[THREAD] it is often not clear for many people (rightfully so because it is hard) to make the link between childhood and teenage years and mental health issues in adults. It is not like anxiety/depression directly tell us where they come from. Let’s talk about that link today.

One thing that’s important to remember is that for our very important formative years, our household is the main form of socialization for a child. Studies have shown that even infants recognize facial expressions and react to them.

That means that if the child’s caregiver(s) are often stressed out, sad or angry, children pick up on it and react to it from infancy. Physical affection is also very important. The whole world for young kids are their families.

They learn about human interactions and experience reality through parents and siblings for the most part. When the household is full of fighting, arguing, and stress, the child will also respond with these emotions because they are the ones they learned.

Furthermore, in our culture, we don’t tend to make sure that kids are far away before adults argue. They tend to think that it doesn’t matter because they won’t remember. But if the child witnesses displays of anger, they will have a lot of anger in them.

Now, men are not discouraged from showing their anger. So we may have little boys who display a lot of anger and violence. For women, it is the opposite. Anger is not encouraged, so it may out in the form of depression and not outward signs of frustration.

Also, we tend to criticize kids from a young age. We withdraw love when they don’t do what is asked of them. However, developmentally, kids don’t understand why love was removed or why parents became angry. So kids will directly blame themselves without knowing why.

It creates an early identity of a child that doesn’t love themselves. They internalize that lack of unconditional love as something that they deserve. Also, young girls, from a young age are told to control their food or they won’t “look good”.

They are taught to have a bad relationship with food and their bodies, combined with external factors such as the media can exacerbate their depression. We learn all these things from our caregivers. We may come to dislike them or the way they raised us.

However, it is harder to unlearn what they taught us in our formative years. Our inner voice that is constantly self critical may look like the external voice of a caregiver that used to criticize us that we now do to ourselves even if we cut off that person from our life.

Of course, we can unlearn these behaviours and learn new ones. Although that process can be a little long, it is definitely possible. I hope that these examples better show the link between childhood trauma and mental health as adults. Stay safe