May 24, 2020

Most people believe they had happy childhoods, and yet in my experience, most families are dysfunctional. The family environment we grow up in represents the world when we are a child. This can have a lifetime impact if we don’t open our eyes. It doesn’t matter whether you are healthy, wealthy, in a great relationship, have plenty of caring friends, be devoted and satisfied with your religion/spirituality/philosophy and generally speaking have a successful life, unresolved family of origin issues will weight down on your life. And that’s the reason why this is my first post, because I believe this is the most important issue (or at least the first one) you have to deal with in order to be happy.

Disclaimer: Some families are not dysfunctional, in which case you might have little or no work to do. You might still benefit from reading this post, though.

Unresolved family of origin issues will make you miserable because they distort the way you look at life. In fact, your firm belief is that your distorted vision is straight and true. Because those beliefs have been taught to you (usually implicitly) since you were a baby, it is nearly impossible to see reality in a different way than through those beliefs. If you had friends and distant family members where the dysfunctions didn’t exist, that might help a little. But make no mistake: it’s what you lived every day that will be imprinted in your mind.

If you have difficulties enjoying life, relational problems, or always feel like something is pulling you down, you might well need to have a look at your childhood and admit that maybe it wasn’t such a happy childhood after all. You might have ingrained beliefs you don’t even realise, such as “I have to please others”, “I am worthy of love only if I give/work/achieve/perform/etc.”, “I am not good at anything”, “I am entitled to special treatments”, “other people owe me”, “no one can be fully trusted”, “it’s OK for other people to lose if I gain”, “it’s other people’s responsibility to make me happy and solve any problem or annoyance in my life”, etc.

I think it is difficult to overestimate the impact of your childhood on the way you see the world right now. All that you take for granted, your understanding of what is right and wrong, good and evil, your beliefs, habits, defence mechanisms, the way you see friendships and romantic relationships, your sense of self-worth, society and other people who are different than you because of ethnicity, age, gender, piercings, tattoos, qualifications, social status or the way they dress or look like, the way you react to good or bad news, your baseline happiness, whether you tend to trust people or not, etc. In brief, everything about how you see the world is linked to your childhood.

If you have some serious mental problems, or whether you just experience frustration or sadness and wish that you were different or that you see the world differently, you might need to deconstruct the way you see the world and reconstruct it. For example, you might have an intellectual understanding that, when seeing your friend’s mum, your own mum was treating you badly. That a good first step, but that’s not enough because the child in you deep down still sees it’s childhood as what is “normal”. So in such a case, you would need to deconstruct that core perception of reality, and reconstruct it based on your intellectual understanding, values, external help, etc.

In order to initiate this process, you must first be able to see your core beliefs and put them in question. Both of these steps are incredibly hard to do. Everyone is different and will use a different catalyst to initiate this process. In my case, it was my values and sense of self-worth. Now the difficulty is: how can you be sure that your core beliefs are indeed wrong and that what you want to become is indeed right? This is where religion, spirituality, philosophy, psychology and therapy come into play. You need an external reference to validate the direction you want to tread.

I am essentially talking about changing your personality here. Some core beliefs can be changed, but some can’t and can only be managed. Changing your personality in order to become the person you want to be is possible, although extremely difficult. Letting go of existing core beliefs will leave you with a sense of grief, insecurity and confusion. In those circumstances, you will need to keep your eyes on the goal of who you want to be and be extremely careful about outside influences. Your friends and family, whether well-wishing or not, will most probably try to put you back in your old self, mostly because they are themselves insecure and uncomfortable with change. The most important thing to keep during this whole process is the faith that you will achieve this goal of transformation, trust in yourself, your intuition and gut feelings, and the clarity of mind brought by deliberate analysis of any “advice” offered to you, or emotions or thoughts coming into your mind.

The most important point here is that you need to establish what are your values first, using a cold, rational mind, and then force yourself to live congruently to those values. It will most probably be difficult and unnatural at first. Keep your values in mind and do what your rational mind tell you is right. Eventually, you will reap immense benefits. Final note: I would strongly suggest that you include self-respect in your core values.