Most inner child worksheets ask you to picture your younger self and write them a letter. But they don’t tell you where to focus your letter.
This worksheet is designed to show you where your inner child needs attention. And if you’re not sure what to say to your inner child, that is further down this page too.
You can do this on paper, or in the free Program Decoder, which asks the same questions but keeps your answers organized for you.
Which memory do you go to?
So which version of you needs this attention the most? Age four? Age six? Age twelve?
All the versions of you live as memories in your subconscious, and any version of yourself is available to be talked to once you know how to connect. Your inner child isn’t one age. They’re whichever age the feeling started.
You don’t go hunting for the right memory. You start with a feeling you already have, from something recent enough to still be clear, and you follow it back to the first time you felt it. The feeling is the thread, and something that bothered you this week is holding one end of it.
Why a recent feeling can point at an old one
Which raises a fair question: what does something that happened to you this week have to do with when you were a child?
Your subconscious is the part of your mind that runs without you thinking about it. One of its jobs is to record everything. And out of everything you experience, the things you feel most often become part of your subconscious programming — something repeated until it runs on its own.
Your thinking will match your programming. If your programming says people are out to get you, that programming will keep making you think people are out to get you, even when they aren’t.
That is what makes a program hard to see from the inside. It doesn’t feel like programming. It feels like your own thinking, and like an accurate read on what just happened.
But a feeling that keeps coming back leaves a trail. Often, completely different people make us feel the same way. When it keeps repeating in different relationships, the feeling isn’t really about any of them — it was already there, and they happened to touch it.
So you don’t have to guess which version of you needs this attention. The feeling will take you there.
The worksheet
Get a piece of paper or open a note. Write each answer down.
- What did they say or do that bothered you? Write down the moment that they said or did the thing that bothered you the most.
- What did it feel like? Not the name of an emotion. “Angry,” “hurt” or “frustrated” are too broad. What did it feel like they were saying about you? For example, if someone doesn’t call you back, “I was annoyed” is the emotion. “It felt like I wasn’t important” is the feeling. Put yours into your own words, even if they’re messy.
- Why did that bother you? Then ask again: why did that bother you? This question is here to distil the feeling down to the real one. The first answer is usually the easy one, the one your ego can live with — “because they were rude” — and underneath it is usually something about you. Keep going until an answer lands somewhere true rather than convenient. Whatever you end up with is the feeling you carry into the next two questions.
- Has anyone else ever made you feel that same way? Not the same situation — the same feeling. How many different people can you count? If more than one person has, that is what points at a program rather than at a person.
- What is the earliest memory you have of feeling that way? How old were you?
What you have at the end
One feeling, distilled down until it felt true rather than convenient. The people who have made you feel it. And the earliest place you remember it. That earliest memory is where inner child work starts. You can use this same process to find different areas to talk to your inner child about.
That is the first half of the work. The second half is going back to that memory and talking to the version of you that is still in it.
What to say when you get there
The questions above tell you which memory to go to. This is what to do once you are in it. It is how I do it — it does not have to be how you do it, but it is a place to start.
One thing before the steps, because it is the part that decides whether any of this works. What reaches your younger self is the feeling, not the words. Saying kind things while you feel nothing changes nothing. The more you can remember how you felt back then, the easier it is to connect.
- Get settled somewhere quiet and take a few slow breaths.
- Go back to the memory and remember everything you can. Where you were. How you saw the world at that age. What you understood about what was happening. The most important part is remembering how the younger version of you would have thought about it, because that is what gets you to how they felt.
- Stay there and keep remembering until you can feel what they were feeling. Not how you feel about the memory now — what it felt like to be you then. This is the step to be patient with. Everything after it depends on it.
- While you are holding that feeling, call to your younger self in your mind. Use the name you went by back then, and keep remembering everything you can from that time in your life while you call.
- As you call, pay attention to your body and feel for the feedback. Goosebumps, usually, or the emotions you were feeling as a child coming back on their own. You will know, because you will be tuned into yourself and feeling what you felt then. That is the connection. If you are not feeling anything, you are not connected yet — go back to the memory and the feeling and stay there longer. This is the step most instructions leave out, and it is why people try this once, feel nothing, and decide it does not work.
Once you are connected, here is why what you say matters. Think of your younger self as trapped in a time capsule. The only thing they know is what you knew back then. Nothing you have learned since has reached them — not how the situation actually turned out, not what the adults were really dealing with, not anything you worked out years later. They have been sitting in that moment with a child’s understanding of it this whole time, and they will keep reacting the way you reacted then. That is what keeps the programming running. You are the only one who can bring them the information.
- So start talking. Tell them whatever you learned later that would settle them down. If the version you are talking to is five, that version of you does not understand much about life yet, so fill them in. You do not have to talk to them as if they are five — talk to them the way you would talk to a friend.
- Tell them the things they could not have known:
- What the scary thing really was.
- How it turned out.
- That they were not the problem.
- That the love they needed was not there because nobody around them knew how to give it.
- That you are here now, and you are going to show them what that love feels like.
- Tell them something about who you are now, especially the things you are proud of. Then stop talking. Think of something you are genuinely proud of in yourself, or how much you love the journey you have been on, and let yourself feel it. Then picture sending that feeling back to your younger self, and picture them receiving it.
Sometimes you will talk straight away. Sometimes you will stay quiet and keep them company. The more you do this, the easier it gets to tell which one the moment needs.
Your younger self may not talk back, especially the first few times. That is not a problem. As long as you felt the feedback in your body, they can receive what you brought. If you did not feel it, you were probably not connected, and that is the part to go back and work on rather than the words.
The longer version, with an example from my own life, why forgiveness has to be part of what you tell them, and what to do when nothing comes back: What to Say to Your Inner Child →
Paper or the free Program Decoder
Paper works. The Program Decoder asks the same questions, and it keeps track of each program you discover. Over time it shows you what your subconscious programming looks like from outside of your thoughts.
It’s free. You only need an email, and once you have it, it’s yours to keep.
Seeing it is the first part
Finding where a feeling started doesn’t change it on its own. Changing it is what The Reflection Method Curriculum™ teaches. Learn the Method →