I am a licensed individual therapist as well as a certified parenting coach and enneagram instructor. I find these orientations go well together. I have worked with people who do not have children, and yet they still benefit greatly from my experience with conscious parenting and the enneagram. Why? Because conscious parenting begins by looking at ourselves. Conscious parenting is about healing ourselves inwardly so we have a greater capacity for a connection with others. I also use terms like “inner child” and “inner adult” with my clients to illustrate that all of us struggle with ongoing woundedness, and sometimes we need to provide our own inner direction and inner healing. Just as we would look at our children with great empathy and strive to understand the need beneath their behavior as opposed to blindly punishing or shaming them, so we need to look at ourselves with empathy and curiosity before we jump into shaming, scolding, punishing, berating, or beating ourselves up. Many of my clients are shocked when I gently point out the ways they have been engaging in this dynamic. We would never call our child names, deprive him of sleep and adequate food, mock him, and then expect him to go perform well, and yet every day we unconsciously engage in tactics that keep us in a defeated state and then beat ourselves up when we don’t perform as well as we want to.

So I speak with my clients about their inner child. I assist them in recognizing all the ways our inner child comes to the forefront; the triggers that cause us to jump right into feelings of anger, fear or shame. Shame is a huge one. And what about the ways that we either anxiously look towards an outside source of help, or the ways that we shrug and say that we absolutely do not need any help at all, closing others out in the process. We have so many childhood defenses that we have leaned upon to keep ourselves from feeling fear and shame that we unconsciously bring it into all of our adult relationships; especially our relationships with partners, and even our relationships with children.

If you have a child that you would like to have a deeper connection with, reach out to me, I would love to help. Or if you are just trying to have a deeper connection with your inner child, reach out to me, I would love to help.