{"slug": "what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now", "title": "What I'd Tell My Inner Child Now", "summary": "A therapist used an AI video tool from Comapps LLC to animate a 1957 childhood photo of himself, creating a psychodrama-style encounter with his six-year-old self that he says yielded genuine emotional insight. The experience, described in a Psychology Today personal essay, illustrates how AI-generated video can serve as an 'auxiliary ego' in psychodrama, a method founded by J.L. Moreno.", "body_md": "######\n[Therapy](/us/basics/therapy)\n\n# What I'd Tell My Inner Child Now\n\n## Personal Perspective: With some AI image help, we can speak to our six-year-old selves.\n\nPosted August 11, 2026\n[\nReviewed by Gary Drevitch\n](/us/docs/editorial-process)\n\n### Key points\n\n- AI-generated video is proving to be a new tool for the \"auxiliary ego\" work at psychodrama's core.\n- Animating an old childhood photo with AI created a genuine psychodrama-style \"encounter\" with myself.\n- Speaking to my inner child yielded honest counsel on worry, love, friendship, and resilience.\n\nThere's an old photograph that opens my memoir, [ Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist's Memoir.](https://a.co/d/015QbH1l) In it, I'm maybe six years old, dressed head to toe in cowboy gear—hat, chaps, bandanna, the whole sheriff-gonna-clean-up-Dodge kit—looking at the world like I already had a few things figured out. This is how I dressed on Saturday mornings back then.\n\nEarlier this week, my wife, Andrea, on a whim, fed that photograph into an AI video tool (Comapps LLC., 2026) and asked it to imagine something that never could have happened: Me, as I am now—white-bearded, with a grandpa's worth of stories in my pocket—sitting down next to that boy on a bench. Then hugging him.\n\nI wasn't prepared for what this did to me.\n\nI've spent a [career](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/career) studying how psychodrama can facilitate hope, [gratitude](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/gratitude), and love. I know, intellectually, that \"inner child work\" is a real clinical tool, and that psychodrama founder J.L. Moreno (1987) built an entire method around exactly this kind of encounter—using an empty chair or a fellow group member as an auxiliary ego to stand in for a piece of the self that needs to be met, not managed.\n\nWhat I wasn't ready for was how differently it lands when the auxiliary ego isn't a stranger playing a role, or an empty chair you have to imagine filling—when it's actually you. The very crease of that six-year-old's mouth, caught by a photographer in 1957, had now been animated into looking up at me the way he used to look up at the sky.\n\nWhen I first saw [the video](https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExazN4c2UwZ2diYW9oenk1a25uNWZwNjZ0ZmhnYzJzcDF6a20xOWdoOCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/bzNTeOurfUcFgntgF0/giphy.gif), I knew psychodrama had entered a new era. I know that feeling of watching and participating in an enactment, and the transformation possible in one. As the video replayed, the drama that unfolded was as rich as any I'd taken part in or directed in real time. My inner child was alive, and he needed a hug. He was also wondering what the future would be like.\n\nI sat with my little six-year-old cowboy for a while, let the video run, and told him some things I thought he'd like to know.\n\nThe first thing I explained was that, although he very much wanted to be a cowboy, he was never actually going to shoot a gun. That yes, he was going to be a peacemaker, but he'd use words and chairs as his tools rather than pistols.\n\nI told him he'd be worried about a million things that would never happen. That nearly everything he was so carefully planning wasn't going to work out the way he thought—that life, for him, would mostly be the experience of aiming at one thing and getting surprised into another.\n\nI told him that even in the moments he didn't feel loved, the plain fact that he was alive, conscious, and breathing was evidence enough. Something in the universe had gone to a great deal of trouble to love him into being.\n\nI told him there would be scary moments—real ones, ones he couldn't see coming—and that these terrible times would turn out to be teachers in disguise, delivering exactly the lesson he needed, at a price he wouldn't have volunteered to pay.\n\nI told him he'd get blindsided, unbelievably sad and confused, even to the point of needing [therapy](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/therapy)—and that would be one of the greatest gifts he'd ever receive.\n\nI told him to keep a beginner's mind. To stay curious the way six-year-olds are curious, before the world convinces you that sounding certain is more impressive than being in a state of wonder. Not to get too serious, or too stuck on any one thing. That a flexible mindset is the best thing he could cultivate.\n\nI told him to be sweet and generous every chance he got, because that sweetness would return to him a thousandfold. That he'd cry harder than he could imagine, and laugh twice as hard, and both would surprise him. That's how the universe gets his [attention](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attention)—the good surprises and the bad ones alike.\n\nI told him to make friends and keep them, because in the end they're how he'll be known. That big parties and mountains of friends are nice early on, but a quiet dinner with your besties gets so much better with time.\n\nI reminded him that although everything wasn't okay for him as a child, he'd get a chance to make it right when he became a father himself—that his parents did the best they could with what they had, and that the empty feelings and disappointments would become the raw material for becoming a better parent than they were.\n\nI told him to take care of the one body he's got, because it's the only one he's getting. Watch what you eat, watch what you drink, and yes—wash your hands before you eat and brush your teeth. (Some [wisdom](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/wisdom) just refuses to be profound.)\n\nI told him he'd become a parent, and then a grandparent, and one day look into his own eyes again in the face of a grandchild—and that when that miracle happened, there'd be so much he'd want to share it would feel like bursting at the seams.\n\nI told him to read, to pray, to meditate—not because those things are magic tricks that get you what you want, but because they're ways of remembering you didn't create yourself. That the fastest way out of a dark mood is almost always to go help somebody else out of theirs.\n\nI told him his thoughts were the most powerful entities in the universe—not because they control what happens to him, but because they control how he receives what happens to him. It was never really about the events. It was about what he'd decide the events meant.\n\nI told him that when he found a love that felt singular and alive and impossible to fake, to make it the priority of his life, above everything else. That the whole arc of his life was a long walk from [fear](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/fear) to love, and whatever the problem or the question, the answer would always include love.\n\nAnd last, I told him this: that a lot of people would betray him and disappoint him, and a lot more would surprise and delight him in ways he couldn't have scripted—and that none of it, none of the wreckage and none of the grace, would ever define him. Each encounter would simply be another chance for him to be revealed.\n\nThen he hugged me, and we said goodbye for now.\n\nReferences\n\nComapps LLC. (2026). *Photica* (Pixly) [AI image and video generator]. photica.ai\n\nMoreno, J. L. (1987). *The essential Moreno: Writings on psychodrama, group method, and spontaneity* (J. Fox, Ed.). Springer Publishing Company.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now", "canonical_source": "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-healing-crowd/202608/what-id-tell-my-inner-child-now", "published_at": "2026-08-11 18:50:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-11 19:21:26.198185+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Comapps LLC", "J.L. Moreno", "Psychology Today"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-i-d-tell-my-inner-child-now.jsonld"}}