Allie Beth Stuckey

It's not something that we should follow.

Again, we inherited our sin from Adam.

And so we are depraved inside.

We don't have a beautiful, perfect inner goddess.

We are sinners who need to be saved.

And so this journey to finding the untainted, perfect divine self inside of us is a losing battle.

that actually will just encourage more self-focus, which is the thing that is oppressing and trapping us, not the thing that's going to liberate us.

The Jungian concept of the inner child really moved beyond psychology circles and into mainstream awareness in the 1990s.

It was

largely through the influence of an American counselor named John Bradshaw.

In 1992, Bradshaw published Homecoming, and it became a New York Times bestseller.

And in that book, he argued that the inner child carries unmet emotional needs, that individuals could begin healing from mental trauma by re-parenting themselves.

So that's a lot of what we're seeing on TikTok.

Bradshaw's message reached an even wider audience through frequent television appearances.

And he, of course, was on Oprah.

And he guides her through a reparenting exercise.

Okay, so that is how that concept was kind of driven into the mainstream.

And you can see Oprah's audience is female.

And there's a reason why this resonates more with women than it does with men.

Because we are more empathetic, because we are more emotional, we are more in touch with those childhood memories and more susceptible to this idea that we have an inner child that is in us that needs to be reparented and reloved.