Yes, I mean that during the course of therapy, some young / childlike parts of me emerged, and found some healing via my relationship with my T. He was a caring adult who could hear all the pain these younger parts had experienced, argue that these things were not my fault, and say that I should have been better taken care of by the adults in my life. An issue for me was that I hid what was going on from my parents, so although they were good parents they could not help me. I pulled the wool over most all adults' eyes during that time and/or they turned a blind eye. So just having an adult who knew everything I'd been through and felt empathy and didn't blame me... that felt huge.

My T is not directive and it's not like he ever gave me homework or anything. But he did introduce the idea that I still had a younger self in there and I was going to have to try to find compassion for her. (In the beginning I hated to think of being young, hated my younger self, etc.) I think he showed me the way by consistently expressing empathy for my young self, and by kind of advocating for her (because again, in the beginning I felt everything was entirely my fault and my young self was loathsome). I remember he asked me once how I felt toward myself at age 11 (I had just been describing stuff that had happened then), and I thought "Disgust is not a big enough word."

Once I stopped attacking my younger self and started accepting it, and I started talking to him from that younger place, I got obsessive about therapy. I thought about it all the time, counted down days and hours till my next session, and found comfort in imagining lying on my T's couch. For me I was somewhere around 11 to 15 years old mentally (because that was when the worst of it happened) but I know for some they would be only 3 or 5 years old or some such, and I imagine that the need for the T is that much stronger because young children have more intense needs for adult care. I agree with BudFox that the therapy structure fails to take this into account and I agree that boundaries can be used in punitive / shaming ways.