This is a book that you need to be ready to read if you experienced trauma during childhood. You may not be ready to open that pandora’s box yet. It’s written by The School Of Life and I came across it as it was recommended by the author, Catherine Gray, on her Instagram page. Incidentally, I read her brilliant book, The Unexpected Joy Of Being Single, which I will write about in a future blog post.
How to Overcome Your Childhood explores just how much your parents have an impact on the person you are – which is a narrative that we hear time and time again these days. However, what this book does, is explain in layman’s terms how exactly that happens in all possible situations/examples. It doesn’t just discuss trauma. You may have had a very happy non-eventful type of childhood, but you’ve turned out to be a ‘people pleaser’ or an ‘over achiever’ (which the book points out aren’t necessarily good things) and this will be a direct result of the way your parents behaved with or around you.
I have recently come across an amazing Instagram account the.holistic.psychologist owned by Dr. Nicole LePera. I’d encourage everyone to follow her account as she also discusses the issues of childhood traumas. And like The School of Life, she explains that when it comes to trauma, “it’s not so much about the event [so does not necessarily have to be catastrophic]; it’s about how the event impacts us based on the support system of those closest to us. How it impacts our nervous system. And, how it disconnects us from our true authentic self. This is why few adults even know what their own needs are. It’s also why so few adults have boundaries or even know how to set them.”
Dr. Nicole has also written a book: How to do the Work – this is going to be my next book purchase! After I’ve read all the books I bought in lockdown 1.0 😅
Going back to the book this blog post is about – How to Overcome Your Childhood – it’s split into three parts; Introduction, Childhood-derived Challenges, Ways Forward
An absolutely fascinating read and it won’t take you long either – it took me around half a day. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.
MY ONE TAKEAWAY
In the introduction there is a section titled ‘Emotional Inheritance,’ which features a table that lists all the possible ‘childhood difficulties’ one may have encountered and beside each difficulty listed is an ‘adult consequence.’ This simple yet brilliant table is a bit of context setting to help you understand the rest of the topics explored throughout the book. Directly after this table, there is a chapter called Attraction to Difficult Partners – which features another table outlining certain behaviours displayed by a partner, our ‘child’ response to those behaviours and what our ‘adult’ response should be. I used to be quite sceptical when I heard sentences like ‘it’s your inner child coming out.’ However, this book combined with the counselling I received, changed my mind and now I realise the importance of understanding our past (every facet of it, down into the depth of the corners of our minds) in order to live a more fulfilled future. Once you’ve got it all out there and truly come to terms with it all… then that’s it. The world’s your lobster! 🌍🦞
