Sounds cliche doesn’t it? You’ve probably got a picture in your mind of someone laying out on a chaise longue talking about their childhood to a psychiatrist who’s taking the odd note accompanied with the occasional reassuring head nod.
The truth is though, our childhoods shape our lives far more than we realise and many of us are unaware of how our experiences growing up impact our mental health now.
The pharmaceutical industry wants us to believe that mental health issues are caused by chemical imbalances so that they can sell us drugs to help change this chemistry.
If it were that easy, why are cases of depression and anxiety always on the rise at the same time as antidepressant use is on the rise? Clearly the drugs alone are not enough to curb the rise in feelings of loneliness and depression.
To address the cause of these unwanted feelings rather than just deal with the effect of them, we need to look deeper. And this is why therapists will often encourage their clients to delve back into their childhoods. It’s here that we start to uncover events, experiences and sometimes trauma that has shaped our lives, our values, our habits and the way we deal with things.
This can be a painful process that most of us will resist. But it’s this disconnection from our past that very often leads to feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety. In the workplace, this can cause team members to be absent, lack productivity, have relationship problems with other colleagues or even leave.
In Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections, he talks about a study in the 1980’s by Dr. Vincent Felitti who accidentally discovered this connection when researching obesity.
He found that people who lost weight following a diet are far more likely to put it back on again if they experienced sexual abuse in their past. But why was weight gain the result of this trauma? “Overweight is overlooked” is how some people put it. Being physically larger made them feel protected from unwanted male attention. Although this realisation only came from talking about their past trauma and trying to understand the role it played in their lives now.
This is just one example and your experience doesn’t need to be something you consider to be traumatic. Talking about your childhood with a friend, your partner or a therapist can be the start of connecting back to your inner child and understanding how they might be thinking and feeling about what they experienced growing up.
Does your organisation have an Employee Assistance Programme where colleagues can access therapists to have these kinds of conversations?
By acknowledging and talking about past experiences and trauma, you can start to build a better connection with your inner child. This is the start of being able to move forward from trauma or starting to be in more control of the way you deal with things now in order to feel happier and less lonely. Otherwise your hurt inner child will always play up when you least want them to.
