Is Your Inner Child Lost Or Wounded? Here's A Quiz To Find Out & What To Do

We all have an inner child. It's that part of ourselves that represents our childlike wonder, joy, creativity, and enthusiasm—but it can also carry years of baggage, trauma, and emotional wounds.

And sometimes, when the burden of that baggage is too heavy to bear, our inner child gets "lost," or otherwise disconnected from our conscious mind. We may feel out of touch with that sense of wonder and joy, as well as from our own needs all together.

To lose your inner child means to become disconnected to the childlike qualities within yourself, like joy and excitement, as well as the memories and experiences from childhood that have shaped who you are.

When our inner child feels safe and content, we're happy, playful, and relaxed. When our inner child feels neglected or lost, on the other hand, it acts out in self-sabotaging ways to get your attention—just like a child would!

As licensed psychotherapist Babita Spinelli, that can look like difficulty with close relationships, unhealthy coping mechanisms, staying in toxic situations, people-pleasing, dissociation, emotional reactivity, and much more. Essentially, when your inner child is lost, it's easy to get stuck in a perpetual cycle of neglecting them even more.

The more lost your inner child becomes, the more you will feel lost as a result.

If the quiz results indicate your inner child is lost or wounded, don't get down on yourself. It happens to the best of us!

As Spinelli explains, anything from daily life stressors to huge life-altering trauma can impact our inner child—and how connected we feel to them. But we also lose touch with our inner child if we don't make room for fun, playfulness, and joy in our adult lives, she says.

Focusing on only your work identity, for example, can disconnect you from your inner child, and so can repressing your needs in a relationship. You could be carrying limiting beliefs from childhood that impact your decisions, or even have a hard time identifying your emotions and needs in the first place.

As such, Spinelli explains, "It’s important to understand and prioritize our values. The impact of not doing so results in neglecting our inner child."

In short, a number of factors can push your inner child away, but as an innate part of who you are, they're never too far gone.

Simply acknowledging the existence of your inner child, according to Spinelli, is an excellent place to start on the path to healing and reconnecting with them. She suggests affirmations, self compassion, and journaling as a simple way to introduce the idea of your inner child back into your daily life.

As aforementioned, sometimes our inner child feels ostracized because we simply take ourselves too seriously. Sure, we're not kids anymore, but we can still make room for fun and play!

As professional intuitive and author of Empath Heart, Tanya Carroll Richardson previously wrote for mindbodygreen, a surprisingly healing thing to do for your inner child is give them what they couldn't have when you were younger.

"One of the difficulties of childhood is that we are largely reliant on others. If finances and stability were an issue for you growing up, prioritize action steps that create more earthly resources in your life," Richardson writes.

A lost or wounded inner child will often manifest as feeling out of touch with your emotions all together, or oppositely, like your emotions are out of control. Learning to identify, express, and manage emotions is essential for your inner child to feel validated, but also safe to express themselves.

"Taking care of painful feelings reconnects us to our inner child," Spinelli notes, adding that journaling, meditation and therapy are all helpful tools to notice, acknowledge, and reconnect with those feelings. "Once we can process those feelings, we can work on taking steps to make healthy changes," she says.

And as Richardson adds, inner child work also involves identifying childhood wounds, which can definitely bring up a lot of emotions. So be gentle and kind with yourself, she says.

While a big part of inner child work is learning how to "re-parent" yourself (AKA take care of yourself like a caregiver would), don't feel like you have to do it all alone.