I have exercises like this, along with many others, written out for people with attachment trauma and for therapists supporting them in my newly published workbook, The Felt Sense Attachment Workbook.

One of the exercises that I often find helpful for people who have been emotionally neglected is something that I call compassionate witnessing. It's like an inner child or parts were type of exercise, but the important thing is that the only purpose is to be a compassionate witness for the suffering of your younger self. You don't do anything to try to change how they feel or make them feel better, even things that would appear to be like comforting or reassuring or soothing. Because for people who have been emotionally neglected, they've already dealt with so much minimization and invalidation of their emotional experiences. And so often what is actually lacking the most is literally just compassionate witnessing, just having someone there to see and hear your pain. So other like inner child or self soothing type of exercises, even if they're not intended this way, can feel like more invalidation, more emotional abandonment. Anything that's an attempt to like make the pain smaller or make it feel better. There comes a time when offering a new perspective or inviting a new experience is important, but not until the original experience has been fully held for what it is. And if we like skip holding it for what it is and we skip right into trying to make it better, it feels like bypassing. I think this is like the most important type of what we call reparenting for people who have been emotionally neglected. It's giving that developmental need that goes on met and emotional neglect, which is someone to just share your emotional truth with you. So you're not alone in it. And so we try to go back and just like give the inner child what they miss back then, what they needed. You might prompt this by saying like if a client is telling me about a particularly hard time in their life, a time where they felt really alone, where they were in a lot of pain, I would maybe have us imagine just like going back and and sitting with that younger version of them. However, they imagine that younger self maybe like alone in the room crying or kind of in a frozen shutdown state or like however kind of captures the way they felt back then. And then we just invite that younger part to share their experience and to share their pain. Even if there's no words, like maybe there's words and things need to be said, maybe there's no words and it's just a feeling from like early developmental trauma and then we can just let that younger part know like I see you and I'm feeling into right now how bad this was for you and it was that bad. It really was that bad. The other thing that comes up is that sometimes people don't feel able to provide that for themselves like it feels like they can't give themselves that compassion and that witnessing and so then I will ask could I be the one to do it? Like we'll imagine me going and sitting with your younger self and I'll be the one to provide that compassionate witnessing experience for you. And then whatever comes forward like whatever that younger part is sharing, emotions, thoughts, sensations, memories, all we're doing is just saying yes you know what else, what else? Like yes I am fully seeing and acknowledging exactly what this felt like for you and what this meant for you. You would be surprised like how powerful that can be for someone who never experienced that growing up.