When your present life feels limited by things that happened in your childhood, it’s time to find the tools and techniques to help you thrive.
For better or worse, things that happen to us in childhood can shape our reactions as adults—in ways we’re not always aware of. When Katie ended up unemployed last year, she got mired in beliefs she’d absorbed as a girl linking solvency to self-worth.
“To be foolish with money, in my father’s eyes, was one of the greatest sins,” she says. “To not be working, or saving for retirement…and both those things I’ve done this year.”
A college professor for 20 years, Katie couldn’t find a comparable position after moving from Florida to Tennessee to be with the man she’d fallen in love with. A nagging sense of financial failure, molded by her upbringing, fed into a depressive episode—which in turn sapped the motivation to reinvent herself professionally.
Katie recalls her father as an unpredictably angry man who would complain about the cost of things like taking his four children to Dairy Queen. In the midst of her depression, those echoes would spiral into irrational fears.
“On some of my worst days, I would think my husband—my sweet, incredible husband who has never been angry in any way with me—was going to come home from work and yell at me because I didn’t do anything that day except cry and binge-watch shows on Netflix. I knew that wasn’t a real fear. It was my father’s voice.”
Escaping the baneful influence of the past isn’t easy. Emotional scars acquired in childhood tend to run deep, and it takes time and a lot of willpower to transcend triggers that spark knee-jerk reactions in adulthood.
[To read the rest of this article by Robin L. Flanigan, click here.]
[Image from hopetocope.com]
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