Inner Child Healing: Would you tell your kid that she's stupid?

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • March 21, 2021

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Relational trauma occurs when the hurt or harm happens within close, important relationships, especially those with caregivers or family, during your formative years. It is not about single traumatic events alone, nor is it a sign of personal weakness or failure to ‘get over it.’ Instead, it’s about the lasting impact these relational wounds have on your sense of safety, trust, and self-worth as an adult. This matters here because the harsh self-talk you experience often stems from these early relational injuries — the very voices that should have nurtured you instead left you feeling unlovable or flawed. Understanding your struggles through the lens of relational trauma invites compassion and opens the door to healing those younger parts of yourself who never got the care they deserved.

• You carry an inner critic shaped by relational trauma that speaks to you with the same cruelty you would never direct at a beloved child, revealing a deep disconnect between how you treat yourself and how you treat those you love.
• Your inner critic is not some abstract enemy but a harsh internalized voice that repeats damaging messages rooted in childhood wounds, making it essential to recognize this voice as a product of past relational harm, not objective truth.
• Healing begins when you deliberately speak to yourself with the same kindness and compassion you offer your child, rewiring your self-talk through consistent, neuroplasticity-based practice that helps reclaim your self-esteem and fosters true self-love.

“Would you tell your kid that she’s stupid?”

“What?! No. Never.”

My client and I were wrapping up a session and she had just begun being incredibly critical to herself.

“Okay,” I said, “Why not?”

“Well,” my client said, “Because she’s just a child, she’s my child!, and she’s *not* stupid, and I love her and-”

I interrupted her. “Exactly! You love her and you would never in a million years say that to her. So why are you saying it to yourself?”

Client pauses. “Well, it’s different with me. I am stupid. Plus, I’m an adult so it’s different.”

I take a deep breath. 

“It’s not, actually. It’s not different. You’re not stupid and it’s your job as an adult to treat yourself with the same kindness that you give to your actual child. With the same patience, and love, and compassion as you would have ideally been shown when you were a child. And I think if you could give yourself even one fraction of what you give to your child, if you could turn that love back on yourself even a tiny bit, you’d experience powerful shifts in your self-esteem and confidence.”

1. Why actively speaking kindly to yourself matters.
2. Why does this matter?
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. How to actively speak more kindly to yourself.
5. I think this is probably one of the most challenging exercises I offer clients.
6. And then, here’s where it gets even more uncomfortable: you then say those things to yourself.
7. Rewiring Self-Talk Through Neuroplasticity-Based Trauma Therapy
8. The invitation.

Why actively speaking kindly to yourself matters.

Over the last ten years of clinical psychotherapy work, I must have had a conversation like the one in this blog’s opening at least 300 times.

I never fail to be amazed at how many of my clients are wonderful, loving, instinctually compassionate, and supportive parents to their own children despite coming from adverse and outright tragically abusive backgrounds where almost no one showed them even a modicum of the care they show their own children. They do not like speaking kindly to themselves. 

It brings me to tears to think about how good my clients are at parenting their children despite the lack of “good enough parenting” they received.

But it also makes me so sad to see that, despite how wonderful they are with their own children, they still deeply struggle to speak and treat themselves well. 

It seems ironic and disconnected, doesn’t it? 

You can be a wonderful parent to your flesh and blood children but a terrible inner parent to yourself.

But I see this all the time.

That’s why one of my very favorite therapy tools to use when I’m dealing with a particularly self-critical client and I know that they’re a wonderful parent, is to invite them to start speaking kindly to themselves as they would to their own child(ren).

Why does this matter?

In a word: neuroscience. 

To elaborate, I’m sure you, like so many of us, have heard the term “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

This phrase and contribution to the field of neuropsychology were first used in 1949 by Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist.

Effectively, Hebb’s rule teaches us that each thought (spoken or unspoken), every habit, every feeling, and physical sensation we experience triggers the firing of neurons which, in time, creates a neural network in your brain. 

Associated channels of memory and habit as it were.

And when you repeat something again and again – consciously or unconsciously – you reify (meaning, strengthen) that neural network.

So for anyone that’s particularly self-critical who has spent a lifetime lambasting, degrading, and being outright unkind to themselves, they likely have strong neural pathways to reinforce this behavior.

To achieve the change that that client ultimately wants from our therapy together, we have to, effectively, rewire their brain.

We have to form new neural pathways around treating and speaking to themselves more kindly, more compassionately.

And a very large amount of this “rewiring” can come from teaching and supporting my clients to actively talk to themselves more kindly in between our sessions.

Talking to and about themselves as they would speak to and think about their own children.

Here’s how the exercise looks in practice.

How to actively speak more kindly to yourself.

The way I teach my clients to actively speak to themselves more kindly happens in three steps:

1. Moment to moment, catch yourself being unkind to yourself.
2. Pause. Instead of being unkind to yourself, think of what you would say to your own child in that moment.
3. And then actively say that to yourself instead.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It is a simple exercise.

But in no way is it easy.

I think this is probably one of the most challenging exercises I offer clients.

Why?

Because first of all, it requires you to bring a heightened awareness to how you’re talking to yourself moment to moment.

Each time you get out of the shower and see your loose skin and belly hanging down, each time you get interrupted by your less-than-supportive manager on a Zoom call, each time you see the state of your chaotic garage and yard and start berating yourself for not having a tidier home… you need to bring awareness to all of these moments through the day when you’re on neural pathway autopilot and starting to beat yourself up about yourself/your capacities/your life.

This level of mindfulness takes work and it’s not always comfortable to do.

THEN, when you do catch yourself in those moments when you’re about to be unkind to yourself, you need to pause, as much as possible and stop yourself from saying something unkind/unsupportive/mean to yourself, and instead think, “What would I say to my own child?”

You might tell your son or daughter:

“It’s okay honey, you’re doing a great job and you’re working so hard. It’s okay not to have everything be perfect.”

“Your body is strong and healthy and beautiful. I love your body!”

“You’re scared and anxious right now, that makes sense. I’m here with you. I got you.”

And then, here’s where it gets even more uncomfortable: you then say those things to yourself.

Yes, really.

Out loud. Silently. It doesn’t matter.

You just have to say that alternative, kind, supportive thought to yourself to get those new, different neurons firing.

It will feel awkward. It will feel forced. It will feel fake.

Remember: you’ve spent decades speaking and treating yourself unkindly.

Those self-critical neural pathways are strong.

It’s going to take time and some discomfort to create new neural pathways and to have those new neural pathways start to feel as automatic as the old ones.

But if you keep practicing the above exercise, day after day, you will create new neural pathways for yourself and you will support the transformation of your self-talk, which in turn will lead to a cascade of positive psychological impacts.

This is the work of change.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

And never once have I had a client come back to me after I assign this exercise and say, “Wow, Annie that was really easy to do. A breeze.”

But also, every single time I have assigned this exercise, my clients have come back and said, “Wow, that was powerful. Uncomfortable, but powerful. I can feel some difference already.”

So again, the work of change, particularly when we come from adverse early beginnings, is not easy. But it is so worthwhile.

Rewiring Self-Talk Through Neuroplasticity-Based Trauma Therapy

When you tell your therapist you’d never call your daughter stupid but can’t stop calling yourself that, describing the disconnect between your loving parenting and vicious self-talk, you’re identifying why understanding neuroplasticity is crucial—your brain has spent decades strengthening self-critical neural pathways that now run on autopilot, but these can be deliberately rewired through consistent practice of self-compassion.

Your trauma-informed therapist recognizes that this split—being wonderful to others while cruel to yourself—is classic trauma patterning where early experiences taught you that you were the problem, not the circumstances. They understand that asking you to speak kindly to yourself feels like asking you to speak Mandarin when you’ve only known English; the neural pathways simply aren’t there yet, making self-compassion feel fake, uncomfortable, even dangerous to your trauma-conditioned nervous system.

The therapeutic work involves not just understanding but actively practicing new neural firing patterns. Your therapist might have you speak self-critical thoughts aloud in session, then immediately rephrase them as you would for your child, helping you feel the stark contrast. They guide you through the discomfort of saying kind words to yourself, normalizing how foreign it feels while celebrating each moment you catch and redirect harsh self-talk.

Together, you explore the resistance—what feels dangerous about being kind to yourself? Often it’s the fear that self-compassion equals weakness, that you need harsh criticism to stay motivated, or that being gentle with yourself means you’re letting your guard down. Your therapist helps you recognize these as trauma-based beliefs, not truths.

Most powerfully, therapy provides a living laboratory for neural rewiring. Each time your therapist responds to your self-criticism with compassion rather than agreement, each session where you practice gentleness with yourself while witnessed, you’re creating new neural pathways. Eventually, the kind voice becomes as automatic as the critical one once was—proof that your brain remains capable of profound change, regardless of how long you’ve been cruel to yourself.

The invitation.

So now, my invitation to you is this:

If you identify with this essay today, if you struggle speaking to yourself or thinking about yourself kindly, if you struggle with treating yourself well – with respect, love, and care – I want you to practice this exercise – actively talking kindly to yourself – at least once a day for the next week.

If you have a child that you deeply love, it is very powerful to use them as a resource here when and if you struggle to find something kind or caring to say to yourself.

If you don’t have a child but there is a child in your life you really love – a niece or nephew or little neighbor child – imagine them into this exercise. How would you talk to them?

And if you can tolerate this and if you want to make this exercise even more powerful, find a childhood photo of yourself from an age of your youth. Imagine speaking kindly and supportively to this child.

And then, if you’re willing, please share how this exercise felt for you here in the comments of the blog.

We get over 23,000 blog visitors each month and they might benefit from hearing your experience and insights so that they can feel less alone.

So again, if you feel inclined, please share about your experience using this exercise here in the comments of this blog.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: You’re Doing the Work and It’s Still Hard

Here’s something I see regularly in driven women who are doing inner child work: they expect the insight to immediately change the experience. They understand, intellectually, that they wouldn’t speak to a child the way they speak to themselves. They can articulate the wound. They know where the critical voice came from. And then they wake up the next morning and the voice is still there — still saying you’re stupid, you’re not enough, you’re going to be found out.

The Both/And is this: understanding the wound doesn’t instantly heal it. You can know something is irrational and still feel it fully. You can have done years of work and still have bad days where the old voice is loud. You can be genuinely healing and still, sometimes, speak to yourself in ways you would never allow anyone to speak to a child you love.

Jordan, a researcher who’d been in therapy for three years, described it this way: “I’ve made so much progress. And then I’ll make a mistake at work and the voice comes back immediately — you’re an idiot, you’re going to lose everything, everyone’s going to find out you’re a fraud. I know that’s not the truth. And it still feels completely real.”

This is not regression. This is healing. It is not a straight line. The old neural pathways don’t disappear because you’ve identified them — they become quieter over time, with consistent reparative work. What changes is the gap between when the voice activates and when you can respond to it with something truer. That gap widening is the work. That gap widening is success, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

The Systemic Lens: Self-Criticism Is Culturally Amplified for Women

The internal critical voice that drives women with relational trauma backgrounds is not only inherited from individual family members — it’s amplified by a cultural environment that has historically measured women’s worth by appearance, compliance, productivity, and the suppression of need. When the culture already tells women they are too much or not enough at every turn, the internal critical voice has an echo chamber to work with.

This matters clinically because it means that healing from self-criticism for women is not only personal work. It’s also about learning to identify which internal voices are genuinely yours — formed in your specific family history — and which have been borrowed from a broader cultural narrative that benefits from your self-diminishment. The woman who calls herself stupid for making a mistake has a personal history that made that response make sense. And she also lives in a world that has historically rewarded self-effacement in women and punished confidence.

Understanding the systemic dimension of self-criticism doesn’t erase individual responsibility for shifting it. But it does help you stop taking it so personally. Your inner critic didn’t appear from nowhere. It was built by a specific family, in a specific cultural moment, in a world that had particular ideas about who deserved kindness and who didn’t. You’re not broken. You were shaped. And shapes can be reshaped.

The Inner Critic and the Perfectionism Pipeline

For most driven women from relational trauma backgrounds, the inner critical voice doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s connected to perfectionism — the belief, usually formed early and reinforced relentlessly, that excellence is the price of safety, love, or belonging. The inner critic is the enforcer of that standard. When you make a mistake, when you fall short, when you’re perceived as less than — the critic activates. And its job, originally, was to push you back toward the standard before something worse happened.

Understanding this connection doesn’t make the critic less painful. But it does help explain why it’s so tenacious. You’re not dealing with a thought pattern you can just decide to change. You’re dealing with a neurological habit that was formed under conditions of real risk and reinforced thousands of times across your development. The inner critic feels like the truth because it was, functionally, protective. The work is in convincing the part of you that deployed it that the protection is no longer necessary — that you are an adult who can handle mistakes, whose worth is not contingent on performance, who does not need to be driven at that level to be safe.

Camille, a senior engineer in her early forties, described the exhaustion of her inner critic this way: “I’ve achieved everything the voice said would make it quiet. And it’s still running at full volume. Which means either I haven’t achieved enough, or the whole premise was wrong from the beginning.” That recognition — that the critic’s standards are infinitely moving rather than achievable — is often the beginning of being able to put it in its proper place: not as the truth about you, but as an outdated protection strategy from a time when perfectionism was the best tool you had.

Reparenting the Critical Voice

Inner child work applied to self-criticism often involves a specific kind of cognitive restructuring: learning to notice the critical voice and respond to it the way you would respond to a frightened child rather than agreeing with it or fighting it. Neither capitulation nor warfare tends to work. What works is acknowledgment followed by redirection.

This sounds abstract until it’s in practice. In a session, I often ask clients to identify what the inner critic sounds like — whose voice it actually is, what it says, how old it makes them feel. Then I ask them to respond to that voice from their adult self: the compassionate, capable, realistic adult who knows things the frightened child didn’t know. What would you say to a seven-year-old who just made the mistake you made today? What would be genuinely true and genuinely kind?

The goal isn’t to eliminate the critical voice. It’s to have a relationship with it — to be able to hear it, recognize it as old information rather than current truth, and choose a different response. Over time, with consistent practice, the gap between the activation of the critic and the capacity to respond to it thoughtfully becomes shorter. The voice doesn’t disappear. But it loses authority. And that shift — from the voice that runs you to the voice you can talk back to — is one of the most profound changes I witness in clients doing this work.

Here’s to the work of learning to speak to yourself with the kindness you’d offer a child you love. That work matters more than almost anything else you’re doing.

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