6 Things We Tell Ourselves to Avoid Tough Childhood Memories

We all cope with some level of challenge and hardship growing up— we don’t have to block it out.

If your close friend badly sprained his ankle on a hiking trip last week, and had not gone to a doctor for treatment, and continued to try to live as though nothing happened, walking on a swollen leg, would you be concerned? “That happened in the past—I need to keep it moving and focus on the present and future,” he says, as he limps along.

The hardship we faced in childhood can play such an important role in our daily lives, but we so often convince ourselves to avoid it. If you find yourself making one of the 6 statements below, you may be preventing yourself from accepting important insights about what makes you tick.

Childhood Hardship in Therapy

A challenging aspect of coming to psychotherapy is having to cope with the reality that a primary reason you are having trouble as an adult may be rooted in what happened to you as a child. This may not be true in all cases, particularly if you’re suffering from PTSD or anxiety relating to events that occurred during your adulthood. But for depression and long-term anxiety, relationship issues, anger, or even learning disabilities, among other conditions, it is very likely that childhood experience played an important role.

Schema therapy, like psychodynamic therapy, holds the view that childhood experience is a crucial tool we need for telling us who we are, how we love, how we feel sadness and joy, how we are creative, and how we cope with stress. We all cope with some level of challenge and hardship when growing up, even with the best of childhoods. When childhood hardship rises to the level of being traumatic, involving serious emotional neglect or abuse, it becomes even more important to come to terms with the past. But again, even if hardship doesn’t rise to the formal definition of being “trauma,” it still plays a crucial role in the narrative of our self-understanding.

So why would we prefer being in denial?

Because thinking about childhood hardship sucks!

It puts us in touch with powerful, difficult feelings like vulnerability, abandonment, feeling flawed, bad, or defective, or rejected. And then the problem is that we end up holding on to those feelings, containing them in a box inside, where they continue to scare us. There are at least 6 things we tell ourselves to keep that box shut:

1. “Therapy focuses on the past and never addresses the future.”

People can approach therapy already feeling uncomfortable and tense. You don’t want to go to the dentist and talk for a long time about needles before having a cavity filled. Let’s just get to it, right?

It’s human nature to believe that thinking about the present and future is practical and gets things done and thinking about the past is a distraction. It doesn’t really work that way in many types of therapy. Even how we talk about our past can tell us a lot about who we are now, and what we are struggling with in the present. And if you’re in the hands of a schema therapist, you’ll share the story of your childhood and your family experience, but fairly quickly jump right into behavioral and experiential work, “the practical stuff.”

2. "There wasn’t physical abuse so it’s not that bad."

Decades of study have proved that non-physical forms of abuse (verbal, emotional) can have long-lasting and even traumatic effects. Just look into the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs) interview, and links established between emotional neglect and auto-immune disorders in adulthood. Without rising to the level of a formal trauma diagnosis, experiences with childhood neglect, or lack of emotional attunement in the family most certainly lead to ongoing struggles in love and work in adulthood.

3. "They gave you all the things you needed, and you had an affluent childhood."

Even if you grew up in an environment where you were given all the material things you wanted, you may have experienced emotional difficulty. I mean, think about this one in a different light: you encounter plenty of adults in your life who have all the material comforts they need, but who still struggle with stuckness, self-sabotage, depression, anxiety, etc. Material comfort doesn’t equate with mental health.

4. "Other people have worse or real childhood problems."

This is straight-up deflecting, right? Yes, it’s true there are people in the world who suffered greater misfortune than you. There may even be people in the world who suffered great misfortune and seem to be doing better than you. But we don’t know what journey they’ve been on, or what recovery work they’ve done, or what natural resilience they may have started with. That doesn’t make them better, or you worse. We are talking about you, and what you’ve been through, how it affected you, and the ongoing effects. Let’s respect you and focus on what you’ve been through.

5. "Focusing on childhood means blaming your parents. I need to take care of myself. They were doing the best they could, and it’s wrong for me to blame them."

This is a tough one. Relationships are complicated, and we can get hurt by the ones we love. Focusing on the pain someone else inflicted on you can feel hurtful again, like opening an old wound.

If that’s the case, it may mean there is some unfinished business with the person who hurt you, unresolved pain and anger. You need to really understand how you were hurt before you can honestly forgive. They may have even apologized or tried to atone for what they did.

So why bring it up again and focus on blaming them? Because we simply need to understand what you experienced as a child, and the damage it caused you. We can accept the truth that your parents caused damage and the truth that you may still want to have a relationship with them. But we can’t avoid the truth of what happened, so that we can really understand what you went through.

Also, this doesn’t mean that, as an adult, you need to confront them. Very often that would be unhelpful and damaging to your relationship in the present. (This can be complicated in the case of childhood abuse and should be worked out with a therapist.) This is only about understanding what you experienced as a child.

6. "I was actually a bad kid and deserved what I got."

There is no child “bad” enough to warrant emotional neglect or abuse. Do you know why? Because they are children. Some children may have impulse control issues, or attention issues, or other behavioral problems. But those are the cards they were dealt, and should not be held against them, as some sign they are “bad.” And if children with such challenges are treated poorly, it worsens their challenges. Punitive discipline or structure just throws gasoline on the fire. Regardless of what challenges they have, kids deserve loving, containing, respectful treatment.

So try to stay open to the idea that you may have had some tough times as a kid, and there’s nothing wrong with considering the effect it had on you. If you notice you are making one of the 6 arguments listed here, you may be avoiding something important. And this kind of avoidance may give you short-term relief, but keep you stuck in long-term frustration.