Anxiety in the Morning - The Adult and the Inner Child

Mornings can be one of the most triggering times of the day for childhood trauma survivors. In this episode of the Adult and the Inner Child series, Patrick Teahan, LICSW responds to requests for a video on morning anxiety, offering inner child work for the dread, chaos, overwhelm, and low energy that many survivors wake up to.

Patrick asks viewers to locate their own childhood mornings on a spectrum: neglect mornings where you packed your own lunch and got yourself to school at age six, chaotic mornings with a moody, stress-monster, or hungover parent, or smothering mornings with a hovering, over-involved parent whose energy was its own kind of drain. He shares that he personally grew up with hungover parents who made mornings feel like a burden to be around, and uses that to illustrate how the inner child still flinches at the start of each day.

The episode gives two action items: reconstruct what mornings were actually like for you as a child, and then design a small, reparative morning routine that the adult self can reliably offer the inner child. It is aimed at survivors who want their mornings back and are willing to trace the anxiety to its source rather than just medicate around it.