Inner Child work is a way to heal. It's really about - eventually - re-creating your relationship with yourself. You may not realize it, but you currently are in a relationship with yourself. Like any relationship, it requires love and attention in order to be healthy. When you have shame, guilt, fear, and longing running the show, it's hard to have a stable, loving, consistent, reliable relationship with yourself. If you think about romantic, friend, or familial relationships you have, you can feel that some of them are healthier than others.
In some relationships you may feel like you can't be your real self. You may feel judged, scrutinized, ignored, disregarded, idolized, criticized, etc. You may feel like you are a victim of the other person's perception of you and expectations of you, and that your freedom of expression is compromised. Guess what? This may also be happening with your relationship to yourself! In fact, this is a likely and common scenario. As a child you learn how to be in relationship with yourself, and the learning is often motivated by fear and a lack of safety.
Hopefully you have at least one relationship in your life in which you feel you can truly be yourself. You feel loved, accepted and highly valued. You feel cared for and attended to. The other person is attuned to your needs, your expression, your boundaries. This is a healthy relationship.
What is the nature of your current relationship with yourself? Is it more like the unhealthy relationship? Or more like the healthy one? Does it oscillate between the two?
Inner Child work helps you heal pain and trauma from childhood, in order to create a truly thriving relationship with yourself. The relationship you've always dreamed of. With yourself!
Your experience in childhood was formative. Whether or not you had "capital T" trauma, you likely had negative, impactful experiences. These experiences and trauma caused you to form a lot of inner protections, and they are not always safe or comfortable for you. These barriers include lot of emotions, beliefs, fear, shame and grief. All of this stuff is wound around and within you, in a way that impacts you on every level.
Inner child work can unlock, unbind, unwind, untwist...un-anything and everything that needs to be undone. All of this chainmail is keeping the real you from being able to breathe and exist. Inner Child work frees you, and then gives you room to cultivate a new, healthy, loving relationship with yourself.
Here's an Inner Child work exercise you can try:
Grab 2 pens or markers and a piece of paper or journal. With your dominant hand, write to your Inner Child: "How are you feeling?" or "What do you need?" Then, pick up the other pen with your non-dominant hand. Take a slow breath, in and out through your nose. Answer the question - without thinking! Just let your non-dominant hand write. It will be very messy. See what your Inner Child needs. Then, try to - however you can - give them what they need. Use your breath, breathing deeply and slowly, if emotion arises. Just allow it and be present with it. There you go. You did Inner Child work!