Claim your Inner child

For a long time, I didn’t realise how disconnected I was from parts of myself. Not in an obvious way — I wasn’t walking around feeling broken or lost all the time — but there were pieces of me I’d pushed aside without even knowing I’d done it.

The younger parts.

The sensitive parts.

The parts that felt too much, cared too deeply, or just wanted to be seen and reassured.

Like most of us, I learned early on how to survive. I learned how to be strong, independent, capable. I learned how to keep moving forward. And in doing that, I unknowingly left parts of myself behind — not because they were wrong, but because they didn’t feel safe to bring with me at the time.

Inner child healing, for me, wasn’t something I read about and suddenly understood. It came through living. Through patterns repeating. Through reactions that didn’t make sense on the surface. Through relationships triggering things I thought I’d already dealt with.

At some point, I realised I wasn’t reacting as the man I am now — I was reacting from old wounds that had never been fully met.

So instead of trying to fix myself, I started listening.

I stopped judging my triggers.

I stopped telling myself I should be “over this by now.”

I stopped seeing those reactions as weaknesses.

What I saw instead was a younger version of me who just wanted safety, consistency, and love — and never quite learned how to trust that it would stay.

Healing didn’t come from analysing that part of me. It came from staying present with it. From not abandoning myself again when things got uncomfortable. From choosing to meet myself with patience instead of pressure.

Piece by piece, I started bringing myself back.

Not just the confident parts.

Not just the strong parts.

But all of it.

And as I did that, something shifted in a really grounded way — I stopped looking for someone else to complete me.

Not because connection isn’t important — it is.

Not because relationship doesn’t matter — it does.

But because I realised I’d been unconsciously asking others to hold parts of me I hadn’t fully claimed myself.

When you genuinely love and accept all parts of yourself, you stop needing someone else to fill the gaps. You stop confusing attraction with healing. You stop turning relationships into places of repair rather than connection.

That doesn’t mean you don’t still grow. I still do. Always.

Healing isn’t a finish line — it’s ongoing.

But now, I grow with myself, not by rejecting parts of me along the way.

From that place, relationships become a choice, not a need.

Love becomes shared, not searched for.

And connection becomes something you offer freely, not something you reach for to feel whole.

The parts of me I once tried to hide were never unworthy of love.

They weren’t broken.

They weren’t wrong.

They were just waiting for me to come back for them.

And I did.

Credit to Zachary Fisher for the photo.

✨️🪽🕊💖