The Five Stages of Healing: How Inner Child Work Transforms Wellness Practitioners and Their Clients

Anat Peri, an inner child expert and mentor to wellness practitioners, runs the Training Camp for the Soul—a certification program teaching practitioners how to integrate body and mind work for deep client transformation. Her methodology bridges the gap between somatic practices and mindset work, offering a structured five-stage healing process that identifies exactly where clients are and how to support them through completion.

Her Instagram is @anat.peri, and her website trainingcampforthesoul.com offers resources for both practitioners wanting to deepen their skills and individuals seeking to work with their own nervous systems.

Why Practitioners Are Adding Inner Child Work to Their Offerings

For the past six years, Anat has been training practitioners in her methodology through a certification program. The program wasn’t originally planned—it emerged from client demand. Clients experiencing incredible transformations said: “I’ve tried so many things. I need to learn to do what you do.”

The methodology brings body and mind to work cohesively together. Many trainings focus on either the body (somatics, energy work) or the mind (mindset, cognitive approaches). Anat’s work bridges both, providing a step-by-step process called the Five Stages of Healing.

Understanding that healing has stages—and being able to identify what stage any client is at—allows practitioners to support complete process navigation. It’s not just throwing tools at clients and expecting them to figure out when to use what. It’s walking them through a structured method.

This work has fulfilled Anat’s heart most: passing along training to diverse practitioners (coaches, bodyworkers, physical therapists, chiropractors) and watching them expand how they serve clients while achieving deepest results.

For brick-and-mortar or manual practitioners wanting to transition online, bringing in this work is an added bonus for clients. While it’s powerful in-person, it translates beautifully to virtual sessions—opening possibilities for practitioners seeking flexibility and location freedom.

Many wellness practitioners successfully build online practices around hands-on modalities, but adding depth work like nervous system regulation and inner child healing creates transformation that manual therapy alone cannot achieve. Learning to integrate trauma-informed practices into wellness offerings differentiates practitioners in crowded markets.

The Results: From Physical Symptoms to Life Transformation

What results do clients experience when practitioners bring this work into their offerings?

Deep trauma healing. Physical symptoms disappear. Students who’ve gone through the work themselves had Big T trauma—sexual abuse, parental neglect, severe childhood wounds. One particular student was a trauma-trained coach who realized she’d learned about trauma intellectually versus learning how to actually move that energy through the body.

Experiencing deep healing themselves led to:

Courage to leave abusive relationships
Leaving misaligned jobs
Starting businesses
Everything across the board shifting

For hands-on practitioners wanting virtual flexibility: when patients come for bodywork, they’re talking the whole time. Not just about physical complaints—they’re discussing kids, jobs, partners, being single, all these challenges.

Having ability to hear what they’re saying and recognize: If I had a 90-minute session with them right now, the depth of freedom this person could experience…

It opens practitioners up to supporting people who already trust them.

How This Work Enhances Physical Healing

This work complements and potentially enhances in-person sessions. It can actually speed the process when the whole person is addressed, not just a physical area.

“Issues in the tissues”—working on the physical, but so much is trapped emotions.

Personal example from Anat: for most of her teenage years through twenties (before deep healing work, which to her is inner child work), her psoas muscles (left and right) were extremely tight. Working a desk job at the Chopra Center, mid-day they’d start burning—hitting and punching the area trying to release tension.

The psoas is a very common area for holding unprocessed emotions. The left side represents feminine/mother energy. As she worked with her mentor on reparenting and mother healing, her left hip opened up.

How many client flare-ups are actually emotionally rooted? Unprocessed emotion and trauma activate the nervous system, which manifests physically. This work complements and supports physical healing.

The Methodology: More Than Just Somatic Movement

How does Anat’s work differ from movement-based somatic practices (breath with movement, closing eyes, typical somatic approaches)?

There are five stages to healing—consider that the process. In each stage, there are methods (sometimes multiple).

Somatics is absolutely part of it (breathwork, movement depending on the person and needs). But there are three major pillars:

Pillar 1: Nervous System Work

Understanding how the nervous system responds, creating safety, building capacity for emotional regulation.

Pillar 2: Inner Child Reparenting

Uncovering what was learned in childhood, understanding it’s an imprint, coming to the root of that imprint, giving opportunity to reparent and provide something new.

Pillar 3: Survival Strategies and Patterns

Understanding personality patterns—recognizing that someone who dissociates from their body needs a different approach than someone who endures and pushes everything down.

The Five Stages Explained

Stage 1: Awareness

Not just awareness of what the client knows they want to address, but awareness of where their nervous system is. Do they tend to collapse, dissociate, endure, control, force?

Once that’s understood, somatic guidance can be tailored. Someone who dissociates needs self-activation, self-touch—starting to feel what it’s like to be back in the body. Maybe massaging arms, slapping arms—just remembering sensations, remembering “I do have a body.”

Versus someone who endures and stuffs emotions down—they definitely need to stand up, move, shake. Shake the bottle they’ve been stuffing everything into.

Stage 2: Acceptance and Emotional Movement

Not just accepting what happened, but learning to let whatever energy, emotion is there, move through. Getting into the ocean of emotions, learning to ride the actual waves.

Supporting clients in moving energy, feeling feelings all the way through, understanding what it means to feel a feeling and express it fully.

This is the deeply somatic part—but then it connects to cognitive work.

Stage 3: Getting to the Root

Working on the mind, the subconscious. Emotions that surfaced have beliefs tied to them. Those beliefs triggered emotions. There’s a story tied to beliefs. There’s a root to that story—a time when this was learned (whether seen, heard, or felt from parents, whether copied or rebelled against).

Stage three explores uncovering the origin. Sometimes more emotions emerge that need to be felt through.

Stage 4: Reparenting and Rewiring

Working energetically and emotionally to give what was needed. Acknowledging what was never received. The inner child work distinguishes between mother (representing extension of self) and father (representing everything outside self—others, the world).

Healing and reparenting these relationships teaches practitioners how to recognize where clients are and help them establish new relationships with themselves BEFORE addressing relationships with others.

Example: A client comes because their challenge is their partner, marriage, or being single wanting relationship. Without this training, practitioners might jump into helping with that.

With this training: “We’re not touching that for about two months. First we need to look at your relationship with yourself—how you love yourself, listen to yourself, acknowledge yourself. Because that’s who’s showing up in relationships or lack of relationships.”

Even if someone says “I know this is something from my dad, this is what dad did to me”—the response is: “Great. So where was mom? What did mom do when dad was being that way? That’s what you learned to do to yourself or how you rebelled and did the opposite.”

So much needs establishing with relationship to self—how to love yourself, listen to yourself, get to the point where you’re your own inner best friend, inner cheerleader, nurturer.

When that’s established, there’s self-love and safety—knowing “no matter what, I’ve got me.”

Going into the world (father, others) with that intact allows truly facing the world, embracing relationships from a place of safety, which means vulnerability and open heart are possible.

Understanding the difference between mother wound work (relationship with self) and father wound work (relationship with others/world) creates a foundation that prevents practitioners from jumping too quickly into external relationship healing before internal foundation exists. Learning this distinction transforms how practitioners sequence healing work.

Stage 5: Integration

On average, integration is an 18-month journey.

This comes from Anat’s mentor (a body-mind psychologist who taught this work for 40 years before passing). She’s now seen this pattern confirmed over 10 years of her own practice.

Especially with big identity shifts—going from lifelong people-pleaser to having a voice, saying no, standing up for yourself—18-month journey.

This is such an important stage: crossing a bridge. Not a solid bridge you drive across—more like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with a wobbly bridge. From old version of self to new version.

There will be moments feeling wobbly, falling back. Grace and compassion are essential. How quickly can you realign and take a step forward? On solid days, how much action can you take to move forward?

Many people think when they wobble: “Something’s wrong. I’m depressed. I need to dig more.” No—this is integration. Honor that stage instead of thinking more healing, fixing, digging is needed.

The Entrepreneurial Application: Building Business Without Burnout

For practitioners running businesses, this work is essential. They’re able to try new things—set up workshops that maybe no one registers for initially—without making it mean something’s wrong with them personally.

Instead of quitting or running endless spin cycles of self-doubt until business becomes exhausting, they take data from experience, troubleshoot, and move forward.

What’s missing when that doesn’t happen: not being your own inner cheerleader, inner best friend in that moment. The self-talk becomes: “See, I suck. No one’s ever going to want to work with me. I’m going to fail at this.”

But when that new foundation with self is established, approach becomes: “It’s all good. This happens. Let’s look at data, learn, see how to shift for next time.”

Same principle. Then from that place, the impact of what was learned from the world and father can be addressed—which often brings bigger emotion. Moving through mother stuff emotionally and somatically is usually smaller waves. Father work is often big heartbreak.

Depression Reframed: Deep Rest, Not Dysfunction

The word “depression” is a label people rush to quickly. Breaking down the word: “deep rest.” The system wanting deep rest from something.

It could be survival strategies created to survive life where you’re not in the driver’s seat. Your inner child isn’t even in the backseat—it’s been locked in the trunk. That disconnected from yourself. That much not listening to heart, truth, self.

What This Looks Like for Entrepreneurs

They’re forcing themselves to do things they think are the right things to build business—because they don’t want to feel fear of business failing.

Inner child (the part holding emotions) is saying: “I’m really afraid this isn’t going to work out. I’m scared I’ll have nothing and have to get a job.”

Instead of listening to that child, throwing them in the trunk, turning music up, going wherever others have gone.

Both business owners know from experience: there are many ways to build business, many marketing approaches. Not all resonate. Some love podcast interviews. Others will never do that—they prefer Instagram content. Some will never want social media—they prefer other methods.

That’s one way abandoning self shows up.

Discerning Growth Edge vs. Self-Abandonment

Common question: How to discern the difference between ignoring yourself versus facing a growth edge?

Example: Entrepreneurs not wanting to show up, self-promote, or market because it feels uncomfortable—yet knowing it’s something they should do.

The answer: Uncover beliefs underneath and emotions you don’t want to feel (fear of rejection, etc.). Once those are moved through—not that you never feel them again, but you’ve trained your nervous system for them.

Personal story from Anat: Four years ago, traumatic business experience with a CEO who did inappropriate things. He was let go, but business took a big hit. Threw her into survival loop for a year to 18 months.

January 2nd two years ago, after setting big 2024 goals, she woke up thinking: “I don’t want to do any of this. I’ve been forcing myself to do so many things.”

Fear emerged: after eight years in business, wouldn’t recover. Another tough year ahead.

She felt through that fear for the first time. Much of the method evolved from her own experience in those two years.

After forcing and doing things she didn’t enjoy, finally feeling through fear, she reached internal place of being okay either way. That released so much energy (energy we’re not aware we’re putting out).

Things started naturally clicking and shifting. She chose to do things that previously would have been “no”—like a TED Talk, keynotes, edges she wouldn’t have crossed.

Not that fear doesn’t show up—it just moves through so fast now.

The Nervous System Speed

The nervous system responds in 0.2 seconds. Conscious mind in 2 seconds. Ten times faster.

When something is programmed as safe for the nervous system to metabolize (like fear is for her now, where it wasn’t two years ago), it doesn’t reach conscious awareness. In those two seconds when it shows up in the system, it gets metabolized, discharged.

So it doesn’t take away presence.

What happens with clients who resist action: they’re suggested something, say “I’ll do it,” then next day—”I didn’t do it.”

When they went to do it, emotion came up, reached conscious awareness, and they talked themselves out of it.

The power of learning to feel through emotions and train the nervous system to be with them means moving with fear—not being stopped by it.

The Other Side of “Depression”

Student example: 39 years old with Big T trauma from childhood. Spent 30+ years running from it (unaware her nervous system was protecting her because it didn’t know how to be with it).

In the program, she healed—moved through it, faced all of it, expanded from it (especially at the six-day intensive retreat about two months into certification).

She felt on top of the world after moving through something she never thought she could.

Within a week of getting home: really tired, not wanting to do anything or get out of bed, crying a lot. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m depressed again.”

Response: “No, you’re not depressed. You’re finally able to rest.”

Judith Hanson Lasater says: sometimes letting go and surrendering to presence doesn’t feel how we think it will. It can feel fully uncomfortable at first.

Imagine spending a whole day thousands of years ago running from a tiger wanting to kill you. Not stopping. Then someone comes and kills that tiger—you can finally stop running.

What would happen? You’d collapse. Start crying because you survived. Probably sleep for a whole week.

But we label it as “something’s wrong. I must be depressed.”

Instruction to student: “Stop judging your need for rest and stop judging your crying. Embrace it completely for as long as it’s needed.”

Within a month, fully recovered. Found strength and power again.

We don’t realize: when in dysregulated nervous system for so long, and it finally feels safe enough to heal, it’s actually going to go the other way first for a while. Need to nurture that, embrace that, take deep rest instead of labeling it depressed. Let healing fully integrate.

Understanding the difference between depression requiring clinical intervention and the body’s natural integration process after deep healing prevents practitioners from pathologizing normal nervous system recalibration. Learning to recognize integration phases helps practitioners support clients through the wobbles without rushing to “fix” what isn’t broken.

Resources and Training

Anat’s website trainingcampforthesoul.com offers several freebies:

Recognition guide for client survival strategies (for practitioners)
Guide for cultivating safety and working with your own nervous system (for personal use)

She’s most active on Instagram (@anat.peri), posting content regularly and personally messaging new followers within a week to get to know the human behind the follow—because you never know what opportunities emerge from genuine connection.

Final Wisdom: The Only Way to Feel Better

“The only way to feel better is to get better at feeling.”

Simple. Powerful. True.

For practitioners and clients alike, healing isn’t about avoiding uncomfortable emotions or waiting until they disappear. It’s about building capacity to be with the full spectrum of human experience—which then allows presence, vulnerability, authentic connection, and sustainable growth.

Ready to Deepen Your Practitioner Skills?

If you’re a wellness practitioner wanting to add depth to your offerings—whether serving clients in-person or transitioning online—exploring trauma-informed, nervous system-based, inner child methodologies can transform both the depth of transformation you facilitate and the sustainability of your own practice.

Book a consultation to discuss how integrating somatic and mindset practices into your wellness offerings can differentiate your services and deepen client results.

Your clients are already talking about their deeper challenges during sessions. Learning how to truly support them through those challenges—not just with empathy, but with structured methodology—changes everything about the healing you facilitate.