#190 – Episode 190 – Overcoming Childhood Issues in Sobriety

VeronicaValli

Chip and Veronica are back from their summer break and kick off this season by discussing how our childhoods affect us and how our relationship with our parents plays out in our romantic relationships. They discuss how we can’t change the past but we can change the meaning we give it and how it affects us in the present.

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about this episode

Understanding how our childhood impacted us allows us to start changing some of the unhelpful messaging and programming we brought into adulthood.

Our first 15 years play a massive role in shaping who we are. That’s when you create the foundational blocks of your personality. Once you come to grips with it and learn the truth about that, you’re much better able to understand yourself, your perspectives, and your choices.

We all need to do deeper work to overcome childhood issues.

In this episode, Chip and I explore why those first 15 years matter so much, how we can start to unravel them and find out how they’ve influenced our character today and how to think about which bits we want to keep, work on, or let go.

key highlights

Linking the past and the present

“I wouldn’t have the life I have now if I didn’t do the deeper work to understand and change this stuff.” Veronica Valli

Your childhood patterns will show up in your adult relationships. There’s no avoiding the fact that your past shows up in your present every day.

Looking back at the past can be uncomfortable or even painful. For most of us, including Chip and me, the initial reaction is to avoid the topic altogether. After all, you can’t change what happened.

But even though you can’t change the past, you can change how you feel about what happened. That’s how we break the thought patterns and behaviors that aren’t serving us.

When children have adverse experiences, they give them meaning. Unfortunately, the meaning our childhood perception assigns often has no basis in truth. Nevertheless, these stories follow us throughout our lives until we decide to do something about them.

Avoiding the past and not doing the deeper work is far more painful in the long run.

 

Reframing the past

A big part of overcoming childhood issues is having someone else reframe the past for you. We can’t do this ourselves.

For Chip, rehab was the first time someone said that the abuse that happened to him as a young child wasn’t his fault. After years of thinking that he must have been to blame, he could take a step back and consider that it wasn’t his choice as a five-year-old.

I had a similar experience. After carrying the guilt of my mother’s failed marriage for years, someone told me that it wasn’t my responsibility as a child to rescue my parent. It was an earth-shattering revelation for me.

 

Breaking generational patterns

“You will parent how you were parented unless you consciously change it.” Veronica Valli

This isn’t about blaming your parents for everything that went wrong. It’s about ensuring you haven’t developed a limiting belief around it.

Ask yourself a simple question: “How would you like to parent differently?”

From that answer alone, you will find so many nuggets of information. If you’re prepared to go digging for it, get your hands dirty and go through all the complicated stuff, you will find golden nuggets that will help you learn how to adapt from that knowledge.

Attracting the right partner

“ I believed I had to find the right person, but that’s not true. What is true is, I had to understand myself and what happened to me.” – Veronica Valli

My pattern was abandonment. I recreated abandonment over and over and over. I thought if I was thinner or prettier, I’d get the right person; I just had to try harder.

But it was none of that.

We subconsciously try to heal our childhood wounds with the behaviors in our adult life.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to go and see someone who can help you understand why you create this pattern over and over and help you change it.

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