Inside Out: Healing the Inner Child Featured at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Japanese Association for Group Psychotherapy

andnp Corp., an independent publisher based in Fuchu, Tokyo, announces that its two-volume nonfiction work, Inside Out: Healing the Inner Child – From “Drop+Kiss…+”, was exhibited and offered for sale at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Japanese Association for Group Psychotherapy, held on March 21–22, 2026, at Keio University’s Mita Campus in Tokyo.

Organized by the Japanese Association for Group Psychotherapy, the conference is a professional academic gathering devoted to the practice and study of group-based psychotherapy. The theme of the 43rd conference, “Group and the Self,” focused on the relationship between the individual and the group, and on how the self is formed, perceived, and understood through engagement with others.

At the exhibition venue, related books were presented along two interpretive axes: theoretical vs. experiential, and social vs. inner-personal. Within this framework, Inside Out: Healing the Inner Child – From “Drop+Kiss…+” was positioned in the quadrant of inner-personal × experiential works.

This positioning is significant. In the fields of psychotherapy and trauma studies, substantial work has been done in theoretical analysis and in accounts addressing broader social contexts. By contrast, long-form primary-source records that allow readers to follow the inner transformation of a single person over an extended period remain relatively rare. This is especially relevant in relation to trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), where the long-term subjective process of change is clinically important, yet often difficult to grasp except through fragmentary case reports or abstract conceptual explanation.

In recent years, the mental health and psychotherapy fields have increasingly recognized the importance not only of theory and evidence, but also of access to lived subjective experience: how change is actually felt, endured, and gradually lived through from within. In that sense, the domain represented by inner-personal × experiential work remains comparatively underrepresented, even though it is crucial for connecting theory with practice.

Inside Out: Healing the Inner Child – From “Drop+Kiss…+” is based on the diaries of author Nana Hinase, written over a span of twenty years beginning at age sixteen. Drawing on primary materials that include approximately ten million Japanese characters of diary writing and more than 700 pages of clinical records, the work explores the inner child as its central theme while tracing a long therapeutic journey through trauma, loss, recovery, and the search for meaning in life.

What distinguishes the work is that it does not primarily explain trauma or ACEs through theoretical discourse. Rather, it enables readers to encounter those processes through a sustained inner record written from within lived experience. For clinicians, therapists, and professionals engaged in interpersonal support, it offers access to shifts in feeling, perception, and inner movement that are difficult to apprehend through conceptual knowledge alone.

Although written as a nonfiction narrative intended for general readers rather than as a clinical or theoretical work, it nonetheless functions as a longitudinal record of psychotherapy observed from the inside. For general readers, it offers a narrative of loss and recovery; for those working in psychology, psychotherapy, or support professions, it provides an experiential resource that may deepen clinical understanding and complement theoretical knowledge.

Its presentation at a professional academic conference devoted to group psychotherapy therefore marked more than a simple exhibition appearance. It also served as an occasion on which the significance of long-term first-person inner records—particularly in relation to psychotherapy, care, and recovery—was made visible within a professional context.

Conference Information

Conference Name
43rd Annual Conference of the Japanese Association for Group Psychotherapy

Theme
Group and the Self

Dates
March 21–22, 2026

Venue
Keio University, Mita Campus
2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan