When Inner Child Healing Makes God Feel Far Away

You notice it most in the quiet: 

you’re doing “the work,” the hard work, the honest work… 

and God feels farther away than ever.

Not just quieter. Distant. 

Like you’re calling down a hallway that keeps getting longer.

It is disorienting to realize that the more you turn toward old wounds, the less you feel the One you hoped would hold you in them. A part of you thinks, “If I’m finally growing honest with my childhood, shouldn’t I feel closer to God, not abandoned?” 

And yet here you are: raw, exposed, and strangely alone.

Many people doing inner child work eventually reach a similar terrain.

You begin to touch memories you had packed away so deeply you almost convinced yourself they did not matter. The fear in your child body. The shame you learned to carry like a second skin. The lonely places where no one seemed to come.

You name them now: 

the criticism that soaked into you, 

the absence that felt normal because you had no comparison, 

the moments you thought, as a child, “No one sees me.”

When those memories surface, they rarely come alone. They drag along questions you didn’t have language for back then.

Why didn’t anyone protect me? 

Why didn’t anyone notice? 

And under that: Why didn’t God?

It can feel like your faith is coming apart. But what is usually cracking is not God. It is the picture you drew of God with the crayons you were given at five, eight, twelve years old.

When those early pictures are tangled up with your woundings, facing the wounds can make it feel like you’ve lost God altogether.

You haven’t. But it can feel that way for a while.

There is a strange mercy in how the soul works.

When you finally stop running from the child parts of you that are terrified, enraged, or numb, the ground underneath your “spiritual life” can give way. The prayers that used to feel easy now feel hollow or even impossible. Old worship songs ring false. Stories you leaned on for comfort sound like someone else’s entirely.

It can feel like betrayal.

You may notice a new edge in yourself: anger at God, disgust, sarcasm. Or maybe just a flatness. You talk to the ceiling and hear nothing. You go to familiar practices and feel like a stranger.

There is a reflex in many of us to fix this as quickly as we can:

to “believe harder,”

to pray more,

to push past the anger so we can get back to “closeness.”

But that reflex often carries the same message your inner child learned early on: 

“What you really feel is not welcome here. Clean it up first.”

So the soul, sensing that old pattern, sometimes does the opposite. It withdraws its usual sense of warmth and nearness, as if to say:

“If you’re going to come, come as you are. 

Even if ‘as you are’ is furious, confused, or silent.”

What feels like God pulling away can be your own honesty rising.

This is part of why inner child healing hurts in a spiritual way.

You are letting long-buried reality surface. 

Not just facts about what happened, but the truth of how it felt.

The child in you may finally be allowed to say:

“I was lonely.” 

“I was scared.” 

“I was not believed.” 

“I was made responsible for things way too big for me.”

If that child learned, at the time, that God was the One who watched and did not intervene, then turning toward them now brings that image into the light, too.

Of course, your spirit protests:

“If this is who You are, why should I trust You?”

There is an honesty in that question that many people never reach. It can feel like blasphemy from the inside, but it is often the first true prayer some have ever prayed.

There is also the texture of surrender.

Inner child work is not tidy. You cannot manage it with the same tools you used to impress teachers, bosses, or even spiritual mentors. You can’t outperform your way through it.

You might find yourself out of strategies. Old certainties don’t hold. You can’t control the timing of when grief wells up, or when memories come back, or how long the anger lasts.

That loss of control is often what makes people feel most spiritually cut off. Longing for God has been tied, for years, to doing it “right.” When you reach a place where you cannot do it right, only honestly, the whole structure shakes.

Many people in this place echo an old cry: 

“If you’re real, you’re going to have to find me, because I can’t find you.”

It sounds like giving up. 

Sometimes it is the only truthful surrender available.

In that surrender, your pain begins to rhyme with an older story: a man on a cross who cried out that he had been forsaken.

Not as performance. 

Not as metaphor. 

As the truest thing he could say in that moment.

You may not draw that connection directly. You may not be able to touch anything “religious” at all without flinching. That is okay.

But something in your own being knows what a forsaken cry sounds like. And it knows the difference between pretending everything is fine and telling the truth from the deepest wound.

When you let the inner child’s cry be heard, you are not stepping away from the holy. You are stepping into a place where mercy is not sentimental.

It does not rush to explain. 

It does not say, “It all happened for a reason.” 

It does not say, “Be grateful it wasn’t worse.”

Mercy, in that raw place, looks more like someone staying beside you when you are inconsolable and not backing away.

Sometimes, before you can sense God that way, you need at least one human room where that kind of staying is possible.

This is part of why spiritual direction, therapy, or honest friendship can matter so much here.

Not because anyone can make God feel close on command. 

Not because there is a technique that guarantees comfort.

But because having a safe place to say:

“I’m disappointed in God,” 

“I’m furious,” 

“I’m tired of praying into the void,” 

without being corrected or fixed, slowly rewrites something inside.

You begin to discover that your pain is not too much for another human to sit with. Over time, this can soften the belief that it must be too much for God.

In some conversations, the only holy thing that happens is that someone says out loud what their eight-year-old self never could, and a witness nods and says, “Yes. That matters.”

There is no halo on the moment. No epiphany. Just air entering a room that had been sealed for decades.

It is enough for that day.

At some point, you may find that your inner world wants symbols again.

Not the polished ones that used to keep questions at bay, but something smaller, simpler, without pressure.

Many people I sit with find unexpected help in imagination.

Not forcing themselves to picture a shining light or a perfect parent, but starting much closer to where they really are. Sometimes it is enough to imagine a hand in the dark, not fixing anything, just there. Or a quiet pool of water where you can put your feet, even if you cannot bring yourself to get in.

Others sense something like a steady warmth in the center of their chest or back, no matter how stormy everything else feels. They might not even call that “God.” Just “the place in me that has not been destroyed.”

These small images can become like footholds, not answers. Ways of saying, “I am willing to notice if there is any kindness at all inside this mess.”

There are old metaphors people return to for this: 

fire that does not consume, only refines; 

water that does not flood, only cleanses; 

breath that returns when you thought you could not inhale again.

You do not have to force yourself to see any of that. You only have to be honest about what, if anything, helps you loosen by a fraction.

Sometimes it is a word. 

Sometimes it is a picture. 

Sometimes it is silence.

One quiet way of praying, when God feels gone, has nothing to do with speaking.

It sounds more like,

“Here is what is true in me right now,” 

offered without decorating it for a divine audience.

You notice:

the tightness in your throat, 

the weight in your stomach, 

the numbness in your limbs, 

the flicker of longing you wish you could extinguish because it hurts to want anything from God.

And instead of deciding what that means, you just name it:

“This is what is here.” 

For some, that simple naming, done gently and without commentary, becomes the most honest worship they have ever known.

Not worship as adoration, but worship as standing unhidden in front of a Mystery you cannot feel and saying, “I will be honest about my experience.”

Over time, that stance can reveal a different kind of presence: not the high of spiritual closeness, but a deep, steady hum beneath everything.

Enough to keep going.

If you reach for reflective practices, it can help to keep them small and kind.

Instead of trying to reconstruct a strong faith, you might:

Notice one moment in your week when you felt even a millimeter more grateful inside your own skin. 

Hold that moment with curiosity. 

What was happening? 

What shifted? 

Did anything in you feel seen, even briefly?

Or you might sit with a younger version of yourself in imagination and simply ask them, “What do you wish someone had said or done for you?” and let the answer be whatever it is, without trying to fix it with theology.

If spiritual language feels like salt in the wound, you can set it down. The Divine does not disappear when you run out of names. Reality is patient enough to be called nothing for a while.

In time, some people find that the words return on their own, changed. 

Less certain. 

More spacious. 

Less about performance, more about presence.

None of this happens quickly.

Inner child healing touches deep structures: how you learned to survive, how you learned to pray, how you learned to disappear.

When those structures move, everything wobbles. Including your sense of God.

Impatience is natural. You may think, “I’ve been in therapy for a year, why is this still so hard?” or “I’ve done all this spiritual work and feel less connected than before.”

That frustration belongs to the child in you, too. They waited a very long time to be held. It is all right to name that waiting.

If you can, try not to measure your life by whether you feel close to God on any given day. Feelings of distance, in this kind of work, are not verdicts. They are weather.

The deeper movements are slower and harder to see:

you no longer gaslight your own pain as quickly, 

you find yourself setting one boundary you could never have imagined before, 

you sense a little less shame when you need comfort, 

you risk letting someone see your tears.

These are not small things. They are signs that the inner child is being invited into the present, not left to fend for themselves in the past.

Spiritual reality has room for that child. 

Most of us need time to believe that.

So if you are in a season where old wounds are open and God feels absent:

You are not failing. 

You are not “less spiritual” than you used to be. 

You may, in fact, be walking farther into the heart of the mystery than you realize.

You are letting the parts of you that learned to survive without tenderness finally speak. Of course your early images of God will be shaken as they do. Of course your prayers will change. Of course your certainty will crack.

That cracking is not the end of the story. 

But it is part of it. 

For now, it might be enough to whisper, or not whisper at all, and simply allow this:

“I will not pretend this doesn’t hurt. 

If You are here, You know. 

If You are not, this still matters to me.”

Some days, that is all that needs be said.

The work of healing your inner child and the work of spiritual transformation are not two separate journeys. They are one descent, into the same deep place where your truest self and any real sense of God’s presence will eventually meet.

That meeting cannot be scheduled or forced.

But you can keep making room for it by staying with what is real in you, however unfinished, however unruly.

If you’d like gentle accompaniment in that kind of honesty, you can subscribe to future reflections from Essence House.

Live and Lead with Soul,

     Ben Shoup