The Inner Child Process
To illustrate what Inner Child work is and provide more context, Michael and Pascal had a conversation with Dr Caitlin Walker. In this blog post, we will share with you examples of Clean Inner Child work, what it is, what makes it clean and what it asks of the facilitator.
What a session can sound like
Imagine somebody says:
“It’s like I’m being weighed down.” “Weighed down like what?”
“Like an anchor.” “Anything else about that anchor?”
“There’s a chain.” “Does the chain have a size or a shape?”
“It’s got links.” “How many links does it have?”
“Thirty-nine.”
Caitlin Walker:
I’m musing about how this experience is organised. Thirty-nine links and an anchor. I wonder where it is. I wonder what sort of water body it is.” You don’t know what the story is going to be. Whereas I think in other approaches it’s a bit more like: ‘How do we get the anchor up?’ These approaches are more intended on ‘fixing the problem’. I’d rather inquire about “what kind of anchor is that anchor?” Why would you presuppose the story when the story is going to unfold in a new and exciting way? Your clients are extraordinary. The stories they have are like poetry.”
Here’s what an insight from this kind of work can look like. Caitlin has worked a lot with teenagers in non-therapeutic environments, using small fragments of this process:
“The children suddenly go: ‘Miss, I know why I don’t do maths. It’s because just as I was starting to learn counting at school, my dad was murdered. We went on the run. I went to all these different schools. I didn’t learn to count until I was dealing drugs.’ They go: ‘Oh, I make more sense to myself.’ And when you make more sense to yourself, you have a greater sense of attachment to your own self — and then it is much easier to make an attachment with somebody else.”
And here is one of Caitlin’s own:
“I would have sworn blind to you when I was 25 that I was raised in a really violent household. I could tell you all the violence. When I did a big piece of inner child work with David Grove, I suddenly realised — instead of being in it, it was like those incidents had travelled through me. Imagine a cloud that goes around you, so that everywhere you look, that’s true — there’s always a cloud. That’s what you think the world looks like. And when I did the inner child work and I was able to get away from it, I was like: oh — there were three months. Three months of intense experiences, which was my parents separating, and it was horrific. But actually, before that, it wasn’t. And there were all these memories I’d never had, because my attention had got stuck in this time period. It couldn’t see backwards, and it didn’t make fresh memories forwards.”
What is Inner Child work?
The concept of an Inner Child has its origins in psychoanalysis (Carl Gustav Jung, 1940). The way it is used in modern psychology is to refer to patterns of emotions and beliefs that you developed in your childhood. These patterns still influence your experience or response as an adult. They may or may not be logical from an adult perspective. Your ‘system’ may be projecting childhood experiences onto and into your adult life.
Working with your inner child is about detecting, exploring and unpacking these experiences to understand them, and in some cases to integrate the ‘inner child’ into the adult.
There are various therapeutic approaches and methods that work with the inner child, including transactional analysis, voice dialogue, schema therapy, family constellations / systemic work and body-oriented work. The approach described here — Clean Inner Child work — originates with David Grove and Cei Davies Linn.
They were particularly interested in how you work with sensitive material, such as memories of childhood trauma — experiences the coach or therapist could not conceive of, which are often jumbled in your own mind, or which you’re very reactive around. What David Grove noticed was that when therapists ask questions, they tend to ask the same kinds of questions — and if you deconstruct those questions, you can work out the therapist’s thinking. He said: well, then they must be imposing their logic, their reasoning, their idea of how the world works and how health works, onto that patient.
The clean questions were a way of asking questions that allow the client to reconstruct their world using their own unique, idiosyncratic logic rather than the therapist’s.
What makes it Clean?
When working with the client, the facilitator asks only clean, non-leading questions, and thereby does not impose an adult logic — nor the facilitator’s epistemology — onto the client.
Caitlin is careful here:
“You’ll find lots of approaches are person-centred, but Clean is extreme in that even when people are person-centred, they are still building relationships with that person the way they build relationships. Clean is where you’re helping a client build a relationship with their own stuff, with their own experience, with their own system of meaning-making — and minimally imposing your system of meaning-making on them. Lots of approaches think that they are not leading. Clean is a really strict discipline of trust in the client to make their own meaning of their own system.”
Some things follow from that stance:
We work with metaphor. We do not start from a generic construct of the inner child; we work with what is real and current for the client. Metaphor creates some distance between the work and the original experience — changes in the metaphor correspond to changes in the client’s lived experience. This way, people don’t have to ‘relive’ unpleasant past experiences.
The client is in the driver’s seat. The clean facilitator doesn’t analyse or steer the session towards specific conclusions. They follow the client’s interest and the client’s interpretations. The pattern or behaviour has an origin and a function for the client, so we operate respectfully. As David Grove would say: we bless symptoms with exquisite attention, and they’ll confess their strengths. They can then be integrated with all the positivity and without the negativity — you don’t need to diminish them.
It can be done content-free. Your facilitator never needs to know what happened in your past, which is important for some people.
You don’t need to remember. How important are memories of your childhood for this work? In Caitlin’s personal experience: “Not at all.” Her own story above is the illustration — the memories that mattered only became available after the work, not before. Your system doesn’t need to remember where a pattern came from for the pattern to be running; it might even be irritating to you, never mind other people.
What does change look like?
Some therapeutic approaches say the way to resolve childhood issues is a corrective experience with a new, different adult — attachment to the therapist. Caitlin’s experience with this work is different:
“I have seen lots and lots of big pieces of healing that have sustained for the rest of people’s lifetimes that were not to do with the therapist. Reattachment can be done within an individual system — you can reattach into your own system, and then there isn’t that need for that strong relationship. The attachment, through exquisite attention into their own system, creates an attachment experience — but they’re not attaching to you, they’re attaching to their own system.”
She’s equally clear that this isn’t magic:
“I absolutely don’t believe that Clean is a cure-all. I think that for lots of people, one good clean session can rebuild in them a sense of trust in themselves — ‘I’m completely dreadful… oh my god, now I understand it. That’s fascinating. I’m fascinating’ — and it can have a transformative effect that never goes away. Others might have a piece that takes longer. I had a piece that hides — a child that hides but wants to be found, but hides, but wants to be found. So the better you are at looking for it, the harder the child hides. That went on for quite a while, because part of the therapeutic journey was: are you going to stay? I needed probably six sessions over two years before that gave up and said: okay, I trust you now, I can resolve now.”
Different people’s systems work with different kinds of therapy, and with different kinds of people. “Some people really need somebody who’s very, very patient. Others want somebody who’s very incisive, very quick, who can tolerate your deepest demons with a glint of love. Your stuff might like a certain kind of person.”
What does it take to facilitate this work?
This is the part Caitlin is strictest about. Inner Child work sits at the therapeutic end of Clean practice, and doing it with actual clients is a serious endeavour.
Squeaky clean is a contract, not a default. Clean questions are very incisive: ask more than two of them and you can go one, two layers deep — three, and we might be into some stuff. In an inner child session you stay squeaky clean because you have a contract with somebody to support them to make sense of early childhood experience. In a classroom or a business meeting, being squeaky clean would be just as inappropriate as being ‘dirty’ in an inner child session. The skill is calibrating the appropriate level of cleanness for the context.
You need to know your own system first. Our inner child stuff is often our driver.
“If your inner child is a fixer, a rescuer, and believes the world will die or their family will fall apart if they don’t do some stuff, you’re going to be hard put to keep that out of your therapy. There’ll be clients that child works better with, and clients that child works worse with. There’ll be clients that trigger your stuff. The worst client for me is anyone who’s working on something I’m working on too — get rid of them quick, because I will confuse them with myself.”
You need to know what sort of clients you like, whose stuff you like working with, and when to refer someone on — for instance to a practitioner whose way of working suits that client’s system better.
Your self-regulation has to be really strong. You have to be able to tell the difference between when your system has got involved. “Being able to go: oh, I’m getting excited, I think this thing is going to fix it — stop it. Because the minute you think it, you’re looking for confirmation bias, and you’re not trusting the system. If it’s going to fix it, just develop it; it will sort itself out.”
You have to track and discern. You cannot make anyone’s system do anything if you’re being clean. So you need to calibrate: that’s a resource — develop it and pull it back in time; that’s a problem state — develop it and pull it back in time. You’ve got to be able to track things temporally, keep a model in your head of what you’re up to, and calibrate what the client wants to have happen next.
You need to understand the entailments of metaphors — and hold them lightly. If someone has a heart in a locked box, locked is a process: there must be a before-the-box-was-locked, the box had to come from somewhere. But you don’t decide what’s going to be told to you — boxes can be locked by all sorts of mechanisms, not necessarily a key. The stance Caitlin calls musing rather than analysing:
“When you become an analyst, you become an expert. Musing is inquisitive in a way that remains, at its absolute core, humble. My expertise is my ability to muse intricately without imposing — and it’s very rewarding, because you don’t do premature evaluation. It unfolds in front of you. It’s like going to the theatre every day.”
One small story shows why this matters. In an early practice circle, somebody said that when working at her best, she was “like lava”. The questions flowed — what kind of lava? anything else? where is it? — “on a bed of straw”. The next questioner, though technically clean, asked “whereabouts on a bed of straw?” in a tone that said that can’t be right — and the person didn’t want to answer, because she could feel the wrongness in the questioner’s attitude. She meant larva, like a grub, not lava from a volcano. “You have to be present to whatever emerges, not what you’re expecting.”
You have to look after the ecology. Know when you’re unpacking, when you’re laying stuff out, and when you’re resolving — you don’t open things up when there is no time or container to work with what emerges. And you have to be okay in your own system that not everybody’s going to get resolution:
“If you’re not okay with that, you will push it — and what you’ll get is something that’s fragile. The client will feel that you need them to do something, and then you’ll bring shame into the system: if they can’t perform for you, then they’ve let you down as well. You’ve got to be okay with being present to what is, and not to what you wish — not what your ego wants.”
And you need proper training and supervision. If you’re going to learn an inner child process and work in that field, you’ll need a supervisor, and you’ll need counselling or coach training, depending on how you’re using it. Caitlin herself is explicit: “Let me be really clear — I am not a therapist. The only way I could learn this was to spend ten years studying with David Grove, getting supervision, and paying my dues. I do this work when it comes up, and I have to recontract with people, and I have a supervisor.”
What can a coach — or anyone who isn’t a therapist — gain from this?
If you use Clean Language as a core part of your work, Caitlin thinks it’s a really good idea to experience an inner child workshop — not to learn the process as something to go and run yourself, but to see what can happen:
“You’ll be like: oh, if I’m super clean, this is what can happen. People can make sense of deep symptoms they might have carried around for forty, fifty years. People can make sense of nagging uneases and go: oh, I know where that comes from now. It works — I can see how it works.”
That understanding changes how you work everywhere else, even in business, medicine or education:
“You know why you shouldn’t do more than three questions deep anywhere. You go: oh, that’s why we have to treat other people’s patterns and symptoms with respect. When you see an inner child piece and you realise that the interrupting is actually a six-year-old in fight or flight, you’re like: oh, that’s why we accept and extend information rather than diminish and pour scorn on it.”
There’s a boundary question every coach runs into: if you’re a coach and you come across something that’s an inner child, you probably shouldn’t be tackling it. What helps is knowing the signals that a pattern belongs to an inner child, and knowing how to move out of that territory calmly — not “oh my goodness, it’s an inner child, I’m so frightened”, but: okay, what are the signals, and what might you do in a coaching environment rather than a therapeutic one? Caitlin draws the line like this: coaching is managing what is, really well; therapy is fundamentally healing something in the system. When work crosses from one into the other, it needs a different contract.
And observing this work is training in itself. When you watch somebody else being modelled, there’s a real tendency to resonate with it — and then to want to go in and give advice, or fix it, or help, because your own stuff gets activated. “It’s always people wanting, deeply at the core of their being, to help other human beings. And it’s lovely, and it’s not clean, and it’s not helpful.” Noticing that impulse in yourself — what is in my system that cannot tolerate the state this client is in? — is a unique piece of personal development, and it’s nothing to do with the client.
Why we’re sharing this
There are very few people left who practise Clean Inner Child work in the lineage of David Grove and Cei Davies Linn. As Caitlin puts it:
“There’s not very many of us, and so I think it’s beholden upon us to share the process — because it so illuminates why our systems are the way that they are.”
If reading this has made you curious — whether you want to understand your own patterns, add to your understanding as a coach, or explore whether this work is for you — have a look at our current events, or get in touch. We’re happy to think along with you about what this work could mean in your practice.