By Jasmin Acosta
At times as a child we grow up feeling unloved, have trouble expressing love, and feeling love for ourselves due to traumatic experiences. Where this carries on over into our adulthood and this affects our self esteem, confidence, and ability to love.
Traumatic events strip away the ability for us to have love for ourselves, as we consistently live day by day reliving our trauma. On the other hand, we have the ability to take our power back through healing our inner child and building love for ourselves. Our inner child is our psyche that encaptures our curiosity for life, and the child that lives inside all of us. When we experience traumatic events as a child this part of our psyche is trapped in our subconscious mind that hides away in an attempt to find comfort through suppressing trauma. To build love for our wounded inner child we need to nurture the child inside us through providing safety, love, and trust that was taken away from us.
Through writing a letter to our younger selves it allows us to be there for our inner child to create safety and comfort to heal from our trauma. Also, through visualizing ourselves in the present, hugging ourselves as a child this helps us to find support that our younger selves lacked, and this guides us to heal our emotions. Empathizing with our inner child creates room for us to build a foundation for us to love ourselves through being able to heal a part of us that had been desperately searching for peace. When we heal the child within us all it creates for us to discover self-love and this carries on over to strengthen relationships not only with the people we love, but with ourselves. In being able to build self-love it causes us to find peace within ourselves, and this allows us to become optimistic for what the future holds for us.