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

RELATIONAL TRAUMA & RECOVERY • April 2, 2023

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

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. (PMID: 23813465)

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. (PMID: 11556645)

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. (PMID: 9384857)

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.

Dickinson’s image captures something that 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. The woman who handles everything, and the child inside her who’s exhausted and wants someone to handle it for her, just once. Inner child work is the practice of beginning to match those seams — gently, over time, without forcing them.

The Exercise: Talking to Your 9-Year-Old Self

What follows is the actual exercise — the same framework I use with clients in my therapy practice, adapted for you to do on your own (or alongside your therapist). Read through it fully first, then go back to the beginning and do 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, please 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. You can always return to this.
• You don’t have to use age nine. It’s the age I’ve found most resonant for many of my clients — old enough to have developed a sense of self, young enough to still be in primary formation — but use whatever age calls to you. Trust that impulse.

Step 1: Find Your Photo

Find a photo of yourself from the age that draws your attention — or that you’ve been avoiding. Both are equally valid starting points. The age that you feel a complicated mix of feelings about. The version of you that might be a little hard to look at, or that you’ve been quick to move past.

If you don’t have photos from childhood — many people don’t, and their absence is itself meaningful — you can work with a mental image. Simply close your eyes and let an image 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 — in front of you, propped up, face visible.

Step 2: Ground Yourself First

Before you engage with the photo, take two or three minutes to settle your nervous system. This isn’t incidental — it matters. You want to come to this exercise from your adult self, not from a triggered state where you’ve already been pulled back into the emotions of the child. 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 up. Notice 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, take a moment to 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. It’s the first voice to listen to. This is what van der Kolk means when he writes that the body keeps the score — the body knows things the mind hasn’t yet articulated.

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 the following prompts to guide your letter. You don’t need to answer every question — let yourself be drawn to the ones that carry charge for you:

• 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?
• What would I want to tell you about the feelings you’re having — the ones you may have learned to hide or make smaller?
• 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 physical safety, your emotional safety, your right to take up space?
• What were you getting right? What strengths, what gifts, what little 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 just 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? And what’s one small thing you could offer her — or yourself — today?

Step 7: Close with Care

This step matters. 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 in the grass, 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 Parent Your Inner Child AND Still Need Support

Here’s something I want to name clearly, because it often gets missed in popular presentations of inner child work: doing this work does not mean your adult self has to be the sole source of healing for your younger parts. That framing — where you become your own perfect parent, where you fill all the gaps through your own effort and self-compassion — can quietly re-enact the very wound you’re trying to heal.

If your wound was that you were left alone to figure things out too early, then positioning yourself as your own lone healer is not the corrective experience. The corrective experience is relationship. It’s being witnessed. It’s not doing it alone.

Leila is forty-four. She’s a physician who runs her own concierge practice, has two kids in high school, and describes herself — with a wry self-awareness that I find moving — as “allergic to needing anything from anyone.” 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. 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. Leila learned to need nothing, want nothing visibly, and be so competent that no one would ever have a reason to fail her.

She started doing the inner child exercise on her own between sessions. She was diligent about it — of course she was — 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 Leila 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 some of what the inner child needs isn’t words on a page. It’s the experience of being in relationship while she’s present. It’s another set of eyes on her. It’s the felt sense of not being alone in the room with it.

So yes — you can absolutely do this exercise on your own, and it can be genuinely meaningful. And you can 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 kind of relational attunement that rewires attachment patterns.

This exercise is a beginning. It’s a practice. It’s a way of turning toward yourself. But it’s not the whole of the work, and you don’t have to do the whole of it alone. You’re not nine anymore. You get to ask for help.

The Systemic Lens: What Your Family Carried That Wasn’t Theirs Alone

I want to hold something here that I think is often absent from popular conversations about inner child work: the places where individual healing and systemic context intersect.

When we talk about the wounds the inner child carries, we’re usually talking about relational wounds — things that happened (or didn’t happen) in families. But families don’t exist in isolation. They exist inside systems: economic systems, racial systems, cultural systems, immigration histories, generational poverty, white supremacy, gender norms that told girls to be small and quiet and accommodating.

Many of the things the nine-year-old was taught to carry weren’t just her family’s dysfunction. They were the product of larger forces operating through her family. The mother who was emotionally unavailable because she was working three jobs. The father who couldn’t express emotion because he’d been told that made him weak. The family that didn’t have language for feelings because survival had always been more urgent than integration. These aren’t individual failures. They’re the downstream effects of systems that didn’t support the full humanity of the people in them.

This matters when you’re doing this exercise because it shapes how you understand what you’re offering that nine-year-old when you write to her. You can tell her: what you carried wasn’t only your fault, and it wasn’t only your family’s fault, and it wasn’t only your individual wound to fix. The systems that shaped the people who shaped you deserve to be named — not to excuse harm, but to make sense of it. To give it proper scale.

For women of color, for women from immigrant families, for women whose mothers were navigating poverty or racism or the particular damage of having their own agency constrained by larger systems — this systemic frame isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between understanding your history and pathologizing it. Your inner child didn’t grow up in a vacuum. She grew up in a context. And that context is part of her story too.

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 at once. Holding both of them tends to make the work feel less like a personal failure and more like what it actually is: brave, complicated, human work. If you’re navigating childhood emotional neglect or the particular weight of relational trauma passed through generations, that context belongs in the letter you write to your younger self.

What Happens After the Exercise: A Vignette

Nadia is forty-two, a hospital administrator with a gift for logistics and a tendency to over-function in every room she enters. She came to therapy for “work stress” and over several months arrived, gradually and 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 I’ve outlined above at home one Sunday afternoon. She found a photo of herself at nine — she’s wearing braids, standing a little apart from the rest of her family at a birthday party, slightly off to the edge of the frame. She said that 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 didn’t stop. 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. They rarely are. But Nadia 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, something like: I’ve got you. You’re not alone in this anymore.

That’s reparenting. That’s what it looks like in an ordinary life. If you want to explore what this kind of work looks like in a therapeutic relationship, working with a trauma-informed therapist is one of the most powerful contexts in which to do it. It doesn’t have to look like anything in particular. It just has to be honest, and it has to be witnessed.

The Path Forward: When to Seek Therapy

This exercise is designed to be done as a supplement to — not a replacement for — professional support. If any of the following apply to you, I’d strongly encourage you to work with a trauma-informed therapist before or alongside this kind of inner child work:

• You have a history of complex or developmental trauma (ongoing abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, early loss)
• Thinking about certain childhood ages or experiences brings up intense dissociation, flashbacks, or flooding
• You find yourself unable to 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

Working with a trauma-informed therapist — someone trained in EMDR, IFS, somatic approaches, or attachment-focused treatment — gives you a relationship and a container for this work. It means you’re not doing it alone. And as I said earlier, the antidote to childhood loneliness isn’t more solitude. It’s relationship.

If you’re looking for support, I work with driven, ambitious women navigating relational trauma, attachment wounds, and the particular weight of building a life when your foundation was shaky from the start. You can learn more about working together by exploring one-on-one work with me or my executive coaching program for women navigating leadership and their inner lives simultaneously.

And 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 the perfect conditions to begin. You just need to begin.

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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 a situation that was 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. That might 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 together, from our own corners, with our own shoeboxes full of photos. You’re not alone in it. And neither is she. If you want a community of women doing this work, the Strong & Stable newsletter is a good place to land — it’s the Sunday conversation you wished you’d had years earlier.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer