Coaching practices for Inner Child Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Inner Child Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I can feel there’s a young, hurt place in me that everything else is built to keep buried, and part of me wants to finally turn toward it
• I want my child to carry a solid sense of who they are even when I’m not there to remind them
• There’s one specific scene from when I was small that I can still feel in my body, and part of me wishes I could step back into that moment and do for that kid what nobody did
• My child has gotten so used to being "the difficult one" that they act like it’s just who they are
• My child can’t seem to name what they’re feeling

Practices that may help

1. Meeting exiles (with care)
   Gently turn toward the wounded, exiled parts that protectors work to keep hidden.
   Internal Family Systems (IFS), Made Practical
2. Build the child’s inner wealth narrative over time
   Consistently reflect back who the child is becoming, not just what they’re doing.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
3. Shadow Work
   Shadow work is the process of becoming aware of — and integrating — the parts of yourself you have disowned, suppressed, or never examined: the traits, impulses, and capabilities you hide from others and from yourself. Rooted in Jungian psychology, it is a clinically used framework rather than a rigorously trialed intervention; the mechanistic rationale is strong and aligns with modern emotion regulation and self-concept research.
4. Imagery rescripting for schema memories
   Revisit a difficult childhood memory in imagination and rewrite it so the child’s needs are met.
   Schema Therapy: Healing Early Maladaptive Beliefs
5. Use experiential recognition to highlight strengths in the moment
   Catch the child demonstrating a virtue and name the virtue directly.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
6. Build mindsight by reflecting inner experience
   Describe your own inner experience in everyday conversation to build the child’s "mind-seeing" capacity.
   The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)
7. Self-applied limited reparenting
   Treat the vulnerable child mode in yourself with the care and limits that childhood should have provided.
   Schema Therapy: Healing Early Maladaptive Beliefs
8. The integration letter to a disowned part
   Write directly to the trait, impulse, or capacity you most want to disown — then listen for its response.
   Shadow Work
9. The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)
   Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's Whole-Brain Child framework draws on neuroscience to explain why children behave as they do and offers strategies that work with the developing brain rather than against it. The core insight is that children's emotional storms reflect genuine neurological immaturity — particularly in the prefrontal cortex — not moral deficiency. The practices are clinically endorsed and mechanistically grounded; RCTs of the Whole-Brain Child program specifically are limited.
10. Working with Multiple Selves (Chair Work in CFT)
    Give voice to different internal parts — the critic, the anxious self, the compassionate self — to understand and change the dialogue.
    Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.