The Key to Confidence: Love Your Inner Child

Derek Francis
5 min readSep 13, 2018

A child lives in me. He is five years old and curious about the world. He wants to reach for the stars and see what he can grab onto along the way. He is playful and he is stubborn. His energy is like a raging wildfire and he has everything to live for. He believes he can conquer the world.

As capable and optimistic as this child is, he is also deeply in pain. Whenever I see this little boy in my thoughts, I see that he is pushed into a corner. It is dark. He has crawled into his corner in the fetal position and he is covering his head like he must protect himself from a hailstorm or a string of blows from a bully. He is surrounded by fingers pointing at him, fingers of people unknown. The child is scared. The child feels like many pairs of hands are choking him. He wants to run away. He wants to be somewhere else. He wants to be someone else.

The fingers pointing at this tiny little boy are accompanied by voices. Some of those voices are laughing at him with indifference and some are snarling in anger. Some of those voices are saying he is an embarrassment to them. There are also some voices telling his he isn’t worth anything and will never be.

Throughout this horrific nightmare in my mind, the child is helpless. He cannot fight back, for he does not know how to. He feels vulnerable and does not want to see the fingers pointing at him or hear the voices screaming at him. Though I cannot see the boy’s face, I can feel every bit of his pain. It is agony!

Like me, there are many who have this inner child within them, pushed into a corner, waiting to break free. Many of these inner children also have their own character judges, pointing fingers at them in an accusatory or derisive way. These fingers are telling us that we’re not living the way society demands, they are telling us that we are not fit to live according to our wishes. They are accusing us of being too lethargic or too loose with our morals. They are, effectively, telling us that we are not good enough.

These horrendous experiences of our inner child are displayed in our outer selves in a way that can damage or seriously handicap many of our aspirations. The accusations and criticisms against our inner child drive our outer character. Together they are in control of our confidence.

Confidence helps us take risks, it boosts our ambition and helps us work towards our dreams. Those of us who say they have a higher sense of confidence are the ones whose inner child is shown comfort, warmth and encouragement by the voices. The inner child among the highly confident do not have fingers accusing them or shouting them down. Instead, they have arms hugging them, they have hands to hold on to when they feel anxious, they have a shoulder to lean on when they feel rejected. The highly confident can do the things they do because their inner child is nurtured with the same love and care that a five-year-old child deserves.

We know these voices in us. They belong to us and they are part of our daily lives. They began when we were in our most vulnerable years of our childhood. Sometimes, as early as when we were just a few months old. They may have been spoken to us by our mothers, fathers, siblings or any other people we may have relied on for care during our childhood. At this young age, our brains are made to absorb as much information as possible and we suck in all that is told to us about ourselves too, believing it to be true. Some of these voices may have also come to us a little later, through relationships with friends or our partners who we loved much. The thing about these voices is that they are ever present in our heads. They are like a tuning fork in constant vibration ringing throughout our life.

The inner child, driven by these inner voices, is how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. If the voices are critical, we also see ourselves critically. We think we are not deserving of being loved or nurtured. Relationships become very difficult, sometimes nearly impossible. We look for relationships in which our partners look at us with the same level of contempt that we have for ourselves. We are constantly seeking the approval of our friends, and we become submissive to win them over to us. We get stuck in a job we do not like because we are too critical of ourselves to think that we deserve better.

Though we may feel comfortable in our own despair, we can never heal the pain of our inner child without silencing and changing these inner voices from those of criticisms to those of warmth and love. The beauty of it all, is that it is certainly possible with patience and effort.

What we must do is to be the parents that our inner children deserve. To show them the love that they ought to have got. To allay their fears by giving them support. To tell our inner child, “you are good just the way you are and I love you just the way you are!” When we make a mistake, we must tell our inner child, “it’s ok, you can always learn from this and do better next time.” When we are anxious, we must hold the little hands of our inner child and say, “don’t worry, you’re doing well.” When we feel tired, we must egg the child on: “just a little more to go. Come on, you can do it!”

In time, this self-parenting or self-love will give our inner children a voice of their own, so that they can stand up for themselves and tell the fingers pointing at them to shoo away. They can still reach for the stars.

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Derek Francis

Derek Francis dives deep into the intricacies of mental wellness in his book "Come, See and Conquer Your Mind".