In this interview with Kristine Czilling Tørå we talk about inner child work and explore how she first overcame anxiety and then started the anxiety portal which now helps hundreds of people all over Norway.
Anxiety controlled her life
In 2013 when Kristine had finished her education, she moved to the countryside feeling ready to start her adult life. She received an internship with an exciting employer, but after just two weeks she couldn’t even cross the doorstep into the workspace.
She started having panic attacks and didn’t understand what was happening to her. After seeing her doctor, she ended up being away from work on sick leave for four years.
Everything was dark and intense, and she felt her life was over.
Every single feeling at the same time
Kristine explains that she experienced her anxiety as chaos, she had every feeling possible inside her body all at once; she was dizzy, had a heavy feeling inside, she thought she was going to die, and she felt extremely scared.
When she figured out she was on the wrong path in life, many things fell into place.
Inner child work
While she was sick Kristine spent a lot of time researching ways to heal herself. She came across inner child work, a method for working through your childhood trauma.
She started to see patterns in her own life and how she’s struggled with anxiety from a very early age.
Kristine says it’s difficult to grow up as an emotional being in our world. Children are supposed to not feel their difficult feelings and sometimes get punished for doing so. The result is that we start pushing away the parts of us that are angry, sad or jealous.
Inner child work is working on the programming that happened back then, when you didn’t feel good enough, left out or belittled
Inner child work and shadow work are the same
In this interview, Kristine explains to us how inner child work and shadow work are the same thing. She also lets us know that the shadows we have as adults would not be an issue for us if there weren’t trauma from our childhood triggering it.
If you resist your emotions, they will just grow bigger and bigger. That’s often why you stay depressed, Kristine says.
Our emotions are never wrong!
As a child, our inner compasses are working without failure giving us our true emotions whenever we feel something. We do not worry whether it’s the right emotion or not.
But as we grow and our caretakers tell us to stop feeling angry or to stop crying, “it’s nothing to cry about”, we start feeling wrong.
We start talking negatively to ourselves whenever we feel an unaccepted feeling and our compasses stop working the way they should work
Emotional neglect
Many of us have had good childhoods and we can’t really pinpoint why we as adults have these difficult emotions or why we experience anxiety. However, more and more, we are starting to talk about emotional neglect and how our parents may not have met us or seen us the way we needed to be seen. The result of that is that we often lack self-love, self-esteem and self-confidence.
Kristine says that we need to remember there’s always a reason we feel the way we do and we should start practicing being in our emotions. We are not wrong, we are great emotional beings of this world.
About Kristine Czilling Tørå
Kristine is a special Educator and specializes in Anxiety. She helps people to defeat anxiety by focusing om trauma and creating emotional safety. She started Angstportalen.no, which is a membership site, to help other overcome their anxiety. She also have years of self-experienced anxiety. Kristine is also one of our masterclass teachers in Wisdom From North Membership where she teaches the class: Heal your childhood programming
Links & Resources
Kristine Czilling Tørå’s website
Wisdom From North Membership
