Exploring the Connection between the Inner Child and Ways to Relate

What Does It Mean to Be Seen?

I want to take a moment to reflect on a theme that lies at the heart of both my healing journey and the work I do with others: the need to be seen. Before I begin, I invite you to pause and ask yourself—What does it mean for you to see or to be seen?

At its most basic level, seeing means perceiving what is around us. We often say, “I know because I saw,” as if seeing confirms the truth of something. But perception goes beyond just the eyes—it’s about how we interpret what we witness. Like a mirror, what we see in others often reflects something back to us, filtered through our own experiences, emotions, and beliefs.

Think of the subtle movements of interaction: I smile, and you smile back. I express anger, and you feel uneasy. I speak, and you listen—or perhaps you don't. I look at you, and you look away. Every action evokes a response. This exchange, this feedback loop, is shaped by context, past experience, and the unspoken energy between us.

And somewhere within all of that, there’s a deeper yearning—to be truly seen, not just with the eyes, but with presence, understanding, and care.

How Our Sense of Self Develops

From a psychological perspective, children aren’t born with a fully developed sense of self—it emerges gradually through early experiences and relationships. In infancy, there's no clear distinction between self and other; the baby exists in a state of emotional and sensory fusion with their caregivers. As development progresses, children begin to recognise themselves as separate beings, express preferences, and form a basic identity shaped by how others respond to them.

Through consistent attunement, mirroring, and emotional validation from caregivers, children begin to internalise a sense of who they are. Their self-worth and identity are built in relationships, and our earliest relationships lay the foundation for how we come to know and value ourselves.

In early childhood, the brain is still developing the capacity for higher-order thinking, such as perspective-taking and rationalisation. As a result, children process their experiences primarily through instinct, bodily sensation, and emotion.

They live in the immediacy of the present moment, without the cognitive tools to reflect or make sense of complex situations on their own. Because of this, they depend heavily on caregivers to help regulate their nervous systems and to provide emotional meaning and safety in response to their experiences.

So let me ask you—what's the first feeling that surfaces when you think about childhood?

When Childhood Is Safe

If we were fortunate enough to have “good enough” caregivers—adults with emotional maturity, a grounded sense of self, and the capacity to attune—we might have had the freedom to simply be. To exist without conditions. Without emotional trade-offs. If my attachments had been secure, I wouldn’t have needed to shape-shift or compromise parts of myself to be loved. My parents would have been able to hold me in love even when I expressed emotions they didn’t understand or know how to handle. Their love wouldn’t have been withdrawn because I was “too much” or “not enough”.

I would have felt seen, accepted, and validated—not just for how I behaved, but for who I was.
That doesn’t mean I could throw furniture across the room and expect praise—but it does mean my caregivers would have held space for my emotional intensity and try to understand it. They would have been able to address and discipline negative behaviours, meanwhile respecting and caring for us, maintaining connection and communication. In other words, love wouldn’t have been transactional or compromised.

Naming What Was Once Normalised

Sadly, for many of us, the experience of family wasn’t built on emotional safety or security. Instead, it may have involved immature or emotionally unavailable parenting, addiction, mental health challenges, codependency, narcissistic dynamics, manipulation, neglect, abuse, or controlling behaviour.

But the positive of this is that in the past years, therapy hasn’t become popular because trauma is suddenly new—it’s because the new generations are finally beginning to point out what was once normalised and justified and start to challenge the status quo and understanding that certain dynamics are just not ok!

To survive such environments, children often have to make impossible choices. We adapt by disconnecting from our true selves in order to gain approval, safety, or love. Psychologist Alice Miller called this the false self, a version of ourselves shaped by the need to be acceptable to others rather than authentic to ourselves.

For example, if I was naturally fiery, expressive, or sensitive, but my parents repeatedly told me I was “too much,” I learned to repress my natural energy. I may have become overly controlled, anxious, or quiet, always bracing myself to avoid rejection or punishment.

Maybe I became the “good kid” —compliant, helpful, always performing—while silently carrying resentment or exhaustion. Over time, I lost connection with my spontaneity, my voice, and the essence I came into the world with.

This often happens because our parents couldn’t separate their wounded inner child from their adult role. Without emotional maturity or self-awareness, boundaries blurred. The roles reversed. We were parentified—becoming the emotional caretaker, the peacekeeper, the therapist, or even the adult in the relationship.

Let me ask: how many of you had to parent your parents? If that hits close to home, take a breath. You're not alone.

In these environments, love is often felt as confusing or conditional. Being “seen” may have meant being useful, quiet, or agreeable. And when our emotional needs went unmet, we internalised the belief that we were too much, not enough, or unworthy of love. These early experiences shape core aspects of identity, and they often show up later in life as low self-worth, poor boundaries, or chronic self-doubt.

But here’s the hope: most of these patterns aren’t intentional—they’re unconscious and generational. They continue until someone—you—decides to stop them.

If you often ask yourself, “Who am I, really?”—that’s the beginning of healing. It means you’re ready to reclaim and heal the parts of yourself you had to hide just to survive. And that reclamation is an act of courage, not rebellion.

The Impact of Conditional Love

We are not defined solely by our wounds. And yet, many of us have spent years—sometimes a lifetime—adapting to dysfunction. We stay in jobs that drain us, marry partners we’re not truly aligned with, have children because it’s “what comes next,” and separate when things get hard—because we were never taught how to stay, how to grow together, or how to navigate conflict with awareness.

Over time, we lose clarity. We stop seeing life as it is and begin to see it through the lens of our unhealed pain. As the saying goes, we don’t see the world as it is—we see it as we are.

And yet, pain and growth are often inseparable. Healing is full of paradoxes. Sometimes the very wound we try to avoid holds the key to our transformation.

So ask yourself: What are you struggling to see clearly right now? What part of you feels hidden, denied, or in need of attention? Your answers might just be the doorway back to yourself.

Reconnecting with the Soul trough Emotional Healing

We can’t longer avoid most of our emotions, bypass them, deny them, suppress them—and yet, deep down, we long to be seen. We want our pain to be witnessed. But we don’t want to feel it.

The emotions we froze in time—grief, anger, fear, shame—still live within us. They act out through our reactions, sabotage our relationships, and cloud our clarity. We wonder why we feel stuck or overwhelmed, not realising we’re still carrying the emotional weight of unprocessed wounds. In trying to avoid pain, we often end up living inside it, unconsciously.

It’s time to open our inner eyes. We need space to grieve the parts of us that felt unloved, unseen, or humiliated—especially the parts that were too young to protect or speak for themselves. And we need to remember: we are no longer those small children. We now have the power to reparent ourselves—to help our inner child grow with us, gently and compassionately.

When we begin this work, we start to peel back the layers of defence and reconnect with what lies beneath the pain: our essence, our soul. From that place, we can meet the world not through ego, but through authenticity, presence, and love.

Owning our story is not about staying stuck in victimhood. It’s about choosing courage over avoidance—integrating our experiences so we can become whole. Not perfect. Whole. Our truth is what inspires others, not our polished surface, but our realness.

Healing doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Sometimes, we need to hold someone’s hand until we find the strength to walk on our own. And that takes courage, too.

Someone once gave you hope. And right now, simply by being here, by being you, you might be that light for someone else. Stop being afraid of who you are, in all your parts. Before the world can truly see you, you must learn to see yourself with honesty, tenderness, and deep care.

If you can’t love yourself with all your contradictions, your mess, your magic, your soul will keep hiding behind a mirror of shame and “what ifs.” So let me ask you: Can you fall in love with your frustrations? When no one seems to understand, can you say to yourself, I’m here. I see you. I love you.”

What the world needs now isn’t more perfection but embodied ways of being that reflect integrity, value and presence.

The NEED to be SEEN.