How Active Imagination and the Inner Child Work Together

By: Dr. Denise Renye

Do you ever feel like you’re on autopilot? That you’re not making decisions in your life but instead enacting the same pattern repeatedly with little thought? Or perhaps there’s a certain limiting belief such as “I’m not worthy,” or “I’m not enough,” that your rational brain knows isn’t true but nonetheless feels true? According to Carl Jung, many emotional and mental disorders that keep someone from functioning in society or enjoying life are due to a “soul injury.”

What a soul injury is varies from person to person but one way to heal that soul injury is to access the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind regulates your heartbeat and breathing (among other automatic processes) but it also stores memories and information your conscious mind may not be aware of. The inner child is a part of your unconscious mind, which is why I’ve mentioned before that engaging with inner child work/play may resurrect old memories. Your inner child registered what happened during your childhood and has held onto it even if your adult self forgot.

By employing active imagination, a technique developed by Jung, you are giving your unconscious/inner child a voice. Active imagination is designed specifically to bridge the conscious with the unconscious. It can be applied to dreamwork, psychedelic integration work, and yes, inner child work.

Active imagination is not the same as re-experiencing a memory. It’s not recalling everything that happened to you as a form of escapism. Active imagination is a mechanism for interacting with a part of yourself, be it a person or object in a dream, or in the case of inner child work, your inner kid. By doing so, there is a potential to get unstuck in your life and unleash forgotten desires as well as hidden talents. You are meeting yourself in a new way. Below is a guided exercise based on Robert Johnson’s book Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

The 4-Step Active Imagination Process

Step 1: Invite in your inner child. Slow down and enter into a contemplative state so your child has room to come to the surface. Allow your mind to begin focusing inward to slowly think less about the external world. This may be done by sitting quietly or focusing first on sounds you can hear farther away. Then sounds outside of the building, sounds you can hear inside the building, sounds you can hear inside the room, and finally focusing on the sound and feel of your beating heart. Take a few deep breaths. If your mind gets caught up in thoughts, worries, or ruminations, come back to your breath. Gently calm your mind by refocusing on inviting your inner child or children to come forward. There are children of all ages inside of you. They are welcome here.

Step 2: Dialogue and Experience. When you feel like you’ve made contact with your inner child(ren), you’re ready to begin a dialogue. You’re “giving yourself over to the imagination and letting it flow,” to quote Johnson. It may also be that you’re not imagining something so much as conjuring up an actual memory. Whatever arises, surrender to it and let your inner child(ren) have a life of their own through active imagination.  

Approach your inner child(ren) with gentleness and curiosity. You’re dialoguing and that means allowing space for them to respond (or not). The response may be in the form of an image,  sound, or body sensation. Or it may come through a drawing “from” them to you. Be open. Like many children, perhaps your inner ones don’t want to talk that much or at all! Maybe they want to play! Write down the experience and respond however feels right to you. This could lead to a discussion that reveals deep insights.

Step 3: Add the ethical element of values. You’ve invited your inner child in but that doesn’t mean your inner child is given free rein. It’s your duty as a conscious human being to set boundaries, apply an ethical stance, and be a loving parent. Your child may not be familiar with values like justice, fairness, or protecting the defenseless so it’s your job as the adult to temper their wants and desires. Is there a compromise? Learning compromise is a deep and important part of inner child work.

Step 4: Make it concrete with a physical ritual. Now that you’ve engaged with your active imagination, it’s time to do something concrete and ritualistic. A ritual is a group of actions performed for their symbolic value that are done in a specific order of relevance for the topic at hand. Modern Western society has all but lost the practice of ritual, yet there’s a hunger for it. So much so that one of my offerings is ritual and ceremonial psychology.

In the case of active imagination, you’re making an abstract process real. You’re bringing the unconscious inner child to your physical, earthbound life. Maybe your ritual is painting an image or scene from your experience. A ritual could also be something like drawing a line in the sand and jumping over it to signify you’re ready to move forward with the symbolic, inner work in your outer life. Other options could be dancing, walking, or using a labyrinth.  

It's up to you to determine what feels most appropriate regarding the ritualized portion of your active imagination exercise. It may be tempting to skip this step but resist that temptation because the physical portion is how your experience is made real. It’s how what you learned from your inner child becomes something more than theoretical and turns into something you can take with you, something you can use in your life. It is an integral part of the deep healing that inner child work can have on and in your life.

It could also be that initially you feel you didn’t learn anything from your inner child(ren) and they simply want to spend more time with you. This is great information! They want to build a relationship with you. That is also a worthy endeavor and something to engage with further. You can communicate with your inner child(ren) as much as you’d like, and as with anything, as long as it doesn’t interfere with other areas of your life. Your active imagination can take you far. Where do you want to go?

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Reference

Johnson, Robert. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. New York: Harpercollins, 1986.