Take Charge of Your Life with NLP

3. Managing Your Inner Child: improving your confidence, self-esteem and happiness

About the Author

Felix Economakis is a highly experienced chartered psychologist, clinical hypnotherapist and master NLP practitioner, with his own private clinic in London. He is known to BBC3 viewers as the psychologist on The Panic Room and Freaky Eaters, where he used clinical hypnosis and more traditional psychological approaches to cure people of their phobias and food problems.

About the Book

Master NLP practitioner Felix Economakis reveals the way to change your life - through changing how you think.

His simple NLP techniques will help revolutionise the way your mind works, so you can take charge of your life for good. Learn how to:

‘Will give you all the tools to develop deep-rooted self-esteem and self-confidence.’

Foreword

I FIRST CAME across NLP in 1990, thanks to Anthony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power. I had heard of the subconscious mind before, but it all sounded a bit ‘woo-woo’ and weird. This was different. As an engineer by trade, I loved the pragmatic step-by-step techniques that promised to change my life. More importantly, they worked for me! By 1993 I had decided that I wanted to teach NLP to as many people as possible, and since then I have trained tens of thousands of people from Hawaii and LA to London, the Netherlands and Israel.

It has been, and continues to be, an amazing journey. Over the years I have witnessed the incredible power of NLP techniques to assist people in changing their lives. I have seen people use NLP to heal family rifts, fix broken marriages, banish phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as become hugely successful in business.

I first met Felix Economakis in 2005, on my NLP master practitioner certification course. As a trainer it is always a thrill to see one of your previous delegates become so successful, and a great honour to be asked to write the foreword for their book.

Felix has taken a unique angle on NLP, integrating it with his expertise in clinical psychology. He fully embraces the way NLP works with the subconscious mind and shows people how to work with it directly. This millennium has been described by many as the millennium of the mind. In this book, Felix tells you how you can make your own mind work for you.

We are all given the most amazing, powerful gift at birth – a subconscious mind. When we get to the age of about five, six or seven we develop a conscious mind, and, for many of us, the path to loosing contact with and trust in our subconscious mind begins. Unfortunately we have never had an instruction manual or user guide for working with our two minds … until now! In Take Charge of Your Life With NLP, Felix eloquently describes how your subconscious mind works and then gives you simple, yet powerful techniques to regain the connection and communication you once had. These processes will enable anyone to unlock the power of their subconscious mind.

By following Felix’s instructions and completing the exercises, you can expect to experience a number of profound changes in your life. Firstly your intuition will skyrocket – as it is your subconscious mind that passes on the infinite information around you to your conscious mind through what we call ‘intuition’ or ‘gut feelings’. You will also begin to experience a greater emotional richness in your life, as your subconscious mind is the home of our emotions. Learning to pay attention to these feelings will bring back balance, joy and a sense of fun. Finally, Felix gives you powerful processes to heal inner conflicts and gain insight in how to heal conflicts that you may have with others in your life. This will bring a sense of inner peace and calm.

To have all of this, and more, all you need to do is read Felix’s words and do the processes he describes.

Introduction

‘Ninety per cent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.’

DESPITE THE FACT that humans have the intelligence to land men on the moon, construct huge telescopes that can peer into deep space, and theorise about dark matter, most of us don’t really have a good understanding of what makes us tick. We often find ourselves making the same silly mistakes over and over in our daily lives. But why is this?

Why, for instance, do some doctors smoke, despite knowing exactly how dire the consequences are for their health? Or why do we lie awake at night, worrying unduly about things, even when we’ve been through the same situations countless times before? Or why do we go for the same type of partner time and time again, only for our friends to say ‘I told you so’ after the inevitable break-up, to which we sheepishly reply, ‘I know, I know…’

Even professors of psychology are not immune to such influences. To quote one such professor: ‘Why [do] I succumb to well-documented psychological biases even though I’m acutely aware of them.’¹

As for me, when both of my young children were babies, in their first year they invariably kept waking up several times a night crying (and the best my wife and I could have hoped for on a good night was four or five hours’ kip). So why couldn’t I make myself go to bed before midnight, even though I knew I would benefit from more sleep?

Going against your ‘better judgement’ is infuriating, puzzling and bewildering. It can also be expensive in terms of health, wealth and time. And it seems we are all prone to it to some degree or other. But you don’t need to keep repeating these kinds of patterns. If you spend some time discovering what’s really going on, you could do something about it rather than squandering all that precious time and energy.

So what drives your behaviour?

As so much of what we understand about our environment is mediated through our conscious mind, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that, more often than most of us are aware of, much of our decisions are actually made by a part of ourselves that few of us ever think about – the subconscious.

Our conscious mind is our rational thinking mind and it helps us to make more logical and objective decisions, based on clinical cost–benefit analysis. That means we might choose not to take a second piece of cake as we have consciously decided that the pleasure of eating it is outweighed by the time we would have to spend in the gym to work off the calories.

Our subconscious mind is our more emotional mind, which guides our decisions based on our emotional values. Some of these emotional values will be biologically driven (e.g. universal responses such as our fear response in the face of something unknown and scary), while other values will be based on how we feel about things and experiences around us. So using the cake example above, we might reach for the second piece of cake, as our subconscious is telling us that eating it will fill an emotional need.

It’s worthwhile to mention here that the ‘unconscious mind’ is an umbrella term that refers to all the multitude of functions and processes involved in life, such as breathing and digestion, which do not concern us here. The subconscious mind is a subset of the unconscious mind and the part more involved with our emotions and feelings.

Furthermore, the conscious mind is also associated more with the logical, rational and analytical left-hemisphere, while the subconscious mind is more associated with the creative, imaginative and emotional right-hemisphere. Hence the phrase ‘left-brained’ for very analytical people and ‘right-brained’ for those intensely artistic types.

All the decisions and choices we make in our lives are governed by either our conscious mind or our subconscious mind. The same choices facing us can be decided on rational and pragmatic terms or decided in terms of our feelings and emotions. Some people choose their partners based on very practical considerations (income, status, location) with a view to ensuring their lives are easier and more secure, and some people choose their partners purely for emotional reasons, reasons which if anything have ended up making their lives infinitely harder and more complicated, by choosing to have long-distance relationships, for example, or to hook up with people whose lives are in a mess and being drawn in to help them pick up the pieces.

Emotions, therefore, can lead us to make decisions independent of any considerations of logic, pragmatism or usefulness.

Sometimes logic and feelings can match up well (e.g., buying furniture that is aesthetically pleasing and useful and within our budget). Other times they can mismatch completely and we do things against our better judgement (buying stuff we can’t afford, we don’t need and we don’t use).

Imagine a huge iceberg. The tip sticking out of the water is equivalent to your conscious thinking mind. Underneath the water, and invisible to the observer, lies the majority of the iceberg, which equates to your subconscious or emotional part of your mind. It’s this greater mass that is actually moving the iceberg. The irony is the tip thinks (if icebergs can think!) that it’s the one who is in control. Just like the iceberg, we may pride ourselves as being intelligent, independent thinkers, on our ‘reason’, yet the truth is that we are much more emotional creatures than we are rational ones, and it is our subconscious, emotional mind that drives most of our behaviour.

Have you ever rejected a supermarket own brand product in favour of an identical more expensive branded version without really wondering why? In this case, your subconscious, emotional mind has been influenced by advertising. Advertising sells on associating certain desirable emotions to certain products, rather than on any scientific evidence. Have you noticed how most chocolate adverts tend to have an attractive, slim female experiencing rapture while eating a bar? Or, in the case of crisps or alcohol, a group of young, slim, attractive (and invariably multiracial) people eating and drinking those brands while also looking as if they’re having the time of their lives? Logically there is little correlation between washboard stomachs and the kinds of people who eat and drink a lot of crisps, chocolate and beer, but the advertising industry spends several billion pounds a year on trying to subconsciously convince us of this link.

Why are advertisers willing to invest so much money in creating such unrealistic and artificial emotional associations? Because their research has already convinced them of the fact that most of our decisions are not made rationally. Advertisers are trying to cash in on the fact that most of us suffer an information and choice overload and cannot think consciously about every small decision in our life, with the result that we tend to operate on subconscious autopilot. Advertisers want to influence that subconscious autopilot to buy their clients’ products. But never fear – over the course of this book, I can going to show you how to understand and influence your subconscious mind, so you have greater freedom of choice when making decisions.

That the subconscious mind is responsible for running most of our behaviour may not be news to you. That particular information has been out there for a while. But, given the tremendous impact of your subconscious mind on your life, just how well do you know your subconscious? If you have been feeling like your life has been like riding a horse that is careering out of control, it’s likely that you’re not in touch with this part of your mind. Throughout the pages of this book, I will give you some simple yet highly effective tools so that you can take the horse by the reins and steer it in the direction you want. After all, what’s at stake here is more than just being drawn to choosing a branded good over the cheaper supermarket version. That’s all small fry. Your subconscious mind heavily influences, for instance:

These, in turn, impact on the type of job and career you enter, how you perform in it (e.g. do you think you are a fraud and so consistently avoid promotions?), how you get on in both private and professional relationships, how you understand and parent your children, your outlook on the world and life in general.

Clearly, there are real massive benefits to working with our subconscious mind, yet for the most part most people’s efforts to do so have been limited to a bit of formal hypnosis or listening to a few subliminal audiotapes or binaural beat sound waves or whatever. More often than not, the whole area of working with the subconscious mind has just been relegated to the ‘important but don’t know what to do about it’ filing cabinet in our mind. What a waste.

Give our general ignorance about the subject, this reaction is understandable, but it is the aim of this book to shed some light on this hugely important part of ourselves, so that we may improve our decisions, our behaviour, our thoughts and our overall well-being.

One more thing: you may not be suffering from any particular psychological ailment per se, but instead be experiencing a more existential restlessness, as if something is missing. Many people express this as a desire to ‘get to know themselves better’ or ‘find out who they are’ (to ‘Know Thyself’ in the words of the Oracle of Delphi). Once again, getting to know your subconscious mind is the key here. The Oracle might as well have said ‘Know your subconscious mind’ because to ‘know thyself’ is really about knowing the ‘unknown’ part of us about which we are not conscious or aware of.

There are people who enter my consulting rooms having struggled for decades with fears, phobias, addictions or even psychosomatic problems and in just the space of a few short sessions (sometimes even just one or two), experience a massive, sometimes complete, change in their lives. Why should something that seemed so difficult then end up being relatively easy to resolve? I believe it’s easy when you know where to apply the maximum leverage. NLP, or neurolinguistic programming, is one such way of making big changes in your life with the minimum effort and the maximum impact.

For those readers unfamiliar with NLP, this rather scary-sounding title refers to the use of language (the ‘linguistic’ part of NLP) to create desired changes in our brain and nervous system, our neurology, in other words, which is where the ‘neuro’ part of NLP comes from. For any change in our behaviour to become permanent, the pathways in our brain needs to be rewired and we achieve that by changing the language that we use to describe us and the world around us.

There’s even a metaphor to describe the way we perceive the world, which you’ll already be very familiar with. You’ve heard of someone being a ‘glass half full’ or a ‘glass half empty’ kind of person? The point is that there is exactly the same amount of liquid involved – how the amount is described makes all the difference. People who see the glass half full are said to be optimists; on the other hand, half-empty types are generally pessimistic, even cynical, seeing what they don’t have, rather than what they’re already got.

If you’re a ‘half-empty’ person and want to see things in a sunnier way, you can do that by changing the way you describe the world and by doing that you use language, the linguistic part of NLP. Language in NLP can be used to create change directly through formal therapeutic techniques or indirectly through hypnotic language patterns and metaphors that work directly with your subconscious mind.

The ‘reprogramming’ part of NLP simply refers to the notion of reprogramming outdated and unhelpful thinking patterns with more useful and resourceful ones. It will probably come as no surprise to you that NLP practitioners have taken the analogy of software updates and reprogramming from the world of computers.

Growing up, I was rather shy and had relatively low-self esteem, but, as an adult, I adopted some of the NLP approaches I outline in this book, which led to a quantum-leap improvement in my life. Previously I had always gone for jobs I was overqualified for and went for partners who were not at all right for me (as I did not think my ideal type of woman would want someone like me). As I learnt to manage myself with these same techniques, I started taking more risks. These included performing therapy in front of TV cameras, trusting myself to deal with all the challenges inherent in starting one’s own business or in writing this book, and meeting, falling in love with and marrying a beautiful and intelligent woman. It was as if a magic wand had been waved, although instead of working in a flash, it took a few weeks of practice for these new habits to sink in and become second nature.

You too can have the experience of such a seeming magic wand effect on your life but it does require a similar modest investment of your time.

How NLP Will Help You

The information contained within this book uses NLP techniques to help you work better with your subconscious mind, allowing you to have:

In addition, throughout this book there are numerous quick self-help techniques so you can either nip some old problem habits in the bud before they develop, or minimise them if you realise they have sneaked up on you.

Chapter 1 explains the subconscious mind and shows which of these aspects of the mind are responsible for undesirable behaviours that you or others around you may be experiencing.

Chapter 2 explains some of the reasons why we have developed poor relationships with our subconscious minds, ending up in the predicaments that many of us find ourselves in.

Chapter 3 addresses how to manage your ‘inner child’ aspect and Chapter 4 focuses on dealing with some of the typical problems caused by inner-child conflicts and how you can resolve them.

Chapter 5 focuses on working with ‘parts’, specifically the main types of problems caused by fears, addictions and psychosomatic problems, which are driven by soldier parts, pleasure-seeking parts and engineer parts. They can be seen as hampering you and your progress towards self-confidence and -esteem, but as I will show, they are essentially trying to help. It’s up to your ‘inner adult’ to direct them better.

Please note: while some of you may be tempted to skip to the chapters that focus on the kinds of behaviours that you want to address immediately, it is still best to read all of chapters 3, 4 and 5 because of the overlap of the sphere of influence between the inner-child aspect and parts. In other words, the answers you may be looking for in one chapter may be present themselves in another. It will also provide a more rounded view of how your subconscious mind operates.

The final chapter asks you to consider the choice of paths you wish to pursue and build on to create the kind of life you desire.

There are many books out there promising a quick fix and ‘instant’ high self-esteem. I really don’t see how they can deliver something lasting because I truly believe that developing a real core healthy self-esteem means cultivating a relationship with your subconscious mind, getting to know it, learning and meeting its needs, earning its trust by actions, as well as allowing for mishaps on the learning curve caused by trial and error. And this takes time. You would not expect someone you’ve been on just one date to trust you enough to marry you instantly. Marriage is a big commitment and a big investment. Your date needs time to trust you. Your relationship with your subconscious mind is no different. You are making an investment and, like most investments, this yields rewards over time rather than right away. Trust me on this point that, after working with thousands of people on this subject, all investments you do make here will provide life-changing returns.

IMAGINE THAT I’M a director of a business and I have a vice-president who actually makes most of the daily decisions and runs the administration and maintenance of my office. If someone were to ask me ‘who runs my business?’ it would be inaccurate of me to dismiss my vice-president as just ‘staff’ and reply, ‘I run the business’, as in truth my VP runs it more than I do.

It is similar with your conscious and subconscious mind. When most people think of their personality, they tend to identify almost exclusively with their conscious mind, but your subconscious plays an even bigger role.

So the first thing I’d like you to take on board is the idea that you share your body with another part of you that has its own distinct personality – its own outlook on life, its own agenda, its own prejudices, even its own sense of pride. Moreover, this other personality in you has a different set of needs to yours and different ways of communicating those needs.

It comes as a shock to most people to learn that you can hurt your subconscious mind’s feelings, just as you could a real person’s. For them, it’s akin to learning that they’ve hurt the feelings of their mobile phone. The subconscious mind tends to be viewed as just a mechanism that regulates our breathing, digestion, sleep systems and so forth – a very sophisticated one, but ultimately a mindless automaton much the same as our laptop or mobile phone.

But trust me; there’s a lot, lot more to it than that. In over ten years of working at this kind of level, I can assure you that I’ve observed that our conscious mind can insult and offend our subconscious mind, even hurt its pride and our subconscious mind can retreat in injured resentment. It’s just like seeing a real-life couple for couples counselling whereby, as a result of their relationship, one partner has become hurt, sad, despairing, depressed, mistrustful or resentful about the other.

The second thing therefore that I’d like you to now take on board is that you have a relationship with your subconscious mind, just like your relationship to anyone else to whom you are very attached. Conscious and subconscious minds argue and bicker, just like real couples do or just like parents row with their children. By ‘couple’ I am not just referring to spouses or romantic relationships, but any combination of two people in a close relationship.

You argue with your parents, siblings or partner because you have different agendas and values to them. For instance, if you want to study poetry but your father wants you to work in a bank, you are going to clash over which direction to proceed. In the sentence above, replace ‘your father’ with ‘your conscious mind’ and ‘you’ with ‘your subconscious’ and you can see how the relationship between your ‘inner adult’ (conscious) and your ‘inner child’ (subconscious) works.

Happy ‘couples’ have learnt to understand and accept the other person’s differences and work with them, rather than judge and blame their partner for not being the same as them. These couples have developed a sense of mutual respect towards each other’s differences. They expect some sort of natural friction or disagreements to occur in their relationship because they fundamentally understand that the other person is not an extension of their thoughts and feelings, but has the right to their own preferences and values. They argue but they quickly fall back on ways to resolve these natural arguments.

Similarly, happy people are happy because they have a good working relationship within themselves. Happy people fundamentally like themselves, even if they act in seemingly contradictory ways, such as being charitable one day and very hard-nosed and pushy the next. They have learnt to accept themselves as a whole and might even celebrate their inner diversity.

Conversely, without exception every client that I have seen in my consulting rooms has seen me because of some sort of conflict with their inner self, some form of a falling out with another aspect of themself that they do not know how to resolve.

In a therapy session with couples or parent–child conflicts, I make it clear that there are two sides involved in this relationship and that it is the quality of the relationship that causes problems between them and needs to improve and I’d say exactly the same thing to you about your mind. The quality of your relationship with your subconscious mind will determine your overall emotional health and happiness. Improving the quality of this relationship is one place where you can consciously exert enormous leverage and influence over your subconscious mind. You may not be able to consciously control a trauma or phobia or some other irrational feeling, but you certainly do have conscious power over the way you treat your subconscious mind – what you say and, more importantly, how you say it.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach every single person on this planet and gain their cooperation. In other words, some buttons will rub a person completely the wrong way, while others can make them melt and make you seem like an angel. The right way to get in my wife’s good graces is plenty of neck massages, giving her compliments and taking an active interest in her day (all generally highly recommended). The wrong way is not being present, not paying attention, being demanding, complaining or criticising. In short: kindness, empathy and consideration for the needs of others go a long way. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Needless to say, there’s a right way and wrong way to try to change your subconscious mind. Simply demanding your subconscious changes according to your needs and agenda, without any regard for its needs (while throwing in blame, criticism and judgement to boot), is the least effective way to get it to change. Paying attention and respecting its agenda and needs, giving it the odd metaphorical neck massage from time to time, gets you a lot further.

If that seems so simple, then why is it that I witness all sorts of otherwise highly intelligent people continuing to berate, belittle, blame, demean and criticise their subconscious mind for its behaviour when these same people would never treat other human beings that way? If I treated my wife, or any other person dear to me, as if they were my slave, shouting at them and criticising them, pretty soon I would no longer have that person around in my life. Is it any wonder that our subconscious mind resents when this type of behaviour is directed towards it?

The simple conclusion must be that we do not understand the nature of the subconscious mind – this invisible entity we share the same abode with.

Imagine if you shared a house with someone you never saw and who could only speak a few hazy words that you could understand (like ‘hunger’ or ‘tired’ or ‘bored’). You wouldn’t know how to talk appropriately at this person’s level because you wouldn’t even know if you were talking to an adult or a young child. You would need to spend time getting to understand this person so you could communicate with him/her and get along better.

Similarly, if you got to understand the nature of your subconscious mind, in turn it would help you to understand how to ‘talk’ with it, how to ask it for things and how to lead it to consider other more helpful points of view.

Understanding your subconscious mind

In our ignorance of our subconscious mind, we keep drawing the wrong conclusions. From these wrong conclusions we form an unhelpful and critical attitude that damages our relationship with it. We end up creating a hostile work environment for our subconscious mind and our poor subconscious mind either gets performance anxiety (and messes results up even more) or gets in a huff with our conscious mind and refuses to listen to our demands any more. There are certain aspects of our subconscious mind’s nature that we would greatly benefit from understanding and which would end up vastly improving our relationship with it.

Different nature

Brain scans have shown that women tend to use more areas of their brain simultaneously, while men tend to use more localised areas. Each system has its relative advantages and disadvantages. Women can multi-task better than men but can be overwhelmed by too many things that clamour for attention. Men are more single-focused, which means they can hang onto a problem longer, but they can become so fixated on a problem that they don’t know when to let go.

In other words, men and women often use different parts of their brains to solve the same issues. It’s not the different methods that are the problem, since both lead to the same results. The problem is when some men or women refuse to acknowledge the relative pros and cons of the other sex’s brain, leading to a war of the sexes.

Your conscious and subconscious minds are also very different and any negative focus on the differences can lead to a war of the two minds.

We have to accept that our subconscious mind is the polar opposite of our conscious mind. The yin to our yang. Here are some basic differences between them so you can appreciate the contrast.

Is one mind ‘better’ than the other?

There is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ answer possible. It depends on your goals and the kind of balance you currently have in your life.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to engage the focus and ‘doing’ capabilities of the conscious mind; sometimes it’s healthier to stop working so hard, relax and take a moment to smell the proverbial roses. Sometimes logic can really limit us and switching to imagination and creativity allows us to think outside the box. The conscious has to learn to respect (even enjoy) these differences, rather than judge them on its own terms.

The main players of your subconscious mind

The subconscious mind is a real paradox – it is simple and straightforward in some ways, mind-bogglingly complex in others. I’ll try to keep it simple and focus on just two aspects of the subconscious mind that I employ time and time again in therapy to achieve results across the majority of health problems I come across and which will form the main focus of self-help therapy in this book.

These two aspects are in the form of metaphors. The first one is thinking of the subconscious mind as a child.

The second metaphor is much more general and simply refers to working with ‘parts’ of your subconscious mind. For example, if you had a phobia, you would look to work with the ‘protective part’ of your mind or if you had an addiction you would look at the ‘stimulation-seeking’ part of your mind.

Using these two models of the subconscious mind, I’ve successfully treated depression, anxiety, OCD, self-esteem issues, relationship problems and other conditions with clients who have already tried other conventional psychiatric and psychological methods to no avail.

In general, whenever I want to work on self-esteem, self-confidence, motivation, depression, worry and insecurity I work with using with the first metaphor – of the subconscious mind as a child. Whenever I work with specific fears, traumas and unwanted behaviours, I use the second metaphor. It is possible for there to be an overlap of approaches, so this is a guideline more than a rule and if you feel it’s more appropriate for you to work with one approach more than other, then please feel free to do so. However, I do advise reading the material on both as you may learn a good deal about your subconscious mind that can help you on your journey.

Subconscious mind as child

You may already have come across the term ‘inner child’. Many people instantly smirk or groan when they hear this term as it evokes images of touchy-feely and overly sentimental and indulgent therapy. In fact, I used to be cynical myself before my experiences in this area, but after years of working in the field, my advice is ‘don’t throw the baby out with bath-water!’ Previous poor application of an idea does not mean the idea itself is poor. Ultimately, what matters are results and this method continues to get fantastic results for my clients, so I’d advise you to put aside any doubts and try using this technique for yourself before you make a judgement.

Is there really an inner child? I’ve heard some therapists facetiously proclaim that they’ve checked the X-rays and there is no inner child to be found. Of course, this rather misses the point, as at the neuro-biological level, the ‘aim of all psychotherapy is to alter connections in the brain so that real or imagined stimuli no longer evoke the same response’.¹ In other words, metaphors can create ‘real’ changes in our brains and in our realities and one such very effective metaphor is that of the inner child.

Exercise for getting to know your inner child

So as a starting point, so you can get an experience of this metaphor for yourself, here is a quick exercise:

1. Stand (or at least sit) on one side of the room. From this position I’d like you to ‘identify’ just with your conscious mind – i.e. notice your perspective from your conscious mind’s point of view. As I have already noted above, the conscious mind is synonymous with ‘left-brained’ thought and logic.

2. Then scan your body and tune into where you feel your ‘emotional’ self to mostly inhabit. When you’ve located where you feel your emotional self most resides, imagine your emotional self floating out from inside you to stand two metres away, facing you across the room.

3. Now observe and describe your emotional self. What does he or she look like and what age best describes him or her?

In my experience, after thousands of sessions of asking my clients to do this, everyone has, without exception, perceived their emotional self to be in the form of a child, even people who’ve never come across the inner-child idea before.

4. Now consider how you would describe your relationship towards your emotional self and how your logical, conscious self feels about it. After getting past the initial ‘feels a bit weird or silly’ phase, allow yourself to begin to tune in and express your relationship with your emotional self in terms of frustration, exasperation and anger (‘why can’t he just do “X”’ or ‘why won’t he just listen to me?’), resentment (‘she’s always intruding and annoying me’ or ‘I’ve tried everything…why can’t he just stop nagging me and let me sleep?’); confusion (‘I just don’t know what he wants from me’); contempt (‘she’s so weak and pathetic’) or guilt (‘I feel like a bad person for ignoring and not looking after her’).

Now let me ask you a question. If you were to see an adult talking to a real child this way, what would your impression of that adult be as a parent? You might well conclude they were: uninterested and lacking in empathy; impatient, abrupt and brusque; critical and blaming; or simply too wrapped up in their own issues to comprehend the needs of someone else. That’s exactly the kind of relationship we have tended to fall into with regards to our emotional selves and it’s a very dysfunctional one.

You might have seen the TV series Supernanny, where an experienced nanny goes to rescue beleaguered parents from their tearaway children who are running rampant in the house. The story is always the same: the parents start off being stressed, exhausted, short-sighted, confused, impatient and at their wits’ end regarding their children. Their ‘management’ style has usually been either overly disciplinarian and controlling, or overly lax, ineffective and indecisive. The nanny focuses on teaching the parents

Contents