for a lot of men, looking back at childhood can bring up some resistance.
maybe your childhood was pretty good.
maybe there are parts of yours you’d rather not revisit.
or maybe you’ve wondered:
that was decades ago. what does it have to do with who i am today?
a lot, as it turns out.
my own healing didn’t really begin until i turned toward my childhood.
not because my childhood was terrible. and not because i needed someone or something to blame.
i needed to understand myself.
nobody had perfect parents
your parents met some of your needs and inevitably missed others.
and because children are completely dependent on the people around them, we learn very early how to adapt.
at the center of those adaptations is a deeply relational question:
what do i need to be to stay connected?
maybe you learned to stay quiet.
to be easy.
to achieve.
to make people laugh.
to take care of everyone else.
to hide your anger.
to stop needing so much.
to become fiercely independent.
these weren’t conscious decisions. they were adaptations.
you learned how to bend yourself around the conditions you were given in order to find safety, love, belonging, and connection.
and eventually, something interesting happens.
you forget they were adaptations at all.
you begin to think:
this is just who i am.
this is where the idea of the “inner child” becomes useful to me—not as something abstract or sentimental, but as a way of understanding the part of us that still carries our earliest experiences, beliefs, needs, and adaptations into our adult lives.
for men especially, some of those adaptations can get reinforced as we grow older. don’t need too much. don’t show too much. handle it yourself. stay strong. keep moving.
what once helped us belong can eventually become something that keeps us from fully knowing ourselves—or letting other people know us.
healing isn’t about blaming your parents or your past.
it’s about understanding how the past is still living in you.
a practice
take a few minutes to get curious about the emotional environment you grew up in.
start with a simple question:
what was the energy of my home?
tense?
warm?
distracted?
playful?
unpredictable?
quiet?
preoccupied?
secretive?
you don’t need to analyze it or decide whether your childhood was “good” or “bad.”
just notice.
then take it one step further:
who did i learn i needed to be in that home?
the responsible one?
the successful one?
the easy one?
the funny one?
the invisible one?
the caretaker?
the peacemaker?
the one who didn’t need anybody?
write down whatever comes up.
then consider one more question:
where does that version of me still show up today?
in your relationships. your work. your friendships. your parenting. the way you handle conflict. the way you ask—or don’t ask—for what you need.
you may begin to see that some of the things you’ve thought of as simply “who you are” have a history.
and when you understand where they came from, you have more freedom to decide whether they’re still how you want to live.
not so you can endlessly excavate the past.
but so you can have more choice in the present.
because sometimes coming home to yourself begins by going back.
with care,
donald