The impact of childhood on our mental and emotional health.

One extremely important concept to grasp is the fact that children are excellent recorders of information, but are very poor interpreters of this information. What this means is that children will remember events and how they felt at the time, but since they don’t have a fully developed mind, and therefore understanding of the context etc they form assumptions and beliefs of their own. In other words, they see or experience something and place their own – normally incorrect – interpretation on it. Sometimes these assumptions are true or accurate, sometimes they are false or inaccurate.

The net result is that in many instances, as a child draws a conclusion on an event being witnessed, in particular traumatic ones, our mind becomes frozen at the age in which we drew this conclusion. The rest of the brain and body continue to grow except for this one section. Whenever an incident reminds us of this event, we are drawn back into using the same coping mechanism we did as a child. In most instances these coping mechanisms are immature and inadequate for us.

Counselling is one of the few ways to discover what the ‘frozen’ areas are in your life. The conclusions most of us came to as children are simply incorrect, yet we live our lives without ever stopping to challenge them, examine them and look on them to see the damage they are causing us.

This is in no way suggesting that every child has had bad parents, or been neglected, but is simply pointing out that every child forms conclusions based on their understanding of the world at that particular time.