Healing Childhood Wounds and Breaking Free With Christine Hassler

A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, dear stellar listeners! I am thrilled to bring you the latest episode of the Stellar Life Podcast, where we dive deep into the transformation world of inner child work with the insightful Christine Hassler.

Christine is a master coach, spiritual psychologist, and dynamic speaker with 20 years of experience in the field of personal development and transformation. She is a bestselling author of three influential books and the host of the highly rated podcast Over It and On with It. As the co-founder of the Elementum Coaching Institute, a premier certification program for coaches, Christine has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of coaching. Her expertise and insights have been featured on major media platforms such as the Today Show, CNN, ABC, CBC, and Fox, making her a respected and sought-after figure in her industry.

Through personal stories and client success narratives, Christine sheds light on how inner child healing can lead to overcoming learning disabilities, establishing healthier relationships, and achieving greater life satisfaction. You’ll hear about Christine’s own remarkable journey from Hollywood’s high-pressure career to a fulfilling, growth-oriented marriage rooted in self-awareness and emotional freedom.

If you’ve ever felt like past emotional wounds are holding you back, this episode is a must-listen! So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

[05:57] – Christine and Orion discuss how children’s subconscious strategies for acceptance within family and society can lead to abandoning one’s true self, impacting adulthood.
[16:52] – Christine advises building a relationship with one’s inner child by looking at old pictures and gradually establishing trust instead of rushing the healing process.
[19:16] – Christine shares her process of teaching her daughter to handle emotions authentically rather than suppressing them to prevent emotional distress from manifesting into physical ailments.
[25:53] – Christine highlights the importance of acknowledging and processing anger towards parents in inner child work rather than immediately jumping to forgiveness.
[30:35] – Christine recounts success stories from her clients who have overcome learning disabilities, established healthy relationships, and improved overall life satisfaction through inner child work.
[33:32] – Christine shares her inner child healing journey, overcoming insecurity, nurturing her marriage, and teaching techniques like handwriting exercises and her online course.
[37:54] – Christine passionately introduces her Be The Queen program, which helps women build committed relationships and delves into the concept of sovereignty.
[43:41] -Christine shares her top three tips for living a stellar life and directs listeners to her website, Instagram, and podcast Over It and On With It, where she provides live coaching.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hi Christine, and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’m excited to have this conversation with you.

Yeah. Maybe you can start by sharing a little about yourself, what brought you to find your mission and what you’re doing today.

Well, that is such a long story, so I will condense it. It really was through my own challenges. I have been a coach and a spiritual psychologist for 20 years now. There have been so many different iterations of my career, my journey, my mission, and what matters to me, depending on what’s going on in my life. I started my career and my adult life out in Hollywood. I was promoted to one of the youngest female agents, dating the head of a movie studio at the time.

I had this really glamorous life and pretty much kind of checked a lot of the boxes off the list by the time I was 23-24. But I was miserable because I had depression and anxiety that had carried over from childhood that I never really dealt with. I compensated for mass insecurity and different traumas by achieving and trying to prove myself. Those traumas and insecurities can propel you to go out and do things in the world.

Pain can be a great motivator. If we never really deal with the pain and we’re just trying to run from it, it does catch up with us.

Because pain can be a great motivator in a lot of ways. But if we never really deal with the pain and we’re just trying to basically run from it, it does catch up with us. So around my early 20s, it really just caught up with me. I was engaged at that time. My fiance broke up with me six months before the wedding. I had a health crisis, and I was estranged from my family at the time. Even though I had made a lot of money, I was all of a sudden in debt, and I just had my quarter-life crisis and went to find books about it.

There were books on the quarter-life crisis, but they were all about finding a job and finding a relationship. There wasn’t a personal development book for women in their 20s. I had been working with a coach at the time, and psychology had always been my passion. I minored in college and thought, “Well, gosh, maybe I need to write the book I need.” 2004, I wrote 20 Something, 20 Everything, which came out in 2005.

At that time, I also started coaching people. I apprenticed with the woman who was my coach and then later returned to get my master’s degree in spiritual psychology and another in consciousness health and healing. I also received various pieces of training, everything from NLP to hypnotherapy to inner child work to nervous system regulation. I’ve just kind of accumulated things over time as my own needs and interests have expanded.

But my mission is to help people not repeat their past over and over again. In my 20 years of coaching, 99.99%, I would even say 100%, but I’ll leave that 0.01% there. Anything someone’s having issues with or trouble within the present is a threat to their childhood. Something in childhood has created what they’re living today.

20 Something, 20 Everything by Christine Hassler

My mission is really to help people not keep playing out their past. Whether it’s like drawing in a relationship that reminds them of their dynamic with their parents, or like me, continuing to try to achieve and achieve and achieve and be kind of addicted to success, never dealing with the insecurity that stems from childhood. So, if I were to sum it up, it’s two things. It’s reparenting; it’s giving ourselves what we didn’t get in childhood. No one else can meet the needs our parents didn’t meet. That’s really an inside job.

And then there is liberation from generational patterns, trauma, and many of the stories we tell ourselves that are, most of the time, untrue.

What role does childhood play in mapping our fears, habits, and relationships?

Well, it’s everything. I do believe everyone comes in with their own unique karma and their own soul. Some things are just like we are the way we are. I do feel like there’s some element of nature that plays into each and every one of us. We’re also molded in shape by what happens or doesn’t happen in our childhood. So in terms of our input, we’re a computer that’s being programmed. I saw it with my two-and-a-half-year-old, and I’m sure you saw it with your 5-year-old. I will say something, and it will come out of her mouth from five minutes to five days later, depending on where it went in her brain.

So much of what she believes, even about Christmas and Santa Claus, is because we’ve talked about it, right? As children, we are programmed by everything we are told, see, feel, and experience. At the same time, she’s learning how to have a relationship primarily by how my husband and I have a relationship.

She’s learning how to have a relationship with herself by how I model it. Then there are going to be things that happen in her life that imprint on her. So everything that happens in our childhood forms the lens through which we look through life, the belief systems that are formed, and how we think about ourselves. If you tell a child over and over again, “You’re too much, or you’re too loud,” they’re going to believe that.

We’re shaped by what happens or doesn’t happen in our childhood.

If you tell a child over and over again, “You’re capable, you’re confident, I believe in you,” they’re going to believe that. And then some things happen in our life—trauma, as you know, has a range. I think sometimes people minimize what happened or didn’t happen in their childhood because they compare it to someone they may know, or someone they may have heard had massive abuse, their parent died, or they were incredibly neglected, which is, anybody can go, “Whoa, for a child, that’s really hard. Me over here and my parents getting divorced at 8, that can’t be that big of a deal.” Or, “I was teased a little bit at school. That can’t be that big of a deal.”

We minimize our trauma and challenges because we look at it on a scale compared to other people, which is a way of dismissing our own experience. We need to be honest with ourselves about what we didn’t get in childhood. What were the things that happened that were really challenging? Because, as children, all of us feel innately about survival and staying alive. That’s what we, as humans, are propelled to do.

As children, so much of that survival has to do with a sense of belonging. I need to be accepted by my parents on some level, like, “I need to belong to this.” Of course, this isn’t a conscious thought. This is very primal. “I need to belong to this unit in order to survive.” Because little children need adults to thrive, a five-year-old can’t live on his own. As children—again, this is all subconscious—we start to think, “Oh, okay, what do I need to do to survive in this unit? Do I need to be funny to distract from all the chaos? Do I need to be a good girl to get my mom’s approval? Do I need to get really good grades and be really smart to get my dad’s validation? Do I need to be quiet? What do I need to do in order to be accepted?”

It starts in the family unit and extends into our social unit. Oftentimes we abandon who we naturally are and become who we need to be to fit into the family, to fit into society, to fit into the culture, and to fit into the peer group. And all the while, we’re abandoning who we naturally are. So, so much of our adulthood, people often come to me and say, “I need to learn who I really am.” And I say, “Well, you need to remember who you really are because it’s in there. There’s just a bunch of math and a bunch of survival strategies that you’ve adopted in order to survive.” Our childhood has a massive impact on how we see the world, how we engage with the world, what we believe about the world, and how we act in the world.

We minimize our own trauma because we look at it on a scale compared to other people, which is a way of dismissing our own experience.

And as a mom being aware of that, I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, my little one will have to do inner child work on this and on this and on this.” The guilt you have as a mom, especially when you’re aware of the things that you do or don’t do, you’re like, “Oh, I should have done this, I should have done that.” I guess this is when I have that heavy guilt for myself. I probably need to do some inner child work on that. “Am I doing good?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a great mom most of the time.” But those times when I’m not, I’m like, “Ugh, that’s not awesome.”

That’s the thing. We have to give ourselves grace. You could be speaking out of my mouth because I have the same challenges. I actually got a coach therapist when my daughter was about 18 months old because I noticed just having this really high expectation of myself, especially someone who specializes in developmental psychology and attachment, I know all the ways I can mess her up.

It’s a lot of pressure to know all the ways that you might be impacting your kid. I really needed to get help managing my guilt, managing my high expectations, and recovering from the massive change, birth, identity shifts, and all of that. Knowing that the biggest thing I can offer my daughter—well, one of the biggest—is a secure attachment has been comforting.

A secure attachment with her is not about being perfect. It’s not about being there 100% of the time. It’s really about being consistent and repairing. So in those moments where I might get frustrated, or I might judge myself or say something that I don’t really mean, or I’m hard on myself, and she hears me say it, I repair. The other day, she was just being a two-year-old and was not going to bed and running around the house. I was tired too. I was like, “Athena, it is time to go to bed.” I wasn’t yelling, but I was basically set at that tone. Because I have this expectation of myself to stay regulated as a mom when I am dysregulated—of course, I’m human; it’s okay to get frustrated sometimes as a mom; sometimes I get really hard on myself.

That’s been my journey. Because so much of my inner child wounding is thinking, “I need to be perfect to make sure other people are okay.” Like, if I was good and I was perfect, then other people wouldn’t be upset. This kind of program, this codependent thing where I confused, where I stopped, and someone else began.

Oftentimes, we abandon who we naturally are and become who we need to be to fit into the family, society, culture, and peer group.

As you’re speaking, I feel like you’re talking about me, too. I’m like, “Yes, I’m with you on that. I understand that so deeply.”

My work as a mom is not getting too engaged in her upset; I am just letting her be. And also, when I do get dysregulated or get frustrated or all the normal things that moms do, especially of young children, to not then shame myself or think I’ve screwed up my kid forever or any of that, to talk to her. In those situations, I say, “Yeah, I got a little frustrated, and I raised my voice and apologized for talking a little louder. I’m going to take a breath. I’m going to move this frustration through my body, and we’re going to try this again.”

The cool thing is, now I see her doing that. When she gets frustrated, she’s like, “I’m getting really upset. I need to take a breath.” I’d rather teach her how to have emotions and move them through than, “Let’s suffocate our emotions and pretend everything’s okay.” Because that’s not an authentic way to live, and that’s not a healthy way to live, and that’s a great way to manifest physical disease on some level.

And so, for me, the thing that helps me with the guilt is knowing that I always come back for repair, knowing that I’m doing my work. As moms, we can get fixated on our children. What do we need to do for our child? What do we need to do for them at any age? And really, it all comes back to us. And that, for me, has felt like both a burden and a relief. It feels like a burden when I’m like, “Oh, my God, it’s all my fault.” But that’s only one lens to look through. It feels like a relief when it’s like, “Oh, wow. Actually, the best thing I can do for my daughter is do the inner work on myself,” and she’s going to feel that. I think one of the reasons she chose me as a mom is because I had done so much work before she came in and really broke a lot of generational patterns.

Beautiful. Congratulations. I think maybe four days ago, I did a craniosacral massage. I told her, “Oh, my God, it’s amazing. I have to bring my son here. I want to help him.” She’s like, “What do you think you’re doing right now? You being here taking care of you is, of course helping him.”

Absolutely, 1000%.

So, we are all walking together with a wounded inner child. We all have things we need to work on. How do we approach the inner child? What are some practical ways to address him or her?

Well, kind of depends on where we are with our relationship with her or him. So people listening or watching either have young children or you’ve been around young children, you’re not just their bestie right away. You have to build trust. You have to get into their world. I look with my own daughter, and if someone just shows up, she’s not ready to let them into her world. They need to get on the ground and play with her and keep showing up.

Then she’s like, “Oh, okay, I trust you. I let you into my world.” The same thing with our own inner children. We can’t just listen to a podcast like this and be like, “I need to talk to my inner child,” and expect our inner child to show up. It’s first about building rapport and building trust. One of the best ways I like to do and teach is to get a picture or several pictures. And If you don’t have pictures, you can’t access them, then maybe you can draw, but get pictures of different ages and just look at the picture and connect and look into your eyes and look at your little body and whatever you’re wearing and where you were and just start saying hello.

Earth is a school and our childhood is a curriculum. Share on X

It’s like, “Hi, little Christine, you’re still in there. I see you, I’m here. I just want you to know I’d like to get to know you better. I’d like to connect and spend more time with you.” So that’s always the first step. I find that people are really gung ho about, “I need to heal my inner child.” It just doesn’t work like that because the inner child so often feels abandoned and neglected by us that just trying to bulldoze in. We need to heal this thing from when we were five years old.

The inner child’s like, “No way.” Then, protector parts come out that block it. The first step is building the rapport. I teach a whole course on inner child. My husband and I teach it together. So it’s hard to summarize it in an interview, but I will give some broad strokes. So after you build that rapport, it’s really about uncovering what needs were most neglected or unmet in childhood. And the clue to that is, what do you struggle with right now?

Let’s say there’s a need for safety. If you don’t feel safe in your life right now, if you have been in many unsafe situations, if you attract unsafe people, if you walk around with a lot of anxiety, and if you lean towards more anxious attachment, that needs to feel safe probably wasn’t there.

True transformation begins with inner child work, where we confront the burdens and beliefs rooted in childhood that dim the light of our awareness.

Another need is belonging. We really feel like we belong in our family if we’re accepted as who we are. A lot of people really struggle. They feel like their parent didn’t want them, or maybe they came in as a boy, but they felt they really wanted a girl. Or there were a lot of other siblings, or maybe, on some level, they just didn’t fit in. This can be a wound that happens again in the familial unit or outside the home. Then we struggle with not feeling like we belong anywhere.

Another I’ll give one more example. The need for emotional expression. That’s huge. As children, it is important to feel and be able to ride the waves of your emotions and have that emotional expression. If we didn’t get that as a child, we’d feel stifled in our life. We’re going to feel like we can’t speak up. We’re going to be a people pleaser in some way. So there are many examples, but those are just three.

So you look at, “Okay, what am I currently struggling with in my life, and how does that correlate to it?” Or basically, “What is the unmet need that has caused this that is huge when we can realize that, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been trying to get this unmet need met from my childhood my whole adult life.’”

When we attract from a wound, we get the same experience we had in childhood, but we don’t get the result we wanted.

But I’ve been doing it by picking people similar to those in my past. Let’s say you grew up again in an unsafe house. You have that need for safety. Well, subconsciously, you attract unsafe people because they remind you of that familial unit. Let’s say your dad was unsafe, they remind you of dad, and all of a sudden, you’re really attracted to this person that’s also unsafe because the inner child’s like, “Oh, well, this person really feels like Dad in a lot of ways. Maybe he’ll meet the need that Dad never could.” And we all know how that turns out, right? It doesn’t turn out super well because when we’re attracted from a wound, we basically get the same experience we had in childhood, but we don’t get the result that we wanted. So the healing that we need to do is about reparenting ourselves, meeting that needs ourselves, grieving the fact that our parents couldn’t give it to us, and healing our trauma so that we’re not subconsciously attracting the same situation over and over again. We stop doing that when we’re actually meeting that need inside ourselves. The core of inner child healing is reparenting ourselves, meeting those needs that we didn’t get from childhood inside ourselves and not continuing to project that outward.

How do unhealed inner child wounds play in within a romantic relationship or relationships in general?

We can start with a romantic relationship, but there are threads to any type of relationship. If we think about it as children, our most intimate relationship is with our parents, whoever raised us. So, we’ll just use the word “parents” in this conversation. That’s our most intimate relationship, where we learn how to have relationships. That’s where our attachment forms. There are basically two types of attachment.

Secure attachment, which is that consistency, that parent, that repairs. The other thing I talk about in attachment theory that not many people do is being in the right role in your family. In insecure attachment, it’s very clear who the parent and child are in any of the insecure attachments, whether it’s avoidant, anxious, or disorganized. Sometimes it’s a little muddled.

Inner child work helps us meet our unmet needs and breaks down repetitive negative patterns, paving the way for healthier connections and life satisfaction. Share on X

People who have insecure attachments also often have a parent who’s spousified them, that parentified them, treated them more as a friend than as a child. The boundaries were a little wobbly. So often, that can lead to an insecure attachment. Well, first, it’s healable and changeable. But until we heal more towards a secure attachment that starts with our relationship with ourselves, we will seek out whatever our primary attachment was.

So, for example, if as a kid you had a parent that was enmeshed with you and you kind of played that codependent dance, maybe you were a people pleaser, or you’re probably going to have more of an anxious attachment because you didn’t know where you stopped and someone else began. You didn’t really develop a strong sovereign sense of self because it was kind of always about the other person. There was inconsistency there.

There’s inconsistency in any insecure attachments, whether anxiousness, avoidance, or disorganized. With that kind of codependent, not really clear sense of self, you are going to most likely attract codependent relationships. Relationships where you rescue people, relationships where you might be attracted to kind of that narcissist personality that love bombs you, but then you just feel anxious because you don’t know what you stand where you stand—emotionally unconscious, available people.

I think some degree of blame is necessary because part of inner child healing is feeling our anger and rage in our parents.

Basically, you’re gonna feel anxious in a relationship, and you’re not gonna feel that real secure attachment. Let’s look at avoidant attachment. If you had a relationship with a parent where it was like very hot and cold and you felt a sense of being neglected, the parent wasn’t really emotionally available. You kind of had to parent yourself in a lot of ways.

Then, in relationships, relationships will be okay until they start to get too intimate, until someone really starts to love you, until someone really starts to know you, until your alone time starts to get bumped up against. With that avoidance style, because of the childhood wounding, brakes will come on. A lot of times, we end up sabotaging that relationship. We’ll make the other person wrong, we’ll cheat, lie, and come up with a lot of excuses. We’ll dive into work. A protector part comes forward and generally sabotages.

Then, the disorganized attachment style comes from a lot of chaos in childhood and just really not knowing where you stand. And often, in relationships, it’s a “Come here, go away” energy. So it’s like, “I want you in a relationship,” and “No, go away. Wait, you’re going, no, no, no, no, come back.” Or just a complete fear of any relationship because of such a lack of trust. That’s just one piece of how our childhood and what happened or didn’t happen shows up in relationships. In summary, those core unmet needs. That’s why it’s so important to really dive in and go, “Okay, what were my core unmet needs in childhood? Was it safety? Was it belonging? Was it an emotional expression? What were the things I really needed that I didn’t really get?” Because that is the thing we will hunt for in other people. But like I said before, we will just attract people like the people who hurt us.

Right. I did a lot of work on my own childhood and the way I was brought up, which was that I had difficult times and forgave my parents. I know some people are having a hard time only forgetting but not taking ownership and blaming their parents for their inner child wounds. What will be your advice to them?

I think some degree of blame is necessary because part of inner child healing is feeling our anger and rage in our parents. Let’s say you’re a woman, and your mom was an alcoholic and wasn’t really there as an adult. You know that your mom’s mom, your grandma, was abusive, and maybe she had some abuse from an uncle in the family or something. Basically, Grandma had an awful life.

Life gets a lot less triggering when we do inner child work.

So you understand that she wasn’t really there to parent your mother. That’s why my mother has an addiction. So your adult self can understand that, and your adult self may go, “I picked her for a reason, and it’s made me stronger. It was all part of my learning. I have compassion for my mom, and I forgive her.” Lovely, but spiritual bypass. The inner child is not on board for that. The inner child is like, “Well, I’m a kid, and when I was five, I didn’t know that the reason my mom was drunk in the corner and not helping me go to the bathroom was because she had this crappy childhood. All I know is I’m five, and my mom isn’t there for me.”

We really need to honor the journey of the inner child down the road. We do want to get the forgiveness of our parents. They did the best they could, but that’s down the road. I never say to someone just starting their inner child journey, “Your parents did the best they could.” Because to the child, no, they did not. We often need to start with, “I’m really mad at my parents. I’m really upset.”

I teach an anger release technique and letter writing technique, which is something called the empty chair process. That kid can get all that out. This is often something I bump against with people, especially if they have any cultural programming, people-pleasing patterning, or even religious programming, like getting mad at mom and dad is not allowed. They feel like they’re just honoring.

Acknowledging and processing anger towards our parents is crucial for inner child work; immediately jumping to forgiveness is a form of spiritual bypassing. Share on X

What I say is that it’s inside of you. That emotion is there. Suppressing it and pretending it’s not there isn’t serving the relationship. So it’s never about calling Mom and Dad up and saying, “You messed me up in all these ways,” and blaming them to their faces. It is about inner work and releasing anger, frustration, and grief.

I always say there are two deaths of our parents. We need to grieve their actual physical transition out of their body and the depth of the ideal, who we always wish they could be. We will keep looking for that in relationships with other people until we grieve and accept that my dad is never going to love me the way I wanted him to. My mom will never see me the way I want her to. We actually grieve that. So, going through anger, rage, and grief is a huge part of it.

Oftentimes we need the blame to get the anger. We don’t sit in blame because that just makes us a victim and them the villains. We’re looking for somebody else to be the hero. So we never sit and blame. But I often use blame with clients, or we use blame in the inner child workshop to get to the anger and the rage and then the sadness and the grief. And then, down the road, we can get to the forgiveness.

I love that. I love what you mentioned about spiritual bypassing because it’s so easy to say, “Oh, I’m enlightened. I’m spiritual. I’m going to just forgive and forget.” And then people that stuff their emotions, they get hurt down the road, whether it’s a disease in their body or a destructive relationship or something. If you don’t deal with it, it’s not going to go away. It will grow and show up in a different part of your life.

We often carry the subconscious strategies we developed as children into adulthood, impacting how we engage with the world and form relationships.

I like that you’re so kind to people. Allowing them to express their emotions, take their time, and acknowledge their grief is huge. I haven’t thought about it this way, where you’re actually grieving the parent you didn’t have. It’s beautiful. So, with you working with many people and helping them in many ways, including inner child work, what was one of the most emotional or surprising moments you came across working with other people with their inner child? I would love to know what it was like for you. What part of revelations?

I’ll start with other people first. The thing I have seen the most is when people do inner child work, their life starts to flow—the things they always wanted, whether it’s their career or expression in the world. I have a client I’m thinking of who just finished a book, and one of the inner child healings that she really worked on was a learning disability, being teased and being told she wasn’t as smart as her brothers and all kinds of other things. I actually just ran into another client who introduced me to her husband and her children, and she vowed never to get married because of her childhood.

Wow, I got goosebumps.

Her childhood was so chaotic. I saw her after about five years since I worked with her, and she’s like, “I have a three-year-old, and I’m pregnant. I’m like, “Oh my God. That’s me. This is my husband. And I’m so happy.” The stories just go on and on. I can think of another gentleman who was in a not-great marriage. His wife was very difficult and wasn’t treating him right.

The entelechy of the soul is to evolve.

As a kid, he had a mom he had to take care of. So he became the knight in shining armor. He became the rescuer and thought that was his role in relationship and was in this marriage and was trying and trying and trying to make her happy. We did the inner child work, and he went back to a memory of feeling this burden of taking care of his mom and helping that little boy understand that wasn’t his job. It was his mom’s job to take care of him. We did all this healing around it, and he’s divorced and so happy. It’s like the color came back into his face. And he’s dating way healthier women.

So nobody’s sucking the life out of him daily.

Exactly. I have so many stories about people, money, and health that things change. If you think about the entelechy of the soul, it is to evolve. Earth is a school, and our childhood is a curriculum. I believe we pick our parents and certain situations; the whole point of existence is evolving our consciousness. And so much of evolving our consciousness happens with inner child work because so much of the burden and the belief systems that dim our consciousness are formed in childhood.

When we can liberate ourselves from those, we elevate our consciousness and step more into our soul alignment. There are still challenges. I would very much say I’ve done my inner child healing, and I’m very much on the path of my soul. I still have challenges because I’m human, and I expect that. We learn in this dimension through contrast, and that’s how we evolve. But life gets a lot less triggering when we do inner child work. And for me, to answer your question, my whole life is a result of inner child healing.

Sovereignty means freeing yourself from the weight of others' opinions and standing firmly in your personal values—it is the foundation of a truly fulfilling life. Share on X

I’m in a career where I’m not trying to prove myself anymore because I’ve healed. So much of my ambition was driven by insecurity. And now I just really do things I love. And that’s such a relief. I’m in a marriage where my husband and I are so committed to growth. I’m in a relationship with someone who will sit in the weeds with me when we’re in it and will own his end, and I’ll own my end, and we will fight for the relationship together. He’s evolving his consciousness as well.

I have a daughter and was blessed with this incredible being to be a guide. And hopefully, as conscious parents, we can spare our children from a lot of the awful stuff that no child should have to go through. And we’re human. There are certain things that we’re not going to get right. We’re being human. It’s like I did choose this. On some level, my soul did pick this.

Yeah. I think most of our struggle here on Earth is our souls come from this beautiful place of unity and light. And then we come into this duality, emotions, and everything that’s going on. It’s so wild.

I saw it with my daughter. I saw it because she was so calm in the womb. Every time the midwife checked her heart rate, they’d say, “Man, her heart rate is just. You’re gonna have this Zen baby.” She came out, and she was like—

“I don’t want to be here. What is this place?”

The great thing about writing with your non-dominant hand is that it connects more to your subconscious mind and slows you down.

I know. And there would be times when she’d be sleeping on my chest. And she still does this at two and a half, where she’ll sleep, and then she’ll wake up and realize she’s human and go, “So I see it.” When they were that little, especially when she was a newborn, I could see just the like, “Oh, man, I’m doing this human thing again.” But it’s how we evolve as souls. So, we choose it.

Yes. How do you help people give a safe space for their inner child? If somebody wants to talk to their inner child in the process, of course, creating a relationship, how do they build a safe space for them?

Well, again, we teach this in our inner child course, which is just christinehassler.com/innerchild, if anyone really wants to dive deep. But after building rapport with the picture I talked about, a great way is to do non-dominant handwriting.

That was my first episode on this podcast. It was Bill Donius, and it was non-dominant handwriting. That was the whole episode.

I love doing that because your adult self will write with your dominant hand. So it might be like, “Hi, little Christine, how are you today?” And then, using me as an example, my left hand is my non-dominant hand. So I take the pen, marker, or whatever in my left hand and then just see what comes out. The great thing about writing with your non-dominant hand is that it connects more to your subconscious mind and slows you down. That’s just a great way to start that dialogue.

I love it. I once did an inner child meditation with a group of women. At the end of it, I had one woman who started crying, and she was 21 and said she never cries. And it was the first time she cried in years just by holding on to that little child. Then, I had a mother and daughter in the crowd, and the daughter said that in her meditation, she was holding her mom’s hand, and they were dancing together as little children. So beautiful.

It’s beautiful.

I like what you said about the photo. Then, simultaneously, in the group chat, women posted photos of themselves as children aged 5 to 7. It was really beautiful.

So beautiful. I love that.

What are you working on currently that brings you meaning, joy, and passion in your life?

Calling in “The One” by Katherine Woodward Thomas

Always doing inner child work with people. And then I’m really excited that our Be The Queen Self-Paced Program is coming up. I met my husband when I was 40 or 41. I had been married before and divorced in my early 30s, when everybody was getting married and having babies. I was divorced and painfully single; it was crickets for a while. I did all the dating stuff. I got a dating coach, did the courses, and read Calling in “The One” and all the things.

It was kind of similar to my 20-Something, 20-Everything, where I read the books on the quarter-life crisis. But nothing was really working for me. Nothing felt comprehensive on the emotional, spiritual, and energetic levels. I was like, “Well, I’m just going to create my own program to call him in.” And I call, “I’m just going to become the queen inside myself.” So, I devised this whole program for myself, and it worked. My husband lived in Perth, Australia. I lived in San Diego. I really called him in from continents away.

How did you meet?

Well, I was over at a friend’s house, and his picture was on my friend’s husband’s computer screen. They were working on a project together, and I saw it from across the room, and I thought I knew him. It was a soul recognition. My friend said, “Oh well, come over here. I wanted you to look at this website anyway.” And so I looked closer and didn’t know his name. And then they said, “Oh my gosh, he’s actually really great, and you’re both going to be in Europe this summer. Do you want to meet?” One of the things that I was in my own personal Be The Queen Program is I had a pattern, and this comes from my childhood of drawing in men that were not really ready, that really weren’t in the stand for commitment that I was. So, I was really clear. She said, “Do you want an introduction to him?” And I said, “I’m not looking for a friend. Please ask him if he’s in the space where he’s calling in his queen and if his commitment is ready. If he’s not, I have no interest in being introduced.” My friend asked him, and he said yes.

In those words?

Yeah, I said, “Please be clear, don’t dance around it.” Because I’m like anyone who’s a match for me, those words will not scare me away. That’s how clear I was inside myself. I had done so much healing on belonging, insecurity, and the wound about being chosen. Because women—most women—carry a, whether conscious or subconscious, because it’s in the collective, this whole being chosen thing.

A queen is someone she’s really embodied in who she is. She’s not concerned about what other people think of her.

Because of that, we will often compromise on our values or intuition because of the fear of not being chosen if we want a relationship and family. Our age or whatever sometimes will talk us into things. And I did the whole “I can change him” thing. I did that, and it never worked. So I was clear. Anyway, he was a yes. We got introduced, we connected over WhatsApp for three months, had many conversations, and I asked him all the things. That was another thing I did in my own program that I teach: you ask the questions you want to ask; you don’t do this whole game thing. We met three months later in Greece and were married three months after that.

Such a beautiful story.

Then, when people on social media started to see I’ve got this boyfriend and now husband, women were like, “What did you do?” I was open about the fact that I had trouble dating and finding and was sick of apps and the swiping, and it seemed like only men 30 years older than me were interested in me. I was just really having a hard time, or I did something emotionally unavailable. So I get when they asked and asked and asked, “How did you do this?”

I said, “Well, it wasn’t luck.” I went through an actual process, and women kept asking, “Can you please turn it into a program?” And so I did, and I actually taught it with my husband so that they get like both sides. We do nervous system work and inner child work, and I teach the whole system. I’m excited that in February 2025, we will have a free three-day event because we do it around Valentine’s Day, where I give women a lot of this, and then they can join us in the life course if they’re interested.

Ah, that’s beautiful. Where can people find that?

Just go to christinehassler.com/queen.

What does being a queen mean to you? There are so many associations with that word.

Queens are value-driven. They’re not insecurity-driven.

I know there is. But if we go archetypical—not like the Queen of England. If we think of archetypes, not like roles in human society. But I’m thinking more archetypical. A queen is someone she’s really embodied in who she is. She’s not concerned about what other people think of her. Of course, she is not selfish or narcissistic. There’s a sense of service and kindness, but not a people-pleasing. There’s no proving she doesn’t need anyone to love her or like her because she’s so sovereign inside herself. If you think of a queen, I think of sovereignty. Sovereignty, to me, means I’m free of the reins that hold me back from anyone else’s opinion of me. I’m going to adhere to my values. That doesn’t mean I’m selfish, but I don’t get caught up in needing to be anybody for anything to anybody else. Queens are value-driven. They’re not insecurity-driven. They’re not fear-driven. Queens have a huge sense of discernment. That’s what I really love supporting women in; it is really trusting their discernment—a yes or no. And there are no maybes.

I love that. What are your three top tips for living a stellar life?

Do your inner work. Focus on relationships, not things. I think, at the end of the day, relationships are the key to really living a stellar life. Because it’s through those mirrors, that experience, and that love that we really open up deeper, and this kind of goes with, “Go do your work.” But I’ll add it as a third: parent yourself. Compassion goes a long way. Like having that self-compassion and self-love and really being the parent to ourselves that we didn’t have is huge.

I love that. Where can people find you?

Christine Hassler is my website, Instagram, and my podcast. I coach people live on my podcast. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years. It’s unscripted, unproduced. Someone calls in with a question, and I coach them. So, if you want to hear a blend of spiritual psychology, inner child work, coaching, and all the things that are Over it and ON WITH IT, it is the name of the podcast.

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It was a fun conversation. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it so much.

Yeah, and thank you, listeners. Remember to do your inner work. Focus on relationships, not things. Parent yourself, have self-compassion and self-love, and have a stellar life. This is Orion till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Do inner work. Delve deep into your emotions and childhood experiences. This is the foundation for real, sustainable self-growth.

{✓}Release anger. Use techniques like letter writing and the empty chair process to express and let go of suppressed anger.

{✓}Grieve losses. Allow yourself to mourn both physical loss of loved ones and the idealized versions of them. This emotional cleansing helps stop repeating negative patterns.

{✓}Build relationships. Prioritize meaningful connections over material possessions. Strong relationships are key to a fulfilling life.

{✓}Practice compassion and self-love. Treat yourself as you would have wanted to be treated as a child.

{✓}Seek sovereignty. Cultivate independence from the opinions of others. Base your actions on personal values rather than societal expectations.

{✓}Believe in your ability to make clear and decisive choices. Avoid ambiguity by trusting your inner guidance.

{✓}Aim to raise your child without unnecessary trauma while acknowledging your imperfections. It’s about consistency and emotional repair, not perfection.

{✓}Identify and meet the emotional needs that were neglected in childhood. This prevents emotional distress from manifesting into physical ailments.

{✓}Learn about Christine Hassler’s various programs, including inner child work courses by visiting her website, christinehassler.com.

Links and Resources

Connect with Christine Hassler

About Christine Hassler

Christine Hassler is a Master coach, spiritual psychologist, facilitator and speaker with 20 years of experience. She is the best-selling author of three books, most recently Expectation Hangover: Free Yourself From Your Past, Change Your Present and Get What You Really Want and is the host of the top-rated podcast Over it and On With It, where she coaches people to live on the show. She is also the co-founder of Elementum Coaching Institute, a premier coaching certification program. Christine is known globally for her ability to identify what is holding someone back and compassionately guide them to clarity. She also works with companies and organizations to increase productivity and decrease their employees’ stress. Christine has a Masters degree in Spiritual Psychology and implements elements of NLP, psychology, spirituality, science and her own diverse life experience into her work. She appeared on The Today Show, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, E!, Style, and The New York Times. Christine believes that once we get out of our way, we can show up and make the meaningful impact we are here to make.