Therapy and Childhood

By Claire Smith

Something people often worry about when starting therapy is that the therapist will want them to spend a long time talking about their childhood, or that anything they say will immediately be brought back to their childhood.

Our childhood can influence us in several ways, so it’s not uncommon for it to be talked about in therapy; however, it will depend on the type of issue that you are bringing to therapy, and on your therapist’s core modality (the type of therapy they practice).

Why the focus on childhood?

Sigmund Freud, the founding father of what is now a very diverse profession of talking therapy, was intrigued by the role our early experiences had on us. He placed great importance on understanding the relationship a person had with their mother and father when working with them in therapy.

Indeed, one of his major theories was that a child has a drive to seek closeness with the parent of the opposite gender and to wish to remove or even destroy the parent of the same gender. (He assumed a binary definition of gender throughout his work) This was known as the ‘Oedipus or Electra Complex’ is based on the Greek tragedy of the man Oedipus who married his mother and killed his father. To most people, the idea that they would want to marry one parent and kill the other feels understandably twisted and uncomfortable- the stuff of psychological thrillers, not real life. And it is very important to note that Freud was not claiming that everyone wants or is planning to do this. The idea of a ‘drive’ in Freud’s theory was not the same as how we might use it today; to say someone is

‘driven to succeed’ suggests they are actively pursuing it. In Freud's work, drives are motivational forces that act in the subconscious to make us more or less likely to do something, but not to compel us to do it or imply we are actively pursuing it.

If your therapist is a psychoanalyst or trained in psychodynamic therapy, they may be more likely to bring up childhood issues, as these therapies look at unconscious processes and are influenced heavily by Freud’s work. The importance Freud placed on these drives may mean that your therapist is keen to explore your childhood to understand the influence of these early experiences better.

The importance of childhood

While many therapists do not follow a close reading of Freud’s work, most therapists will consider a person’s early experiences in life to be important. It is during our childhood that we first encounter many things and are actively taught lessons, meaning many of our beliefs, values and responses areat least initially formed when we are children.

And during our childhood, our parents and caregivers were incredibly influential. As babies, we depend on them for survival. Humans are born helpless and take many years to achieve independence, during which, if we were deserted by our caregivers, we would likely starve or be vulnerable to serious harm. As a result, humans have evolved so that babies get good feelings when they please their parents. We like it when Dad smiles because we drew a nice picture, and we like it when Mum laughs at our jokes. So, we learn that pleasing them makes life better and that their opinion is an important influence on our wellbeing, and this can be a hard lesson to unlearn.

If a child is told repeatedly by their parents that they are not good enough, it is likely to be relevant to adult struggles with anxiety, perhaps because they fear failing. This adult's fear of failing would represent something truly terrifying to them- that they might indeed not be good enough, prompting a remembered vulnerability and terror of losing the love of the person they depend on.

When childhood might be less important

There may be times when the topic we are working on in therapy is sufficiently understood that it is not necessary to analyse our childhood. If you know that you are struggling with a work problem because you get anxious about deadlines, you and your therapist could work together on some tools that help you calm your anxiety and give you the mental space to get on with the work. Or if you are coming to help you process the grief of losing someone, you can work through those feelings in the here and now.

But even in these examples, it may be helpful to consider just for a moment the role of childhood. If you get anxious about deadlines, it can help to reflect on your experience of pressure or stress as a child (whether your own or seeing a parent stressed). And though your grief is very current, it can be helpful to consider what messages you got about death when you were first learning about it, likely during your childhood. As our childhood was such a formative time for us, its influences are widespread across our lives, making it frequently relevant to therapy.

Conclusion

So, if you do not think your childhood is important, or you feel like nothing significant happened, you can share your scepticism with your therapist, but try to be open to a little bit of exploring how it might be relevant to what you are currently struggling with. Looking at your childhood is not a way of shifting blame onto your parents, or of making something more complicated than it needs to be; it is often about getting right to the root of an issue so that it can be properly excavated from your mind and will not just resprout at a later date.

Claire Smith is a UKCP registered psychotherapist who has a special interest in Eco-Therapy and environmental issues.