Inner child work and faith

Can inner child work fit with my faith?

For many people, yes. Inner child work is a way of paying attention to feelings, needs and beliefs about yourself that took shape in childhood, and responding to them with more care. Nothing in that asks you to adopt a new belief system or set aside the one you have. Many people of faith find it fits naturally with what their tradition already says about mercy, being known and being loved.

It helps to be clear about what the idea is. "Inner child" is a popular, informal psychological concept, not a diagnosis, not one standardized therapy and not a religious doctrine. It grew out of psychology and self-help writing, which where the inner child idea comes from traces. Whether and how it connects with your faith is something you get to decide.

What does scripture say about becoming like a child?

Christians often notice that Jesus put children at the center of some of his teaching. In Matthew 18, when the disciples ask who is greatest, he calls a child over and says, in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, "unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," adding that whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest. In Mark 10, when the disciples turn away people bringing children, he says, "whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it," and takes the children in his arms and blesses them.

The Hebrew scriptures have a quieter image. Psalm 131, titled in that translation as a song of quiet trust, says, "I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother." Many readers find it a picture of rest after struggle: not a demanding infant, but a child who can simply be near.

It is worth being careful here. These passages are mainly about humility, trust and receiving rather than earning, and teachers within each tradition interpret them in different ways. They do not describe inner child work, and it would be a stretch to say scripture teaches it. What they can offer is permission: in many traditions, being small, dependent and in need of care is not a failure but part of how people come to God.

Where faith and inner child work meet

For some people, faith is one of the warmest parts of childhood: a grandmother's prayers, a church that felt like a second home, hymns that still steady them. Bringing those memories into inner child work can be a source of comfort and strength.

For others, faith and childhood pain are tangled together. A harsh parent might have used God's name to enforce rules. Sermons about sin or hell may have been frightening for a child who could not yet put them in context. Some people find that their inner critic speaks in a religious voice, telling them they are never good enough. And for some, the image of God as a father or mother is hard to approach because their own parent was distant or unsafe.

None of this means your faith is the problem, or that you need to leave it. It means some of what you learned about God as a child may be worth looking at again as an adult. Research on religious coping suggests why this matters: a 2005 meta-analysis by Gene Ano and Erin Vasconcelles found that positive forms of religious coping, such as seeking comfort in faith, tended to go with better adjustment to stress, while negative forms, such as feeling punished or abandoned by God, tended to go with worse adjustment. Pages on religious hurt and leaving a church and doubt and changing beliefs go into this further.

What does research say about faith in therapy?

There is no research on faith-integrated inner child work as such, but there is a substantial literature on including clients' religion in psychotherapy. The largest review, a 2018 meta-analysis by Laura Captari, Joshua Hook, Everett Worthington and colleagues, combined 97 outcome studies with 7,181 clients.

It found that therapy adapted to clients' religious or spiritual beliefs helped more than no treatment, and that in the most rigorous comparisons it reduced psychological distress about as well as the same therapy without religious content, while producing greater gains in spiritual well-being. The fair reading is that including faith is not a stronger treatment in itself, but for people who value their faith it attends to something that matters to them. More on this is in what faith-integrated counseling is.

How faith can be part of counseling, if you want it

In a counseling setting, faith enters only as far as you choose. Some people want it woven through every session; others want to mention it once and move on; others want it left out entirely. Each of these is a reasonable choice. Examples of what inclusion can look like:

• Talking about how your early experience of church, prayer or God shaped how you see yourself now.
• Using an image from your own tradition, such as being held, blessed or welcomed, when you picture comforting your younger self.
• Beginning or ending a difficult conversation with a prayer or a moment of silence, if that is your practice.
• Noticing where a belief learned in childhood comforts you and where a particular way of holding it adds to shame.
• Making room for doubt, anger at God or grief over a lost community without anyone trying to fix it.

Inner child work, faith and Laura Bass

Laura Bass is a psychotherapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a part-time office in Columbus near Tryon, licensed in North Carolina and South Carolina. She offers inner child work as part of individual counseling with adults. She studied Spiritual Direction at the Haden Institute and is an Ordained Minister through the Alliance of Divine Love, and her approach to faith is broad rather than tied to one denomination.

She works with the whole person, mind, body and spirit, and clients decide how much of the spiritual side is part of their sessions. If you would like to know how your faith could be part of inner child work, ask Laura, or explore the inner child work guide and the faith and therapy guide.

If revisiting childhood or a crisis of faith has left you feeling hopeless or unsafe, please reach out now: call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency. The page on spiritual crisis and the dark night may also help.

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