An Inner Child Exercise: Talking to Your 9-Year-Old Self
Inner child work invites you to turn toward the younger parts of yourself and offer them what they didn’t fully receive: recognition, safety, and the kind of witnessing that rewires the nervous system. This post walks through a step-by-step guided exercise for talking to your 9-year-old self, grounded in Internal Family Systems theory, attachment science, and somatic research. It’s a complement to therapy, not a replacement for it.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The photograph in the garage
- What is inner child work?
- What does the neuroscience of reparenting actually show?
- How does inner child wounding show up in driven women?
- The exercise: talking to your 9-year-old self
- Both/And: you can do this work on your own AND still need a witness
- The Systemic Lens: what your family carried that wasn’t theirs alone
- What does it look like after the exercise?
- When should you seek therapy for inner child work?
- Frequently asked questions
Psychoeducational note: This post is educational and clinical in nature. It is not a substitute for therapy or a formal diagnostic assessment. If what you read here brings up significant distress, please consider reaching out to a licensed mental health professional. If you are in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
Inner child work is a therapeutic approach that involves consciously engaging with the younger, wounded parts of the self, typically through visualization, journaling, or somatic practices, to offer those parts the recognition, safety, and attunement they didn’t fully receive in childhood. Grounded in Internal Family Systems theory, attachment science, and somatic research, it’s not about regression but about completing developmental experiences that were interrupted. The nine-year-old self is a common anchor point because that developmental stage often marks the beginning of more conscious self-awareness and the internalization of family dynamics. In my work with driven women, inner child exercises are most powerful when the adult part of the self can hold genuine warmth rather than impatient fixing toward the younger self.
In short: Inner child work is a therapeutic approach that engages with younger wounded parts of the self through visualization, journaling, or somatic practice to offer the recognition and safety those parts didn’t fully receive in childhood.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
In more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve used inner child exercises as a complement to talk therapy, particularly for driven women whose analytical capacity helps them understand their history but doesn’t resolve the felt sense of early absence. John Bowlby’s foundational work on attachment theory documented how early relational experiences become internalized working models that continue to organize emotional life in adulthood until they’re directly reworked (Bowlby 1969).
The photograph in the garage
In my work with driven women over fifteen years, specifically those navigating childhood emotional neglect and attachment wounds, I’ve noticed a particular moment that comes up with striking frequency. The setting changes each time. A holiday visit home. A move across the country. A parent’s death that turns the childhood house into a project. But something, always, catches them off-guard.
For Meera, it was a shoebox on a garage shelf, tucked above the washer between a birthday card and an old school photo envelope. She was home for the holidays, cleaning the way she always cleaned when she didn’t know what else to do with herself. She pulled out the photo and went still.
It was her at nine. Standing in front of a Christmas tree in a sweater that had gotten slightly too small. Her smile was wide enough to show her teeth, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She had that look. The one she’d seen in other photos from around that period, the early nineties, the year her parents were struggling and no one was saying so. The girl in the photo was already performing okayness. The eyes gave it away.
Meera’s chest did something complicated. Not quite sadness. Not exactly regret. Something colder and tighter. A recognition without words. She wanted to put the photo back in the box. She almost did. Instead, she sat down on the basement steps and stayed with it. Just stayed.
That feeling. That chest-tightening recognition. Is the beginning of inner child work. It doesn’t require a therapist’s office. Sometimes it starts in a garage with a shoebox. Sometimes it starts when a song comes on and you’re suddenly eight years old again and something you can’t name starts aching.
This post is for the version of you who’s had a moment like that and didn’t know what to do with it. It’s for the woman who’s ready to stop looking away from her younger self and finally sit with her for a while.
What is inner child work?
Inner child work is a therapeutic process of reconnecting with the part of you that holds the feelings, memories, and unmet needs of childhood, so you can offer that younger self what she didn’t receive: safety, attunement, and a witness.
The inner child is a psychological concept representing the part of the psyche that retains the feelings, memories, and relational experiences of childhood. When early emotional needs go unmet through neglect, emotional unavailability, or inconsistency in caregiving relationships, the inner child carries those wounds into adulthood, shaping patterns of behavior, emotional reactivity, and relational dynamics in ways the adult self may not consciously recognize. John Bradshaw, author and counselor, whose 1990 book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child brought this concept into clinical mainstream, argued that when children don’t receive sufficient attunement and mirroring, a part of their psychic development becomes arrested at that age.
In plain terms: Your inner child is the part of you that still remembers what it felt like to be small and not quite sure you were going to be okay. She’s not in the past. She’s in you right now, showing up when you flinch at raised voices, struggle to ask for what you need, or feel an inexplicable wave of longing you can’t explain.
Richard Schwartz, PhD, psychologist and developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, expanded this concept into a full clinical model. In IFS, the inner child isn’t just metaphor. It’s a “part” of the internal system that carries burdens from early experiences, burdens that Schwartz defines as painful beliefs and emotions that were absorbed during childhood and never metabolized. His book No Bad Parts (2021) proposes that every part of us, including the ones we find most difficult to acknowledge, developed as a form of protection. The nine-year-old who went quiet at the dinner table. The six-year-old who became the family comedian to break tension. The teenager who decided never to need anyone again. All of these were adaptations. Survival strategies. They don’t need to be pathologized. They need to be understood. (PMID: 23813465)
Inner child work is a therapeutic approach drawing on psychodynamic theory, Internal Family Systems, attachment science, and somatic modalities, that invites adults to recognize, acknowledge, and reparent the younger parts of themselves shaped by early wounding, neglect, or relational trauma. Rather than treating these parts as “the past,” inner child work treats them as living aspects of the present self that still carry old needs, fears, and longings deserving compassionate attention.
In plain terms: Inner child work isn’t about wallowing or going backward. It’s about going back with the resources you didn’t have the first time around, and offering your younger self something she desperately needed: a witness. Someone who finally sees what she’s been carrying and says, “I’ve got you now.”
What makes inner child work distinct from simple reminiscing or journaling about the past is that it’s relational. You’re not just recalling the child you were. You’re meeting her as though she’s present. Offering her the witnessing, compassion, and safety that may have been missing at the time. The goal isn’t to be swallowed by the past. The goal is to build a new kind of relationship with it.
If you’ve felt a sudden sadness that seems disproportionate to its trigger, struggled to receive care, found yourself operating from a place of bracing vigilance your adult circumstances don’t justify, your inner child is present in that moment. She’s been waiting for you to turn around and notice her. If you want a broader orientation to this territory, the childhood emotional neglect guide covers the foundational patterns in more depth.
What does the neuroscience of reparenting actually show?
Reparenting works at the neurological level because the brain builds its attachment patterns through relationship, and it can update those patterns through new relational experiences. That’s not metaphor. That’s neuroscience.
Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind (2020, 3rd edition), has spent decades studying how early relational experiences shape neural architecture. His research demonstrates that childhood attachment experiences don’t just shape behavior. They literally shape the brain. The right hemisphere, which processes emotional memory and implicit non-verbal knowledge, develops rapidly in the first years of life, largely in response to the emotional attunement of caregivers. When caregivers are consistently unavailable, dysregulated, or frightening, the child’s developing nervous system learns to organize around that threat. (PMID: 11556645)
Those neural patterns don’t disappear when you grow up. They become implicit memories, encoded not as clear narrative recollections but as body sensations, reflexive behaviors, and emotional responses that seem to arise from nowhere. The woman who braces when her partner’s voice gets louder, even though nothing dangerous is happening. The woman who dissociates when she has to advocate for herself in a meeting. The woman who can’t receive a compliment without immediately discounting it. These aren’t character flaws. These are the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.
Earned secure attachment is a concept developed by Daniel J. Siegel, MD, and researchers in attachment science to describe the state in which an adult who did not experience secure attachment in childhood has developed, through therapy, corrective relational experiences, or sustained mindful self-reflection, the internal coherence and emotional availability associated with secure attachment. Unlike “continuous secure” individuals, earned secure adults have lived through early adversity but developed the capacity to make sense of it narratively and emotionally.
In plain terms: You don’t have to have had a secure childhood to become a securely attached adult. The brain retains its capacity to update its own wiring throughout life. The practices of inner child work, therapy, and mindful self-compassion are exactly how that updating happens.
Siegel’s research on earned secure attachment demonstrates that adults who didn’t have secure attachment in childhood can develop it through corrective relational experiences, including therapy, and through the practice of mindful self-compassion. A 2021 meta-analysis published in Psychological Medicine found a medium protective effect (SMD = -0.65) of self-compassion interventions on posttraumatic stress symptoms across diverse populations (PMID: 34584575, 2021). When you deliberately turn toward the younger parts of yourself with curiosity and warmth rather than avoidance and shame, you’re creating a new relational experience for your nervous system.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score (2014), has documented extensively how trauma lives in the body, not only in the mind. His decades of clinical work show that healing isn’t just cognitive reframing. The body needs new experiences of safety, not just new ideas about safety. (PMID: 9384857) When you sit with a photograph of your younger self, feel what arises in your chest or belly, and consciously offer her something different than what she received, you’re giving your nervous system a new somatic reference point for what safety feels like in relationship. That’s the neuroscience behind reparenting. You become the attuned caregiver that younger you needed. And over time, that rewires things.
If you want to explore what relational trauma does to the nervous system at a more granular level, that guide covers the foundational mechanisms in detail.
How does inner child wounding show up in driven women?
Inner child wounding in driven women tends to be hidden beneath a layer of extraordinary competence, which is one reason it takes so long to name. The very adaptations that made survival possible become indistinguishable from personality.
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind. As if my Brain had split. I tried to match it. Seam by Seam. But could not make them fit.”EMILY DICKINSON, Poet (1830, 1886), “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind” (Fr. 867)
Dickinson’s image captures what inner child work often surfaces: the felt sense of internal fracture, of parts of yourself that don’t quite cohere. The adult who’s competent and capable at work, and the younger self who still doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. The woman who handles everything, and the child inside her who is exhausted and wants, just once, for someone to handle it for her.
COMPOSITE CLINICAL VIGNETTE
Priya, 39. Management consultant.
She arrives for our Thursday session in November rain still carrying her rollaboard, having come straight from the airport. She sets a Yeti tumbler on the table between us, still in her coat, and says: “I’m fine. I just don’t know why I cried on the flight home and I need to understand it before my next call at four.”
What she describes is this: the in-flight movie had a scene of a mother braiding a daughter’s hair before school. Nothing dramatic. Just a mother, a daughter, morning light. Priya watched it and felt something crack open. “It’s so stupid,” she said. “I’m forty years old. I have my own company. Why does a movie about someone’s mom make me feel like I’m nine?”
Sitting across from her, I recognized what I’ve seen in this work consistently: the woman who built an extraordinary external life, in part, because the internal world was never safe enough to inhabit. The competence isn’t separate from the wound. It grew out of it.
What Priya was describing, though she didn’t have language for it yet, was the inner child’s ongoing presence in her adult nervous system. The nine-year-old who learned that feelings were inefficient, that self-sufficiency was survival, that needing things was a liability. She’d carried that nine-year-old across fifteen years of a demanding career, never once stopping to check in on her. That cracked-open feeling on the flight was the first time that younger part had gotten her attention in a very long while. She didn’t know what to do with it. Most of the women I work with don’t. Not at first.
In my clinical practice, roughly 7 in 10 driven women I see who are presenting with burnout, relational difficulty, or an unexplained chronic dissatisfaction also describe a childhood history of having been the capable one, the responsible one, the one who figured things out without asking for help. The “inner child” they need to meet is often the version of themselves who worked very hard not to need anything from anyone. And she’s tired.
The clinical name for what many of them are carrying is anxious attachment, or more specifically, a compulsive self-reliance that developed as a variant of avoidant attachment. The kitchen table translation: they learned so early that needing things was dangerous that they stopped noticing they had needs at all. What looks like strength from the outside is, at the interior level, a nine-year-old who is still holding her breath.
The Fixing the Foundations™ course was built specifically for driven women doing this kind of foundational repair work. If you’re recognizing this pattern in yourself, Fixing the Foundations walks through a structured protocol for identifying the childhood wounds still shaping your adult emotional life and beginning to work with them at the nervous-system level.
The exercise: talking to your 9-year-old self
The following exercise is the same framework used with clients in the therapy practice, adapted for individual use. Read through it fully first, then return to the beginning and move through it slowly.
A few notes before you start. This exercise is designed as a complement to therapy, not a replacement. If you’re carrying complex or developmental trauma, do this work alongside a trained trauma-informed therapist who can help you regulate when difficult material surfaces. You’re in charge of the pace. If something feels too intense, slow down or stop. And you don’t have to use age nine specifically. It’s the age that most resonates in clinical practice, old enough for a developed sense of self, young enough to still be in primary formation, but use whatever age calls to you.
Step 1: Find your photo
Find a photograph of yourself from the age that draws your attention. Or the one you’ve been avoiding. Both are equally valid starting points. If you don’t have childhood photos, many people don’t and their absence is itself meaningful, work with a mental image. Close your eyes and let a picture of yourself at that age arise naturally. Notice what details your mind offers you. Place the photo where you can look at it while you write.
Step 2: Ground yourself first
Before you engage with the photo, take two or three minutes to settle your nervous system. You want to come to this exercise from your adult self, not from a triggered state where you’ve already been pulled into the child’s emotional experience. The goal is to meet her, not to become her.
Try this: feel both feet flat on the floor. Notice the weight of your body in the chair. Take three slow breaths, making the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. Look around the room and name five things you can see. You’re here. You’re the adult. She’s not alone anymore because you’re here.
Step 3: Look at the photo
Now, look at the photo. Really look at it. Don’t rush past the discomfort if it comes. What do you see in her face? What do her eyes tell you? What’s her posture? How is she holding her body? What do you imagine she was feeling in that moment? What was happening in her life around that time?
Just notice. Don’t judge what comes up in you. If you feel the impulse to look away, notice that impulse with curiosity rather than shame: Interesting. What is this part of me protecting me from?
Step 4: Check in somatically
Before you begin writing, scan your body. Where do you feel the sensation of looking at this photo? Is there tightening in your chest? A heaviness in your belly? A sense of something opening in your throat? A warmth, or a cold? You don’t need to interpret the sensation right now. Just note it. Write it down if you like: “When I look at her, I feel ______ in my ______.”
Your body is telling you something. This is what van der Kolk means when he writes that the body keeps the score (PMID: 38198456). The body knows things the mind hasn’t yet articulated. Starting with somatic awareness rather than cognitive analysis is what keeps this exercise from becoming another intellectual exercise rather than a relational one.
Step 5: Write to her
Open your journal or a new document. Address your letter directly to her. Using her name, or “little me,” or whatever feels right. Start with the simplest possible acknowledgment: I see you.
Then use these prompts to guide your letter. You don’t need to answer every one. Let yourself be drawn to the ones that carry charge:
- If I could sit with you right now, what’s the first thing I’d want you to know?
- What do I see when I look at you that you couldn’t see about yourself at the time?
- What are you carrying right now that isn’t yours to carry alone?
- Was anyone telling you the truth about what was happening? What’s the truth I want to offer you now?
- What do I want you to know about your right to take up space?
- What were you getting right? What strengths, what gifts, what small acts of resilience can I name for you now?
- What would I want to offer you, comfort, protection, a witness, a hand on your shoulder, that you may not have had then?
- What good things are coming for you that you can’t yet imagine?
- What do I want to promise you?
Write for as long as it takes. Don’t edit. Don’t make it neat. Let it be messy and real and yours.
Step 6: Sit with what comes up
When you finish writing, put the pen down and be with what’s there. Notice what emotions have surfaced: grief, tenderness, anger on her behalf, a fierce protective surge, sadness, relief. All of it is welcome. Ask yourself: What does it mean that these feelings are here? Not as a problem to solve, but as information. What does this younger part of you still need?
Step 7: Close with care
Don’t move directly from this exercise into your inbox or your next task. Your nervous system has just done something significant. Honor that.
Take a few minutes to do something gentle and regulating: make a cup of tea, go outside, put your feet on the ground, call someone who feels safe. Offer your adult self the same care you just offered that younger version of you. You deserve it too. Right now, today, not only in retrospect.
Both/And: you can do this work on your own AND still need a witness
Doing this exercise independently is genuinely meaningful AND it isn’t the whole of the work. The distinction matters, and it often gets lost in popular presentations of inner child practices.
The Both/And here is specific: the capacity for self-compassion is real and developable AND some of what the inner child needs isn’t words on a page. She needs the experience of being seen by another person while she’s present. She needs the felt sense of not being alone in the room with it. That relational dimension is what produces the most durable healing, and it’s what solo journaling exercises can’t fully replicate.
COMPOSITE CLINICAL VIGNETTE
Yasmin, 44. Physician, concierge practice.
She came to therapy presenting it as a professional development question. “I need to be a better delegator,” she told me in our first session, a Tuesday afternoon in late February, her signet ring turning slowly on her right hand as she spoke. Over several months, what emerged was a woman who had learned very early that having needs was dangerous. Her father was unpredictable. Her mother was loving but overwhelmed. Yasmin learned to need nothing, want nothing visibly, and be so capable that no one would ever have a reason to fail her.
She started doing the inner child exercise at home between sessions. She was diligent about it. Journaling to her younger self with the same precision she brought to everything. “I’m doing it right,” she told me, a little frustrated. “I’m saying all the right things to her. Why don’t I feel anything?”
What Yasmin was discovering is the central Both/And of this work: you can do the exercise correctly, in solitude, with great sincerity. And still not get all the way there. Because her original wound was being left alone to figure things out too early. Positioning herself as her own lone healer was, without her realizing it, re-enacting the very thing that hurt her. The corrective experience wasn’t more self-sufficiency. The corrective experience was relationship.
We shifted the approach. Rather than writing to her inner child alone, she’d bring the letter to session and read parts of it out loud. With me in the room. Present. Not fixing anything. Just there. The first time she did it, she cried within two sentences. Not because the words were different. Because she wasn’t alone with them. She still talks about that session as the one where something finally moved.
The research supports what clinical practice shows consistently. A 2023 study in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that therapist attunement, not technique alone, was the strongest predictor of lasting change in trauma-focused interventions (PMID: 36939067, 2023). The modality matters. The relationship matters more.
So: yes, do this exercise. Do it more than once. Do it at home with a photo and a journal and a cup of tea. And also recognize that real inner child healing happens most deeply in the context of an attuned therapeutic relationship. Where another human being is sitting with you in it. Helping you regulate when the material gets big. Offering you the relational attunement that rewires attachment patterns at the source. You’re not nine anymore. You get to ask for help.
Of course the self-sufficiency feels safer. Of course you’d rather figure this out on your own. That makes complete sense. It’s what you learned. And it’s worth asking whether that learning is still serving you.
The Systemic Lens: what your family carried that wasn’t theirs alone
The systemic lens on inner child work shifts the frame from personal failure to structural context, and that shift changes everything about how you hold what you’re healing.
When we talk about inner child wounds, we’re usually talking about relational wounds. Things that happened, or didn’t happen, in families. But families don’t exist in isolation. The mother who was emotionally unavailable because she was working two jobs and managing her own unhealed trauma. The father who couldn’t express emotion because he’d been told his whole life that doing so made him weak. The family that had no language for feelings because survival had always been more urgent than integration. These aren’t individual failures. They’re the downstream effects of economic systems, racial systems, gender norms, immigration histories, and generational poverty operating through the people who were supposed to take care of you.
The mechanism matters here, because the systemic lens isn’t about excusing harm. It’s about making sense of how harm propagates through family systems without anyone consciously choosing to perpetuate it. Capitalism extracts labor from parents at the cost of their presence with children. Patriarchy teaches men to suppress emotional attunement while simultaneously requiring women to carry the emotional labor of entire households. White supremacy produces intergenerational trauma in communities of color that expresses itself in the exact relational patterns inner child work is designed to address. These aren’t abstractions. They live in your mother’s exhausted face at dinner. They live in your father’s silence when you needed him to say something. They live in your body right now, in the way you hold yourself in meetings, in the way you manage your own needs out of existence before anyone else can fail to meet them.
The sensation test here is specific: if you’re a woman of color doing this work, the nine-year-old you’re meeting didn’t only absorb her family’s particular limitations. She absorbed what her family absorbed from a world that was actively hostile to their full humanity. Naming that as part of her story, rather than flattening it into “family dysfunction,” is part of the healing.
For women navigating childhood emotional neglect with a racial or cultural dimension, the letter you write to your younger self can include this: what you were taught to carry wasn’t only yours. It was handed down through people who were also handed something they didn’t choose. You’re not just healing your own wound. You’re interrupting a pattern that has moved through your lineage for longer than you’ve been alive.
Healing at the individual level is real and necessary. And it’s happening inside a much larger story. Both of those things can be true simultaneously. Holding both tends to make the work feel less like personal failure and more like what it actually is: brave, complicated, human work.
What does it look like after the exercise?
The shifts that follow inner child work are rarely dramatic. They’re usually quiet, accumulative, and easy to dismiss as unrelated to the exercise. They’re not.
COMPOSITE CLINICAL VIGNETTE
Kavita, 42. Hospital administrator.
She came to therapy for “work stress” and over several months arrived, at her own pace, at the real thing: a childhood in which she’d learned to read the room for danger before she could read words, and to manage everyone’s feelings while having no one manage hers.
She did the exercise one Sunday afternoon, a gray March day, at her kitchen table with a cup of chai she let go cold. She found a photo of herself at nine, standing a little apart from the rest of her family at a birthday party, slightly off to the edge of the frame. Her mother’s Nalgene with the peace-sign stickers is visible on the table in the background. When she looked at the photo, she felt what she described as “a very old, very quiet grief.”
She wrote to that little girl for forty minutes. She told her that it wasn’t her job to manage everyone else. She told her she was allowed to be the one who got to need things. She told her that the skills she’d developed, the reading of rooms, the anticipating of needs, the fierce competence, had served her beautifully and cost her deeply, and that it was okay to grieve the cost.
When she came to session that week, she said: “I think I’ve been very good at caring for everyone except the person I was before I knew how to be that good.” She cried. She let me witness it. That was its own kind of exercise.
The shifts that followed weren’t dramatic. But Kavita began to notice when she was operating from the part of her that was nine, braced, hypervigilant, already compensating. And she started doing something different. She’d pause. She’d put a hand on her own chest. She’d say quietly: I’ve got you. You’re not alone in this anymore. That’s reparenting. That’s what it looks like in an ordinary life.
What I want to name clearly is that this kind of shift is available to you regardless of whether you’re currently in therapy. The exercise is a starting point. The repeated practice of turning toward rather than away from your younger self is what builds the capacity over time.
In my clinical practice, I’ve noticed that the women who make the most durable progress with inner child work are the ones who stop treating it as a one-time exercise and start treating it as an ongoing relationship. The nine-year-old doesn’t need you to fix her. She needs you to keep showing up. She needs to know that this time, you’re not going to disappear again.
What does that look like practically? A hand on your chest when you feel small. A pause before the usual automatic self-criticism. A moment of asking: Which part of me is running this right now? And when the answer is the nine-year-old, offering her something different than what she originally learned to expect. That’s the work. It doesn’t require a session. It requires a choice, made repeatedly, to stay.
When should you seek therapy for inner child work?
This exercise is designed as a complement to, not a replacement for, professional support. Several specific markers indicate when working with a trained therapist is important rather than optional.
If any of the following apply to you, I’d strongly encourage working with a trauma-informed therapist before or alongside this kind of inner child practice:
- You have a history of complex or developmental trauma: ongoing abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, early loss of a primary caregiver
- Thinking about certain childhood ages or experiences brings up intense dissociation, flashbacks, or flooding
- You can’t access any compassion for your younger self. Only shame, contempt, or numbness
- You’re currently in a period of acute mental health crisis
- You’ve previously found similar exercises destabilizing rather than regulating
Working with a trauma-informed therapist trained in EMDR, IFS, somatic approaches, or attachment-focused treatment gives you a container for this work. Someone in the room with you, helping you regulate when the material gets big. And as I’ve said throughout this post: the antidote to childhood loneliness isn’t more solitude. It’s relationship.
If therapy isn’t accessible right now, financially, geographically, or logistically, know that doing this exercise mindfully, staying within a tolerable range of activation, and having one safe person you can call afterward is a meaningful place to start. You don’t need perfect conditions to begin. You just need to begin.
Here’s what I want to leave you with: the nine-year-old version of you was doing the best she could with what she had. The drive, the perfectionism, the hypervigilance, the self-sufficiency. These weren’t character defects. They were adaptations made by an intelligent, feeling child who was trying to survive something bigger than she was. She made it through. You made it through.
And now, from the vantage point of adulthood, you have something she didn’t: the capacity to turn back toward her, to look at her with clear eyes and an open heart, and to say: I see you. I’ve got you. You don’t have to manage this alone anymore.
That’s not a small thing. For many of the women I work with, it turns out to be the whole work. You don’t have to do it perfectly. You just have to be willing to show up for her. The way you’re learning, finally, to show up for yourself.
We’re all doing this from our own corners, with our own shoeboxes full of photographs. You’re not alone in it. And neither is she. If you want a community of women doing this work together, the Strong & Stable newsletter is a good place to land.
Of course you’ve been waiting for permission to put some of this down. Of course you’ve been holding it together so long that you’ve forgotten there’s another way. That’s what the proverbial house of life produces in women who learned early that strength was the only safe currency: a house that looks beautiful from the street and has a nine-year-old in the basement who’s still waiting for someone to come and find her. She’s not a burden. She’s the missing piece. And she’s been waiting for you all along.
If you’re ready to go deeper than a single exercise, Fixing the Foundations covers the full arc of relational trauma recovery, including the inner child patterns that shape attachment, self-worth, and the capacity to receive care. It’s designed for driven women who want to do this work at their own pace, with clinical structure and real support.
Q: What exactly is the inner child in psychological terms?
A: The inner child is a psychological concept representing the part of the psyche that retains feelings, memories, and unmet needs from childhood. Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems, describes these as “exiled parts” that carry emotional burdens from early wounding. The inner child isn’t metaphor only; it maps onto actual implicit memory systems in the brain that remain active in adulthood.
Q: Is it safe to do inner child work on my own without a therapist?
A: For many people, gentle inner child exercises are safe and meaningful as a standalone practice. The important caveat is complex or developmental trauma. If your childhood included ongoing abuse, severe neglect, or experiences that still produce flashbacks or dissociation, this work is safest alongside a trained trauma-informed therapist who can help you regulate when difficult material surfaces.
Q: Why does nine-year-old come up so often in inner child work?
A: Age nine sits at a developmental crossroads. Children at this age have a coherent sense of self but are still in primary emotional formation, before adolescence reorganizes identity. Many clients report that nine is when they first clearly remember deciding who they had to be in order to survive their family environment. That decisional moment is often exactly what inner child work needs to reach.
Q: How do I heal my inner child? Where do I actually start?
A: The most accessible starting point is a structured letter-writing exercise like the one described in this post. Find a photograph of yourself at a younger age, ground your nervous system before you begin, and write directly to that younger self with curiosity rather than judgment. The goal isn’t to fix her. Witnessing her is the beginning. That act of turning toward rather than away is where genuine inner child healing starts.
Q: I feel nothing when I look at childhood photos of myself. Is something wrong with me?
A: Emotional numbness in response to childhood imagery is clinical information, not a personal failing. It often signals that protective parts are working hard to keep painful material at a distance. That protection made sense when you were young. Working with a therapist trained in IFS or somatic approaches can help those protective parts feel safe enough to step back and allow contact with what’s underneath.
Q: What is reparenting and does it actually work?
A: Reparenting is the practice of offering the younger parts of yourself the attunement, safety, and recognition they didn’t receive from caregivers. Neurologically, it works by creating new relational experiences for the nervous system, building what Daniel J. Siegel, MD, calls earned secure attachment. Research on self-compassion interventions shows medium-to-large effect sizes for reducing trauma symptoms including PTSD and depression (PMID: 34584575, 2021).
Q: Can doing this work make me feel worse before I feel better?
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
Q: How is inner child work different from just journaling about my childhood?
A: Inner child work is relational, not just reflective. Journaling about the past describes events from an adult observer’s position. Inner child work invites you to establish an active relationship with the part of you that still holds those experiences. You’re not analyzing her. You’re meeting her. That relational dimension is what produces corrective emotional experience rather than intellectual insight alone.
RELATED READING
- Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True, 2021.
- Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. Guilford Press, 2020.
- Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Bradshaw, John. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. Bantam, 1990.
- Neff, Kristin D., and Christopher K. Germer. “A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 69, no. 1 (2013): 28, 44. PMID: 23813465.
- Wright, Annie. Inner Child Healing for the Busy Professional. AnnieWright.com.
- Wright, Annie. Childhood Emotional Neglect: A Therapist’s Complete Guide. AnnieWright.com.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.
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