The Mark Your Childhood Leaves on You

The influence of our family of origin on our lives has become a hugely popular psychology topic of late. Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychologist who once worked alongside Sigmund Freud, once said: "The happy person is healed by their childhood; the unhappy person spends a lifetime healing from it." The memories or shadows of childhood are an imprint we struggle to erase for the rest of our lives. So how does psychology explain the influence of the family of origin? And how might we respond to the influence our family of origin leaves us with?

Freud's theory of psychosexual development

Compared with positive psychology, which discusses the direction of the future and emphasises the capacities unique to human beings, Freud's theory emphasises a person's past. Freud believed that a person's early experiences determine their personality, and he stressed the influence of experiences before the age of five on later development. In his famous theory of psychosexual development (Psychosexual stage), he proposed that children pass through five stages: the oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital stages. At each stage, a child focuses on the sensory development of a particular part of the body. In the oral stage, for example, an infant takes pleasure in trying to put all sorts of things into their mouth; this period is also an important stage for the development of the bond between infant and mother. Freud proposed that if an infant's oral activities are restricted during this period — for instance, through inadequate maternal care or not being fed in time — the infant's oral senses go unsatisfied, and they may go on to develop an oral personality (Oral Personality) later in life. Because of unsuccessful development during the early oral stage, a person with an oral personality will, as an adult, regress to or remain fixated at the oral stage, seeking pleasure through the mouth in their behaviour — biting their nails, smoking, overeating and the like are all characteristics of an oral personality. Freud even suggested that anorexia is linked to poor development during the oral stage: because anorexia patients were not well cared for during the oral stage and feared being abandoned by their caregivers, they later become prone to developing conditions connected with oral activity. In the phallic stage, a child grows close to the opposite-sex parent and develops a rivalry with the same-sex parent; the resolution is for the child to give up trying to replace their same-sex parent and instead learn from them, going on to seek out a lover resembling their opposite-sex parent in adulthood.

John Bowlby's attachment theory

The psychoanalyst John Bowlby (John Bowlby) proposed attachment theory (Attachment Theory), pointing out that the relationship a child has with their caregiver in early childhood shapes their later patterns of relating to others — especially the attachment bond with a partner. The attachment styles in attachment theory include secure attachment, anxious-ambivalent attachment, avoidant attachment and disorganised attachment, with secure attachment accounting for the majority of the population. Many psychological studies on attachment theory have found that most male patients with psychological disorders had unhealthy attachment relationships in childhood. In addition, one study observed couples parting at an airport and found that avoidant-attachment women displayed resistant behaviours when separating from their partner — looking away, halting intimate contact such as embracing, and so on. Yet when these avoidant-attachment women were not separating from their partner but heading out together, this did not occur. The study reflected how the attachment relationship of early childhood shapes the attachment relationship within adult romantic love.

Bowen's family relationships

The contemporary psychologist Murray Bowen (Murray Bowen) put forward a theory about family relationships, viewing the family as an emotional system. He proposed eight interlocking concepts, of which triangles (Triangles) is one. Unlike the love triangles we are familiar with, Bowen's triangles refer to drawing a third party into the relationship between two people when their bond grows fragile. A parent complaining to the children about the other partner's shortcomings, for example, draws the child in, and the parents-and-child grouping becomes a common family triangle. Bowen also proposed the concept of differentiation of self (Differentiation of self): family members with high differentiation of self are relatively independent within the family system and are comparatively unaffected by the family's dysfunction, whereas family members with low differentiation of self are easily affected by family conflict. With this kind of parents-child triangle, when problems arise in the couple's marital relationship, one party may lower their anxiety through a third party — by throwing themselves into work, say, or by paying excessive attention to the child's development. In a parents-child triangle, the child is the party who is triangulated, taking on the role of the third party that blocks the conflict in the marital relationship. To block the conflict between the couple, the child may use all sorts of methods — getting into trouble at school, for instance — to draw the parents' anxiety away from the marital conflict. This kind of triangle within the family hinders the child's development and also adds to the stress the child carries while growing up, and as an adult the child may use different methods to escape the emotional pressure of the family of origin.

In closing

None of us is free from the influence of our family of origin, so how should we respond to those harmful influences? In everyday life, we can apply the principles of psychoanalytic therapy to address some of the habitual ways of thinking that conflict in our family of origin has left us with. When we encounter a similar conflict again, for example, we can observe the other person's attitude with an open mind, and notice that our feelings in the moment may be shaped by past experiences rather than by the matter at hand. Although there are plenty of uncontrollable factors in life, with this awareness we can deepen our understanding of our emotions and make peace with ourselves. As for Bowen's triangles, Bowen proposed that family members should first recognise where they stand within the family's triangles; the triangulated party should then stay emotionally neutral rather than "take sides," and encourage other family members to communicate directly with one another when conflict arises. In short, to reduce the harmful influence of the family of origin, we must first become aware of the unhealthy relationships we ourselves are caught up in, and try to step outside the framework of the family of origin, so as not to be hemmed in by past experiences.