The Difference Between Inner Child Healing & Shadow Work
The hardest journey to go through is the journey that takes seconds to begin and sometimes a lifetime to complete — it is called “doing the inner work”.
All the answers that you need are found precisely within. But in order to unlock them, you have to go through a labyrinth of many mental and emotional triggers connected to your own inner child healing and shadow work.
The inner work takes you away from people, but it brings you closer to the one person you spend 24/7 together — yourself.
It takes courage to look within, and once you embark on this journey, you will never be the same person. But when you make it to the other side, you reconnect with your Higher Self, discover your soul’s purpose and become comfortable freely expressing yourself in every life situation.
Here are the key differences between inner child healing and shadow work if you’re considering doing the inner work!
INNER CHILD HEALING
Inner child healing is the examination of your own childhood, which includes the beliefs and wounds you’ve been carrying with you that you have never truly taken the time to analyse, forgive and integrate as part of your human experience.
Through the inner child healing work, you go through your early childhood and your teenage years, so that you can re-claim your power and re-write the story by changing the deeply ingrained beliefs you have around who you are (and who you are not), which bring emotional turmoil and suppress your authentic self-expression on a subconscious level.
Inner child healing includes working on:
feeling helpless and unable to ask for help
relying on others FOR PERMISSION to think, act, feel or be (yourself)
craving rescuing or attempting to rescue others
holding anger / pain from NOT being able to express yourself freely or authentically
struggling to reach out to people due to fear of rejection
feeling scared to bond with people on a deeper level due to the fear of abandonment (which often leads to commitment issues)
Inner child healing is essentially allowing your emotional body to feel its emotions without suppressing them or judging them. This in turn helps you to expand your consciousness to a higher level of operating and it gives you a higher perspective of all things in the world around you.
Ultimately, inner child healing is about recognising how valuable, precious and worthy of love you are, regardless of your early childhood or teenage impressions of life!
SHADOW WORK
Shadow work is the process of diving deep into your own actions and how you’ve impacted others through your intentions, words and beliefs.
Doing shadow work helps us understand the part we’ve played in our own suffering and the suffering of others.
This is the area of your self-growth or spiritual awakening journey where you truly face “shame” and “guilt” and redefine what they mean to you.
Shadow work includes freeing yourself from:
carrying guilt for setting boundaries that honoured your self-worth and your feelings
feeling guilt for NOT SETTING BOUNDARIES when people repeatedly crossed them and disrespected you
being held back from expressing your authentic self due to fear of failure / judgement
carrying pain from denying your own potential, voice and dreams during your teenage years
Simply put, shadow work is the process of facing one’s deepest fears that are blocking you from living your “dream reality” — the version of reality that brings so much joy in your heart, you can’t help but smile from ear to ear!
Until you go through your shadow work, you might feel unworthy of living in the reality of your dreams, which is why you might find yourself self-sabotaging great opportunities and blocking your manifestations (in other words, standing in the way of bringing what’s on your vision board into your physical world).
While the inner child healing reminds you that you’re worthy of love, the shadow work process empowers you to embody your Higher Self that is capable of both giving and receiving unconditional love, which boosts your own inner power to become the creator of a life that is full of joy, success and prosperity.
