How childhood shapes identity — and how you can heal and grow 🤍

Have you ever asked yourself why you are the way you are?

Why do you get really angry when you have to clean the kitchen?
Why do you feel so utterly helpless in front of people?

I’m making up things here, but we could find a million situations in your life and mine.

Situations that are, objectively, harmless — but to us, they elicit strong emotions. Emotions we might not want to feel because they’re so uncomfortable.

So, why does this happen? 🤔

Nature or Nurture?

In psychology, there’s a big debate called the “nature or nurture” debate.

What is natural — what were we born with?
And then, what experiences and environmental influences shaped us?

They could have been different — then would we have been different!?
Wow. That touches deeply on identity!

Luckily, our brains are plastic (meaning neurons can form new connections throughout life).
That means we evolve and change as long as we are on this earth — and so does our identity.
(Hint: not the core, though.) 🌿

A lot of research suggests that early childhood plays a key role in laying a foundation for identity formation.
But it’s not everything.

Let’s go back to that debate for a second:

Nature: what we are born with
Nurture: the influence of our environment

Well — it’s not either-or.
Both influence us.

Illustration of the nature vs. nurture debate in Psychology — “Nature vs. Nurture” debate *(source: OpenAI, 2025)*

Influences from Your Environment

Attachment — learning to trust

There’s something called attachment style.
It describes the kind of relationship you have with your parents (or caregivers).

If this style is secure — meaning the child can trust that the parent provides for them emotionally and physically — then the child also learns to trust itself and the world around it.

Interesting, right? 💭

The famous psychologist Erik Erikson described something very similar.
According to his theory of psychosocial development, during the first stage (birth to ~1 year), a baby learns either trust or mistrust (Erikson, 1963).
And if that fails, you learn… mistrust.

Learning by Watching

Another way of learning is by imitating others.
What else can we do as young children?

Albert Bandura described this in his Social Learning Theory (1977).
He said we pick up a lot simply by observing others.

This could be how our parents interact, how they show (or don’t show) affection to each other, and much more.
I sometimes wonder if we also get a sense of how secure our parents are in their own identity — and we learn that too!

So maybe, if you think about your own past, reflect on how your parents lived their identity — and whether you might carry some (or a lot) of that to this day.
(They are also just humans, with their own wounds.) 💔

a child is oberserving how its parents are interacting — Children observe a lot. *(source: OpenAI, 2025)*

Storytelling — making sense of your story

A third influence is narrative thinking.

Jerome Bruner (1986) emphasized that human beings develop the ability to interpret their thoughts and emotions — and to “read” those of others.
Through this process, we start telling stories about our lives.
The meaning we make out of what we’ve been through contributes to who we believe we are. ✨

“But my childhood is gone…”

I want to pause here on a thought that may have come up:

“I feel really helpless reading all this; my childhood is gone; I cannot change what has happened.”

Yes — and no.

Of course, you can’t change the past.
But if you read with care, you might notice that the psychologist who discussed narrative thinking shows how we make up our stories.
Through the narrative approach, we can reinterpret events.

The Freedom of Choice

Fitting to that is one of my favorite psychologists: Viktor Frankl.
He differentiated between the psyche, the body, and the spirit.

As humans, we have the great power to choose how we face everything.
We are not free of things, but we are free in how we approach them.

That’s where healing begins. 💫
This learning takes time (please, be gentle with yourself), but it’s worth it.