How much does your childhood dictate the adult you become?

For some time I’ve wanted to address the elephant in the room and shine a light on the dynamics of the emotional relationship between the parent (or primary caregiver) and child and how it directly impacts the adult we become.

During the course of your life you have mastered becoming the person you are today, but what if who you’ve become, isn’t who you are at your core? What if you are being driven by a part of you that causes you internal anguish and skews your view of yourself and the world around you?

We tend to be unconsciously driven through life by a dominant aspect of ourselves determined in childhood. In the language of psychology different theories have been created to describe these aspects driving a person’s behaviour.

Psychologists have created numerous different frameworks to help people understand themselves and their behaviour beneath the surface, which is a blessing to have so much variety but can also be confusing to know which one to follow and where to start. Due to my desire to simplify a complex system and make it more accessible for people who don’t currently have an extensive knowledge of human behaviour, I focus on two main sides people are driven by, their survival self and their authentic self.

Your survival and authentic self are both parts of your primitive human essence and have been with you since inception and will remain with you until your final breath. During the course of your life both side will be constantly vying for your attention and depending on the state of your internal environment, this could be in the form of a dance or a battle for dominance.

The sole purpose of your survival self is to keep you safe at all costs, however, due to its primitive nature, it can’t distinguish from genuine threat to perceived threat in the form of new unfamiliar experiences. An indication someone is being driven by their survival self is if they tend to deviate to their comfort zone instead of pushing though the fear to try something new. Your authentic self is by nature calm, rational, the complete wholeness of a person with the ability to confidently move through life with courage, even in the face of adversity.

As an adult, your habits, how you form and develop relationships and the way you respond and process stress are all dictated by your dominant driver. To understand the origin of your dominant driver you need to shift your focus on to the dynamics of the emotional relationship you had with your primary caregivers.

The reason why I am specifically drawing your attention to the emotional aspect of the relationship, is because your emotional development and the self sabotaging and disempowering behavioural traits you exhibit in adulthood are directly linked back to the dynamics of this relationship.

On the surface it may appear that you had a perfectly normal childhood, and maybe you did but what if the way your parents interacted with you was actually detrimental to your overall grow and development?

To examine this further we need to go beneath the surface to look at the emotional availability of the parents who raised you.

If you were brought up by a warm, supportive, loving parent who was able to be emotionally present and responsive to you in your time of need, so that you felt seen and heard by them to safely express yourself freely without fear of rejection, this indicates your parent was attuned to your emotional needs and the by-product of this tends to be an individual with a robust emotional foundation who is able to regulate themselves effectively in most situations throughout their life.

If however, you had an emotionally unavailable parent, who wasn’t attuned to your emotional needs, such as an inability to show affection, unpredictable and volatiles demeanour, or just a general lack of awareness of your emotional state ignoring or dismissing how you were feeling and expressing your despair in your time of need, all signal to a child that it is not safe for them to express themselves resulting in the child adapting their behaviour by creating coping mechanisms.

The dismissal of the child’s emotions needs by the parent, however innocently done, accumulatively lead to a lack of internal trust and safety within the child resulting in the survival self becoming the dominant driver, which if left unchecked, can turn into people pleasing or becoming overly independent and isolating yourself when you feel emotionally overwhelmed.

Whilst these incidences in isolation aren’t an issue generally speaking, this is rarely the case. The reality is the accumulative effect these responses have on a child’s emotional development leave an imprint creating an invisible wound that is directly responsible for the identity you create and the story and beliefs attached to it.

Here we need to cast the net wider and take into account that there are other factors that shape and develop your identity in adolecence and through your life, but it is the foundations of the relationship with your parents that pave the way for how you navigate all other areas of your life, and most importantly, the relationship you create with yourself.

If we take this a layer deeper, as a society have we been conditioned to believe that its perfectly normal for a child to have emotionally unavailable parents?

I’ve come to the realisation that there is a strong possibility a large proportion of the population are the by-product of emotionally unavailable parents and that everyone is coping with some kind of emotional anguish as a result of it, albeit mostly unaware.

What I’m specifically referring to are what therapists call small T, aka trauma. Personally, I prefer to use anguish to describe the effects of the event, although the event can nonetheless be a traumatic experience for the person involved. In the world of talking therapy they categorise trauma into two different ends of the spectrum. Big T tends to refer to the effects of more severe and adverse events such as the death of a parent or sexual abuse, and small T tends to be used to refer to emotional unavailability, or the divorce of parents. However, the accumulative effect of small T can be just as damaging to a child as the more serious life altering events, especially in the case of emotional neglect through misattunement.

Is the mainstream narrative vastly underestimating the importance of children’s emotional development and is it even possible to create a society that aren’t suffering with some kind of internal anguish, especially when most people are too busy distracting themselves to even know what they are actually feeling?

We know that some form of internal suffering is an integral unavoidable aspect of our species, and that it doesn’t harm us, it enables us to develop our coping skills to create more self reliance and emotional resilience. But what about the long term effects of persistent unaddressed internal anguish and the health implications linked to it? Surly by now the medical profession recognise the negative consequences stress has on the mind and body? Or do they?

To help you heal some of your emotional wounds, it’s important to remember that behind every problematic and challenging relationship you may have with a parent, are the reasons why they behave the way they do. Your parent is a child that hasn’t been able to heal their adolescent emotional wounds, and in most cases your parents are unaware of the damage their behaviour may have caused you growing up. Even now as an adult you may still be having to navigate challenging aspects of your relationship with them.

It can be a hard pill to swallow but sometimes due to the dynamics of the relationship, you may never get to be the child and it may always fall on you to be the default adult in the relationship. In situations like this a type of mourning can happen as you learn to make peace with the fact that you will never have the type of parental relationship you have so desperately craved throughout your life.

To break the generational patterns of behaviour requires self awareness and an ability to implement boundaries within the parental relationship to ensure you are attuning to your own emotional needs. Initially, you may find doing this uncomfortable and it may bring up feelings of guilt, but with practice, in time, you will find an increased ability to regulate your emotional response when having to navigate your parents challenging behaviour.

To end there are two pieces of information I want draw your attention to. Firstly, a child’s identity is not fixed in place and with early intervention, their emotional development can be course corrected when the parent raises their awareness as to how there behaviour is affecting them, thus mitigating any long term effects.

And secondly, our identity and the story and beliefs we have attached to it can be updated in adulthood any time using neuroplasticity. Your identity is learnt behaviour, via the process of firing and wiring billions of neurons together to imbed every aspect of how you think, feel, speak and behave. As I have previously mentioned, you have spent your life unconsciously mastering your current identity, if you feel you have outgrown it and there are aspects of it that are holding you back from achieving something you desire, you can replace it by implementing new ways of thinking, feeling, speaking and behaving that are more in line with your authentic self. To imbed any new internal changes requires you to create a series of new habits that will replace your old behaviour patterns, which consist of a simple formula of repeated and consistent practice until they are automatically carried out without your conscious awareness, thus a new habit and a new aspect of your identity has been formed.

Learning to heal your emotional wounds can feel like a daunting task, especially if you have never attempted to examine yourself beneath the surface before. There are infinite ways for you to rediscover and reconnect to yourself, you just need to find an approach that is aligned to your preferred style of help. Due to my own internal anguish, I have first hand experience with an exceptionally overactive mind, and understand how it can be difficult to imagine being any other way to how you are now. However, it is possible to change aspects of ourselves and we are not helpless victims of our internal anguish. I honestly don’t feel that we can ever truly achieve wholeness without addressing our childhood anguish and healing some of the wounds it left us with.

Creating long lasting changes within your internal environment can take time but with consistent attention and repeated practice you can update your outgrown childhood identity making way for a thriving relationship with yourself for the years to come. No one is too old, too broken, or too busy to be able to heal themselves!

For more information on how I may be able to help you book your free 30 minute discovery call today.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article and I hope it provided you with some useful insights. This is a multi layered complex topic to dismantle and I have merely skimmed the surface of it to provide a baseline understanding to build on in more detail in future articles.