Editorial Policy

This site sits next to mental health without being mental health care. That is a genuinely difficult position to write from, and the rules below are how we try to stay honest in it. They are not decoration: several of them run as automated checks that will stop a page being published.

1. Self-reflection is not diagnosis

Nothing on this site diagnoses anything. We do not name psychiatric conditions as something a reader has, we do not assign attachment styles, and we do not treat a quiz result as evidence about anyone's history. The free check returns a reflection area — Safety and Reassurance, Permission to Have Needs, Boundaries, Self-Trust, Rest Without Guilt, or Play and Emotional Expression — and says plainly that eight questions cannot establish more than that.

2. No trauma assumptions

We do not infer that anything happened to you. A guide about people pleasing will describe several possible influences — temperament, learning history, culture, current relationships, ordinary incentives — rather than concluding that childhood caused it. You will not read "your parents did this to you" here, because an article cannot know that.

We also do not ask readers to recover memories, and we do not encourage confronting family members on the basis of a reflection exercise. Exercises that touch on the past are optional, carry a warning, and can be stopped at any point.

3. The word "inner child"

Used as a metaphor for present-day emotional patterns. It is a popular therapeutic and self-reflection concept with roots in psychoanalytic and transactional-analysis writing — not a formal diagnostic category and not a measurable entity. Where we discuss its history and its evidence base, we do it honestly, including where the evidence is thin.

4. Sourcing factual claims

Where a guide makes a factual claim about psychology or mental health, it is attributed to a recognised authority: the American Psychological Association, the NHS, the National Institute of Mental Health, SAMHSA, established university medical centres, peer-reviewed research, or professional clinical guidelines.

• We do not invent studies, authors, dates or findings.
• We do not publish statistics we cannot attribute. An unsourced percentage is removed automatically before publication.
• Where something is a framework rather than a finding, we label it as a framework.
• Where the honest answer is "the evidence for this is limited", we write that.

5. Safety boundaries in the writing itself

Guides that touch on severe distress, intrusive memories, dissociation, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, ongoing abuse or major disruption to daily life say plainly that professional support is the right tool — and do not sell anything in that passage. Our products are never presented as the answer to a clinical problem.

6. Language rules

• Hedged where the subject is uncertain: may, might, some people find, one area worth noticing.
• No promise of healing, cure or completion. We write about practising, not finishing.
• No shaming — not for people pleasing, needing reassurance, struggling with boundaries, resting, or being sensitive.
• No fake urgency, no fake scarcity, no crossed-out prices, no countdown timers.

7. Automated checks before publication

Several of the rules above are enforced by scripts that run before the site is deployed. They flag deterministic causal claims, diagnostic language, guarantees of emotional outcome, unsourced statistics, quiz output that behaves like an assessment, and any private data that could leak into a page address or an analytics event. A flagged page is reviewed by a person, not published and fixed later.

8. How guides are updated

Every guide carries a publication date and a last-updated date, and both are real. When we revise a guide we update the date; when we have not touched it, we do not. Substantive changes to a factual claim are noted in the guide itself rather than made silently.

9. Corrections

If something here is wrong, unclear, or crosses the line into diagnosis or assumption, please tell us at hello@theinnerchildhealing.com. We will correct factual errors promptly and say what changed. Corrections that affect the meaning of a guide are noted on the page.

10. Who writes this

The Inner Child Healing Editorial Team: writers and editors. We do not present ourselves as therapists, psychologists, counsellors or trauma specialists, and we do not publish fictional clinician bylines. If a qualified reviewer joins, their real name and credentials will appear on the pages they actually reviewed, and nowhere else. More on that on the about page.