Anxiety at Night -The Adult and the Inner Child

Many childhood trauma survivors report that nighttime is one of the most difficult parts of the day — a combination of loneliness, restlessness, sleep problems, and a dread that keeps them up too late. In this sixth episode of the Adult and the Inner Child series, Patrick Teahan, LICSW reframes nighttime anxiety as less about sleep hygiene and more about attachment and personal security.

Patrick treats the anxiety as a clue that the inner child is surfacing, and invites viewers to sit with what is underneath it — loneliness, feeling left out, insecurity, a sense that something is missing. He then traces that feeling back to what bedtime was actually like in childhood, whether that was neglect, fighting parents, unsafe limit-setting, or simply caretakers who could not be present at the end of the day. He shares his own experience of staying vigilant for an alcoholic mother who might not make it home, and how that wiring followed him into adulthood as a busy brain at night.

The episode offers a framework for using the nightly wave of anxiety as a doorway into inner child work rather than something to fight off, and for the adult self to begin providing the security that was missing from those childhood nights.