Reflect on your childhood

Reflect on your childhood:

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Reflect on your childhood.

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What was it like?

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Who did you grow up around?

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What was considered normal?

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Did you have good influences around you?

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Or bad ones?

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Who did you spend a lot of time with?

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What were they like?

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Were they good people?

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Did you grow up with stable relationships around you?

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Or was there always a lot of fighting?

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Or stress?

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Or uncertainty?

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What kind of people were your parents like?

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Did they spend time with you?

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Did you have two parents raise you?

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Did you have siblings?

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How are they similar or different to you?

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All of these questions are worth asking yourself.

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For our parents and grandparents, they never had time.

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They were too worried about survival.

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People weren’t talking about therapy, childhood trauma and reflecting on the past.

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Only in the last few decades has more evidence come out about the experiences of childhood.

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Learned all of this in a book called ‘What Happened To You’ By Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry.

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One of those books that changed me forever.

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The more you think about it in your own life, the more you see it in other people’s.

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This came up because of a conversation at the family dinner table.

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I’m on vacation with my parents and siblings and the topic of therapy was brought up.

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A few of us have been going to therapy and that shocked my parents.

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They couldn’t understand it.

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They never went.

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Their parents never went.

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But as we were speaking more, they were more open to the idea of therapy.

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Specifically addressing childhood trauma.

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Understanding why they are the way they are.

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My dad said ‘we didn’t know anything else. All we knew was what we saw.’

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Exactly.

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They grew up in households where education was stressed and hard work was the minimum.

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So how did they turn out?

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Exactly like that.

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What did they stress to me and my siblings?

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Hard work and education.

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That’s why I’m the person I am today.

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It’s why I have the drive.

It’s why I have the commitment.

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It’s why I have the discipline.

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It came from them.

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But there’s a fine line between achievement and misery.

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If you’re always chasing success, you’re always chasing a destination.

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Thinking that achievement will make you happy.

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It doesn’t.

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I’ve tried.

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It’s a temporary boost to your ego, and then it’s onto the next thing.

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You have to be careful you’re not running a race you don’t want to run.

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It took me years to figure this out.

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Hours of writing, meditating and learning.

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Happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey.

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It’s a choice every day.

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To understand that you have enough.

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You are enough.

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These motivators that dictate your life are not yours.

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They’re from your subconscious.

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That comes from your parents.

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It comes from your childhood.

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It comes from the environment you were raised in.

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We didn’t know this before.

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The knowledge, culture and awareness wasn’t there in our parent’s and grandparent’s generation.

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But it is today.

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So please.

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If you only do one thing in your life.

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Reflect on your childhood.

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It’ll give you more answers about yourself than you will ever find anywhere else.