Inner Child Work Works
The version presented online is often incomplete.
Inner child work emerged from relational psychotherapy. Richard Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems in the 1980s while working as a family therapist, noticing his clients described their inner lives as interacting parts. John Bradshaw’s workshops in the late 80s and 90s filled convention centers with thousands of people doing this work together, guided by trained facilitators. The original practice happened between two nervous systems: a therapist and client, or within a held group.
Then it got democratized. And that impulse was good. Mental health resources are expensive, inaccessible, gatekept. The desire to give people tools they could use on their own, without waiting lists or insurance barriers, came from a real place.
But something got lost in translation. Journal prompts. Meditation tracks. Visualization exercises you do alone in your room, trying to become your own good enough parent. The relational container was removed. What remained was a solo practice built from a relational one.
The original wound wasn’t “I didn’t love myself enough.” It was: I reached and no one was there. I needed attunement and got absence. I needed a regulated nervous system to borrow from and got chaos. Or emptiness. Or someone who needed me to regulate them. Or I had to become the parent before I got to be the child. Or I was loved for what I did, never for who I was.
The wound happened in relationship. It cannot fully heal outside of one.
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The self development industry profits from keeping healing individual. Apps scale. Courses scale. Your best friend staying on the phone while you fall apart doesn’t sell or scale. So they package self parenting. Self soothing. Self regulation. As if your nervous system was ever meant to heal in isolation.
What your inner child actually needs isn’t a better monologue from you. It’s a dialogue. Not you holding them harder. Someone holding both of you. Not you telling them they’re safe. Your body learning safety from another body that can hold its own.
The repair happens in moments like: you reach and someone is there. You express something ugly and they don’t flinch. You fall apart and they don’t need you to fix it quickly for their comfort. This is what solo reparenting cannot replicate. The lived experience of another who stays.
This doesn’t require a perfect relationship. Or years of expensive therapy. Or a romantic partner who meets every need. It means your healing cannot be fully contained in a solo practice. A friend who can hold space without fixing. A therapist who co regulates, not just interprets. A group where you’re witnessed without performing.
Both can be true: inner child work builds awareness, creates compassion, helps you understand your patterns. And it has limits. It cannot complete what connection completes. It cannot teach your nervous system what it can only learn relationally.
The question isn’t “how do I reparent myself better?” It’s: where in my life am I actually letting myself be held? Where am I reaching? Where am I allowing my nervous system to borrow regulation from someone who has it to lend?
Maybe it’s time to reach outward instead of continuing to go deeper inward.
I really appreciate this framing of the inner child wound and the honesty about the limits of healing in therapy alone. Naming where traditional or even unorthodox inner child work can’t fully reach—and where relational repair still matters—feels both grounding and compassionate.
As a trauma therapist, it’s painful to witness how many of these are lonely wounds—formed when a child needed co-regulation and instead had to become the regulator. Your writing names the wound as relational, not moral or motivational, which is so freeing. The injury wasn’t a failure of self-love, but reaching for attunement and meeting absence, chaos, or role reversal. I especially feel for those whose only truly psychologically safe relationship has been with themselves.
So beautiful. And it's exactly as you have written. We don't have to heal alone, we can heal in relationships as well (not necessarily romantic). Having people who can hold space for you is priceless 🤍