Why Your Childhood Matters
Getting to the Roots of Your Current Struggles Isn’t About Blame
“It’s such a cop-out to blame my parents for all my problems.”
From time to time in my role as a therapist, I hear some form of this sentiment from clients. Or this: “I’ve worked through all that past stuff already.” Or: “I don’t see the point of dredging all that back up.” Or: “Isn’t that just wallowing? I can’t do anything about my childhood.”
Well, there is something you can do about your childhood, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
When a client shows up in my office for the first time, we start with the now: What’s troubling you now? What are you struggling with now? And I want to also know how you feel and think about yourself, how you feel and think about others, and how you generally feel and think about the world. Those last three — how you feel and think about yourself, others, and the world — directly impact the issues that bring you to therapy. They’re also the link to the roots of those issues.
Most of my clients come to me because they think there is something “wrong” with them. Anxiety and depression set in because “I can’t relate to others,” “I get too angry,” “I’m hard to be around,” “I let people walk all over me,” “I’m a bad mother/father/partner/sibling/friend,” “I can’t stay in relationships,” “I stay in unhealthy relationships,” “I can’t make decisions,” “I procrastinate,” etc, etc. The harsher underlying narratives to these often emerge as “I’m just a bitch,” or “I’m an asshole,” or, “I’m weak,” “I’m lazy,” “I’m too much,” “I’m not enough.”
It’s important that you not only counter those negative thoughts, but to understand that there are reasons why you can’t relate, or get angry, or have trouble with relationships and it’s not because you’re a bitch, an asshole, weak, lazy, too much, not enough, or whatever the negative narrative is. I might say something such as, “You are not bad. You are a product of all of your experiences, so let’s figure out which experiences have created these struggles.” My hoped for response from a client, whether conscious or unconscious, is something like “Ah, yes, I’m not a terrible person. I wasn’t born this way. I now understand why I think, feel, and behave that way.” When clients stop labeling themselves and develop self-compassion, it’s much easier to move toward making changes.
It is often true that negative childhood experiences are a direct result of less-than-ideal parenting. Some clients will acknowledge that their parents, too, suffered from neglect or abuse or overbearing parents. These statements, meant to avoid the blame game, also work to minimize the client’s experience. Part of the work is to hold the dialectic: You can rationally understand generational trauma and emotionally know that your unique experience matters, that your unique experience is important, that your unique experience shaped you into the unique you that you are. It’s not about blaming others, it’s about honoring yourself.
So, what can you do about your childhood? Well, you can think and feel about it differently, especially if the blame you’ve been holding onto has been directed inward. You can come to understand and appreciate the impact it has had on the way you currently function. And you can now decide which of thos childhood “lessons” that you learned — about yourself, others, and the world — you want to keep and which lessons you want to let go of.
And that is when the work of therapy, in the here and now, really begins.