Reconnecting With Your Inner Child: From Freeze to Aliveness

This is the second time in recent weeks that blog ideas have popped in during my walks. I get so lit up and can't wait until I get home to start writing. When I shared with a colleague about it later, I felt a warmth rising in my heart, an energy from my core expanding out into the world—joining and being with life, not hiding. I could also feel a little constriction in my throat, a trace of freeze around expressing myself. I let my heart lead.

The Moment I Realized My Inner Child Was Missing

Twelve years ago, I was at a retreat in Florida. A fellow participant who's a therapist and I missed a 6:00 a.m. dolphin excursion and felt the ache of missing out when others shared how great it was. I heard her say something like, “I'm scooping up my little one to soothe her.” I stood there perplexed, with no idea where my inner child was.

When Your Inner Child Freezes

Rounding my favorite part of the lake trail behind my house, I had a spark of insight: our inner child can be frozen, lost to us, without a voice.  

From a somatic perspective, freezing is the body’s intelligent way of surviving what once felt unbearable. It protects us from overwhelm and from what didn’t feel safe at the time, so we could cope and continue living. When clients drop deeper into what’s troubling them in the present, they often touch an old layer of early trauma. They might notice a heaviness in the chest or belly. With more intense traumas, that heaviness could immobilize the torso, arms, or legs, and there’s often a vacant look.

As we gently process what was once overwhelming—grief, anger, or terror—the body begins to thaw. Energy starts to move again, and clients may experience some warmth, burping, yawning, then a settling and feeling present.

Our life force inherently knows health and coherence, carrying the blueprint of our full potential. Trauma distorts that natural flow, creating disconnection from the vitality that wants to express through us.

Some signs there might be freeze in one's nervous system that contributes to issues like:

• Nameless dread and chronic high anxiety that can lead to obsessing

• Collapsing into helplessness or constant fixing/busyness to avoid it

• Numbing out with food or substances

• Low energy, and no desire to engage in life

• Fawning (appeasing): abandoning yourself to avoid conflict, rejection, or threat

• Unable to self-protect (often history of being bullied)

• Physical symptoms like migraines and chronic pain, or chronic fatigue

  
  

Somatic Pathways to Unfreeze and Reconnect With Safety

In training with Dr. Aline LaPierre, founder of NeuroAffective Touch®, I learned how deeply we can contract in body and heart. As children—even as fetuses— since we can’t run or fight, we survive by freezing, constricting our tissues and viscera.  Healing begins by unbracing the body.

A good starting point is to unbrace the spine, which houses the nervous system (the control center for how we heal, rest & adapt to stress) —inviting it to yield into support and safety.  The spine is where the nervous system first develops. In fact, when a fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining, it does so from what will become the baby’s back—the spine. The constriction in the spine can even begin there if, for example, the pregnancy was unwanted. We also need to soften the heart as well as the cranial base, so mind, heart, and body can function together in harmony.

I may teach clients tools from Somatic Experiencing® to break the habitual pattern of freeze in a way the body can tolerate. Briefly, tools include movement (slow and gentle), orienting (look around with soft, receiving eyes to come into the present moment of safety), and connecting (with someone supportive).

Relational Healing Takes Patience

At my first NARM Master Training with Dr. Laurence Heller in the Bay Area in 2019, he likened our young parts to feral cats—needing extreme patience and caution. For some clients, these young parts can take in their own adult presence fairly easily as a resource. We track the contact together:

"What’s it like for her (your little one) to see or you there with her?”When the client reports, “Her body relaxes as she lets me sit beside her,” I might ask, “What happens in your body and nervous system as she softens?” Often the response is, “I feel more open and settled.”

This integration allows the young and adult parts to come together as one coherent self. For many clients, it can take some time for young parts to trust. For womb or preverbal trauma, clients can drop into a dreamy state when cognition wasn't developed but can unbrace when it senses safety through my presence.

For severe trauma, like sexual abuse, young parts stay hidden for quite a while.  But when they do, clients dissociate far less and can move forward in healthy ways with their lives.  One client shared recently as she came out of what she called “a 40-year freeze,” that “It’s safe to feel alive.”

Why We Heal Best in Safe, Attuned Relationships

Early traumas happened in relationships where we felt alone, unsupported, and we had to shut down from being overwhelmed. Relational support can be reparative for our heartbreaks to be witnessed, so parts of ourselves that retreated in pain can come out of hiding to be seen, felt, and integrated. Then it's easier to love ourselves because we know what it feels like to be cared for.

Why Being Told to “Just Love Yourself” Is Unkind

For years in spiritual circles, I felt ashamed that I couldn’t just love myself. Now I know: we have to come home to ourselves first. This means reconnecting with hidden young parts and digesting what was once too much to bear— at a pace your body can tolerate and heartbreaks can soften.

A lovely shift for me has been as my heart is healing and unbracing, I have more access to tenderness. When I feel hurt or rejected—like if someone judges me or is unkind, whether they actually did or I perceived it through the eyes of old wounds—I can be with the hurt feeling. Then somehow, I sense that person in my heart too. In that space, I don't feel separate, victimized or need to defend.

Finding Your Inner Child in Everyday Life

Now, when I’m triggered, I take time to pause, sense my internal experience, and feel what’s there with kindness. When I notice tightness somewhere along my midline: throat, heart, solar plexus, or belly, I might place a hand there and just be with it. The body knows how to settle from activation when given space, time, and care. I have to be watchful not to let my body go into collapse, which started in the womb. Sometimes I assure a scared part. For bigger triggers, I sit with a practice partner or my practitioner. For me, the roots almost always trace back to my young parts.

Bit by bit, as your inner child returns, you begin to feel natural in being you, reconnecting with the power of your life force to create the life you want. However, since we’ve lived in contraction for years, our tissues and hearts need time to build tolerance for expansion, and our brains need repetition to lay down pathways for new beliefs. As your aliveness returns, you can engage more fully with your life—meeting yourself with tenderness instead of shame. You’ve grown yourself up.

Various inner child work exists to help with reclaiming lost parts. If you feel moved to learn more about how I work, please reach out through my website below for a free initial consult. 

Brianna Lia Ho, MBA, BBA-PSYC, is a NARM Master, Neuro-Affective Touch, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. She's trained in other somatic modalities as well as in spiritual counseling with One-Spirit Interfaith in NYC. She works with clients internationally via Zoom. www.Essence-Alive.com

Disclaimer: Please note that I am not a psychotherapist or mental health counselor. The info above is not a substitute for licensed medical, psychological or psychiatric help.