Healing the inner child: The gateway to lasting emotional freedom

As a clinical hypnotherapist, EMDR practitioner, and a specialist in adoption-related issues, one of the most powerful transformations I witness from my clients is guiding them to heal the wounded inner child – the part of us that still carries emotional pain from unmet needs, abandonment, shame, or fear from the past.

These unresolved wounds often continue to shape adult patterns-spiralling anxiety, self-doubt, people-pleasing, procrastination, or an inner critical voice that never seems to rest. Yet, most people don’t even realise they’re living through the lens of that younger, wounded self.

Using an integrated approach that combines hypnotherapy, EMDR, free association, and regression therapy can help clients gently uncover and transform these deep-rooted imprints, often formed before the age of 10. These powerful modalities bypass the conscious critical faculty of the mind and access the subconscious, where these learned beliefs, behaviours and emotional blocks are stored.

Through hypnotherapy, we create a safe space to revisit childhood experiences – not to relive the trauma, but to reframe and reprocess it with the adult mind. With eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR), we desensitise the emotional intensity and rewire the brain’s response. Free association allows the mind to open intuitively, often revealing symbolic memories that the conscious mind has buried. And regression therapy invites the inner child to be seen, heard, and healed with compassion and clarity.

As someone who personally survived the emotional and identity wounds of a mother and baby home, I know just how deep early abandonment and disconnection can run. For many years, I lived with an unconscious sense of ‘not being good enough,’ of striving, people-pleasing, and pushing through painful emotions just to survive. It wasn’t until I began doing my own inner child healing – through hypnotherapy, EMDR, regression and free association –  that I found something profoundly life-changing: A way to meet that abandoned part of me with love, understanding, and safety for the very first time.

This personal journey is what now allows me to hold space for others so deeply-because I’ve been there. I understand how scary it can be to ‘go back,’  and how tempting it is to avoid the past altogether. But I also know that true emotional freedom lives on the other side of that healing.

FAQs

Do I have to remember everything for inner child healing to work?

No. You don’t need perfect memory. In fact, your subconscious already holds the emotional truth. With tools like hypnotherapy, free association, regression therapy and EMDR, we access those patterns gently, through feelings, sensations, or symbolic memories. The goal isn’t to relive trauma, but to meet it differently, with adult strength and compassion.

Will it be too painful?

Understandably, people worry about being overwhelmed. But in sessions, we go at your pace. We create internal safety first. Clients feel relief, not re-traumatisation, because they’re finally expressing emotions that were once locked away and finding a healing resolution that their inner child needed but never had.

How will this help me now, in my adult life?

Healing your inner child allows you to break cycles of emotional reactivity, people-pleasing, self-sabotage, and avoidance. It reconnects you to your authentic self: someone who feels worthy, grounded, and empowered to make decisions from a place of clarity rather than old pain. These modalities allow my clients to make profound changes to heal themselves.

Client’s report feeling lighter, more confident, more aligned with their authentic selves, and they stop repeating old patterns in relationships. They start to trust themselves, and they find peace where there was once chaos. 

Healing the inner child is not about blame; it’s about liberation.

It’s about giving yourself permission to finally feel safe, worthy, and whole and from that place, everything changes.