The hashtag #innerchild has close to 1.5 million entries on Instagram, and TikTok is equally chock-full of content related to the concept. We hear prominent figures like Kendall Jenner, The Bachelor contestants, and others talk openly about doing inner child work on the regular. You’ve also probably heard about it from your friend, your therapist, or your babysitter because it’s just that ubiquitous. But why now?
Generally speaking, the subjects of therapy, self-care, and overall wellness have crossed firmly into the mainstream over the past few years—especially among millennials and zoomers, who no longer think of these concepts as taboo and actively preach about the importance of this kind of self-work. While this is undoubtedly a wonderful development that has huge potential to bring us as a society into greater healing, Rai points out the “wellness” movement can also have a dark side—namely, the pressure to keep up with visible (and often expensive) “self-care” practices being extolled by others.
“Even the wellness industry can have an aggressive edge to it—so much of our pursuit of well-being can be driven by low self-esteem and the feeling that we need to better ourselves,” she explains. “It is not uncommon in my experience for our healing to become quickly co-opted by the underlying trauma, turning it into a frantic and shame-fueled process of trying to fix what we perceive as being ‘wrong with us.'”
As such, Rai believes that many of us are craving a deeper—and, more importantly, gentler—form of self-work. That’s where inner-child work comes in—a practice that’s firmly rooted in gentleness and self-compassion.
“I think that as a culture we are beginning to adopt a more trauma-informed mindset when it comes to well-being, and in turn we are becoming more gentle in our approach,” she says. “I think that perhaps this is why there is a growing interest in inner-child work. It invites us to tend to the underlying cause rather than the symptom, and it invites us to do so in a very tender, curious, and compassionate manner.”
