The Best 10 Books for Inner Child Healing
Disclaimer: This blog post is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your healing journey. I am not a psychologist, therapist, or medical doctor. I do not offer any medical or professional advice. If you are suffering from mental illness, please seek help from a qualified health professional.
This blog post is all about inner child healing and the profound effects it has on your state of being!
I will go over:
My journey with inner child pain and healing
How did your wounded inner child develop in the first place?
What is inner child healing?
10 best books for inner child healing
My journey of inner child healing
Anyone who has experienced severe responses to negative childhood experiences and attachment wounding knows how much it takes to just simply feel okay. Not even great, just okay.
I used to feel so heavy every day. Like emotionally and physically weighed down. It put me in such a sad, depressed mood. It made me not want to do anything ever but isolate myself. I was always hunched over. I was quiet. I was fragile to any external stressors that came up (and they did alllll the time). I felt empty inside. Completely hollow and numb to everything around me. I was frozen and stuck in the past.
I had, what felt like, a hole in my stomach. Sometimes I would place my hand on my abdomen area and feel a heartbeat pounding.
I remember thinking, “My soul literally hurts.”
And it did. It definitely did.
What shifted this gut punching, soul-sucking feeling?
It wasn’t years of therapy. It wasn’t medication.
It was learning to heal the wounded child within me.
How did the wounded inner child develop in the first place?
As you grow up, there are several factors that influence what our inner state of being is like in adulthood. Our inner state of being is made up of our identity, beliefs, and inner voice.
These are formed in childhood by:
Your parents’ words and actions toward you (or absence of words and actions)
How you watch your parents’ treat themselves
How your peers respond to you
Any highly emotional experiences (anything too fast, too soon, or too much)
Any consistent neglectful experiences
When we got our emotional needs met as a child (AKA the opposite of neglectful experiences), our inner child/inner parent dynamic is secure and stable in adulthood. The child becomes a self-sufficient adult.
Unfortunately that isn’t the case for many of us.
We are influenced so heavily when we are young. Every facial expression, snide remark, and tone of voice has a major impact. We absorbed every bit of our environment like a sponge and made meaning out of it about ourselves. The meaning we made created our subconscious beliefs that many of us hold for the rest of our lives. This is where our wounds are.
Children take things so literally. For example, if your dad came home late because he was at work (making money to support the family!) a child might’ve thought:
Dad came home late = Dad likes work more than our family
Or,
Dad came home late = Dad doesn't love me that much
Do you see how extreme these beliefs are? This is SO important to keep in mind when we are healing our inner child. We have to remember what our brain was like way back then.
Although these meanings seem extreme and irrational to our adult brains now, they still might ring true deep in our subconscious mind and body.
Inner child healing is a branch under the subconscious mind reprogramming umbrella. If you want to learn more about how to change your subconscious beliefs I recommend reading The 2 most powerful ways to change your subconscious mind.
These beliefs are what is causing the heaviness, stress, fear, depression, anger, low self esteem, loneliness, emptiness, anxiety and even potential health problems in our adult day-to-day lives. These extreme, painful feelings stem from beliefs that formed in childhood when we were learning and making meaning out of the world.
Unfortunately, a lot of people stay stuck in these negative, limiting beliefs throughout the rest of their lives. However, there is a way out through inner child healing.
What is inner child healing?
Inner child healing can be so many things. For what I’ll be discussing in this post, inner child work is mostly imaginary work. It can be through self talk, visualization, or through IFS (Internal Family Systems), also called Parts work.
While these buzzwords like “inner child” and “inner parent” have been thrown around a lot, let me explain what I mean.
The wounded inner child represents the heavy chronic feelings that so many of us carry. It is the feeling part of us. It’s the part of us that gets really angry, really fast at seemingly small things, cries when they’re frustrated, and shuts down when they’re overwhelmed.
We can begin to heal our inner child by developing a healthy inner parent. This process is called reparenting.
Our inner parent is the logical, authoritative, and responsible part of us. It’s the part of us that sets boundaries, keeps us healthy, and makes sure we’re on time. It is the nurturing, rational part of us that is capable and confident.
When you learn how to create this inner dynamic between inner child and inner parent, you start to meet your own needs. The inner critic shrinks. The heaviness lightens. The frozen parts thaw. You begin feeling significantly better.
The best 10 books for inner child healing
These books are a great way to start your inner child healing journey. They are jam packed with hope, exercises, stories, and wisdom that will help you transform your inner state of being to being one of empowerment and true freedom.
These books help you embody this truth:
“There is nothing wrong with you. Everything about you and your adult responses makes sense given what you’ve been through.”
Soul Wounds: A Guide to healing, empowerment, and wholehearted living - Candice Creasman PhD
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This book is phenomenal and my top choice for a reason. Candice articulates the feeling of emotional pain so well. I felt so understood when I read this book. Childhood wounds are soul wounds. I saw myself in so many of her examples. Several of her stories involved clients who were suffering over unfairness, extreme health crisis’, financial hardships, after more. She goes in depth about healing the victim perspective, hopelessness, toxic shame, and feeling chronically inferior.
Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child - John Bradshaw
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This book is truly a 10/10. This is a book where I actually did the exercises and they helped me significantly. He explains in detail WHY we end up as wounded adults. He goes through each age of childhood and what each age needed to develop healthily. Then he talks about how each age will suffer problems later on when these needs are not met. For example, he talks about how if you had to try really hard to please a parent growing up, you might feel a sense of emptiness as an adult. This is because you couldn’t be your authentic self and adopted a false self during childhood. When you can’t be your true self, there is a deep loneliness that follows. He also talks about all the ways parents use their children to fill their emotional needs (called parentification), and how the consequences affect the child as they grow up.
Bonus! Healing the Shame that Binds You (also by John Bradshaw) is a great read as well that, obviously, capitalizes on the shame wound.
Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness through your inner child - Erika J. Chopich and Margaret Paul
You can buy this book on Amazon here. If you’ve ever felt lonely in a crowded room, this book will explain why. When we don’t feel deeply connected to ourselves, we cut off our connection to others and to God. This book had so many eye openers for me for why we have a deep loneliness and desire for a deep, true connection with others. This oftentimes leads to codependency. These people will do anything for a sense of connection, feeling wanted, or even needed. The authors talk about how this leads to the adult feeling a chronic sense of powerlessness and how to overcome it.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents - Lindsay C. Gibson PsyD
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This book is a lifesaver. I think I have more highlighted pages in this book than any other book. This is an excellent resource for explaining why we have so many emotional needs in childhood and how when they go unmet, we suffer tremendously as adults. She talks about how emotionally immature parents will use their children to meet their own needs. She also makes several good points about how these adults have a very low capacity for true emotional intimacy. In order to heal she guides us to become the observer and re-learn self compassion.
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving - Pete Walker
You can buy this book on Amazon here. I might have read this book more than any other book. Pete is great at taking very complex feelings and explaining them simply. He talks a lot about the four nervous system responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and how they can “appear out of nowhere” for a lot of people with a wounded inner child. He calls it an emotional flashback when you feel stuck in a wound from childhood that keeps replaying in your life over and over again (ex. rejection). This is what causes adults to feel so helpless at times. He dives really deep into abandonment wounds and how to bring healing to them. He talks about how many people with a wounded inner child become codependent, perfectionists, and dissociated, too. He also really stresses the power of imagery while healing your inner child. He is probably the most famous for his 13 Steps to Managing an Emotional Flashback which has helped me personally.
Transcending Trauma - Frank Anderson
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This was the first book I read on IFS (Internal Family Systems) and I was hooked. Frank reminds us that inner child healing is regaining our sense of safety and trust in the world. He assures that extreme experiences warrant extreme responses and how we should never minimize our adult sufferings from childhood wounds no matter how “small.” IFS (also called parts work) helps you separate your Self (true self) from your protector parts and exiles (or false self, or wounded parts).
Codependency No More - Melody Beattie
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This book feels like a gentle hug to anyone who has felt taken advantage of (to any degree) and found themselves in codependent relationships and friendships. This was a book that made me take a really hard look at myself. Her gentle tone guides you to lovingly look in the mirror and see where we could be part of the issues in our relationships and how to end the cycle. Melody talks about the importance of boundaries and how boundaries are the way we begin to teach other people that we are worthy of love too.
Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child - Margaret Paul
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This book is all about separating YOU from your pain. It’s about creating the healthy inner child/inner parent dynamic, so when you do feel triggered, you can gently guide yourself back to feeling okay again. She gives many client conversation examples so you can learn how to talk to your inner child. She even talks about how to heal the relationship you have with your actual parents while doing this work, which is so helpful!
Inner Child Workbook - Cathryn L. Taylor, MA, MFCC
You can buy this book on Amazon here. This workbook is an excellent resource for getting in touch with your deep feelings. This is great also if you want more of a daily commitment to healing your inner child. It will help you gain awareness and understanding for why the discomfort and chronic stress is presenting itself in your daily life. And it goes deeeeeep, so be ready! This book also is a very helpful tool for rewriting your past. Of course, we can’t change the past, but when we change how we feel about the past, it creates a big shift in our mind and body.
Running on Empty - Jonice Webb, PhD
You can buy this book on Amazon here. If you feel like you have to use willpower everyday to get out of bed, this book is for you. Jonice explains so well why we don’t have energy or life force running through us–it is because we have wounds and unmet needs that need to be attended to. Desperately, at that. She guides you deep into yourself, your wounds of feeling ignored and unseen and how to feel your feelings in a way that heals you and brings energy back into your daily life.
Incorporating inner child healing into your personal growth journey can be a transformative experience, providing a deeper sense of wholeness. The 10 books I recommended in this post offer so many helpful and practical tools to guide you through your healing process. When you understand why you ended up with a wounded inner child and learn techniques to nurture and reparent your younger self, you find deep healing.
Be gentle with yourself during this process and don’t forget it’s okay to go slowly. Allow these books to be your companions but know that it’s okay and totally normal to take breaks and pick it back up when you’re ready.
I promise though, the vibrant, playful, and happy inner child (Self) within you is there! Just keep trusting the process, and keep diving into the inner work. The little you deserves it!
