This page relates to therapy for adults with unresolved issues or concerns from their childhood.
For most children, childhood is a time to learn, grow, play and get to find their way in life in a nurturing environment of innocence and safety. But not all children experience this. Many children grow up under conditions of sustained stress.
If our childhood was unhappy, or left emotional scars or continuing stresses, this can prevent us from living a fulfilled and contented life as adults today.
There are no objective criteria for what constitutes stress since what is experienced as stressful differs for each individual. Stressful childhood situations can include: living with parents who struggled with some sort of mental illness or addiction, where there was abuse, poverty, violence or where we felt lonely. What is stressful for one person may not have been stressful for another.
When we are young we often develop defences as a way of keeping ourselves safe. We may continue to use these defences well into adulthood and then reach a point in our life when it becomes clear that these defences are not working for us any more. They may need undoing if they are not to become self-sabotaging. Breaking habitual ways of thinking and behaviours, and overriding what has become instinctual, can be achieved with therapy and with awareness.
The first step in working with childhood issues is to establish a sense of safety so that there is a felt sense of security, stability and reliability in the therapy setting. The work is slow and gentle and goes at the client’s pace. Encouragement is given to check how supported we feel before we bring anything in so that the process stays manageable from an emotional point of view throughout. The work takes place within the therapeutic relationship and the psychodynamic approach offers the potential to facilitate the client in being more fully seen and understood. It offers the potential to work through our story, to make sense of what happened, to understand things better, to process and to gain a new perspective on past situations.
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