The Adult and the Inner Child

Inner child work is one of the core practices in healing childhood trauma, and yet it is often misunderstood as something vague or purely metaphorical. In this video — the first episode of Patrick Teahan's Adult and the Inner Child series — Patrick lays out a clear, practical framework for understanding these two parts of the self and why separating them is the starting point of self re-parenting work.

Patrick uses John Bradshaw's imagery of an adult with the inner child strapped to them to show how, for most trauma survivors entering therapy, the adult and the inner child are fused into a single miserable entity still running on childhood survival rules. He offers the analogy of Windows 95 trying to run on a modern operating system to describe how dysfunctional inner-child code keeps misfiring in present-day life, and introduces his mentor's framing of the inner child as a real foster child who needs a slow, consistent relationship before they can trust a new caregiver.

The episode focuses on the first step of the work: the adult coming online, separating from the inner child's worldview, and becoming aware of how that worldview drives beliefs, reactions, and stuck behavior. It sets up the rest of the series as an in-depth look at building a secure internal relationship between these two parts.