In Transactional Analysis (TA) or in therapy sessions, we often talk about the “inner child” as if it’s a single part of us formed in our early years. But in reality, it’s much more layered than that. Inside our Child part sits another, smaller structure with several distinct parts, each still active in us today. Understanding these parts individually is useful in itself and this piece introduces them. The next one will look at how they work together.

For now, I’d like to introduce them one at a time.

The Witch Parent

A.K.A ‘pig parent’, ‘magical parent’, ‘fairy godmother’, and the ‘electrode’ with TA literature.

The witch parent. And no, not your actual parent on this occasion. The witch parent is an internalised, exaggerated version of the rules and warnings you absorbed and picked up as a child. All of those “shoulds”, “musts”, and “don’ts” picked up from the people around you transformed into rules for survival. Alongside these rules come fantasies about what would happen if we didn’t follow them and these fantasies usually involve abandonment, annihilation or catastrophe. The voice of the witch parent is usually harsher than any real caregiver was. This is a reflection of a voice that has developed from an under-resourced child, usually imagining the worst.

The Natural Child, the “Somatic Child”

This part holds your authentic feelings, needs and impulses. As a child, some of these spontaneous needs may have felt risky to express, if they threatened closeness with a caregiver. For example, a child experiences sadness, and the caregiver tells them to not be sad, or not to cry, otherwise the caregiver becomes frustrated or annoyed. A child might learn that it is not ok to be sad and will therefore hold back sharing that emotion in future. In response, the Witch Parent treats these needs as dangerous, meeting them with fear, shame or anger, in an attempt to keep the Natural Child safe from an imagined consequence.

The Little Professor

Between the two sits the Little Professor — the child’s creative problem-solver. Its job is to answer an impossible question: how do I meet my own needs while staying connected to the people I depend on? Using intuition and a fair amount of magical thinking, it develops adaptive strategies — often suppressing needs or hiding parts of the self to avoid a feared, usually fantasised, parental response. The same strategies that once kept a child safe often carry forward as real strengths in adulthood: creativity, intuition, social awareness, and an ability to read a room (to name a few!).

Why does this matter?

These three parts form early, and gradually. They don’t form in a single moment, but through repeated relational experiences and because they’re built in childhood, they don’t offer rational adult guidance. They’re survival adaptations, usually built by a child doing something genuinely intelligent with limited information. But living by these rules with their imagined consequences can be what leave us feeling stuck during adulthood, and these rules and responses can work against us as we attempt to move forward. These might be some of the things that we begin to look at in therapy, and get curious about, without the self-criticism, so that we can begin to make different choices about how we want to be in the world.