it all has to do with one’s childhood, can be irritating

A founding principle in modern psychotherapy, it all has to do with one’s childhood, can be irritating. Why do we need to be forever tied to things that happened to us infinitely long ago? For many, we might not have seen our parents for decades. Yet, the idea refuses to go away. We keep to return to understanding that parts of our characters appear to be determined by dynamics that unfolded within the family circle.

We learned to speak an entire language around our families, picking up words and complex rules of syntax while we played in the garden and jumped around in the kitchen. Yet it feels implausible that we simultaneously learned an entire emotional language: a language that expresses love, what to expect from men and women, the rules of happiness and our response to desire. The spirits of the past have the power to smothering of present. The wise can pay enough attention to childhood family dynamics to loosen their punitive grip to get on with their lives.