It seems like a fair question. People work on healing their inner child, which is truly important work for them to heal from deep-seated wounds. But why heal the inner witch child in addition to healing your inner child? Both are centered on taking your inner self and reconnecting with it, but what’s different about trying to heal the inner witch child?
I view the difference being that the usual healing of the inner child is confronting trauma of different levels that impact you as a whole, impacts your relationships, and how you show up in the world. Healing the inner witch child is subtler and easier to miss in the great healing work a therapist can help you do around your inner child or even with your own personal work.
The inner witch child is a powerful connection you can work to reconnect with and heal that leads to a deep belief in yourself and the magic that you lived in as a child. For some, they might not have had a safe place to connect with their inner child in the first place — it’s something they wish they had experienced as a child. Healing their inner witch child is a chance to connect to something they never had but can help strengthen and empower their magical practices.
Sometimes, reconnecting with that side of yourself as that little witch child within sits, forgotten and alone in your internal darkness helps you reconnect to your inner magic, your ability to see divinity everywhere around you in nature, in other people, in simple interactions with the world.
People I have talked to (as well as my own personal experience) can be afraid of our own power and what we are capable of. Sometimes, we used our gifts and were told what we did was bad or wrong. Your inner witch child is that core belief in a magical view of the world that you might have held when anything was possible because magic was real. You knew magic deep inside yourself and could wake up excited about what magical experiences the day would bring.
I feel a part of healing yourself is striving towards authenticity — something that I avoided for a long time because I was afraid (much like my inner witch child was) that people wouldn’t like my authentic self because I didn’t like my authentic self (hence my healing journey). I’ve found that striving for being truly me has helped me connect with more likeminded people than I had before by not being truly who I am.
I feel part of that is my work on my inner child and especially embracing the magic that my inner witch child can help me connect to as well as that sense of awe that children are easily able to experience. That level of awe connects people to the power of the thing they are experiencing, such as seeing an amazing full moon that’s close to the horizon at its biggest, or seeing a wonder in nature such as a redwood tree or the Grand Canyon, or even manmade wonders such as the Notre Dame cathedral or even a captivating piece of art.
The Oxford dictionary defines awe as “feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.” Think back to how many things filled you with awe as a child — how magical did that make the world seem? Seeing a Disney princess or Mickey Mouse in Disney Land or Disney World if you got to experience that was sometimes powerful and emotional when we were little. Seeing someone we had seen in movies or shows in person might have been life changing in a way.
How many of us went back after seeing a figure from a movie or show we loved in person to get home and want to have the toy figures, posters, or somehow try and grasp the awe and magic we experienced in the movie or moment seeing something that filled us with wonder?
That’s realm where your inner witch child thrived — imagination, trusting yourself and your experiences, and being able to see magic everywhere. Then people, usually family, stifled that side of you either due to their own personal wounds or feeling embarrassed to have you expressing yourself authentically as you were, dressed as some figure you strongly identified with. And with that interaction, a little piece of you felt that you were wrong to think or feel that way or maybe it started as a simple questioning of “maybe that isn’t what I thought it was.”
Overtime, many of us want to fit in rather than stay true to who we are, so we put our little witch child into a corner of our mind and try to be accepted by whatever society we are in.
Yet somehow, that little witch child nudged you or pulled you into the direction of believing in magic on some level again. Something happened or some conversation made you pause and be curious about what magic could do for you and your life.
Once you’ve started on the path you are on, for many including myself, it becomes a battle between your faith in how your inner witch child saw and still can see the world versus your rational mind which is impacted by society and fitting in.
What I’m hoping to do for myself and you all following along is to be able to welcome our inner witch child sides into a state of co-creation, where they will feel safe enough to reignite that sense of awe, magic, and wonder you could regain as well as the older, adult side of you that can make sure to protect that innocent side of yourself.
