What Does Inner Child Mean To You?

Donna opened by sharing feedback from someone watching the series, who said they loved how different she and Kirsty are, and how much they valued hearing two very different people stay present with each other through a conversation. That is exactly what this series is trying to do, so this week Donna asked Kirsty a question straight from a viewer: what does inner child mean to you?

Kirsty described two versions of her inner child, the true essence and the wounded adaptation, and let the answer unfold live rather than planning it. At the essence, her inner child is curious and observant, someone who scans the whole room and takes in the big picture before joining in. There is nothing wrong with that pace, she said, it comes from a place of wonder at how fascinating people and the world are.

The wounded aspect showed up as watching rather than joining, shaped by a fear of being judged, getting it wrong, or getting into trouble, and an early assumption that she did not quite fit. She named being the child on the edge of the playground, and traced it back to that same purity of fascination, just filtered through fear.

Kirsty's inner child feels deeply and notices everything. In nature, that showed up as pure joy, building fairy circles in the garden, playing with the elements. But as she grew older and more self conscious, she began hiding her fairy circles whenever someone approached, and nature shifted from a joy into an escape from being observed and judged.

She also named the empath pattern directly, taking on other people's feelings and trying to fix them in her own body, and the ongoing work of separating what is healthy feeling from what is hypervigilance, the scanning she does before entering a room just to feel safe.

Alongside the feeling and the watching was a joyful, silly, impulsive child who loved music and movement, and who was often told she was too loud. That side became hidden too, squashed down out of fear of being mocked or excluded, even though the people closest to her now see more of it than most ever did.

Donna's answer came from a different angle. For her, the inner child is a child frozen in time, the child who comes into the world already knowing exactly who they are, before adults and society squash that down for being too loud, too big, or too bright.

She connected this directly to why she teaches delight on both the top and the bottom of the Circle of Security. Delight is in the fairy castles, the dancing, the big emotions a child finds scary, met with the message that nothing about them is too big and their big feelings will not scare the adult away.

Donna returned to Gabor Maté's two things every child needs: authenticity and belonging. When the outer world says a child is too big, too bright, or too loud, that child faces a choice, keep being fully themselves, or shut down the light so they can belong. She named this as the core of why she does this work, because she knows firsthand how many years it takes to unravel what gets frozen in that moment.

Kirsty offered a gentle challenge back: it is never too late to unravel it, but why not go straight to the core of who you are, rather than working through every layer first.

Donna described her own kinesiology sessions with Kirsty, including a moment that stayed with her, being taken back to her mother's womb without being told where the pressure point was, and suddenly feeling her mother's own fear during that pregnancy. She has had this happen more than once, talking before Kirsty ever says where she is pressing.

Both agreed this points to something real about the body, that we freeze parts of ourselves, and that reconnection, to the inner child, to the body, to the parts that got put away, is at the centre of both of their work.

Donna spoke to the parents who never wanted to become a certain kind of parent, and find themselves shutting down or shouting at their own child under stress anyway. Her message: this is not who you are, it is the memory of what happened to you, and becoming a parent is a journey of reparenting yourself and your inner child, so your child never has to do this same unravelling later.

She linked this back to Circle of Security work with couples, where each parent often carries a shut down inner child of their own, and half the light of the family gets lost as a result. There is no need for shame or blame, just space for those inner children to feel safe enough to speak.

Donna reflected on her own journey from parent infant work through to working with adults on their own childhood wounds, and named how she now sees support as a village rather than any one person having every answer. Sometimes it is nutrition and the body first, sometimes it is nervous system work with Kirsty, sometimes it is Circle of Security. There are many ways up the mountain, and the point is finding the right door for where you are.

Donna is based in Pukekohe, Aotearoa New Zealand, and works both locally and online. She calls herself The Relationship Facilitator because her modality, Relational Flow, moves across every kind of relationship: adult attachment work, couples, parenting, and children's big messy behaviours.

Kirsty Denny of Kirsty Marie Energy is an energetic kinesiologist and home educating mother of neurodivergent children. She uses kinesiology to work with the layers of subconscious stress and conditioning that can impact our ability to align to our truest expression.

When it comes to working with nervous system health and healthy attachment, she believes that it all matters, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual, with healthy relationships with ourselves and others as the bedrock.

www.kirstymariedenny.com