6 keys to overcoming a difficult childhood

Several circumstances of our first years of life can leave an almost indelible mark.

Childhood is not only the stage of life characterized by innocence; it is also the one in which we are more delicate, more susceptible to psychological damage. This is not an unimportant detail, considering that there are many experiences or conditions of life can be negative to vulnerable people without the ability to seek help outside the family.

Thus, the marks of a complicated childhood may still be noticeable when we have grown up and entered adulthood. However, that does not mean that we should resign ourselves to it. As much as the discomfort and anguish may be unbearable at times, in most cases it is possible to significantly improve the way in which we live with that past. To contribute to this, we will now look at some guidelines for overcoming a difficult childhood, as well as a reflection on how we should approach this task.

Emotional Pain coming from the past

Some people talk about this feeling as if it were a kind of emotional hacking: the pain comes to us through the vulnerabilities of the past, although we believe that if we had not gone through all that suffering today we would be totally complete and capable of everything without devoting much effort to it.

In other words, the traumatic events and the anguish experienced during our first years of life not only robbed us of our childhood, but also of our adulthood.. The stain of trauma is constantly spreading as we try to flee into the future.

However, we need not be slaves to our past, even if it took place during childhood, the time when we first became aware of what the world is like. Change is always possible, as we shall see.

How to overcome a difficult childhood

You must keep in mind that each case is unique, and therefore, if you really suffer from your past, it is best to seek the personalized treatment that psychologists can give you in their office. However, in the short term you can use these tools that we offer below.

1. Learn about the effects of psychological trauma.

This is important, since in most cases there is an excessively deterministic and pessimistic conception of trauma..

It is true that traumas can contribute to various problems of emotional management and attention regulation as adults, but this does not mean that people who have had a difficult childhood systematically develop PTSD, nor that this type of experience necessarily leaves us scarred.

In fact, even in cases of severe violence and abuse in childhood, there are many people who mature into adulthood without significant mental problems and without lower than expected intelligence.

What does this mean? That in many cases, people with a complicated past face states of discomfort generated by pessimistic life expectations based on a problem that is not there. That is why when it comes to overcoming a difficult childhood it is necessary to be clear that all or a good part of that feeling of discomfort may arise from a fiction.

2. Change social circles

As far as possible, Try to stay away from people who have made you feel bad in the past and who have no intention of helping you in the present.. In this way, situations that remind us of traumatic events will appear less frequently.

3. Lead an active social life

Breaking the isolation is a good way to break with ruminationthat is, the propensity to give in to recurring thoughts that end up becoming obsessions.

The good thing about having an active social life is that it helps to live in the present and get away from those memories that come back again and again. Building a life in the here and now is a good solution to prevent the mind from filling that gap with elements belonging to past times.

On the other hand, after spending some time in the company of friends and loved ones, it is not necessary to self-impose this strategy. And the fact is that the memories that generate discomfort, however intense they may be at the beginning, can lose force at great speed if we get used to not invoking them frequently for several months in a row.

4. Take care of yourself

Often, going through outrageous situations makes us automatically fix our idea of Self to all the discomfort and vulnerability suffered in the past. This can cause us to act as if we don't matter at all, i.e., we treat ourselves the way life treated us.. If those complicated situations appeared during childhood, there is also a chance that we may not have known any other version of ourselves than the victim role.

To break this vicious cycle, it is necessary to force ourselves to take our own well-being seriously. This involves eating well, exercising, maintaining good personal hygiene and sleeping well, among other things. In other words, we must make an effort to show ourselves our potential, even if we don't feel like it at first.

In this way, those beliefs linked to our own self-image will change until our self-esteem improves significantly and, with it, our expectations will also improve.

5. Reinterpret the past

There is no single interpretation of our lives: no matter how hard we try, we can never reach an objective perception of things.. This is especially true when, in addition to considering the facts, we take into account the emotions with which they are associated.

In fact, our memory functions in such a way that memories are constantly changing. The simple fact of remembering something when we are in an intense emotional state can make the facts that we evoke more congruent with those emotions.

Knowing this fact can help us a lot to not blindly believe that we keep those painful childhood memories because the experience was real and caused us discomfort. Maybe we keep that memory because we have learned to associate it with negative moods, even distorting its content.

So, feel free to reinterpret the past without fear of unconsciously modifying it: the latter is inevitable, but we can prevent it from damaging us emotionally.

6. Seek professional help

There are cases in which, no matter how much effort and effort is put into it, very little progress is made in overcoming the traumas and problems experienced in childhood.

This is not due to a lack of willpower, but to something much simpler: in the same way that these mental alterations emerge from the influence of our environment, to get out of this kind of emotional quagmire we need someone to help us from the outside. And that someone must be a mental health professional..