What Have I Brought With Me from My Childhood?

How we are in our relationships now, relates largely to our family experiences as a child. Most of us were imperfectly loved as children because our parents did their best, despite not knowing better.

As a result, though, we haven’t learnt how to truly love value and honor ourselves in many ways.

When we were little, we depended on our parents to make life safe for us. When they failed, we unconsciously felt unworthy of their love, unlovable, and at fault ourselves.

Throughout life, each of us has a Life Theme—a core psychological issue shaped by recurring childhood emotions that influences self-worth and capacity to love.

The 6 Broad Categories of Life Themes:

1. Neglect
2. Abandonment
3. Abuse
4. Rejection
5. Deprivation
6. Emotional Suffocation

In childhood, this was the reason you believed you didn’t deserve to be loved, and as an adult, it has become the basis for your inability to love yourself, and therefore those around you, in a healthy way.

Throughout life, you attract people who repeat your childhood experiences, reinforcing the same patterns over and over.

To understand why you repeat relationship patterns, consider these key questions:

• What is your Life Theme?
• When did I experience it as a child?
• When did I recreate it again in other relationships?
• What are my unconscious expectations or thoughts?

Further to this, you then start adjusting your behaviors in response to that theme.

Our Responses to Our Life Themes

There are two ways that you can do that and many of us use both of these in different ways:

1. Overcompensation / over-functioning / grandiose/ superior behavior

2. Giving up on yourself / under-functioning / feeling a victim / feeling worthless

Here again, it is very helpful to look at where in both your life and your relationship, you are behaving in these ways:

• Where am I overcompensating in my life and my relationship?
• Where am I under-functioning because I don’t feel worthy?

Professional help can reveal hidden patterns and show how they impact your relationships, which are often hard to see alone.

The Keys to Being Psychologically Healthy

Many of us grow up with well-meaning parents unaware of psychological health, leaving us unsure of it in adulthood.

Key attributes of psychologically healthy people are essential for happiness and well-being.

1. You experience and express a wide range of feelings deeply, both pleasant and unpleasant, and in the moment, rather than block them or deaden the impact of them.
2. You expect to experience pleasure and mastery, believe you can shape your life, and trust that your real self can expect positive responses from others.
3. Self-activation and self-assertion mean recognizing your unique goals and dreams, expressing them confidently, and taking steps to protect and achieve them.
4. Acknowledging your self-esteem helps you see that you have coped with a problem or crisis in a positive and creative way, reminding you of your worth and skills.
5. The ability to soothe painful feelings. When things go wrong, and you are hurt, you can know how to minimize and soothe painful feelings and, as well, put things into perspective.
6. The ability to make and stick to commitments, both in career and in relationships when it is clear that it is in your best interests.
7. Creativity. The ability to replace old, familiar patterns of living and problem solving with new and equally or more successful ones.
8. Intimacy. The capacity to express your real self fully and honestly in a close relationship with another with minimal anxiety about abandonment or engulfment.
9. The ability to be alone without feeling abandoned lets you manage your emotions, focus on meaningful sexual activities, and avoid empty relationships or meaningless sexual encounters.
10. The continuity of self: recognizing a stable, unchanging core within you, constant despite external changes.

If you would like any help in developing any of these areas in yourself, please don’t hesitate to call us as we can help you. Contact us for an individual or relationship counselling appointment today.

We have Psychologists in Sydney and in all capital and large regional cities in Australia. Please give us a call or you can find the Psychologist who is right for you from searching on the right-hand bar. We would love to help you, as relationships are our passion.