The concept of the "inner child" typically refers to the part of ourselves that felt unloved and unimportant during childhood. This inner child embodies trauma, pain, and a desire for love and appreciation.

As children, we yearned to feel loved and connected to our caregivers. We sought their approval and often tried hard to please them to earn their love. When we didn't feel important or loved by them, we carried that sense of neglect into adulthood, where we continue seeking love and acceptance.

Even as adults, we continue to pursue love and significance, seeking the nurturing and validation that we lacked as children from our loved ones. This desire to feel loved and treated as we wished to be treated in childhood can complicate our roles as parents. Without realizing it, we may want our children to fulfill our unmet emotional needs. We hope they will obey us and succeed in validating our importance to them. Consequently, when they engage in behaviors we disapprove of, we may interpret these actions as a sign of a lack of love for us.

In this podcast, we aim to raise awareness among parents about the importance of giving rather than receiving. We need to examine our relationship with our children to ensure we aren't expecting them to please us to feel loved. Additionally, we should refrain from punishing them as a means of expressing our feelings of unworthiness or lack of importance.

We discuss the significance of compassion for our well-being and the value of maintaining good relationships with others. Being unkind to ourselves contributes to unhappiness and reduces our productivity. Blaming ourselves or forcing ourselves to meet expectations drains the energy we need for the things we genuinely want to do.

Additionally, we examine how childhood experiences influence our self-care in adulthood. If we were treated harshly by our caregivers, we may struggle with self-kindness as adults, which can also affect how we interact with our loved ones.

In this podcast, we explore how childhood influences our sense of worth. Not feeling loved and connected to our caregivers during childhood makes us think we must perform to be accepted. This causes many people to work hard to achieve their goal of being loved and accepted. Unfortunately, this never happens, and they continue pursuing this goal their entire lives.

If you had a traumatic childhood, you dream about having a different experience in your adulthood. You would like to find love and feel safe in the hands of your significant other. However, your trauma may often stand in the way of finding happiness. You may have difficulty trusting your partner, and you may have developed coping skills that might hurt your partner.

This podcast discusses the tendency to project the image of the people who hurt us in our childhood onto our partners. This can lead to attacking them as if they were our enemies, which can cause them to become defensive and confirm our fears that we cannot trust them.

The good news is that traumas are not set in stone. Our brains are plastic, and we can learn to trust our loved ones and heal our inner child. We have helped many couples overcome their childhood trauma and have better relationships. We invite you to join us in this quest to understand how the wounds you carry from your childhood affect your present relationships and how you can overcome them to find happiness and connection.

We all dream about having a great relationship with a loved one. We think the ideal relationship is one where there isn't any disagreement, or at least disagreements are rare. In this podcast, we show how even the best relationships have disagreements. The hallmark of a good relationship isn't the absence of disagreements but the ability to repair. When we disagree and feel disconnected from our partner, our ability to repair will make all the difference. Reaching out to our partners and taking responsibility for hurting them helps us reconnect.

In this episode, we discuss people's tendency to think that their worth depends on external circumstances. We explain that our worth does not depend on our condition, money, beauty, or accolades.

The concept of authority is frequently confused with harshness and power. The “authoritative” person places themselves in a position of superiority and shows others who is the boss. This causes people to feel humiliated and disrespected. The result is that people either resist defiantly or comply for fear of consequences.

We receive these messages about authority from our caretakers in our childhood. Many of us were treated from a top-down position by them. We felt hurt, but we learned from them and did the same as they did to us. We pass down to the next generation what was passed down to us. We don't remember how we felt hurt and humiliated by this kind of treatment, and we lose the ability to be empathic to our children and subordinates.

In this video, Tricia and I introduce a different type of authority. One that is born from a deep sense of respect and belief in the good of the other person. We focus mainly on parenting and how we can change the narrative of power and force to kindness and respect.

In this edition of the Thriving Your Love Podcast, Shalini Dayal, MFT, and Natasha Kharbanda, LCSW, speak about their work and how they have shared their knowledge of EFT and John Gottman with therapists in India and other countries.