What Childhood Has to Do With Your Adult Relationships

Are you still bothered by your childhood? Does your therapist keep asking about your early life experiences?

You can probably hear your mother saying, “It’s been 40 years. Why can’t you just get over it? You are just blaming your problems on me. I did a good job with you as your parent… and it was hard. I sacrificed so much.”

And all of this may indeed be true. So, why do therapists always want you to talk about your childhood? What good is it going to do, especially since your parent probably doesn’t want to hear it?

Rest assured, there are really good reasons for surfacing your early interaction patterns with your parents and siblings. You can do this work on your own, but doing it with a therapist as a guide will keep you focused on the intended target (yourself).

As a therapist working with adult clients, the focus is typically on helping them stay out of negative interaction patterns with their friends, families, and romantic partners, curtail resentments and dissatisfaction, feel good about themselves, and better enjoy their lived experiences. So, what does childhood have to do with it?

Early relationship patterns, especially those occurring when your brain is still forming (up to middle childhood), get encoded in your brain’s perceptual systems, emotional circuitry, and related automatic thoughts and responses. Sure, you can learn to override these patterns as an adult… but first you need to see and recognize what you are trying to override clearly.

Example 1

Janice, a single, 24-year-old woman, knows her parents loved her as a child, but she was often invalidated, told her emotions were wrong, and not allowed to express herself directly. She grew up to have a best friend who does not see her needs, invalidates her, is selfish, and does not reciprocate… but Janice finds that even though she frequently feels devalued and hurt, she cannot speak up or ask for better treatment. She trades giving voice to her authentic self to avoid the (feared) pain of being rejected.

Example 2

Ed, a 56-year-old married man, never felt loved by his parents. His father alternated between being distant and flying into a rage and hitting Ed over the smallest of mistakes or shortcomings. His mother pretended not to notice and never took it upon herself to protect him from his father.

He grew up to be extremely sensitive and highly reactive to the subtlest of (perceived) criticisms. People experience Ed as defensive and hostile.

Example 3

Grace, a single, 40-year-old woman, grew up the middle of five children. Her older siblings were stars in sports and academics and demanded a great deal of parental time to coordinate their activities. She had a younger sibling with serious mental health issues and associated behavioral problems. This sibling took up whatever parental attention was left as the parents tried to manage the problem behaviors.

Grace knew her parents had no time or energy for her, so when she was sad and in need of support, she went and sat on her bed alone and cried herself to sleep. She felt invisible. When Grace later tries to date as an adult, she finds herself feeling highly insulted with dating partners who don’t ask her enough questions or show adequate interest. She also gets very irritated when text messages or phone calls are not responded to quickly. She continually breaks things off after a few dates, even though she feels isolated and lonely.

Interpretation

Each of these examples shows how childhood experiences, especially those that are repeated across an extended period of time, get wired into our perceptual and emotional systems. Even if we see our patterns, we may feel powerless to change them and keep doing the same things over and over.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Essential Reads

How Did This Man Beat Extreme Childhood and Adult Trauma?

The Rosebud Phenomenon

Janice starts feeling strong anxiety every time she considers complaining to her friend or asking for her needs to be met. The anxiety is strong and intense in the moment and is more aversive than the thought of her friend continuing to treat her poorly, so she keeps her mouth shut.

Ed has a learned (classically conditioned) fear response. He automatically has a strong adrenaline (norepinephrine) release that happens so quickly after he is triggered that he finds himself angry and lashing out before he even knows what happened. His initial emotion is to feel scared, but it is covered up so quickly by the anger or retaliatory response that all other people see is his anger. He then feels misunderstood and guilty… which feeds back to make it more likely that he will be triggered by the next subtle criticism.

Grace is flooded by feelings of loneliness and sadness every time she perceives that others may not be adequately interested in her. This immediate feeling is far more intense than the chronic sense of isolation she experiences on a daily basis. So, she cuts off the horrible feeling in the moment by ending the dating relationship (short-term gain for long-term pain!).

Action

If you get clear on the patterns from childhood that got ingrained in your emotional system and are impacting your adult life, you could proceed with the following steps:

1. You could have a conversation with your parents to see if they can recognize and accept or validate your experience. This might make you feel better about your parents, but it won’t rewire your emotional system or change your reaction patterns.
2. A great option is to look closely at your childhood patterns so that you can see what fear system (in Ed’s case) or belief about yourself (Grace being invisible) is being activated and what the triggers are in your present adult environment.
3. Learn to see other people’s behaviors as “triggers” not “causes” of your negative emotions. The emotional responses are already inside you, waiting to be unleashed by triggers in the present that approximate (close enough) the pattern or events from childhood.
4. With practice, you can recognize when you get triggered and know what got triggered. That way, you can choose not to act out your childhood issues on the people around you. You can feel the pain (anxiety, fear, being invisible), learn to hold it in your body, and then work it through in therapy, a self-help group, or with the help of a self-help book (like the John Bradshaw classic, The Homecoming).
5. After you sit with the truth of what occurred in childhood (think of exposure in PTSD treatment), you can use creative visualizations and imaginal exercises to give your inner child (which represents your emotional memory) a new experience of being loved, treated as special, protected, and seen. This type of activity, if you learn to visualize and involve your senses, can lay down new memories and associated emotions that can replace the old feelings and responses with new ones.

And remember, it took you decades starting in childhood to learn, solidify, and enact the old patterns that don’t serve you anymore. So, please be kind, loving, and patient with yourself and don’t expect to change these patterns overnight. Just like in childhood, it takes many repetitions and practice for a new response pattern to take hold and realize lasting change.