Overview
“Inner work” is a term that’s widely used in pop psychology, though it’s rooted in ideas going back to Carl Jung about reflecting on one’s psyche as an internal world that interacts with the external world.
If you’ve encountered phrases like “healing your inner child,” “doing shadow work,” or “protecting your peace” as general concepts divorced from specific therapeutic modalities or treatment protocols, you’re likely dealing with pop psych literature or content that heavily draws on clinical buzzwords without the rigor of the scientific process and peer review. This doesn’t mean it’s outright bunk or pure marketing, but it does mean that a lot of “inner work” that’s commonly discussed in public discourse covers for the intuition of armchair folk psychologists running social media accounts based on mental health.