This article was published in the blog section of the College of Psychic Studies
The inner child & the illusion of separation
College of Psychic Studies tutor Giancarlo Serra explains why traditional inner child work often loops back without lasting change, and what lies beneath it…
By: Giancarlo Serra. Posted Wednesday 23rd September 2026
The happiness we’re conditioned to chase
If you’ve done inner child work before – sitting with that wounded part of yourself, trying to comfort and reparent the inner child – and still find yourself looping back to the same old patterns under stress, this is for you. There’s a reason that inner child work so often stalls, and it has to do with something deeper than the wound itself.
The root illusion of separation and the construct of the inner child are not two separate psychological phenomena. They are the same mechanism, viewed at different levels of depth.
The birth of separation
A sense of separation arises when the boundless state of being contracts, or identifies with an individual form, during early development. This creates the illusion that a separate “me” exists inside a body, with everything else on the outside. That perceived separation brings a sense of loss, and it is this loss that triggers the need to seek. The inner child is simply the energetic memory and habituation of that original contraction – it is the very shape that “who we are” first took when wholeness contracted into a self.
