Why are therapists interested in childhood?

It can be a cliché of psychotherapy to be interested in childhood, but why live in the past when the issues you are experiencing today are nothing to do with it?

How we respond to the challenges we face in life can be within our awareness, a complete blind spot or a combination of both. Understanding how we have been shaped in childhood can shed light into not only how we respond by why we respond the way we do.

The why

The way in which we respond to others has a lot to do with the first relationship we form from birth, be it a mother and/or another primary care giver. This has the biggest impact as firstly, our physical survival depends on this relationship being a ‘success’. With this in mind, our experiences in these the first few years are our most impactful as our brains grow 4x more outside of the womb. Therefore, early experiences create a literal blueprint of sorts in the way our brain cells are wired together to form quick pathways. The more these experiences are repeated, the stronger these connections are in our brains, creating automatic reactions and responses.

One way of thinking about automated brain pathways is in learning a skill like driving. We are more conscious to what goes into driving when we are learning, but when the skill or patterns have been mastered we may find we have driven from A to B so mindlessly that we allow our minds to wonder to something completely different, such as having a conversation with others or even singing at the top of our lungs to our favourite music. The same goes for our reactions and the way we connect to others, where we stick to the automated implicit rules we have created to be able to respond quickly to others and familiar situations.

By the time we are 3 years old, our brains have grown to 80% of our adult size, and by 5 years old they are 90%. During this time, a parents influence on their children is paramount to shaping the structure of their world, their view of themselves, their ability to make sense and align their feelings, thoughts and emotions, and in createing a blueprint of how they relate to others.

The how

As an adult, our formed ways of being is so automated that we don’t need to actively think of how to be. The brain power and energy that would have been used for this task is freed up for other daily activities like problem solving. However, we may find our learnt coping mechanisms, ways of being in the face of adversity, or how we relate to others, may no longer be helpful to us. In order to be able to change, to continue the driving analogy, we can use therapy to take our thoughts and feelings out of automatic mode into manual mode so that we are more conscious of what gears we are driving in, and more able to change it if the engine is struggling. Understanding how we got into automatic mode, and where we have been driving in it, is often very helpful to unpicking this.

The so what?

By understanding the past, we start to form a view of why we have adapted to life and others in the way we have, so we can understand and bring active awareness to how we are repeating our patterns in the present. By observing ourselves in this way, we can create space, and thought between the action and reactions, which will allow us to be able to identify alternative ways of being or responding and creates choice.

The misconception

Our society is sometimes all too quick to attribute blame, so when we look at the experiences of parenting, it may feel like we are trying to villainise or attribute blame to parents who have often only ever tried to do their best with the tools they had at the time. This is of course not the point to this exploration. 

The ultimate goal of this exploration is to look at it through a sense of curiosity and understanding of how we have been shaped to be the way we are. There is no such thing as perfect parenting, and ‘good enough’ is all we can hope for. Of course there will be mistakes, cross words, and even catastrophic events we cannot avoid. For some, there may be deep wounds inflicted that need healing through therapy.

Two things can be true at the same time, our parents can have tried the best based on their experiences and circumstances, AND part of the environment we grew up in may have contributed to some unhelpful feelings, behaviours or responses that show up in our lives today that we would like to adjust.

How much we focus on the past varies from client to client and can swing like a pendulum into the present or future, depending on what is emerging for the client and how relevant it may be at the time. 

If this blog sparks any thoughts or questions, please get in touch for further discussion.