What Your Childhood Left Behind. The echoes are quieter now, but they still speak

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” Poet Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse.

These famous lines, wry and blunt, capture a truth that modern psychology continues to explore, even the most well-intentioned parents (and other childhood influences) leave an imprint on our emotional lives. Many of us grow up thinking our childhood was “fine”, perhaps we “had a good life, we went on holidays” yet struggle with anxiety, low self-esteem or difficulties in relationships later. We might feel something intangible was missing, but we hesitate to pin our adult pain on our upbringing. After all, isn’t it ungrateful or unfair to suggest our loving parents, or those playground years had anything to do with our present-day unhappiness?

In this blog, we’ll explore what decades of research and therapeutic experience show: how formative childhood experiences; from bullying and peer rejection to lack of love or emotionally unavailable parenting can profoundly affect adult emotional wellbeing and relationship patterns. We’ll do this through a person-centred lens and touch on the concept of the “inner child.” This isn’t about blaming Mum or Dad or rehashing textbook attachment theory; it’s about understanding, with compassion, how our early years shape our inner world. By doing so, we can start to heal those old wounds and make peace with the past.

The Hidden Wounds of Childhood

Childhood experiences cast a long shadow. A growing body of evidence links adverse experiences in youth to challenges in adulthood. For instance, childhood emotional neglect, the experience of not receiving adequate affection or attention is now recognised as a form of trauma with long-lasting effects on mental health. Lacking the love, security or validation one needed as a child often leaves invisible scars. Adults who endured emotional neglect may struggle with depression, anxiety, or a persistently low sense of self-worth, even if they can’t point to any obvious “trauma”. Studies of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) find a strong correlation between early emotional neglect and later-life difficulties like anxiety and mood disorders. In short, when a child’s basic emotional needs for love, safety and acceptance go unmet the person may grow up feeling internally unstable or empty, as if something crucial is missing.

Bullying and peer rejection in childhood can similarly leave a lasting mark. Being chronically teased, excluded or humiliated by peers doesn’t “toughen kids up” it often plants the seeds of deep-seated social anxiety and distrust. Long-term research has found that children who are bullied can carry those effects well into adult life. One large longitudinal study in the UK and US discovered that being a victim of childhood bullying was associated with worse mental and social outcomes decades later, even after accounting for family background. Those who had been bullied were more likely to have poorer health, financial struggles and difficulties in their adult relationships. Another recent study in 2024 showed that young teens who developed a strong distrust of others because of being bullied were 3.5 times more likely to experience serious mental health problems by late adolescence. In essence, bullying teaches a cruel lesson: people can’t be trusted, I’m not safe, I’m not good enough. A child who internalises these beliefs may grow into an adult who either withdraws from relationships or conversely, desperately seeks approval in them, all the while plagued by the lingering fear of rejection.

Even less overt forms of peer rejection say always feeling like the odd one out or being the friend nobody chose can erode a child’s developing sense of self. “Rejected children often grow up to experience difficult self-relationships, including self-doubt, self-neglect and self-hate,” notes one therapist, adding that “They can maintain a sense of unworthiness, which can hinder them in relationships, school, work, and even leisure.” In adult life, this may manifest as either avoidant relationship patterns (fear of intimacy or commitment, difficulty trusting others) or anxious patterns (fear of abandonment, clinging or needing constant reassurance). Many who felt unloved or unwanted as children carry a gnawing loneliness inside, well into adulthood. They might be surrounded by people yet feel fundamentally alone, replaying an old emotional memory that says, “No one really cares about me”.

Crucially, these hidden childhood wounds do not magically disappear with time. We often like to think children are “resilient” and indeed, children adapt as best they can, but adaptation can come at a cost. As renowned physician Gabor Maté explains, “Trauma is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” In other words, it’s the inner narrative and emotional pain that a child is left with “I’m worthless”, “I must not feel anything”, “I’ll always be hurt by others” that constitutes the true injury. Those internal wounds, if unaddressed, continue to whisper in the background of our lives, shaping how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to others.

“I Had a Good Life – I Shouldn’t Blame My Parents.”

Despite this evidence, many adults are reluctant to connect their present struggles with their childhood. It’s common to hear people say, “My childhood was fine, I wasn’t abused, my parents did their best. We had food on the table and even holidays abroad. I have no right to complain.” This reluctance often comes from a place of love and loyalty. We love our parents, and acknowledging their imperfections or mistakes can feel disloyal or ungrateful almost like a personal failing on our part for not being “over it.” There’s also a social taboo at play: in many cultures, openly examining or “judging” one’s parents is frowned upon. We’re taught to honour our mother and father, not critique how their anger issues or emotional distance affected us.

Therapists frequently encounter this wall of guilt. Clients struggling with clear signs of childhood trauma or neglect often minimise it: “Yes, Mum drank a lot, but she had a hard life, and I was a difficult child,” or “Dad hit me a few times, but only because I misbehaved – it wasn’t a big deal.” It’s striking, as one psychotherapist observes, “how we get used to abuse and even normalise and minimise it.” Children survive by normalising their reality even if that reality was neglectful or harsh because a child has no choice but to depend on their caregivers. By the time we’re adults, we’ve often rationalised our parents’ behaviours (“They had their own trauma”; “They were strict for my sake”) to avoid the pain of feeling betrayed or uncared for by the very people who were supposed to love us. We may carry a huge sense of indebtedness – they gave me food, education, opportunities, I can’t possibly blame them for anything, as if the basic emotional nurturing we needed was an unfair extra demand. As a result, many people push down their hurt, telling themselves it’s “not that bad” or “all in the past.”

But making sense of our childhood isn’t about assigning blame or holding a grudge against our parents. In fact, therapy often helps clients arrive at a more compassionate understanding of their parents, who very often were doing the best they could with the knowledge and emotional tools they had. Philip Larkin’s poem, after its famously rude opening goes on to note: “But they were fucked up in their turn / By fools in old-style hats and coats… Man hands on misery to man.”. In plainer terms: our parents were shaped by their own parents, and by the hurts they experienced. As Gabor Maté points out, “We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.” Your father’s quick temper or your mother’s inability to say “I love you” might well trace back to the way they were raised. This cycle of unconscious pain gets passed down through generations, not because anyone consciously wants to hurt their children, but because unhealed wounds tend to resurface in times of stress or intimacy.

Understanding this cycle is liberating. It allows us to see our parents as complex, fallible humans rather than all-powerful figures. It shifts the narrative from “I was a bad kid” or “I’m just broken” to “I learned certain patterns when I was young, and my parents learned patterns in their youth, none of us meant for this to happen.” Importantly, acknowledging childhood wounds is not about vilifying our parents. It’s about appropriately placing responsibility so that we, as adults, can take steps to heal. In therapy, a client might be gently reminded that giving voice to their younger self’s hurt is allowed, even if in real life they choose to maintain a good relationship with their parents. One can love one’s parents and recognise that some of their actions (or omissions) were harmful. These two truths can coexist. Letting go of the taboo against “judging” our parents, opens the door to honest healing work: you can finally tend to the child inside who says, “I felt alone,” without immediately shushing that voice out of guilt.

Unconditional Love and the Self: A Person-Centred Perspective

Carl Rogers, founder of the person-centred (or client-centred) approach, believed that one of our core needs in childhood is to be valued and loved unconditionally, that is, loved just for being, not for what we achieve or how we behave. When we receive genuine unconditional positive regard from our caregivers, we develop a solid sense of self-worth. We grow up feeling “I am enough as I am.” But few of us receive truly unconditional love all the time. Parents (being human) often use praise, affection or criticism to socialise their children. Rogers observed that through these interactions, children absorb “conditions of worth” – essentially, internalised messages about what they must do or be to earn love and approval.

Perhaps you learned that being helpful and well-behaved made the adults happy, but expressing anger or needing comfort made them withdraw. Perhaps only when you brought home top grades or excelled in sports did you feel truly noticed. Over time, the child concludes: “I’m lovable if I achieve, if I’m good, but not when I’m upset or imperfect.” According to Rogers, this is how we start splitting our self-concept. We accept the parts of ourselves that win approval, and we reject or hide the parts that don’t. “If children only receive love by meeting expectations, their self-regard and capacity to love others may be compromised,” Rogers noted. In adulthood, living with these conditions of worth often leads to a basic insecurity: a feeling that my worth is contingent, that love from others (and self-acceptance) must be constantly earned and is always in jeopardy.

The result is what Rogers called incongruence, a gap between one’s true self and the false front one feels compelled to present in order to be worthy. A person might appear successful and pleasing on the outside yet inwardly feel like a fraud, terrified of slipping up. Or they might have trouble even knowing what they truly want or feel, because they’ve spent their whole life conforming to others’ expectations. This state of inner tension often breeds anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression. Imagine a woman who as a girl was only praised when she was “useful” or didn’t make a fuss, she might grow into an adult who never says no, who takes care of everyone else but secretly feels empty and resentful. Or a man who learned he was valued mainly for high performance might achieve great things yet be crushed by any failure and unable to form intimate relationships (since he believes he must always impress people to be loved).

From a person-centred viewpoint, healing begins when we create an environment of unconditional positive regard and empathy, much like the environment the child should have had. Rogers found that when a therapist genuinely accepts and values the client without judgment, the client can start to dissolve their conditions of worth. In the safe, non-judgemental atmosphere of therapy, you can begin to experience being valued for who you are; flaws, emotions and all rather than for the roles you play. Over time, that allows your true self (which you may have kept hidden since childhood) to emerge and feel safe. The parts of you that were exiled; the angry part, the needy part, the part that feels not good enough can be acknowledged and integrated, rather than denied. You learn to give yourself that unconditional love. In Rogers’ words, you “re-evaluate the conditions of worth [you] have internalised” and realise those external standards were never the true measure of your worth. This can be a powerful turning point: when you stop striving to earn love and start feeling deserving of it by virtue of being human.

Healing the Inner Child

One way to describe the lingering effects of childhood experiences is through the concept of the inner child. In simple terms, we all carry within us the child we once were with all their feelings, needs, and memories. You might notice this when you overreact to something trivial or feel especially vulnerable in a conflict, suddenly you’re not the confident adult, but a hurt kid again. That child-like part of your personality is what therapists mean by the inner child. It’s the echo of your younger self that can still feel small, frightened, unseen or angrily defiant, especially when triggered by stress or events that resemble old hurts. For example, a colleague’s criticism at work might activate the same feelings of rejection you had when your father scolded you harshly and you find yourself wanting to hide and cry, or conversely, to lash out. These are clues that your inner child has jumped into the driver’s seat of your emotions.

Inner child work is a therapeutic approach that involves reconnecting with and healing those younger parts of yourself. It starts with the understanding that the unmet needs and emotions from your early years don’t just vanish with age they live on in your subconscious and body, often directing your reactions in adult life. If as a child you never felt safe to express sadness or fear, your inner child might still be carrying those unshed tears and terrors. If you were bullied or felt lonely, that child inside still yearns for acceptance and friendship. Inner child work invites you to acknowledge those feelings and needs, rather than bury or dismiss them (as you may have had to do growing up). As one psychologist describes, “How we were taken care of by adults as children is often how we take care of ourselves as adults”. If your caregivers were harsh or neglectful, you might notice you treat yourself with the same harshness or neglect today perhaps pushing yourself too hard, criticising your every mistake, or ignoring your own emotions. By becoming aware of this, you can choose to start treating yourself more kindly, in essence re-parenting your inner child.

Re-parenting means providing to your inner self the guidance, nurture and comfort you missed out on. In therapy, this often involves exercises like imagining the younger you and mentally giving them the hug or encouraging words they needed. It can also be very practical: learning to self-soothe and self-care in moments of distress (instead of, say, numbing out or berating yourself). For instance, if your childhood lacked reassurance and praise, re-parenting yourself might involve deliberately acknowledging your efforts and strengths now, effectively telling your inner child, “You’re doing your best and I’m proud of you.”. If you never felt protected, it might mean learning to set boundaries with others to make your inner child feel safe and respected. If play and silliness were not allowed in your youth, it could involve giving yourself permission to be playful and spontaneous again, to “let the child out” in healthy ways. All these practices help integrate the wounded child part with your adult self, so that the child is no longer running the show or frozen in pain, but instead is heard, healed, and part of a whole, balanced personality.

It’s important to note that inner child work can stir up deep emotions. At first, many people feel awkward or even resistant to the idea of talking to their younger self, it might seem strange to console the six-year-old you, decades later. There can also be a lot of shame or fear guarding those vulnerable child parts, because often in childhood we were implicitly taught to “hide the mess, don’t be a baby, don’t be angry, don’t be needy.”. Therefore, inner child work is often best done with the support of a trained counsellor or therapist, especially if one has significant trauma. A skilled therapist provides a safe, compassionate space and can guide you slowly, so that you’re not overwhelmed by resurfacing feelings. They essentially model the role of the caring adult for your inner child until you learn to do it for yourself. Over time, as you practice listening to and nurturing those young parts of you, something beautiful happens: the wounds begin to close. People often report feeling more emotionally resilient, triggers lose some of their power and they no longer feel “pulled back into the past” when stressed. The child inside, once desperate for attention or locked in loneliness, finally receives the love and comfort it always needed, from the one person who will never leave you – you.

Breaking the Cycle: Toward Understanding and Healing

Both person-centred theory and contemporary trauma experts agree on this: to heal the effects of a difficult childhood, understanding and compassion must replace silence and shame. Gabor Maté reminds us that even “small-t” traumas, subtle hurts like a parent’s lack of attention or a teacher’s constant criticism can wound a child, even if no one meant to cause harm. “You can wound a kid not only by doing bad things to them, but also by not meeting their needs,” Maté says. “Even doting parents can easily, unknowingly, inflict small-T traumas on their children.” This perspective removes an element of moral blame and instead frames it as a human developmental fact: children have real emotional needs, and when those needs aren’t met, there are consequences. Understanding this can help adults stop feeling “weak” or silly for being affected by “ordinary” childhood events. It wasn’t that you were overly sensitive; it’s that those needs truly mattered.

Maté also offers hope: if trauma is what happens inside us, then healing, too, comes from within. The past can’t be changed but the meanings and beliefs we drew from the past can be updated. “If the wound was that I decided as a result [of childhood experiences] that I wasn’t worthwhile as a human being, I wasn’t lovable – that’s a wound that can heal at any time,” Maté observes. In therapy, revisiting your story with empathy allows you to challenge those old conclusions. You learn, for example, that your parent’s inability to show affection said nothing about your lovability, it was about their limitations. You realise the bullying you endured was not because you were “weak” or “weird” but because children acting out their own pain chose you as a target. Gradually, the toxic self-beliefs formed in childhood (“I’m not enough,” “I must not trust anyone,” “I should never cry”) can transform. In their place grows a more truthful, nurturing narrative: “I am worthy of love. I didn’t deserve to be hurt. I can ask for help. I am not a powerless child anymore.”

Therapy provides the fertile soil for this new narrative to take root. A good therapist brings the qualities that perhaps were missing in one’s early life: empathy, acceptance, consistency and positive regard. In the warmth of that therapeutic relationship, clients often experience a kind of corrective emotional parenting. Over time, you internalise the therapist’s reassuring voice as your own. You learn to comfort yourself in distress instead of instinctively criticising yourself or running away from feelings. This is where person-centred therapy shines, it trusts that, given the right supportive environment, people will naturally move towards growth and wholeness. Rogers believed we all have an innate tendency toward psychological health (he called it the actualising tendency). When the obstacles of past conditions and fears are removed, we naturally gravitate toward a more authentic and fulfilled version of ourselves.

For someone who has carried childhood wounds, making peace with the past does not mean forgetting or erasing what happened. Rather, it means no longer fighting or fleeing those memories and feelings. Instead of a source of shame or anger, your childhood becomes a source of understanding, a context that explains (but does not excuse) why you feel or behave in certain ways. With that understanding comes forgiveness of your parents or others who hurt you (who likely were hurt themselves), and just as importantly, forgiveness of yourself. You let go of the notion that it was your fault or that you were “bad” or unworthy as a child.

And then, the remarkable happens: the past loses its stranglehold over the present. The old triggers still arise now and then, but you recognise them and have tools to cope. You can have compassion for the scared inner child without letting them rule your adult decisions. Your relationships improve as you communicate and set boundaries from a place of self-worth, rather than old fear. In short, you begin to live more fully in the here-and-now, free to respond to life instead of reacting from old scripts.

To return to Larkin’s poem – he ended on an ironically cynical note: “Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.” But most of us will not take such drastic advice! A more uplifting takeaway is this: They may not have meant to, but they did – now it’s up to me to mend what was broken. Through therapy and self-compassion, we can break the cycle that Larkin described. We can ensure that “misery” is not handed down further, not to our own children and not, anymore, to ourselves. By tending to our emotional wounds with the care we needed back then, we reclaim our power and our peace. Our past shapes us, but it does not have to define us. Healing is possible. With understanding, the hurts of childhood can transform into the strengths of adulthood; empathy, resilience, self-awareness and we can finally give that little child inside the love they always deserved.