"healing your inner child" — casini photography

What does it mean to heal your inner child?

Women of intersectional identities are adultified and parentified when they are young frequently across cultures; girls are often denied aspects of their child-self in order to serve their family or a status quo.

In line with modern understandings of complex trauma and healing, the adoption of personifying your child self and caring for your child self has become a widely adopted therapy technique referred to as “reparenting” or “"inner child work”.

Once I decided this was the theme I wanted to pursue for my essay, I posted a casting-call announcing that I was looking for participants for a photo shoot.

The positive response was overwhelming, even outside of those I ended up photographing, I could see that this theme and message resonated widely.

When it came time to do the shoot, I designed the process in a paritfualr way: wanting it to sit somewhere between performance art, documentary and portrait.

I instructed each model to bring a physical manifestation of their mode of healing— an activity, a food, a toy— and to wear something they felt condfident and comfortable in, just as we would dress during play time. Once they arrived, I had them connect to my speaker and sit on a pink picnic blanket full of objects of my own that reflected my own healing journey: my first stuffed animal, seashells, bubbles, candy, silly toys and more. I invited them to sit and asked them to tell me a bit about their day, about what it means to heal their inner child, what their object meant to them, why this project spoke to them.