Dealing With Your Past (Part 3)

Dealing With Your Past (Part 3)

As you look back on the punishments you received as a child for bad behavior with hindsight, it seems obvious to most that your parents were not going to annihilate you. Yet as a result, you might underestimate the impact of the punishment at the time on the child version of themselves, and the lasting mark it made on them growing up.  You do become a prisoner of your environment while growing from childhood to life as an adult, whether it was good or bad. That doesn't mean you can't change as you get older for the good, but that change doesn't come without being able to overcome your past behaviors.

Solid relationships early in life help you develop a stable sense of who you are. Researchers call this "self-concept clarity." Your sense of identity develops through your interactions with others, and positive and predictable relationships offer a reliable context in which to develop that identity.

ACEs are often linked with low self-concept clarity, which in turn leads to greater depression, loneliness, perceived stress, and life distress. An impoverished sense of self may then lead to poor adult mental health. In contrast, having a clear sense of your identity can protect you against depression and isolation.

Some of the habits you developed early in life actually get stronger later in life, particularly through your interactions with others. Your relationships with early caregivers play a big role in whether we're generally secure or anxious in these connections. Someone with an anxious attachment style, which is the way you relate with others close to you, will have a hard time feeling cared for in a relationship, which might lead to desperate measures to avoid being abandoned. These behaviors, in turn, might lead a partner to distance themselves, which will further trigger the fear of abandonment and clinging as the cycle continues.

As a result, your interactions with others can amplify the tendencies that you developed in childhood. A recent study confirmed this pattern among adults with a history of physical abuse and neglect. The researchers found that childhood maltreatment led to an anxious attachment style, which in turn led to depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. 

You can't help how you were raised as a child. You may have had the best parents in the world or the worst. Your childhood may have been delightful or destructive. Please remember this one thing-YOUR past DOESN'T control YOUR future. God can help you change all of that.

Isaiah 43:18, 19 "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert."