Why Does My Therapist Want Me To Talk About My Childhood?

The short answer: because it’s important in ways that aren’t always obvious.

The long answer: ultimately the past is irrelevant. Whatever did or didn’t happen to you, what’s really important to feeling better in your life is your stance in the present, and that should always be the underlying focus of therapy. But the past always continues to live in the present, often shaping our patterns of thinking and feeling in ways we aren’t even aware of. Getting to know those patterns is essential to taking control of your life in the present moment.

Neuroscience and psychological studies have shown that patterns of relating, feeling, and thinking are laid down in the first 10 years of life. From the time a baby is born their unique genetic makeup is melding with their caregiving environment to produce these patterns. Even before the brain has the ability to make explicit memories (the kind we’re all used to), the brain and the body together are producing implicit memories in the form of associative patterns. Someone says something in a tone that is very familiar to us and suddenly we feel sad, or happy, or angry. That’s implicit memory at work.

Sometimes, making these implicit memories explicit is essential to understanding our reactions to the world around us. This can be particularly true when you carry some judgment about your reactions. Judgment towards the self tends to arise out of fears that whatever is going on is evidence of something deeply, deeply wrong with us, and that it is all our fault. Especially in our highly individualistic western culture, people tend to feel that these inherited patterns are their fault, and then feel shame about them.

But shame tends to block things out of awareness. And you can’t change what you’re not aware of. So talking about your childhood — how you were related to, cared for, things that happened to you, and the demeanor of your caregivers — offers insight into the origins of your own patterns. And there’s no shame in any of that, only old history that you’re ready to let go of. But you can’t let go of things until you recognize them, and understanding the patterns of your past can help you see how they still live in the present.

The point of this is also not to shift blame. My goal isn’t to get you to stop being mad at yourself and start being mad at your parents (though it is certainly both common and totally okay if that happens), but to get you to regard yourself with a more compassionate eye. Your parents are humans too, like most of us probably doing the best they knew how to do. But you shouldn’t have to pretend that the experiences you had didn’t have an impact on you. Positive or negative, they did. The positive is usually easier to acknowledge, but we often deny the negative.

Ultimately, again, all of this is building towards recognizing what, in the present moment, needs to change, and then developing the ability to shift these things in the present moment. But sometimes (not always!) we have to look back before we can go forward, and in those cases your childhood might offer essential clues.