’d like to talk to you today, are you there? And then my non -dominant hand and our non -dominant hand is more connected to our subconscious, more connected to our memories, more connected to our emotions and feelings. And so with my non -dominant hand, I’d answer whatever comes through and there’s something kind of magic that happens with…
dominant, non -dominant handwriting where it’s like you’re accessing a part of you that you didn’t even know you had access to. And obviously the handwriting isn’t super legible, but the information comes through. And in our workshop, we guide people through a series of questions that kind of build on each other, but just for these purposes, you could ask something like, is there anything you want to tell me and see what happens? Is there anything you need and see what happens? Is there something you want to…
Share with me about how you’re feeling and see what that part writes. And again, the first time you make it nothing, you might get like, man, this is your judger may come in and go, this is a silly exercise. This is not, I’m not getting anywhere with this. You know, this isn’t making any sense. This is dumb. I can’t access my inner child. And just when that part comes up, just say, thank you. I recognize you. I know you like are trying to protect me and like, I’m gonna keep doing this. And if you keep doing it.
you know, give yourself a few days. You’ll be surprised at what comes forward. Another technique that we teach in our workshop, and it’s something that I can’t really teach on a podcast because there’s a lot of context to it, but is actually talking to your inner child by setting up two chairs and moving back and forth between the two chairs, talking to your little one and just cultivating that relationship. And once you have a relationship, then you can go into the deeper work of…
creating a safe space for them to express feelings that weren’t expressed. You know, I had memories come forward when I was 35 of things that happened to me between five and eight that I had completely repressed. I had a sense that something might have happened based on, you know, just knowing what I know about psychology and seeing some of my patterns. But I never had, like, a memory. And then when I was 35, I had a really bad migraine.
and I knew I was blocking something and I gave myself permission to remember and the memories came forward. And I asked myself, do I need to actually remember things in detail? And the answer was no, because it wasn’t a fun thing to have to remember or think about. And so what I did is I just went back to that little girl and said, all right, we don’t need to relive what happened. We don’t need to relive this story.
But I want to give you full permission to express what you’re feeling. Because what happens in most difficult to traumatizing situations for children is they freeze. They have to hold all their emotion in, especially in any case of abuse, and completely just dissociate and separate from their body. From their physical body, their somatic body, their feeling body.
just completely leave. That’s the only way that the psyche can survive sometimes. And so, but what happens is a bunch of feelings that never got expressed get lodged in the body, which is why we see so much like IBS and reproductive issues and endometriosis and all kinds of things with any kind of sexual abuse or abuse or anything like that. And we could, I’m sure you see this in your work so much, Brett, like we can…
connect so many physical ailments and disorders to things that have happened to us in our life and the way the body had to process it. And so a huge part of inner child work is going back and letting ourselves have the feelings, letting ourselves have the sadness, have the fear, have the anger, but also know there’s this part of us, our healthy, wise adult self, there for us going, it’s okay, you’re safe now.
Let it out. It was so crucial in our child work not to do a lot of explaining or reassurance in the way of, you know, like if you were talking to your eight -year -old girl, then maybe a party with it goes, you know what, Brett, like, this is really hard, but you’re gonna marry the most amazing guy, you’re gonna have two amazing kids, and like, you’re gonna have a great marriage, and it’s gonna be different. Okay, all that may be true, but it’s again dismissive to the feelings that the inner child is having at that moment because…
That eight -year -old isn’t in the future. That eight -year -old is in the experience right now. And again, so many of these things get locked in time in our psyche. So we want to go back to that child and just give them full permission to express what they didn’t get to express. So in my case, I got to express the fear, the shame, the anger, and it took, you know, it was months of moving this through me and moving this through my body without…
ever having to remember the super nitty -gritty details of what happened. So I was able to revisit the emotional expression but not relive the experience. Does that distinction make sense?
Brett:
It does, and I think it’s such a great distinction. And when you say you were moving it through you for a couple of months, I mean, just so people can visualize, was that like you were doing journaling, you were doing the dominant, non -dominant handwriting, you were moving on a mat or, I mean, did you want to just give a little more color for?
Christine:
Mm -hmm. Sure. Well, I think that there’s no one way for any, there’s no one size fits all for any kind of healing work. So for me, it was both the dominant, non -dominant handwriting, talking to the inner child. I had to do quite a bit of anger work, and the way I teach and define anger work is setting up a space, safe space, and having, I like to use pool noodles and cut them in half, having something you can hit with.
having a pillow you can scream with, having Kleenex in case you cry, and having a stuffed animal that you can snuggle with after you ride the wave of the emotion. So for me, anger work, especially giving a child a voice, is not going to a rage room. It’s not going to a boxing class. It’s not even going to a workshop and one, two, three, everybody yell. True anger work is actually using your words with it.
and allowing yourself not to relive the experience but to go back in time to that child who didn’t have a voice and give them a voice. So a lot of mine sounded like, no, this is not okay, get off of me, you’re this, you’re that, I hate you, you know, like really screaming and yelling and saying all the things I didn’t get to say as a kid. And then having, and just really riding that wave.
And usually after a good anger release, there’s sadness that comes up. And I will say, for women, and this is why at my women’s retreat, I facilitate a huge grief release and a huge anger burn. And I notice so often that women collapse into sadness. And so it’s so important for women to find their rage. Like women can often be pretty good at feeling sad.
but we can often not really tap into our anger. We can be irritable or snippy. It can leak out in other ways, but really finding our rage is important. And a lot of times that rage comes from childhood, from having to be a good little girl, from not having, you know, girls don’t have as much of an opportunity for physical release as boys do. Now I’m making a lot of gender generalizations, and in my 20 years of doing this work, this is what I’ve seen between, you know,
growing up in a different gendered body. And so for women especially, it’s really, really important to get that rage out. And maybe you don’t identify with a gender. Maybe you identify more with like you’re someone that tips more into sadness, you know, and tips more into people -pleasing. So important to find that anger and find that fire because that’s what makes the inner child feel really, really empowered. So.
It was that, it… Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Brett:
I love how you talked about like using the words with the movement, because it’s like, yeah, if we just go to a rage room and destroy things, that’s an outburst and that’s cathartic and it can feel great. But it, one of the somatic trainings I did, and I did a lot of privates as well as part of it. And the therapist worked so closely with me on really crafting some of those statements, which were all pretty basic, you know, a lot of it was like, no, or, you know, no more or things like that. And then.
Christine:
Cathartic.
Hehehe
Right.
Brett:
We, you know, using like a wiffle bat was what I use, but the pool noodle is a good idea. I’m circling that. And just really, you know, hitting it out, just so, so important. Cause I think, yeah, we’re, we’re carrying this rage around and it’s, it’s seeping out in other ways, irritability or binge eating or, you know, whatever it is. So.
Christine:
Yeah.
Yep, yep, shaking our body, that was another big thing for me, learning how to do.
Tremor release, it’s like a release technique, but you don’t even need to know the technique. Just actually getting on your bed and shaking your body or standing up and shaking your body and shaking it out is a really good way to release things. So all of these things, journaling, I like to teach a type of journaling called release writing where you get paper that you can throw away and you just start writing. Like I’m angry because I’m scared because you just write, write, write so fast that you can’t even read it. You’re just writing kind of stream of consciousness and you do it for a minimum of 10 minutes. And then when you’re done, you burn it.
You just destroy it, you get rid of it. Or you rip it up in tiny pieces if you can’t burn it in a safe way. But that’s like a purging. That’s another way to emotionally release. Because sometimes journaling can be recycling. It can be too reflective. We can get into analyzing things a little bit too much. Whereas release writing is like, let me just purge it. Let me just get it out.
Brett:
I love that. Our time with you has flown by. Before we let you go, I want to circle back to parenting, because we wanted to bookmark that. And I’m sure there’s a lot of parents listening or ones who might be parents one day. People might be parents one day. And we’re talking about reparenting ourselves and all the ways this can show up than when we’re parenting someone else. So were there a couple key things you wanted to say about that?
Christine:
Mm -hmm.
Yes, so something that I saw actually before I became a parent is I’d be coaching people and they’d be parents and their stuff would be coming up and what would be happening is they would be giving their children the childhood they wish they had had but they were completely neglecting their own inner child.
and their own inner child was subconsciously trying to get their attention in certain ways. So I’ll give an example. One client, she had a boy and a girl, and they were both like tween age. I think one was like nine and 11, something like that. And she had given them this amazing life.
just amazing life. She really worked hard on her marriage. She sent them to Montessori schools. She just did all these things to give them an amazing childhood. And as I got older and older, her anxiety levels just kept increasing and increasing and increasing and increasing. And what was happening is the inner child in her that grew up in trauma,
that didn’t grow up in safety, that didn’t grow up feeling like she mattered at all, felt completely abandoned and neglected, and that all her energy was going into her children, and was trying to get her attention. And she tried so many things to deal with the anxiety, mindfulness practices, and this and that, you name it, she tried it. And it wasn’t until…
We had a couple sessions, it took a couple sessions to actually connect with her little girl, who actually was kind of mad at her for neglecting her for so long, to reconnect and be like, I am here. I am ready to look at you.
and I love my children and they mean the world to me and you matter too and I’m gonna parent you too. I will stop leaving you out of the equation. And we started really like tending to this third child she had that she had been neglecting. And within a year, because I don’t believe in quick fixes, I mean it changed dramatically once she made that connection, but within a year the anxiety was gone. She didn’t have that, that.
feeling that just feeling inside our nervous system that she just couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. So this is a super important thing for those of us as parents is not to neglect our own inner child and think that we can heal our childhood just by giving our children a better childhood. We’re actually going to give our children a better childhood if we heal our own. And the other thing I’ll say is, you know, children do a great job of…
bringing up unresolved stuff for us. And I notice that whatever age our children are, approximately, tends to bring up…
what happened to us at that age, what happened or didn’t happen to us at a certain age. And so our children are great mirrors and often times we’ll think we need to change our parenting strategy and if only our child would listen or if only our child would do their homework or if only our child, you know, we had a different relationship but really what we need to do is do the inner work inside ourselves, give ourselves what we need, become resourced inside ourselves because when we have…
an abandoned, neglected, upset, even traumatized inner child living inside of us, it’s very hard to regulate our own nervous system. And children can’t regulate their own nervous system. Most people say until the age of seven. I tend to think it’s actually a tiny bit later. But anyway, our children are constantly looking at us and wanting to regulate through us. So oftentimes, a child being dysregulated in any way,
quote unquote not behaving or even having anxiety or issues or whatever is a reflection of us not being resourced and not being able to regulate. And I will tell you, like doing my own inner child work and having a relationship with my own emotions that I had to.
really hide when I was a kid. Like I couldn’t really express them. I mean, I was put on Prozac when I was 11. So I just got, like there was such a numbing that happened. And I’m so glad that I’ve had my, I call the anger release that I teach a temper tantrum technique.
because I would watch kids and they’d have these meltdowns and temper tantrums and if they were just held in a safe space and not interrupted, they’d eventually get to the other side. It was like a wave and they’d eventually calm and self -soothe and they’d be okay. And…
What I found is by doing that for myself, you know, my daughter’s at the age where meltdowns happen and temper tantrums happen, and I’m able to stay really resourced and regulated and calm. And what I mean by that is my heart rate isn’t going up. I don’t have knots in my stomach. I’m not getting frustrated. I’m not uncomfortable with her emotions. I’m not trying to overly soothe her and tell her, it’s okay, it’s okay. And I’m not trying to distract her. I’m just riding that wave with her.
And we can’t really do that with our children unless we’ve done it inside ourselves first. And to me, it’s one of the most important aspects of parenting.
Brett:
I love it. So, so good. I love the visual of riding the wave and, you know, everyone listening, if you have kids, you actually have one more than you thought you did. Good news. You have yourself as well. And you also have a pet that you don’t know you have, which is your own human body. I often talk about that, how like we actually have, just like, you know, you have to take care of a dog or a cat. We actually have this like very animal body that needs our attention and somehow
Christine:
Yeah.
Yeah.
yeah.
Yes, yes, so true.
Brett:
thinking of it in that way often helps me, you know, do self care and feed myself at good intervals and, and, you know, respect different things that are happening at different times of the month and all of those things. So, I mean, this has just been an amazing episode. I feel like we’ve learned so much from you for people who are listening, just as a recap, you know, what Christine said and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s like, if you don’t remember, cause I know we worked with one of my vivid memories, which I’m so glad we did, but if you don’t remember, just look at what’s not working in your life right now.
Christine:
Right, right, exactly, exactly.
Brett:
right? And I love the takeaway that we can just feel without having to relive something and that it’s not too late to have a great childhood. I mean, just to end on kind of an uplifting note, was there just anything else you want to say about that? Because I just, I wrote that down and I love that idea.
Christine:
Nope.
Yeah, really, inner child work can be really fun too. You know, when I was really knee deep in a lot of my inner child healing, one of the things that my little girl loved to do, and it’s interesting, because my daughter loves this now, is swing. She used to love swinging. And so I would make swing dates with myself, and this is when I’m in my early 30s. And I was living in LA at the time, and I would go down to the beach, or I’d find like a tree swing, and I’d have swing dates with her. And I would like…
talk to her and be like, this is for us. So you can do fun things. Like, you know, if you never got to go camping as a kid and you always wanted to, go camping and bring your inner child with you. And I know people might roll their eyes and be like, it’s not the same, but actually it is. It actually is that part of you still lives within you and you can give that part of you those experiences.
Brett:
I love that. I’m so excited. I mean, I totally have ideas of things that I can do, some that I’m kind of already doing, but some that I definitely want to amp up. Tell everyone where they can find you, where they can potentially do this workshop if they want to go deeper. Obviously, I’ll put all this information in the show notes as well. But I’m just so glad we got to have you with us today. Tell us.
Christine:
I love that.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, thank you so much. So a great place to get to know me better is my podcast. It’s called Overwritten On With It, and there’s two episodes a week. One where I interview someone like you, and the other one airs on Wednesday, is an unscripted, unproduced life coaching episode.
So I’m coaching someone and a lot of time I’m doing inner child work with them. So that’s a great way to dive deeper into coaching and spiritual psychology. And then I’m on Instagram. I don’t post it time, but I’m there. And then my website is ChristineHassler. And if you’re specifically interested in the inner child, you can go to ChristineHassler.com/innerchild and find information there.
Brett:
We’ll put all those links in the show notes. Thank you everyone for listening. Go do something for your inner child today. I mean, whether it’s like finding that first photo or just thinking of something really fun that you could do and have it be an activity for the two of you. I think there’s so many actionable tips from this episode. So make sure to do some fun self care today and I’ll talk to you next week. Namaste.
