Inner Child Healing London

Inner Child Healing London - Reclaim The Self You Were Meant To Be

What is Inner Child Therapy?

When painful things happen in childhood - abandonment, inconsistent love, shaming, screaming, physical fear, or being left to cope alone, the developing brain adapts.

It doesn’t choose - it survives.

Your “inner child” is not a fantasy - it is the living memory of who you were before life taught you to hide.
It carries your earliest experiences of love, safety, joy… and pain.

When those early needs for nurture, acceptance, and protection are unmet, the child self stores the wound.

You grow up, but that pain remains - often silently shaping your choices, relationships, and self-belief.

Inner Child Healing London therapy works with these deep roots.

It draws on Bowlby’s attachment theory, modern trauma research, and somatic practice to restore the trust, safety, and self-worth that were interrupted.

It is not about blaming the past - it is about freeing the present.

Does This Sound Like You?

I struggle to trust closeness - even when I crave it.
I feel invisible or misunderstood in relationships.
I say “yes” when I mean “no” - and it exhausts me.
I was told I was “too sensitive” or “too much.”
I hide how I feel, over-explain, or avoid conflict to keep the peace.
I have intense emotional reactions I can’t always explain.
I fear that expressing my needs will push people away.
I worry something is fundamentally wrong with me.

If this feels familiar, your inner child may still be carrying the pain your adult self is trying to manage. If you are seeking Inner Child Healing London or online, this may resonate with what your heart is carrying.

How Childhood Pain Shapes the Adult Self

Trauma is not always a single catastrophic event.

Sometimes it is a slow erosion:

A parent who was emotionally absent.
A sibling who mocked or belittled you.
A teacher who shamed you in front of others.
A home where love had conditions.

These experiences shape your nervous system:

Your brain’s alarm system stays on high alert.
Safety feels fragile, fleeting, or out of reach.
Self-worth becomes tangled in fear and self-blame.

Your adult patterns — people-pleasing, self-abandonment, perfectionism, emotional numbness — are not personality flaws. They are adaptations you made to survive.

Read more about the emotional absence of fathers here →

Healing the Father Wound (Inner Child Work in Adulthood)

For many people seeking inner child healing in London, the deepest ache comes from what’s known as the father wound — the emotional imprint left by a father who was absent, unavailable, cruel, or simply unable to love and protect in the ways you needed.

This isn’t just grief over a man — it’s the inner child’s unanswered question:

“Why wasn’t I worth staying for? Why didn’t you protect me — from your temper, your silence, your indifference… or even from my mother?”

Unhealed, the father wound often shows up in adulthood as:

Fear of abandonment or rejection
Mistrust of men / masculine energy
Attracting emotionally unavailable partners
Over-achieving to “earn” love
Needing constant validation to feel secure

In my Inner Child Healing London practice, we work gently with this wound by:

Releasing inherited shame (“It must have been my fault”)
Building emotional safety in the nervous system
Reparenting the inner child so she no longer needs to earn love
Redefining father energy on your own terms - nurturing, protective, devoted

You cannot change what didn’t happen in your childhood — but you can stop abandoning yourself in the present.

Ready to go deeper? Read my reflection: Healing the Father Wound – Reclaiming Your Worth

Healing the Mother Wound (When Nurture Was Not Safe)

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This isn’t just grief over what wasn’t given — it’s the inner child’s broken belief that “I must not be worthy of care.”

The mother wound is often the hardest to name, because it lives beneath layers of conditioning: mothers are sacred, mothers are love. When your lived experience doesn’t match the myth, it can leave you drowning in shame — convinced that you are the problem.

You may have lived with a mother who was…

– Emotionally absent or preoccupied with her own pain
– Highly critical, enmeshed, or easily triggered
– Loving one moment, unpredictable the next
– Consumed by body-image, anxiety, control, or resentment
– Capable of providing physical care — but not emotional safety

Inner Child Healing helps to reach the roots of this wound so it stops silently running your life.

How the Mother Wound Shows Up in Adulthood

– Fierce self-criticism and perfectionism
– Anxious attachment and fear of abandonment
– People-pleasing and over-functioning
– Emotional eating / body issues (trying to soothe the pain or control the chaos)
– Resentment, guilt, or deep ambivalence toward your mother
– Difficulty trusting your own intuition and needs

What Changes Through Inner Child Healing

Together we:

Face the reality of what your younger self truly experienced (not just what you were told)
Separate your worth from your mother’s wounds
Cultivate a new, internal source of mothering rooted in compassion and safety
Release shame and anxiety stored in the nervous system, reconnecting you to your body and voice

This isn’t about blaming. It’s about unlocking the love you never stopped longing for — from within yourself.

💭 If you resonate with this, you may also wish to explore my Anxiety Therapy work — many clients experience relentless overthinking and hyper-vigilance rooted in a mother wound.

Reparenting Therapy (Becoming the Parent You Needed)

Inner Child Healing London Within Emotional Recalibration Therapy

Reparenting is the heart of inner child healing — because for many of us, the love, protection, or permission we needed simply wasn’t there.

We don’t blame ourselves as children. We adapt.
We become quiet, helpful, high-achieving, or emotionally numb — not because it’s who we are, but because it’s how we learned to survive.

These adaptations got you here.
But now, they may be costing you your peace, voice, and truth.

Signs You May Need Reparenting Therapy

– You struggle to soothe yourself without external validation
– You speak to yourself harshly and expect perfection
– You feel like an anxious child in adult situations
– You find it hard to make decisions, trust yourself, or feel proud of yourself
– You long to feel safe, but don’t know how to create that safety internally

What Reparenting Therapy Does

Together, we peel back the expectations and adaptations — not to blame your parents, but to reclaim your power. Reparenting therapy helps you:

Hear the needs of your younger self, instead of silencing them
Speak to yourself with warmth, clarity, and encouragement
Create healthy boundaries and soothing routines your nervous system recognises as safe
Become a steady internal mother/father voice — firm, kind, dependable

Ultimately, reparenting is about becoming the adult your younger self needed — so you no longer look to partners, friends, or work to fill the void.

This deeper inner child work often radically transforms anxious attachment, self-abandonment, and emotional overwhelm - the very patterns many of my clients bring into Emotional Recalibration Therapy.

In my practice, Inner Child Healing London is not a standalone tool - it is the heart of Emotional Recalibration Therapy.

Together we:

Witness the child self without judgment — naming the pain you were never allowed to voice.
Reparent with truth, compassion, and nervous system safety.
Integrate so your adult and child selves no longer fight, but walk side by side.

This work is gentle but powerful.

We move at the pace your body allows, combining somatic regulation, guided inner journeys, and practical boundary work so healing is not just emotional — it is embodied.

What You May Discover

Confidence and clarity in your relationships.
The courage to express your needs without guilt.
Relief from shame, anxiety, and old emotional storms.
A deeper sense of calm, play, and self-acceptance.
An end to the loop of “I’m too much” or “not enough.”
A new relationship with your body, your worth, and your voice

You Were Not Made This Way - You Became This Way

And if you became this way, you can become differently.
Not perfect. But more present. More true. More free.

🌱 Ready to Begin Inner Child Healing London?

Reclaim your voice. Restore your self-worth. Rewrite the story.

To learn more about Inner Child Healing London

Book a free discovery call today →

Emotional Recalibration Therapy
in Central London

with

Stella Dove PDCH MBSCH

A trauma-informed pathway blending inner child healing, somatic awareness and hypnosis to soothe grief, rebalance the nervous system and bring your heart back to peace.

Book a complementary 30 minute discovery call

This is our chance to feel if my work is the right fit for you. I promise to be honest — if I feel someone else could serve you better, I will say so with care.

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