What's Your Water?
When I ask someone in my therapy room to tell me a little about their childhood, I usually get one of two responses:
A breezy, casual, “You know – I just had a normal childhood. Nothing out of the ordinary. Normal. Normal kid stuff. Normal parents. You know. Normal.”
A cautious (and slightly suspicious) “Um … why?”
There’s an unspoken thought that goes with each of these responses, and it’s something along the lines of “Here we go – she’s going to try and pin everything that’s wrong with me on my parents.” It’s the running joke about therapists. We’ve already decided you must have had a terrible childhood to come to us, and if you deny it – well, that’s just more evidence of how deeply you’ve buried the pain!
I get why people poke fun at how quick we are to ‘blame Mum and Dad’. But that said, there’s good reasons why a therapist might want to know about your childhood and the people who raised you that have nothing to do with apportioning 'blame'. There’s a clue in the first response above – the insistence that “I had a normal childhood”.
Well, of course you did. How can you have anything but a ‘normal’ childhood? To a fish, a childhood lived in water is normal. It doesn’t even know what ‘water’ is.
The question we’re looking to answer in therapy is what’s your water.
As children, we have to learn to adapt to the interpersonal world we’re born into. From our earliest months, we seek knowledge about how we affect others, as well as knowledge about how others are likely to react in response to us. This may be picked up through explicit words or actions, or we might make assumptions based on unspoken actions and attitudes. For example, if we get sent out of the room or smacked every time we cry, we’ll come to believe that crying is unacceptable in general.
The knowledge we gain forms our beliefs about self, relationships, reality, morality and the world. They become central to the way we live and relate. They guide self-preservation and adaption. They control how we perceive ourselves and others. They organise our personalities, affect our moods, and impact our motivation.
But they may or may not actually be ‘normal’ in the world outside our families.
As an extreme example, it's safer as a child to believe that your abusive parent hurts you because you are bad or ‘not good enough’ in some way – that you cause and deserve what happens. The truth (that your caregiver, who you depend on for survival, is unsafe and unpredictable) is much too frightening to comprehend. Such a child has a high possibility of growing into an adult who carries a sense of inherent ‘badness’ and low self-esteem, which has big implications for his or her future in terms of work, love and happiness. This is what we call a 'pathogenic', or harmful belief in therapy.
Therapy tends to be sought when a person has suffered greatly – and continues to suffer – from his or her pathogenic beliefs.
Common pathogenic beliefs include:
If I worry enough, the bad thing won’t happen.
I am weak if I accept help.
It’s not OK for me to cry.
It’s not OK for me to get angry.
My feelings and thoughts are bad, which means I too am bad.
People will always leave me, and I should not rely on them.
It’s dangerous to trust anyone.
I’m too sensitive.
I must not ask for anything.
I must be perfect to be loved.
Now, while there are very clear-cut cases of abusive, unkind, uncaring or neglectful parental behaviour, many of us acquire pathogenic beliefs through life’s knocks regardless of how loving our parents were. Nobody survives childhood without hurt, and I would argue that each and every one of us has something to heal from. Beliefs we picked up that no longer serve us, or were never true to begin with.
We ALL have pathogenic beliefs, picked up from all sorts of places. Parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbours, peers, and colleagues. We get them from misunderstandings, wrong assumptions, and simply because we're trying to keep ourselves safe from pain.
Ultimately, the past - whatever it was - happened.
Our task as adults is to stop re-living that past in our present.