Why Your Childhood Matters
- Seung Ju
- Dec 18, 2020
- 4 min read
I’ve had what many would call a perfect childhood. I spent most of my time playing tag on the grass, rummaging through the parking lot to create secret fortresses, and playing hide-and-seek with my brother.
I’ve traveled to more than ten countries before I turned fifteen, where I lavished myself in buffet foods and soft, creamy sheets. On weekends, our dad would take us on frequent hikes to Monkey Beach or trips to our favorite water park down in Ipoh.
All in all, my childhood was carefree, comfortable, and cheery.
But growing up in high school, I wasn’t as cheery. Early in the morning, I spent time on the swings on campus, solemnly watching the sunrise. The rest of the day, I kept my concentration sharp on my studies and my extracurricular. And at the end of school, I would run twenty-minutes around the campus, do a couple of dumbbell reps alone, then slowly trudge back home to lock myself in the room to study.
If I look back, I barely hung out my senior year--the epitome of freedom in high school. I would unintentionally distance myself from a lot of my friends and occupy myself with a packed schedule. But at the end of a day’s hustle, as I heard the lull of the stale air, I would cry myself to sleep.
I can’t explain why I felt so blue back then (although part of it was surely hormones). I excelled in school, extracurricular, and was socially recognized; but inside, I felt insecure in all of my relationships and couldn’t stop criticizing myself.
Later on, I hit a much bigger wall in university, dealing with mental health issues and loneliness in a foreign city without my previous friends and my family. I had trouble getting out of bed, started missing tutorials and lectures. I even began to break mugs and plates because of how blurry everything seemed. My self-worth and my security in relationships began chipping down. I was lost about my identity and frequently wanted to dig myself into a hole.
I often wonder how I developed any of the negative thought patterns and beliefs that led me to this moment. I thought that I would be beaming with optimism and self-confidence with the childhood I had. But going into therapy, I realized that I missed a crucial aspect of childhood.
Growing up, my parents didn’t cater to my negative feelings nor try to express theirs. After having a devastating breakup with a good friend, I remember going to my dad for comfort.
We stood in the living room, where the tropical hot air blew against my face through the windows. With his eyes awkwardly avoiding mine and blinking from the hot air, he told me that things like this happen naturally and that I should simply move on. I wanted to burst into tears from all the emotional baggage, but my dad quickly interfered.
"I'd rather you not cry in front of me."
I remember biting my lips so hard to hold back my tears; and breaking away from the stuffiness of the hot air, headed back into my room to let the hot tears flow. Whenever I shared feelings of loneliness or sadness with my dad or mom, they would shift uncomfortably, frequently wave them away, and say to give it time to dissipate naturally.
Soon enough, I ignored and learned to feel ashamed of my negative emotions. I’d not only hold them back from my family but also my friends. I was scared that they would think of me as a negative, grumpy, or whiny kid. Without having anyone to share these emotions, I would only watch it burst randomly at times when I sat alone on the swings or in my bed.
Thinking all along that the negative emotions got lost in neutrality, I realized that they only built up to spill over into adulthood. With what my parents modeled and taught, I built beliefs (ways of seeing the world) that stopped me from expressing my honest feelings: if I’m too honest, my friends will start leaving me; if I talk negatively, I will be labeled as a complainer.
With what I’ve learned in therapy and self-reflection, I’m trying my best to unlearn the negative thought patterns. I’m not going to lie; it’s hard because of how it’s been active over most of my childhood and high school years. But I don’t blame anyone. My parents grew up in a culture that rewarded hard work and regarded negative emotions as a burden that hindered an individual’s growth and the economy. They only modeled to me what they thought was the most optimal way for me to grow. In their childhood, they have also been neglected, their negative emotions not taken seriously.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I have to adopt that same belief. Times have changed, and with my study in psychology (especially attachment styles) and experience, I know that disregarding a child’s emotions could unintentionally hurt him later when he grows up. It could snowball into toxic thoughts and behaviors by adulthood, make him insecure about intimate relationships.
But I also know that no one can have the perfect parenting style. As I said, I can’t blame my parents. My parents are also vulnerable people, with their flaws and insecurities. I’m grateful for my parents; they’ve done their best to give me the resources to support me with what I want to do. Without their investment and the frequent trips to the water park or beach, I wouldn’t have had the passion and optimism that I have now. But I also want to make sure that I apply what I’ve learned now to naturally model it to my children, especially when it means stopping generations of more repressed negative feelings and frustrations.
References and Research:
“According to some writers, the most important proposition of the theory is that the attachment system, a system originally adapted for the ecology of infancy, continues to influence behavior, thought, and feeling in adulthood (see Fraley & Shaver, 2000). This proposition may hold regardless of whether individual differences in the way the system is organized remain stable over a decade or more, and stable across different kinds of intimate relationships.”
Avoidant and attachment style deactivation: negative reactions to vulnerability and negative emotions
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