Dear Ilyana,

you’re very welcome.

I would really love to find a way to be nicer to myself. It just hurts so much to be always finding fault with myself.

What can help you to be gentler with yourself is to remember that there’s a wounded inner child in you, and when you’re judgmental with yourself, you’re actually judging and condemning her. When the child is in pain, she doesn’t need your scolding but your soothing and compassion. This helped me a lot to develop self-compassion and tone down my harsh inner critic.

I have had lots of therapy before, but this therapist seems to have a very different approach, which is more focused on healing than insight.

I’ve had experience with body-oriented therapy too, and it definitely helps to process emotions and create a new emotional and bodily experience, rather than just staying in my head. Because we may know and understand everything, all the reasons for our trauma, but still be unable to change our behavior. That’s usually because the inner child – who is stuck in the past, in a particular emotional wound – needs to be healed first. For that, we need to get in touch with our inner child and give it a corrective emotional experience, which helps her get unstuck.