Unsaid words, hidden wounds, and choked emotions fester more fatally than physical wounds. The impact only worsens if you experience such happenings from a young age, which might lead you to develop habits or patterns hindering your emotional growth as you grow up. Because what happens to us in childhood doesn’t stay in childhood; it follows us, often silently, throughout our lives until our last breath.
These observations also form the fundamental tenets of extrapolation by psychotherapists and psychologists who engage with individuals to help them process these difficult emotions and guide them towards the healing spectrum.
However, recent findings published in Developmental Psychology have called years of psychodynamic theory into question. The findings suggest that the influence of family environment, whether marked by warmth or detachment, wealth or scarcity, has little to no impact on shaping an individual’s personality.
Does Your Familial Environment Shape Your Personality?
Robert Plomin’s Blueprint (2018) draws on decades of statistics from twins and siblings across various countries and species to delve deeply into whether familial environment truly affects a person’s personality.
The results are shocking or, perhaps, right under our noses – twins with identical genes raised in different environments developed remarkably similar personalities. Furthermore, even siblings (adopted) with no direct genetic links who were raised in the same environment developed different personalities.
Judith Rich Harris’s No Two Alike (2006), which also cites findings and results from twin studies, proposes that the brain is a mysterious tool specialising in ‘survival of the fittest’ that shapes each individual with unique skills and demeanour.
If we sit on these revelations, does lived experience not have any bearing on our individuality, and how does genetics really affect us beyond our physical endowments?
Well, research on the subject is still ongoing, and clarity has yet to be drawn on the entire mechanism. However, when parsing through a few longitudinal studies on the link between early adverse childhood experiences and adult mental health, scientists and researchers have yet to find any correlation between the two. This means that our adverse childhood experiences do not affect or influence our adult mental health.
While early lived experience has little impact on our adult mental health, recollection of these memories is a different story. Seems counterintuitive, right? Memories are faulty, they are subjective, and tend to mould themselves to our perspective at the point in time.
Consider this scenario: you and your sibling were each given a piece of chocolate. You ate yours immediately, but your sibling saved theirs for later in the fridge. Later, feeling tempted to have chocolate again, you took the chocolate from the fridge and ate it. And now, your sibling is crying and arguing for you to give them the chocolate.
You, as a child, might not feel much, except that you ‘wanted’ to eat the chocolate and you did. Meanwhile, your sibling might have felt hurt, angry, and shocked. But this incident won’t affect either you or your sibling unless you start recalling them. If you are sad, you might recall the instance with deprivation and strife from your childhood, while your happier sibling might remember the incident as more positive.
An amazing example of this notion is the three memoirs: Running with Scissors (2002), The Long Journey Home (2011), and Be Different (2011), each recalling a radically different depiction of common childhood instances despite hailing from the same family.
Read More: FlippED: Psychologists And Therapists Cement Trauma Onto Minds Instead Of Actually Helping
The Answer Lies In Here And Now
Trauma proponents Freud and Gabor Maté have spoken at length about how our personalities and sufferings stem from our early childhood experiences, which need to be reassessed. While these theories may resonate, the harm they inflict on us, especially for children, is potentially greater than the comfort they bring.
Children tend to become whatever they focus on. So, if a child spends a lot of time thinking about sad or difficult feelings, those feelings only grow stronger, not weaker. But many child therapy approaches still ask kids to focus on these tough emotions, in the vain hope that just talking about them will make them go away.
I wasn’t any different. When I read about these studies, my defences started popping up, desperately trying to find loopholes in the science behind these findings, which is fine, these sentiments come from a vulnerable space to protect ourselves. But we must also understand that looking for answers in our past will stagnate us and freeze our future.
Rather than linking your trauma to a past experience, it’s time for us to examine the reasons and methods behind the cause without disregarding human suffering. In fact, cultures worldwide, with entirely different beliefs about the origins of suffering, care just as much about healing, yet approach it in very different ways.
Historically, from Nigeria to Malaysia, and even in the West, just a few decades ago, childhood wasn’t seen or positioned as the shaping force of a person’s emotional life but rather simply one stage of human development. These cultures understood suffering as something that is shaped more by how we relate to our present circumstances than by events long past.
Even some of the greatest philosophical traditions in human history – from the Buddha and Lao Tzu to Aristotle and Jesus – focused on the present moment, not on childhood as a permanent scar. A thousand years later, Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas did the same, and a few generations ago, philosophers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, and William James didn’t view childhood as the axis of human suffering.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Sun Magazine, National Library of Medicine, The Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health
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This post is tagged under: childhood trauma, emotional development, mental health myths, psychotherapy debate, trauma and healing, personality development, genetic vs environmental influence, twin studies psychology, Robert Plomin Blueprint, Judith Rich, Blueprint by Robert Plomin, No Two Alike, Gabor Maté, Freud and childhood, memoir examples Harris, nature vs nurture, present moment awareness, memory and perception, cultural perspectives on suffering, healing without the past, global views on trauma, childhood in different cultures, historical philosophy and suffering, Western vs Eastern healing
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