EP 156: How Childhood Wounds Secretly Run Your Business (And How to Heal Them

What if the overwhelm, the burnout, the fear of raising your prices, or the paralysis around hitting “post” on your next offer…
isn’t a strategy problem?

What if the parts of your business that feel the heaviest—the patterns you can’t seem to outgrow—are actually coming from the younger versions of you still trying to keep you safe?

In this episode, Jessica Read unpacks the unseen ways your inner child is silently shaping your business decisions, and how healing these parts of you is the missing piece to unlocking sustainable growth, ease, and expansion.

What You’ll Take Away:

✔️ Why no amount of mindset work will stick if your inner child still feels unsafe.
✔️ How childhood wounds are showing up in real-time through undercharging, burnout, perfectionism, and fear of visibility.
✔️ How to begin reparenting these younger parts of you so you can lead from grounded, sovereign wholeness.

This episode is your permission slip to stop forcing and start healing—because your business can only grow to the level your nervous system feels safe to hold.

Brain, body and business experience for female founders ready for their income to finally match their expertise.

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Transcript

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1:55

Welcome to Resourced with Jessica Read. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and a luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here, we unlock the magic of inner alignment. emotional mastery and energetic strategies so you can lead with clarity, confidence and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more and it all starts here.

jess_2_03-03-2025_120913 2:41

/What if the overwhelm, the burnout, the fear of raising your prices or the paralysis around pressing publish on your latest offer isn't actually about mindset or strategy or clarity? What if the parts of your business that feel the heaviest, the parts that keep looping and staying stagnant and repeating the same patterns, no matter how much you work on them. What if they are actually your inner child, still holding on, still protecting you, still trying to keep you safe. Today, we are not just talking about why you feel stark, we are talking about the younger versions of you who are silently shaping your business and how to finally give them the safety that they need so that you can actually achieve the things that you want to achieve as your adult self. Welcome to Resourced. This is the sacred space where we dissolve the invisible walls that keep you small. Where we build businesses that don't just look good on paper, but feel expansive, nourishing, and deeply authentic. And this conversation today is deeply personal, because I was actually asked to speak On a podcast last week about this topic, and it is something that I am currently going through again, because even now, as someone who guides other women through this healing work. I am still noticing when my own inner child is showing up in my life and in my business, and obviously both, like it's going to impact both. And right now, and I can't wait to share, I can't wait, but I will share more details about what it is that I am going through when I am on the other side of it. But right now I am currently working through deeply ingrained patterns that have been showing up for me over and over again since I was a child. Since I was super, super little, I now see how these patterns have been showing up in my teenage life, in my relationships, in my adult life, and now in my business as well. I believe in timing. I believe in layers. I believe that all of the work that I have done previously has led me to being ready to deal with this. And now that this has come to light, oh, it's a big one for me. It is a really big one for me. And I'm beginning to understand, you might have heard me talk a couple of weeks ago, But how I've been navigating cortisol dysregulation and other things going on in my body and in my life and in my world, I now understand why I've been led to this point because this pattern. is huge. And this pattern is driven by my inner child showing up to run my adult life. So in my client's experiences, this might look like overgiving inside of offers. These are things that they might come to me for which we always lead back to that inner child. Overgiving inside of offers. Hesitating to share things that feel vulnerable, hesitating to be seen, hesitating to raise prices. And every time we follow back that thread in our sessions, in our work together, we will be led back to an inner child. And perhaps that's the girl who learned that being too much wasn't safe, or the girl who learned that she earned love by care, taking care of everyone else. Or the girl who believed that success required sacrifice. So if you've been spinning in self doubt, if you've been overworking, procrastinating on launching something that you know is meant to come through, this episode is for you. Because maybe you feel like you've exhausted all options and you still Can't move forward. And this does not mean that you're bad at business. It does not mean the universe is trying to tell you that you shouldn't be doing this thing. It probably means you have an internal block to explore. And when you are operating from subconscious survival patterns, no amount of strategy is going to override that. Until those younger parts of you feel safe, you will keep circling the same plateaus. And trust me, I know this. It is it is true in everybody that I have worked with. It is true within my own patterns, no matter how much you work on your mindset. So through the rest of this episode today, we are going to chat about how your inner child is running parts of your business without you even realizing it. We are going to chat about the very real ways that old wounds show up in pricing, visibility, and overworking and burnout. And we are going to start to explore how you can begin to reparent those parts so that you can lead your business grounded. Sovereign whole and if we haven't met hi My name is Jessica. I am an intuitive business mentor and alternative therapist and I support solid entrepreneurs to build spacious Sustainable success by healing the emotional roots of self doubt scarcity burnout and fear in my work We are not just Adjusting your business model. We are calibrating your nervous system. We are releasing subconscious stories. We are integrating the inner child parts that are silently pulling the strings behind your business. You have heard me say time and time again, your business can only grow to the capacity that you can hold. And this involves your inner child. So let's talk about what the inner child actually is and why does it matter in business. So today we're going to talk a lot about this from a business context, because I know you're listening to this thinking, how can I grow? Why aren't I growing? Why am I? I'm stuck. How do I move forward through all of this? Let's look at your inner child. Let's look at how these patterns that maybe you've learned as a child is showing up now in your adult life and impacting your business. So psychologically, your inner child is the part of you that carries the emotional imprints, the unmet needs, the protective strategies that you developed in your childhood. So by around about the age of 7, so from 0 to 7 approximately, we are primarily functioning from our theta brainwave. I want you to imagine that is like a sponge. So by around the age of 7, your subconscious mind has already decided what is safe. Has decided how to receive love. Has decided what it takes for you to belong. Now when it is making these decisions, then two people in the same household are going to have very different experiences because it is so individualized. Because when it is making these decisions, it is not making decisions based on a logical thinking, analytical mind. It is making these decisions based on how you feel. And so let's say for example, and I'll just give a really broad example here, let's say you have A parent who works really long hours and we know as adults now that they are doing that because they have to pay mortgages, they have to keep, food on the table. They have little flexibility potentially in their job. Like we understand this logically as adults and we can look back on our childhood and we can logic things because I want to be really clear here. You don't have to have had a traumatic childhood to have had unmet needs. Okay? You could look back and think, my parents are great. I had a really safe childhood. But again, you don't have to have had a traumatic childhood to have unmet needs. So your younger self is going to make an emotional, sorry, an egocentric interpretation around how they emotionally feel. So again, let's say you've got a parent who's working really long hours and that parent comes home and it's seven o'clock and they're really tired and you haven't seen them all day. You're four years old and you just want to play with mom and dad or mom or dad. You're begging that parent, let's play, let's do a puzzle, let's, and they're like no, dinner, bath, bed, and you feel dismissed. Maybe you feel unloved, maybe you feel unseen. Maybe you're trying to share about your day and they are not able to give you that emotional support. Because again, they're coming, they're rushing dinner, it's, we've got to get everything ready for bed, and get up and do it all again the next day, and we've all been there at times. But that child is going to make assumptions about themselves, about their place in this world, based on how they feel. And when those circumstances are repeated we can imagine the stories that come through. I am not lovable. Nobody cares about me. I am not as good as my sister gets A's and I don't and they celebrate her. Therefore, I'm not worthy of celebrating. I am not as loved as she is. Thinking about, again, these not Logical, emotionally based conclusions that you are coming to about yourself and about how you belong, about how you are loved, about what is safe. Maybe you grew up watching your parents argue about money or crying when they couldn't pay the bills and you then put your own interpretations on that. Maybe you watch people growing up with certain coping strategies. In resource therapy, we understand that these parts are a stuck ego. They are stuck ego states. These are younger parts of you that hold these old survival strategies. And they reactivate. During moments of risk, during moments of exposure, so all this time that you've been thinking, Oh, I'm afraid to launch this program because, the economy is bad and I better not undercharge because sorry, I better undercharge because yeah, whatever your reasons are. Believing that you're burning out because you're bad at boundaries. These are all adaptive patterns that are replaying from your childhood, that are protecting you in your business in the same way. That they believe they protected you in your family system. And so healing begins when we stop trying to push through and we start making those parts feel safe. And you will hear me refer, particularly you'll notice if you work with me, you will hear me refer to that inner child all the time as a part. Because we have multiple parts of our personality that can come forward. Parts that can come forward and re parent that child. Parts that can come forward and run our adult life, but because this inner child part believes that she is keeping you safe, these are survival strategies. If that child does not feel safe to be seen, to be heard, and you here as the adult are going, Hey, we're going to get on an Instagram live and we're going to sell this offer and we're going to speak on this podcast, or I'm going to stand up on a stage in front of a thousand people. And that inner child is going, hang on a minute. This is not how we stay safe. We stay safe by being quiet. We stay safe by whatever it is. Looking at your schooling experiences, looking at your home experiences, this starts to show up and impact what you want to do in your adult life. So let's have a little bit of a look more specifically around how child wounds could secretly be running your business. So things like fear of visibility. This could be a fear of judgment. And this could look like you avoiding showing your face. It could look like you avoiding speaking in your authentic voice. I really, I have an episode, it's quite a while back, might have to find it around layers of authenticity. Layers of visibility, sorry. Because I believe that there is a layer of being able to show up and then there is a layer of being able to show up with your authentic voice that takes a whole nother crack open. And then we get to these layers where we start sharing really deeply, personally, being really seen for our warts and all inside out. And that is a whole nother layer of visibility. And on each of those layers, You will likely have stories and fears and childhood experiences that are keeping you stuck. So maybe this also looks like editing and re editing your content over and over again. Overthinking captions before you post. Delaying launches because just the thought of being seen feels too dangerous. And so something like this might be rooted in experiences of childhood shame or criticism or feeling like you're too much. And then let's look at perfectionism in business. This could be fear of not being enough. And this might show up as holding back offers that aren't perfect. It might show up as Spending weeks tweaking things that no one else will ever notice. Believing that you need to prove yourself with a flawless delivery. That was me. This might be rooted, and again, everyone's got their own individual experiences, but just to give you a little bit of an idea, this might be rooted in conditional love. Maybe it was tied to achievement. Or maybe you perceived it was tied to achievement. Or tied to good behavior. And then let's look at overgiving. Overgiving is seeking approval, over delivering in programs to the point of depletion, fears that clients will be dissatisfied, needing to constantly have validation externally, struggling to hold those clear boundaries for yourself. This could be rooted in childhood experiences, for example, of earning love through caretaking. Fear of charging. This could be a worthiness wound. This might look like un pricing your offers, under pricing your offers, sorry. Feeling guilty about raising your prices, discounting before anyone even asks. This could be rooted in growing up around financial scarcity, or conflict, or shame around money. And then let's look at burnout. This could be tied to hyper independence, where you're doing everything yourself, where you're resisting support. Where you believe that you can only rest after you've earned it. And maybe this is rooted in childhood roles that required you to be the strong one, or the caretaker, or some, how you witnessed a parent. So these aren't random behaviors. They're nervous system responses that are keeping you safe, keeping you loved, keeping you accepted, or so you think, just like they did when you were a child. And until we can reparent these parts, they will keep leading when they are reactivated. So how do we even begin to heal our inner child? I think the first thing is really about awareness. It really is about having this awareness. And I was asked on this podcast, how do we know when the inner child is showing up? I think it's really safe to ask yourself, what sensations are happening in my body? Does this feel comfortable? Does it feel safe? Does this feel like a scarcity or a fear based sensation? What, where am I meeting patterns of resistance, patterns of stagnation? Looking at all of these areas in your life, looking at the behaviors like some of the ones that we just spoke about a moment ago, looking at these areas in your life, And then realizing that you have a core belief that is driving that you have a core belief that is driving that behavior, that pattern, and that core belief is stored in your body mind so we can connect him with our body and we can locate where it is and we can then use that as a tool to explore what it is that needs to be healed. And you can do that through so many modalities. There is not one right or wrong way. If you work with me, we will explore it through things like EFT, through somatic practices, energy practices. We will explore it through hypnosis. If you work with a psychotherapist, you might explore it through other cognitive behavioral ways of exploring your mind. There are so many ways that you can explore this, if you choose to work with someone. And that is about choosing the right therapies, or maybe it's a combination of therapies. I know for me, I have, I work with a very, at the moment, I work with a very clinical based therapy, and then I also work with a very feeling based therapy, very experiential. And that's where we bring in the somatic practices, that's where we bring in the other aspect. I'm combining both. I'm combining both because that is what I know that I need right now. I need a clinical understanding of how everything is happening in my brain, as well as That holistic somatic practice. You might look at things like EFT tapping, where we clear the fear around visibility, worth, safety to receive. And if you want to do this on your own, this might look like tapping and saying something like, even though a part of me is afraid to be seen, I deeply love and accept myself. You might look at somatic practices, so this is learning how to ground safely into the body. Connecting with that inner child, getting a sense of how old is this sensation in your body and just seeing it. It is safe to be seen. It is safe for me to feel this. I am here. I am listening. Beginning to just connect in with that part of you, that part of you who is coming forward and she is saying, Hey, this isn't safe. How would you deal with a child if that was the case? And I really do recommend as you get deeper into this work to be held by somebody. Okay. I'm happy to talk about whether that could be me. I'm happy to give you recommendations of people I work with, find the right person, be held by someone. But if you are working on your own and things that you can do daily to start to heal that child, to start to reparent that child, That's asking yourself simply the question if that was my child or a child on the street or that I can, that a friend's child, whoever. And I saw them feeling ashamed, feeling sad, feeling guilty, feeling scared. What would I do and say to that child? Because that is likely what your child needs to hear. And so it's not saying, alright, come on, let's get over this now, we're a grown up. Suck it up and let's go. That is saying no, it's okay. You're okay. You're safe. I'm here with you. We're going to do this together. Take my hand. Let me help you. And sometimes it's just simply hands over the place where you feel that discomfort and just saying it is safe for me to insert what you're going through. It's safe for us to be seen. It's safe for us to succeed. It's safe for us to receive. There are some journaling prompts that you can explore as well that I can give you now. So what did I crave the most as a child that I didn't receive? So what is it that child is trying to receive? Does she feel abandoned? And she feels like she needs love and maybe she's adapted some not so healthy coping strategies to maintain that love. Maybe she needs to feel heard. So often we have trouble expressing our voice when our inner child feels like it is not safe for her to be heard. Maybe the way that she is dealing with stress and challenges in, sorry, maybe the way that You are currently dealing with stress and challenges in your life and your business. Is it not overly effective? And that is rooted in an inner child who does not know how to deal with challenging emotions. Who does not know how to deal with big feelings. Who has not modelled how to deal with imperfection. I don't know. They're all so individualised to you. So journalling, asking yourself, what did I crave most as a child that I didn't receive? How is that longing driving my business behaviours now? What would I say to that child within me, who is afraid to lead, be seen, be heard? And then let's get to rewriting that story. You could again, journal this out, you could do this with tapping. Reframing, I have to earn love to, my presence is enough. Reframing, I can't rest until it's perfect, to I'm allowed to rest now, it is actually essential and productive. Reframing, I have to do it alone, to I am supported in every way. You get to reframe your story. So as always, I have some reflection questions for you as we become to the end of this episode. And I would love for you to start to look out for yourself and I'll pop these in the show notes. Where is my business being run by an old story from my childhood? What part of me is craving safety, not strategy? And how would my business change if I let my healed self lead? Now, if this episode spoke to you, then I would love for you to explore my resources. They are down in the show notes. Have a look at how we can work together. I have an upcoming program that is so beautifully focused on embodying. That version of yourself who already is successful and in a child work is going to be a big part of that. I have two ways that we can work privately together through ongoing retainer, where we really get to go deep into who you are and make those transformations, or through a one off intensive. We also have the Transcendence Mastermind where we work on you and your business, all in the one beautiful container. Now, if you are feeling like you would like to share something with me personally, I would love to hear it. So feel free to pop over to Instagram. Let me know that you have listened to this episode. If you have had an aha moment, if something has dropped in for you, if there is a recurring pattern and I just want you to be aware, go back and listen to the episode around sabotaging because these patterns aren't necessarily always just going to be things like, I get to the same income ceiling. These might be things like I can't let go of this illness. I live with chronic headaches. I keep going back to old patterns of emotional coping. I want you to look at your life as a holistic picture. When you are starting to look at what patterns might be here, that are being driven with this inner child at the window. I like to think of my forehead as a window looking out into the world, and there is this part of me that has come forward. This part of me who is going, Oh, okay, no this is not how we do things. This is not how things are for you, Jess. We need to bring in another part then, we need to find a way, and there is a technique that I actually use called the de trauma technique, it is a trademark technique that I am qualified in, where we perform an inner child rescue. Because sometimes what that child has experienced is traumatic, has activated a response within her or him that really believes that the world is not safe. That you are not safe. So as we wrap up for today, I want to leave you with this. You are not behind, you are not broken, you are not bad at business. You are just still protecting the parts of you that didn't get what they needed. And in the moment that you start to make those parts feel safe, so that they can release their grip, so they can stop driving that bus, so they can get back to the back and do the things that a child is meant to do. It is not your child's job to run your business. It is not your inner child's job to show up in your relationships. It is not your inner child's job to parent your children. But as you start to do this work, as you start to realize this, everything gets lighter. Everything gets easier.

28:36

Thank you for tuning into Resource with Jessica Read. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced, stay radiant, and trust in the magic that is you.