Blog Short #279: Does Going Over Your Childhood History Help You?
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Depending on who you ask, the answer ranges from “yes, you must” to “stop blaming your parents and get on with your life.”
After 45+ years as a therapist, I believe it can be enormously valuable, but with certain precautions.
The main one is that you can get lost in the process and find yourself living in your past while your present passes you by.
But if you do it right, reviewing your history, especially while engaged in psychotherapy, can be extraordinarily useful. It helps you unlock those places where you’re stuck so you can let them go and move forward. You gain the psychological freedom to live your life by choice rather than by your past.
I’m going to review the pros and cons and give you some guidelines you can use if you decide to work on it yourself. I would encourage you to work with a therapist who can help you as you go.
Let’s start with why a therapist might delve into your childhood history.
What Your History Can Tell You
When a therapist asks about your childhood history, they want to learn about your parents, your family, and the experiences that led you to where you are now.
This information helps guide you toward discovering insights about yourself. How you became the person you are. How your self-image was formed and what your current level of self-awareness is.
The Upside
As you go through that process, you gain a greater understanding of the scripts you internalized while growing up about who you are, what you should be, and how you should comport yourself in the world.
All these scripts shape your sense of self, your choice of occupation or work, and your significant relationships.
When you know what they are, you can decide which scripts you want to keep and use, and which you want to let go of.
Scripts are the beliefs, expectations, and rules about ourselves and the world that we absorb as we grow up. We often accept them without question because they were handed down during our developmental years. They’ve got staying power.
You can eliminate dysfunctional scripts, keep the useful ones, and add new ones of your own choosing.
The purpose of this process is to get a clear, accurate picture of who you are (and aren’t), what you struggle with, and what obstacles keep you from your goals, aspirations, and happiness.
That’s a big positive.
The Downside
The negative side of this discovery process is getting stuck in your history.
Not using it to your benefit, but becoming obsessive about ways you feel you were wronged, mistreated, misunderstood, abused, or traumatized. In other words, ways you were victimized.
There’s a difference between seeing something and holding on to it.
When you first recognize the negative aspects of your history, it’s normal to feel angry, resentful, or regretful. It can be painful. But a good therapist can help you work through those feelings over time as you process them.
Eventually, you integrate the insights you’ve gained into your current life. And you feel a sense of freedom and look forward to your future.
However, if you hold on to those painful emotions, you can get stuck in victimhood.
Instead of seeing yourself as someone who was victimized, you identify yourself as a victim, and you maintain that identity going forward. You replay your history over and over in your mind.
People can spend years rehashing how they were mistreated. And in the meantime, bring their futures to a standstill.
Processing isn’t the same as ruminating. Processing the past helps you metabolize it. Ruminating keeps you living in it.
Depending on your history, this process can take considerable time. The goal isn’t to rush it. The goal is to keep moving through it rather than remaining trapped inside it.
How do you avoid this?
The Necessity of Acceptance
Here’s a way to think about it:
Everything that happens to you provides an opportunity to learn something. Nothing is irrelevant.
We don’t get to choose the circumstances of our birth, our parents and family, or the experiences we will have as children growing up. We don’t get to choose many of the things that occur in our lives. But we can respond to them in ways that make good use of them.
You can accept what is and what was. Instead of lamenting that your life didn’t go the way you would have liked, or that you’ve had harder experiences than other people, you take what you were dealt and use it to your advantage.
I’m not saying that’s easy. Not at all. Depending on your circumstances, it may be very difficult. But you do have a choice in how you respond.
Therapy can help you with that.
The good thing is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing this at 30 or 60. There’s never a time in life when you can’t become more self-actualized.
But you can get stuck if you won’t accept what your life has been. Acceptance is necessary for growth. Not acceptance of abusive treatment, but of the fact that it happened and now you have the power to make use of it and grow.
Acceptance doesn’t mean approval or pretending something didn’t hurt you. It means acknowledging that it happened.
Now let’s talk about scripts.
How Do Scripts Work?
Life scripts include beliefs, values, and patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that you acquired growing up. They’re ideas embedded in your sense of self that influence how you see yourself and interact with the world.
Examples are:
You’re the oldest child and caretaker in your family, and you learned to set aside your needs and desires to serve others. As an adult, it’s hard for you to set boundaries or see where your responsibilities end. People take advantage of you.
You grew up in a family where conflict was avoided, so you learned that keeping the peace is more important than saying what you really think.
You were praised more for your performance than for who you are. Mistakes were unacceptable and met with parental disappointment or criticism. Now you struggle with perfectionism and fluctuating self-esteem.
We sometimes don’t notice these scripts until someone else prompts us or they begin showing up in our work, relationships, or behavior.
What you don’t want to do is spend your whole life reacting to your scripts without ever examining their validity.
That can lead to chronic resentment, anger, defeat, depression, and anxiety. And you miss out on the life you might otherwise create.
What Can You Do?
You can work on it using this four-step process. I would recommend working with a therapist, but you can go it alone if you like.
- Identify your scripts and their emotional impact on you.
- Allow yourself to feel and process your reactions. Give yourself enough time.
- Revise your scripts by challenging their validity.
- Add new scripts of your own that fit who you are now and what you want to do with your life going forward.
This process will take time. The great thing about starting is that once you begin thinking about your scripts, more memories and examples will surface in your mind, which leads to greater insights you can use.
The important takeaway is this:
Although you didn’t choose the family you were born into, the experiences you had growing up, or the scripts that were handed to you, you have a choice now. You can keep living by those scripts, or you can question them and let go of what doesn’t work while keeping what serves you.
Now, take your psychological pen and write new scripts that reflect who you are and who you want to become.
That’s all for today.
Have a great two weeks!
All my best,
Barbara