Shelley Klammer

Inner Child Therapy Worksheets

“We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.”

~ Serina Hartwell

I loved creating my Inner Child Therapy Worksheets and I invite you to enjoy the art journal exploration excerpted from the worksheets below.

Because negative emotions become trapped in the body, you might only able to keep a life-affirming statement running in your mind for a few minutes before you revert back to your habitual negative self-talk. Commonly known as positive affirmations, statements such as, "I love myself," do not often take hold when you are holding onto trapped inner child emotions.

Finding the "antidote" statement that will change the structure of your emotional body is essential to emotional healing. Yet, you must take care not to simply wallpaper a new positive judgment over top of a negative judgment. It is important to release negative emotions first to make room for new positive truths to take hold.

After negative emotions are released, an antidotal healing statement will usually arise from your true self. Once you find a healing statement that has a strong positive energy charge of truth, you are likely going to need to practice saying this new truth all day, every day, for at least a month or more.

Sometimes it takes well over a month, and even a year or more to reverse a lifetime of conditioned inner child negativity. Saying, "I love who I am." Or, "I am worthy of love," over and over until it becomes a regular believed truth in your muscles, cells, body organs and tissues takes time, practice and effort.

Art Journal Exploration - Finding Your Inner Child's Power Statement

Paint a background in your art journal that expresses your inner child's sense of innocence, hope and power. Sense into where your body feels pain and ask it, "What do you need to hear in order to feel better?" You will have one or more inner child "power statements" that fill your body with energy, hope, strength. Once you hear your body's affirmative message, write it down on your painted background.

Embellish your inner child's power statement with details and images, and spend time repeating it, looking at it, and asking it to find a home within your body. Imagine this new power statement flowing in through the top of your head and filling your body with colour, light, and healing.

Excerpted from Inner Child Therapy Worksheets

Expressive Poetry

An Intuitive Poetry Journal is Experimental

I invite you to begin a very easy spontaneous creative practice and to take a journey deep into your body's spontaneous wisdom. In my one year expressive art and writing course, you will be invited to develop an experimental, intuitive journal, and fill it up with free form words and imagery. In this journal, I will encourage you to meditate upon the poetry of your mysterious inner life.

Set aside five minutes each day to quickly pull an image that feels strong for you, and to try your hand at an intuitive poem. This simple daily way of expressing is an amazingly powerful process. If you do not have the inclination to write a poem - try cutting out some random words from a book or a magazine that you feel drawn to. Arrange the words in a spontaneous way - and voilà - an intuitive poem! 

This simple daily entry in your expressive art journal will help you to see how simply and clearly your intuition guides you over time. The imagery that you choose will speak of your emotional life, even if you do not consciously know what it is trying to tell you just yet. Finding a few words for your imagery will help you begin to further develop a conscious language for your emotional landscape.

I developed this simple creative practice during a period of my life when I felt exhausted and depressed. We often do not want to do anything when we are depressed because frozen emotional pain is a stagnating state. Inviting something new each day shifts can shift your inner state.

Because I was working full time when I created this practice, and I know that the process works for busy people too. It is all too easy to allow our lives to fall into a dull, practical routine. We forget to see life freshly. We become creatures of comfort and habit and do not invite ever-creative newness to shake up our lives.

Whether you are struggling with deep emotional overwhelm or are simply bored with your practical life, this course is for you. To create a different emotional state, it is helpful to work in your journal consistently over the next ten days. If you do, your body will accustom itself to use that sacred time to go deeper and tune in to your emotional world.