Childhood Conditioning - How You Wrote Your Life Script

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” Carl Jung

A Note for Parents: While it may be tempting to solely consider this material in relation to your offspring, remind yourself that the better you can understand your own life experience and raise your own self-awareness, the more authentically connected you will be with those around you, including your children.

Why is it important to understand childhood conditioning when you’re trying to make positive changes in your life?

Because it is that very wiring, from childhood, that is dictating how you navigate through your present-day experience. It's dictating what you believe, what you think, how you feel, how you act and react, how you express (or don't express) how you feel, how you interact with others, how happy you are with your work...you get the point.

Most people have no idea just how often they are completely on autopilot, acting out habitual patterns, while mistakenly believing they have agency in their lives.

It's when you're willing to go beneath the surface and uncover what's lingering from the past that more core-level change can be achieved. It's by becoming more mindful that you can uncover outdated core beliefs and limiting ways of seeing things that are blocking your full potential.

It's important to note that by exploring our childhood conditioning, core beliefs, and emotional wounds we are in no way trying to place blame, shame, or point fingers at our caregivers.

They did the very best they could. But most of us were raised by people who had little awareness or guidance around their own painful beliefs or true nature. They only passed down what they knew.

Each time you felt unsafe, unseen, unloved, or powerless in childhood, it had the potential to create an emotional wound. If there were other times where you felt safe, loved, seen, and empowered, it helped to balance things out.

But regardless, it’s impossible to navigate through childhood and adolescence without being emotionally wounded.

In most cases, your caregivers weren’t intentionally being malicious. They weren’t trying to limit you or cause you to struggle later in life.

In most cases, they were well-intentioned in training you to see + experience the world exactly as they did – their objective was to keep you safe.

They weren’t consciously aware that they were also passing along their biases, misinterpretations, judgments, and faulty opinions (many of which they took on from their own parents or caregivers).

Many of us were raised by caregivers whose own emotional wounding got in the way of providing a solid emotional foundation for us. As children, we longed for our parents' love, affective, admiration, and acceptance. When it wasn't possible for them to consistently meet those needs, we grew into unhealthy adults who are still seeking those things, but who deep down, don't believe we deserve it.

Many adults feel broken, unlovable, or defective, without understanding why we feel that way.

Becoming aware of your old, outdated Life Script opens up the opportunity to make a conscious choice to unlearn old, programmed ways of being. It opens the potential to learn new responses based on who you wish to be now, and not continuing to repeat your past.

What is Your "Life Script"?

As a child, to help you make sense of the world around you, your mind subconsciously started to make up a story, a kind of "Life Script".

Typically, it’s firmly in place by age 7. Your mind "created it" so that you could feel safe by knowing what to expect.

It was almost like a rulebook that helped you know what role you had to play in order to be okay and accepted by those around you.

Entries were added each time you got hurt, in an attempt to shield you from experiencing that kind of emotional pain again.

Your Life Script developed in relation to your childhood interactions and experiences with your caretakers, as well as siblings, extended family, and friends. It is primarily influenced by family, but is contributed to by educational, cultural, social, and religious settings.

Many beliefs, expectations, and outlooks that were accepted as truth got passed down to you by others.

Imagine your Life Script neatly catalogued with categories like:
-“Who + How I Am”, “
- "What I Should Expect from Others”,
- “My Self-Worth/What I Deserve”,
- “What I’m Capable + Incapable Of”,
- “What’s Right + Wrong”,
- “How I Need to Be in Order to be Loved + Accepted”,
-“What I Can Expect from Life”, and on and on.

Childhood conditioning doesn’t just happen through verbal or direct messaging.

Our caregivers' mannerisms, body language, even what is NOT said, express more than words ever will. As a child, you are a sponge. Your young mind was constantly INTERPRETING what was going on around you - connecting dots and telling stories.

Stories that were likely, much of the time, incorrect and completely off-base.

For example, having a parent who used “being busy” as a way of coping with their emotions may cause a child to draw the conclusion that they are an inconvenience or a bother.

This may not have been based on anything other than a feeling or way of interpreting things so that it made sense (i.e., “Mom’s always busy because she has to do things for me.”)

This may then shape an aspect of the child’s personality. We adapt and change ourselves in an attempt to get the love, affection, and attention that every child craves. We do it to protect that vital bond with our parents. It all happened below the level of conscious awareness.

An example of Childhood Conditioning - adapted from a talk by Michael Singer

Imagine yourself as a two-year old who wants a cookie just before dinner. Being responsible and wanting you to eat a healthy dinner, your caregiver tells you no. Understandably, you get upset and frustrated because you can’t have what you want, so you get angry.

If your caregiver had an issue with anger (maybe they grew up in a rage-filled home or were not allowed to feel anger themselves), they may have sent you the message: “Good little girls/boys don’t get angry”.

If you still displayed anger, your caregiver may have punished you or temporarily removed their affection. The underlying message you may have received: “Angry little girls/boys don’t get love”.

In that case, not showing anger or frustration may have been a helpful adaptation at the time – helping you to avoid punishment and the shame and painful emotions that accompanied it.

This event and others like it would cause you to push down and be unaccepting of your anger.

As an adult, even when anger is justified (someone violates one of your boundaries, for example), it may still be an emotion you do not feel comfortable having or expressing.

A part of your authentic self has been pushed down and you no longer consider it as being part of you.

The Link to Emotions

We are often trained/programmed through messaging and modeling to push down or avoid our emotions. When you cried, did you hear messages that sounded like:

“I’ll give you something to cry about”
“There’s nothing wrong; you shouldn’t be upset”
“That’s not scary/upsetting/sad”
“You’re overreacting/being too sensitive”,
“Smile, be happy!”

It was most often not a conscious decision for caregivers to invalidate what you were feeling; more likely, it was that your emotions were making them uncomfortable. But as children, we usually can’t grasp that. And it makes us question our reality.

Beliefs our child-mind takes away from the above statements like these might sound like:

“Only “positive” emotions are acceptable”.
“I can’t trust what I’m feeling because I’m being told nothing is wrong even though I can feel that something is wrong.”
“There’s something wrong with me because I feel this way.”
“Emotions are bad and should be avoided.”

We watched how others handled their emotions and absorbed it as a blueprint – an unconscious roadmap – on how to feel about, experience, and express OUR emotions. We wrote it in our Life Script and played out the same patterns over + over again.

Your child-mind tried to make sense of everything that was going on around you, while also trying to see how you fit into it all.

In childhood, we take everything personally and relate everything that is happening back to us. It’s just the way we’re wired.

Even if you believe that your childhood was ideal, you still got hurt a lot; you still took on many beliefs about yourself, others, and life that just aren’t true.

Again, this is not to blame or criticize our caregivers, but rather it’s an opportunity to acknowledge our experience within it all.

Our experience caused us to develop ways of coping and handling strong emotions that were helpful to us then, but cease being helpful as we go through life. They can become limiting and harmful instead.

Because your Life Script was based on a child's limited information processing skills, much of what is contained within it is inaccurate and often becomes self-limiting in adult life.

Without insight into how it all works, your Life Script creates beliefs and behaviors that we blindly cling to, even as adults. So basically, regardless of our actual age, we're using the strategies of a six-year-old to navigate through life.

We might keep choosing situations and people that hurt us, because we believe that's all we can hope for. In a less drastic way, it might mean we don't take up certain opportunities because they are outside our Life Script.

Your Life Script is not a "life sentence". Once you realize WHY you're the way you are, it becomes your responsibility to choose differently. When you're unaware or asleep to it, you believe it is who you are, feeling powerless. Once you start to notice the automatic assumptions your mind is making, seeing it as wiring and not who you are, you become empowered in your life.

It is my hope that by exploring your childhood conditioning, you will make the connection and see how powerful this work can be in your life!