An Inner Child Exercise: Talking to Your 9-Year-Old Self

RELATIONAL TRAUMA & RECOVERY • April 2, 2023

The Photograph in the Garage

She finds it in a shoebox on a shelf above the washer. It’s tucked between a folded birthday card and a school photo envelope she doesn’t remember keeping. Maya is home for the holidays, and she’s cleaning because that’s what she does when she doesn’t know what else to do with herself — she organizes, purges, makes order out of whatever’s in front of her.

She pulls out the photo and goes still.

It’s her at nine. Standing in front of a Christmas tree, wearing a sweater that’s slightly too small. Her smile is wide enough to show her teeth, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She has that look — the one she’s seen in other photos from around the same period — where it’s clear she’s already learned to perform okayness. Already learned to hold her body a certain way. The eyes give it away, though. They always do.

Maya’s chest does something complicated. Not quite sadness. Not exactly regret. Something colder and tighter — a kind of recognition she can’t put words to yet. She wants to put the photo back in the box. She almost does. Instead, she sits down on the basement steps with the photo in her lap and stays with it for a minute. Just stays.

That feeling — that complicated, chest-tightening recognition — is the beginning of inner child work. You don’t need a therapist’s office or a formal session for it to start. Sometimes it starts in a garage with a shoebox. Sometimes it starts with a photo that catches you off-guard. Sometimes it starts when a song comes on and you’re suddenly eight years old again, and something that you can’t quite name starts aching.

This post is for Maya. It’s for you if you’ve had a moment like that and didn’t know what to do with it. And it’s for the version of you who’s ready to stop looking away from your younger self — and finally sit with her for a while.

What Is Inner Child Work?

The term “inner child” entered the clinical mainstream largely through the work of John Bradshaw, author and counselor, whose 1990 book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child gave millions of readers language for something they’d long felt but couldn’t name. Bradshaw argued that when children don’t receive sufficient attunement, safety, or mirroring from their caregivers, a part of their psychic development becomes arrested at that age — frozen in an emotional moment that the adult self keeps unconsciously re-enacting.

Decades later, Richard Schwartz, PhD, psychologist and developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, expanded this framework into a full clinical model. In IFS, the inner child isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a “part” of the internal system that carries burdens (painful beliefs and emotions) from early experiences. Schwartz’s work, detailed in his book No Bad Parts, proposes that every part of us — even the ones we find most difficult to acknowledge — developed as a form of protection. The nine-year-old who learned to go quiet at the dinner table, the six-year-old who became the family’s little comedian to diffuse 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.

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. It’s to build a new kind of relationship with it.

If you’ve ever felt a sudden, inexplicable sadness that seems disproportionate to what triggered it — if you’ve struggled to receive care, felt deeply uncomfortable being seen, or found yourself operating from a place of bracing vigilance that your adult circumstances don’t quite justify — there’s a good chance your inner child is present in that moment. And there’s a good chance she’s been waiting for you to turn around and notice her.

The Neuroscience of Reparenting

It might feel strange — or even a little ridiculous — to imagine sitting down and having a conversation with your nine-year-old self. But this isn’t just emotional metaphor work. There’s real neuroscience underneath it.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind, has spent decades studying how early relational experiences shape neural architecture. His research shows 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, body-based) 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.

Here’s what’s important: those neural patterns don’t just 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 finds herself suddenly bracing 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.

The good news — and this is where neuroplasticity enters the picture — is that the brain retains its capacity to update those patterns throughout life. 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. 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. You become the attuned caregiver that younger you needed. And over time, that rewires things.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented extensively how trauma lives in the body — not only in the mind. His decades of clinical work reveal that healing isn’t just cognitive reframing; it requires somatic and relational engagement. The body needs new experiences of safety, not just new ideas about safety. 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.

This is the neuroscience behind reparenting. It’s not about believing in some mystical inner child. It’s about creating new neural pathways through the same mechanism the brain used to build the original ones: relationship.

How Inner Child Work Shows Up for Driven Women

There’s a particular version of this that I see in my work with driven women — women who are accomplished, capable, and by most external measures, thriving. And yet.