Healing the inner child

December 15, 2022 5:50 PM

Seeking book recommendations for healing the inner child. For a person who might be wary of "self help" type books.
posted by kinddieserzeit to Health & Fitness (11 answers total)

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz!

And in general, books on Internal Family Systems therapy.
posted by bearette at 6:30 PM on December 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Maybe The Body Keeps The Score? It's got a lot in there about trauma and childhood trauma but it's not self-help-y, it's much more about the phenomena and treatments in general than about "how you can X". This is also the downside, if you want to apply it to yourself you really have to think about it and what that means.
posted by Lady Li at 10:14 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wanted to second IFS as an approach - my personal experience of it has been very powerful - but just to give a bit of a caveat that I found No Bad Parts quite a mix of useful ideas and self help-y stuff that didn't work for me at all. Depending on the person, they might bounce off it quite hard, which would be a shame if it put them off IFS.
posted by crocomancer at 1:08 AM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I second crocomancer’s comment. “No Bad Parts” is def worth reading, but I was hard side-eyeing some of the workbook type exercises he wants people to do. The theory of it seems good, though.
posted by SomethinsWrong at 4:15 AM on December 16, 2022

Maybe "Complex PTSD from surviving to thriving"?
posted by Geameade at 4:35 AM on December 16, 2022

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents is a good one, and imo not very self-helpy.
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:15 AM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Probably a little dated, and a reviewer called it 'very dry' (which may be a feature in this case?), but maybe:

Healing The Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families, by Charles L. Whitfield M.D.
posted by Bron at 9:25 AM on December 16, 2022

The Emotionally Absent Mother by Jasmin Lee Cori
posted by gemutlichkeit at 7:01 PM on December 16, 2022

A long time ago, I briefly used The Inner Child Workbook by Cathryn Taylor.

Here's an old blog post of mine with one of the exercises.
posted by kathrynm at 12:43 PM on December 17, 2022

I've been going to the Internet Archive for books on psychology, and finding a lot of material. Here are all their books on inner child therapy.

Guided meditations in shadow work have been very helpful in my efforts to recover from complex trauma this year, and the practice is very similar to inner child work. This is a good anthology on the topic (also free to read on Internet Archive).

It might be a tall order to find reading about inner child therapy that isn't firmly in the self-help genre. Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw was very helpful for me this year. But it is very much a self help book... Same for The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, which is exceptionally well written.

Sorry if I've strayed off topic a bit. I hope you find what you're after.
posted by tovarisch at 3:18 PM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I despise self-help books. My wife has stopped recommending them to me because I will finish 1 (one) chapter, then pace around ranting about how stupid it was. The Drama of the Gifted Child and For Your Own Good (also by Miller) literally changed my life.

I was not parented super well (my mom wanted to be my friend instead and expected me to be her shoulder to cry on in return), so self-parenting is a fact of life for me. I'm going to follow this thread myself.
posted by the liquid oxygen at 8:03 AM on December 18, 2022