By now, many people have heard about the “inner child”: an aspect of each of us who is generally imagined to be a lot like we were when we were infants, toddlers, or maybe a little bit older.

Inner children are not literal human beings, of course. They are not physical people at all, but rather archetypal states, or states of mind, or aspects of our own psychologies that we can personify in developing a comprehensible model of the mind for understanding ourselves. Sometimes they are simply our own individual versions of developmental states every human being normally passes through. Other times they are reactions to traumas we experienced in our past. In the course of healing, wounded inner children may reveal states of innocence, joy, curiosity, excitement, and peace that are also, and at least equally, our own.

As a concept, the inner child resembles other prominent states of mind, such as The Protector, the Critic, the Hero or Heroine, the White Knight, the Damsel in Distress, and the Good or Bad Parent. Each such persona is typically accompanied by an identifiable set of emotions, a specific belief system, a particular way of understanding and thinking about the self and the world, and patterns of attitudes and behaviors that become recognizable over time as we learn about our inner lives.

When we pay attention to these aspects of ourselves and allow them to expand and be fulfilled, each one can behave like a little personality by itself: a lively model of one piece of the more complete person we are. That focused kind of exposure can provide us with insight, information, and feedback about our complexity, and help us understand what prompts us to do the things we do.

Personas may be any age, any sex or gender, and even any species, and becoming aware of them does not mean a person has “multiple personalities” as in Sybil or The Three Faces of Eve. The severe dissociation portrayed in those books and movies always involves amnesia, or lost time, as well as behaviors that are inconsistent from one personality to another and do not share a single, unifying narrative or life story. Even when people do not know about their different aspects, or when those aspects do not know about each other, personas express different states on a consistent continuum. All an individual’s personas live the same life and are aware that they live the same life, and their stories all cohere.