Breaking the Cycle: Overcoming Depression Rooted in Childhood Trauma - Rachel Devine

You might be wondering why your life doesn’t seem to be as happy as you want it to be. You might be fighting depression and feelings of hopelessness and may not even know where these feelings are coming from. Unfortunately, our subconscious mind holds almost all emotions from everything that happened in the past and does unleash it’s negativity onto our lives in the present without any notice. It's increasingly recognized that childhood trauma and adverse experiences can have a profound effect on mental health later in life, often manifesting as depression in adulthood. The impact of emotional neglect, abuse, the loss of a parent, domestic violence, or other traumatic events can create long-lasting psychological wounds and negative core beliefs about oneself.

Let’s take a look at these inner child wounds and ways to recover from the negativity from the past to alleviate the depression that may be plaguing you in the present time.

Overcoming depression!

How Childhood Trauma Leads to Adult Depression

Traumatic childhood events can lead to complex feelings from the past of shame and insecurity, and a lack of self-worth that persist long after the trauma occurred. Past inner child wounds can also cause depression, hopelessness and a feeling of self-loathing, just to name a few. This inner critic and negative self-talk increases vulnerability to anxiety and clinical depression over time. It’s important to recognize the inner negativity that may creep up on your day in the form of negative self-talk. The deep seated wounds are in the subconscious mind and drive your life. The key is to try to reverse the negative past to a positive present moment.

Healing childhood trauma!

Healing Childhood Trauma to Overcome Depression

While the impact of childhood trauma runs deep, there is hope for healing and undoing the mental anguish and depressive symptoms rooted in the past. Again, the key is to work on the subconscious mind where the trauma is stored. Some powerful techniques include the following:

Inner Child Work—visualizations, inner child letter writing, and reparenting your inner child through work and internal family systems therapy—can rematrix core childhood wounds. Inner-child healing is possible with some effort. Nurturing your inner child is key to healing the wounds from childhood.

EMDR Therapy: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based therapy using bilateral brain stimulation to reprocess and resolve traumatic memories.

Cognitive Behavioral Techniques: CBT helps identify and change negative thought patterns, core beliefs, and cognitive distortions stemming from adverse childhood events.

Trauma-Focused Therapies: Other top modalities include prolonged exposure therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), which foster emotional release and new experiences of feeling safe and secure.

Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness meditation, self-compassion work, and practices cultivating self-love help quiet the inner critic and build emotional resilience.

Positive affirmations: Feeding yourself positive affirmations is a way to manifest change for the subconscious to a positive, which holds the trauma and negative experiences. Keep telling yourself you are worthy, you are loved, you are valued, and you are loveable. Saying I love you daily to yourself is a positive affirmation that is valuable to healing old childhood wounds of perhaps not feeling so loved.

Brainspotting: Brainspotting is a way to clear the subcortical brain, better known as the subconscious, of negative experiences from the past. Brainspotting can penetrate the subconscious and clear the mind of trauma from the past.

Somatic Therapy: Body-oriented approaches like somatic therapy can help resolve trapped trauma in the body. Breathwork, sensorimotor psychotherapy, massages and other mind-body practices promote healing.

Your mental health does matter!

It’s important to recognize that most depression has roots in childhood trauma and negative experiences. This awareness is crucial to inner healing. With patience, commitment to the inner work, and the right therapeutic approach, it is possible to break the cycle—replacing depressive core beliefs with self-compassion and self-love, which will assist in undoing the impacts of childhood adversity—to alleviate the depression and get back to being happy again.

Rachel Devine is the author of, Discover the Power of the Secret Within - Healing your Inner Child to Manifest your Dreams.

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• Take the Inner Child Quiz

Take the Inner Child Quiz - Rachel Devine

Taking an inner child quiz can be the first step towards identifying and healing emotional wounds from your past. Studies show that a surprising number of adults experience the lingering effects of childhood trauma and stress. Unresolved issues from our early years often manifest in adulthood through struggles like addiction, anxiety, depression, and relationship conflicts. However, most people do not correlate inner child wounds with present day issues like depression and addictions. Furthermore, most people don’t even believe in the inner child factor. This is unfortunate because so much clarity and healing can be revealed with some foreknowledge. Let’s look at this in a comprehensive manner before embarking on an inner child quiz.

Finding the source of dysfunction

Addictions, anger issues, chronic fears, anger issues, and other adult dysfunctions frequently arise from childhood emotional wounds around topics like self-worth, security, and emotional needs not being met. Tracing back to the origins provides clarity and focus for unraveling these patterns. It sheds light on the actual patterns from childhood, helping one understand the root cause of their adult issues.

Statistics on Inner Child Wounds

Studies show 60% of adults of adults report experiencing abuse or other difficult family circumstances during
childhood. 26% of children will witness or experience a traumatic event before they turn four. About one-quarter of adults experience three or more adverse childhood experiences that can lead to emotional trauma.

A 2019 Harris poll found that 64% of American adults have inner child wounds that affect their happiness. The most common wound stemmed from emotional neglect, reported by 19% of adults.

These are just a few fascinating statistics on inner child wounds and their impact on adulthood can be more devastating than the original infraction!

Why Our Inner Child Impacts Our Adult Selves

Unmet childhood needs like connection, safety, validation, trust, and love often are the culprit behind our inner child wounds and resurface through some of the following issues:

● Addictive behaviors like alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, and unhealthy attachments that fill a void or numb painful feelings from childhood on a subconscious level.

● Anxiety and depression result from core feelings of not being good enough, blaming oneself, and struggling with vulnerability.

● Anger issues are tied to growing up feeling unimportant, criticized, threatened, bullied, or powerless.

● Relationship problems due to difficulties with trust, communication, empathy, and respect—all learned in childhood.

These are just some dysfunctions that branch out of our early childhood. Identifying and nurturing your inner child’s unresolved wounds through self-discovery, counseling, therapy or support groups can help you form healthier, happier relationships and break detrimental, repeated cycles traced back to the past. The key to healing the inner child wounds is to recognize the patterns from childhood. The only way to recognize these patterns is to do the inner child work. The benefits of a potential healthy life without addiction or depression is far worth the work invested in your inner child healing. However, it all starts with awareness.

Benefits of Taking an Inner Child Quiz

Awareness happens with a little effort. If you take an inner child quiz you will have increased self-awareness. Understanding your inner child can help you recognize recurring destructive patterns that originated in childhood. An inner child quiz strips away rationalizations and makes you tune into core emotional triggers. It can also help you by pointing out your emotional wounds. Quizzes help uncover specific childhood events or dynamics that shaped your coping mechanisms and beliefs about yourself and the world. Identifying these root causes paves the way for healing. Living in an oblivious state and not understanding why certain core issues are coming from is unfortunate.

In closing, the key to happiness in life is to be aware of the origin of our present day issues. In understanding the patterns from childhood, one is empowered to heal from inner child wounds. The first step to any healing is becoming aware of the problem that needs to be healed. An inner child quiz is the first step to healing.

Take the inner child quiz here.

Rachel Devine is the author of a new inner child book called, Discover the Power of the Secret Within - Healing your Inner Child to Manifest your Dreams. This book is available now on Amazon.

Amazon review: The book really got deep on how our subconscious mind works and how important it is to not fall into the negativities and train yourself to think positive always . I really enjoyed it and it was very inspirational and really broadened my knowledge of how our minds work . I really recommend it ! Tina

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If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Devine.

7 Ways to Heal Your Inner Child Wounds

Our inner child represents the emotional part of us that developed in infancy, childhood, and adolescence. These were vulnerable times when we experienced life as a child. Lots of different feelings developed from experiences and possible traumas. Many of us developed inner child wounds. Inner child work means going back to understand, validate, and heal your childhood wounds. As psychologist Carl Jung put it this way, “The inner child carries the burden of being our past and future." Those are very critical words to describe exactly what the inner child carries around for us.

Let’s look into the inner child wounds from the past and see where we can heal the inner child.

Validate your past

It’s so important to not only connect with what happened to you as a child, but to validate your feelings. If you experienced trauma or grief, it’s important to try recognize and to feel those feelings. Any repressed inner child feelings will only erupt during anxiety, fearful, angry or stressful times and cause havoc in adulthood. It would be like opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. Getting in touch with those feelings will be the best thing you can do to combat adult disruptions. Once you are in touch with those feelings, you can release them. One way to release them is to speak about it out loud, even if just to yourself.

Identify any neglect or trauma

It’s important to recognize any neglect you may have experienced as a child or trauma. Bringing out our dark secrets from the past into the light of day helps it lose it’s power over us. Just speaking it out loud is a great start. Try to acknowledge the neglect to a friend or therapist.

Look for patterns

Our lives are a series of patterns from childhood emotions that seep into adulthood. Our anger issues that get out of control, are usually from past childhood anger that come out of left field during a heated argument. Recognizing any pattern from childhood is a great start to healing. An example of a relationship pattern from childhood would be having anger issues over your father not coming to your little league games. Now, as an adult, you take that anger out on your wife if she can’t be there for you in a certain situation. The anger would be intense and out of proportion to a minor situation with your wife. This is just one example of a pattern of anger from childhood.

Feel your feelings

Suppressed emotions manifest in other unhealthy ways. Make space to feel sadness, anger, and fear fully. It is imperative to feel your feelings.

Write a letter to your inner child. Assure your younger self that they did nothing to deserve mistreatment. Remind them of their talents and intrinsic beauty. Also list any hurt feelings or anger in your letter. Also identify any feelings of emotional or physical abandonment issues. Looking back on your childhood and writing about hurtful times is imperative to healing. Getting it all out on paper will serve as a great way to alleviate the fears and anger from the past. It might feel uncomfortable, but that will pass and you will start to feel healed. You can also do daily journaling on past experiences as an inner child. Journaling is a sure way to bring to light inner child wounds and help heal them. Remember, every time you remember an inner child wound, and write it out, you are releasing it to the universe.

Speak encouraging mantras

Combat an inner critic with loving wisdom. Tell yourself often, “I am enough. I matter. I am worthy of love. I am loveable” Create new neural pathways with affirmative language. Using words of affirmation will help you feel more positive and in turn happier. Speak words of affirmations daily to yourself, and do it over and over again until it resonates for you.

Meet unmet needs

Make a list of activities that would comfort your inner child’s fears and longings. Do you like to play music? Create art? Engage with spirituality to really heighten the experience, if you choose to. Enjoying life is part of self-care. Self-care is putting total focus on yourself and doing things that make you happy. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation.” Take that vacation you always wanted. Get out a coloring book and be creative. Go to a park and enjoy the swings. Walk barefoot on the beach. Fulfill your own needs by acknowledging them and acting them out.

Cultivate a safe community

Surround yourself with people who champion all parts of you, past and present. Be around people who celebrate you, not tolerate you. Consider joining a support group to share struggles without shame and reduce isolation. 12 step programs are an excellent way towards healing. Seeing childhood wounds in friends allows empathy for what they too endure. Kindness is contagious. Be the person you need for someone else. When we help others, it helps us stay focused on our own healing as well.

In closing, it’s important to implement with patient devotion these methods in order for your inner child to feel seen, safe, and healed. You deserve to be nurtured now and always. It’s so important to recognize your inner child wounds and start the healing process. These 7 steps are a great start to healing the inner child. You want to graduate to this state of being happy, rather than fight invisible emotional wounds from the past for the rest of your life. Remember, the rest of your life starts today. You have the power to change the things you can.

If you feel like you need help, I offer life coaching, and can help you with reparenting your inner child and other areas you may be struggling with in your life. I offer a free coaching session.

Rachel Devine is the author of a new inner child book called, Discover the Power of the Secret Within - Healing your Inner Child to Manifest your Dreams. This book is available now on Amazon.

Devine Intervention - Inner Healing Center.

If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Devine.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can, I Think I can! It All Starts with Your Inner World! Rachel Devine

I love that children’s book, The Little Engine that Could by, Watty Piper. The big phrase in the book is the little blue engine says repeatedly, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. It’s such a positive affirmation of hope in achieving the little engines goal of going over the big mountain. Many of us also have mountains we want to climb over in life. Some are goals and other mountains are obstacles.

We all are capable of unimaginable success and climbing over mountains, if we realize that our inner world is a big factor in determining how we progress in life. Most of us are oblivious to this crucial part of our lives that dictates almost every decision we make and we wind up in a circular driveway, going nowhere fast.

The wounded inner child, carrying baggage from childhood wounds, abandonments, or critical messages, can undermine our success in life through self-doubt, excessive need for external validation, perfectionism, feeling unworthy, and other limiting patterns and beliefs. By understanding and healing this part of ourselves, our inner child transforms from foe to friend. This transformation helps one to be successful in any endeavor they undertake including, losing weight, running a successful business, becoming a writer, an actress, giving up an addiction, making lots of money, finding your soulmate, etc.

Let’s look at this in a comprehensive way.

Identifying Inner Child Sabotage

Unconscious ways your inner child may sabotage success include the following:

• Needing others’ approval before acting on inspiration.

• Abandoning projects when you hit roadblocks.

• Talking down to yourself with criticism.

• Only feeling worthy with perfect outcomes.

• Isolating when feeling overwhelmed or depressed.

• Self-medicating the empty void with food, alcohol, or drugs.

• Staying stuck, envisioning the worst-case scenarios.

• Low self-esteem.

• A feeling of unworthiness.

The inner child operates behind the scenes by distorting thinking around present-day goals based on old conditioning. Those negative thoughts that come out of left field and invade your mind are the dialogue of the inner child from the past. This negative dialogue is a block to good relationships, family connections, success in business and so much more.

Transforming Inner Dialogue

Bring conscious awareness to times when you undermine progress through harsh self-judgment, doubt, isolation, unworthiness, or seeking excessive reassurance. Pause and identify this as the inner child’s fearful influence. If you want to start a project or move towards a long-awaited goal and you can’t get past self-doubt, it’s time to really look at the inner child and your thoughts.

Rather than reacting the same old way to negative self-talk, consciously respond with compassion towards yourself. Provide the unconditional love and affirmation your inner child craves to heal old wounds. Forgive perceived imperfections. Turn negative dialogue into positive ones. Create a self-loving environment. Build on your own self-esteem by giving to yourself in a nurturing and generous way. When you direct your own love toward yourself, you are building a strong relationship with the most important person in your life, and this will carry over to every area you want to succeed in.

Positive affirmations

Positive affirmations are positive phrases, or statements that are used to offset negative thoughts. You can use them to motivate, encourage positive changes in your life, or boost your self-esteem. Affirmations also penetrate the subconscious mind, if said with enough feeling, and this in turn will help your life move in a positive direction.

You can build positive affirmations by writing them out and saying them out loud as often as you can. Some ideas are, I am worthy, I am loved, I am confident, I am successful, I found my soulmate, I am healthy, and I am making lots of money. Or you can make positive statements, such as, I now express health, happiness, prosperity, and peace of mind.

Gradually, this positive self-parenting transforms your inner voice from sabotage to an uplifting cheerleader. The light of awareness dispels unconscious shadows and you might find yourself succeeding in areas you thought were not possible.

Replacing negative patterns

As dysfunctional patterns loosen through inner child healing, proactively build positive habits that serve your goals, like consistent practice in moving towards your goal, dividing tasks into manageable steps, and celebrating small wins. You can also journal with positive affirmations and replace any negative intrusion of thoughts immediately to positive ones. This alone can help you transform to new heights. By building positive habits that serve your goal, you are on your way to succeeding in the goal you choose. Additionally, a “To do list” will keep you on track in moving in the direction of your goal.

Louise Hay, founder of Hay House Publishing and author and teacher says this about the inner child:

“Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”

Picture your words as being in an echo chamber. What you say comes back like an echo. This is the law of attraction working, as like attracts like. Changing dialogue to a positive state will move your life in a positive direction.

Remember, it’s so important to let your inner mentor emerge to help manifest dreams rather than allow past pain to dictate your present moments. Befriending your inner child removes blocks to claiming your joy and success. Be the parent to your inner child that will help you grow into the person you were meant to be. Remember, if you think you can, then you can do it. Stay positive and focused and your dreams will manifest into reality.

Rachel Devine is the author of, Discovering the Power of the Secret Within - Healing your Inner Child to Manifest your Dreams.

My new event is January 31, 2024 7:30 pm on Zoom, “Master the Power of Manifestation. Turn your Dreams into Reality.” Click on this link for more information.

Devine Intervention - Inner Healing Center.