How your inner child can help your adult anxiety

If there’s a word that most aptly sums up the age we live in, it’d probably be “anxiety”. That word has become common parlance for those moments we feel overwhelmed, uncertain, and out of control.

In the NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, it said anxiety and depression affected about one in six people. While the ‘anxiety economy’ — I’ll be doing a bigger write up of this later this week — has boomed to cater for this rise in public unease, there are a number of ideas in the history books that are worth exploring. One of those is our ‘inner child’, first developed by Carl Jung.

Jung at heart

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the early 20th century. He worked with Sigmund Freud to develop what was then the non-existent field of human psychology.

In his work, he described something called a ‘Child archetype’ in his list of archetypes that represent the development of the different parts of the self into a functioning whole. That idea, Jung said in his memoirs, came out of an acknowledgment that he’d lost the creativity and love for building things that he’d had as a child.

This child archetype became what we now commonly refer to as our ‘inner child’, and it’s important when it comes to understanding our feelings as adults…