Unless your parents or caregivers suffered from mental health disorders - they did not intend to mess you up - it just happens, even if your parents were totally awesome nearly all of us have what is called a primal wound.
We get this emotional wound because humans need to care for a very long time. By the time you are 18, you would have spent 25 000 hours with your parents.
You would have lived in this weird place called 'home' that is run by your equally weird parents.
As little people, we become shaped by big people. We pick up their habits, we see them get angry at things we do and hopefully, we see them happy around us and because of us.
If I asked you now to imagine the childhood bedroom you can in an instant, you will still be reminded of home by certain smells and even certain music.
From birth, we are totally dependant on our caregivers for all our physical and emotional needs. We don't understand our emotional needs - why do we feel sad, or angry and we believe our parents are right in everything they do because we have no other frame of reference.
We reflect our parents, beliefs, ambitions and attitudes.
We are shaped by them, as they have been shaped by their parents.
As a child you have no barrier - if your parent shouts at you there is no reasoning it away as, they have had a bad day or don't realise that their shouting is small for them but huge for us. It feels as though our very place in the world is under threat.
When a parent leaves us we don't understand that adult destinies are not always in their own hands either.
We feel like we must have been bad so they abandoned us.
Watching parent fight to a child can seem like they hate each other intensely, even though the adults think this is perfectly fine level to be talking at. A child can feel like their whole world is about to dissolve.
As children we don't have a job, we can't go anywhere else there is no 'moving on'. Even the greatest childhood is, at best an open prison.
Our early life experience starts to distort us and we become odd in certain ways, we might develop trust issues or feel we are pretty but not clever we may be scared by people who raise their voices. so the normal things that happen in everyday life may provoke a 'strange' reaction from us.
The source of a primal wound may not be dramatic but their effects are far reaching into our adult lives. Often we describe our childhoods as 'great' yet seem unable to feel joy or explode with rage when our child spills things.
This is the sad fact everyone who was in our childhood may have been trying their best to make it great yet we still arrive as adults with emotional scarring.
This primal wound effects us and we think we must just be clingy, angry or needy or unable to commit to one person for life because that is just the way we are.
If we could describe our wound then we may be better understood it but unfortunately for most of us, we can't. We think we have just always been his way. But here is the thing you can stop thinking of yourself as clumsy, spineless, joyless or angry and instead you can recognise that you have been wounded at a very early time in your life and if you see little children now the last thing you would do is berate them.
Instead, you would be kind and understanding - and you can express those same tender feelings to yourself.
