Childhood Conditioning and the "Life Script"

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

Note: although this is included in the Session 1 file, please do not feel that you have to read and understand everything before coming to session. We will draw from this material throughout the entirety of the Program.

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

We tend to focus on our behaviors, thinking we’ll use will-power or try some new strategy or technique to change them. It’s not an effective approach because there is so much going on beneath the surface that impacts us in our day to day living. This can limit our potential and keep us from gaining insight and understanding into our subconscious mind, which is running the show (i.e., aspects like core beliefs, thinking patterns, emotional reactions, etc.).

It's important to note that by examining childhood conditioning, 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 limiting beliefs or true nature. They only passed down what they knew.

Your caregivers weren’t intentionally being malicious. They weren’t trying to limit you or cause you to struggle later in life. On the contrary, they were well-intentioned in training you to see + experience the world exactly as they did – their objective was keeping 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).

Each time you felt unsafe, unseen, or unloved in childhood it created an emotional wound. If there were other times where you felt safe, loved, and seen, it helped to balance things out. But it’s impossible to navigate through childhood and adolescence without being emotionally wounded.

Your child-mind tried to comprehend everything that was going on, while also trying to see how you fit into it all. We take everything personally as a child 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.

Conditioning doesn’t just happen through verbal messaging. Mannerisms and body language 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 were an inconvenience or a bother. This may not have been based on anything other than a feeling or a 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 in an attempt to get the love, affection, and attention every child craves. We do it to protect that vital bond with our parents. It all happened below the level of conscious awareness.

Maybe to adapt to your belief that you were an inconvenience, you developed a sense of independence and a conviction that you should do everything on your own. This is an adaptation (a role you played or action you took to get your needs met and maintain attachment with your caregiver).

As you got older, you likely accepted being “independent” as part of your “true self”, without realizing that it was actually an adaptation that had been based on faulty information.

Without deeper insight and awareness, being “independent” is something you would maintain. Even if it ultimately caused you pain, your childhood wiring would continue to send messages that it is helpful and “good”. This deep, unconscious belief can keep us stuck in habits and behaviors that no longer serve us.

Our emotional reactions are conditioned; they are something we have learned. Times when what was happening around us in childhood was particularly confusing or upsetting, it would have triggered our automatic, internal survival system.

The nervous system would trigger the body into fight or flight mode. As children, we are powerless. We quickly learn that it doesn’t help to fight back (even on an emotional level).

And it’s often not possible to run away or leave the situation. So, the option that is left is to freeze. This can look like zoning out, dissociating, or distracting by focusing on something else.

Those reactions allowed us to comply and adapt in an environment where it was necessary to do so to maintain connection with our caregivers (which is necessary to our survival). It served an important function at the time (i.e., pleasing a parent or escaping conflict or punishment), but does not serve well in adult life.

Going into “freeze mode” as adults may look like turning down opportunities because they’re outside our comfort zone, numbing out by binge watching a tv series, difficulty with decision making, procrastination, and generally just feeling “stuck”.

Becoming conscious to our core beliefs and the impact of childhood conditioning allows you to make new decisions and create new responses, rather than simply reacting in old, habitual conditioned ways.

It provides an opportunity to change destructive habits and mindsets and empowers us to choose new, healthy approaches.

What is Your “Life Script”

The Life Script is basically a rulebook you wrote as a child to help you make sense of the world around you.

Typically, it’s firmly in place by age 7. You created it so that you could feel safe by knowing what to expect. It helped you know what role you had to play in order to be okay and accepted by those around you.

You didn’t consciously realize you were creating this rulebook – it got written at the subconscious level and often had information downloaded into it by others. Entries were added each time you got hurt in an attempt to shield you from experiencing that pain again.

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 + Uncapable Of”, “What’s Right + Wrong”, “How I Need to Be in Order to be Loved + Accepted”, “What Can I Expect from Life”, and on and on.

It developed in relation to your childhood interactions and experiences with your caretakers, as well as siblings, extended family, and friends. It takes place within the home, but also within educational, cultural, social, and religious settings.

Your Life Script outlines all the beliefs, expectations, and outlooks that were passed down to you by others, that you accepted as truth. It is the story we make up as children about ourselves and our lives, other people, and the world around us, which turns into beliefs and behaviors that we blindly cling to, even as adults.

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

Would you believe me if I said that your Life Script is dictating your experience right this minute? That it’s dictating the thoughts that are going through your mind, the emotions that are coming up for you, and the sensations in your body? It is my hope that by reading this, you will make the connection and see how powerful this realization can be in your life!

When we’re unaware that we have a Life Script, we can feel powerless, operating from the belief that life is happening to us. We can’t understand where we keep going wrong or why we keep repeating the same destructive or unhelpful patterns. We can seem like a stranger to ourselves and distant from others; life can seem like a scary place.

There is a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). It’s located in the brain stem and acts as a filter, only allowing certain things to reach us on a conscious level. The aspects of life it lets in are the ones that fit and reaffirm our core beliefs. In psychology, is called confirmation bias. On a constant basis, we subconsciously seek information that confirms what we believe, while discarding information that goes against what we believe to be true.

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

Another 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), 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.

We learn to shut down parts of ourselves in order to be accepted. But these are valuable parts that we need in order to be whole. We make the unconscious choice as a young child to disown them, and many people never rediscover or reclaim them. When we work to integrate all aspects of ourselves, we experience increased self-acceptance and a sense of wholeness + well-being.

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.

Common Core Beliefs (adapted from Dr. Nicole Lepera)

Core beliefs from in the subconscious mind from birth-age 7 based on the beliefs of parent figures and those closest to us. The subconscious mind is working every second of every day to confirm core beliefs created in childhood.

Becoming aware of core beliefs allows us to make new choices beyond them. It allows us to consciously choose new beliefs and responses in alignment with who we truly are.

Common Core Belief: “I am not worthy, good enough, something is “wrong” with me.”
- Adult behaviors that show this belief include: self-betrayal, negative self-talk, procrastination, chronic fear of criticism, perfectionism, performing/playing a role, denying ones own needs and boundaries.

Common Core Belief: “I must betray myself (or parts of myself) in order to be loved and accepted”.
- Adult behaviors: codependency patterns, enabling partners who harm you and themselves, fear of stating your own needs, lack of boundaries, inability to be vulnerable, avoidance of romantic relationships, losing self in romantic relationships

Common Core Belief: “I must compete, smear, or tear down others in order to “win” or get what I want.”
- Adult behaviors: fear-based decision making, inability to collaborate, assuming everyone has negative intentions or is “out to get you”, black + white/right or wrong polarized thinking, inability to see the perspective of another

Common Core Belief: “People will never stay and will always abandon me.”
- Adult behaviors: insecure attachment in relationships, push/pull behaviors, inability to follow through with tasks, controlling behaviors, impulsive behaviors (shopping, changing jobs, relationships, etc. without being intentional or fully thinking them through.

Common Core Belief: “I am unlucky, good things do not happen to me.”
- Adult behaviors: sarcasm as a coping mechanism, “playing small”, fear of over-revealing dreams, goals, and aspirations, chronic complaining, emotional dumping as connection.

Common Core Beliefs: “I am not safe and the world is not safe.”
- Adult behaviors: addiction or negative behaviors as an attempt to regulate the nervous system, isolation, high reactivity, defensiveness, over-independence, lack of resilience

Healing is about creating a new perspective – practicing new thoughts, new beliefs – and challenging old owns, stepping away from beliefs that create unwanted patterns.