The Burden of Childhood

It is one of the most consistently irritating claims of modern psychology: that the early years, from zero to ten, determine pretty much everything about a person’s emotional functioning (how they love, who they trust, how they esteem themselves, the way they communicate…) and are the single greatest factor in explaining the difference between one human and another – particularly when it comes to patterns shaped by childhood emotional neglect.

To be asked to imagine, at the age of thirty, fifty-five or ninety-two, that we are still, despite our increasing knowledge, our professional accomplishments and the sheer time that has elapsed, like marionettes, being pulled by factors which set in when we were barely the size of a chair, violates all our reasonable wishes for autonomy and dignity – and for the chance for a fresh start.

Part of what makes the claim so implausible is that it is extremely hard to ‘see’, remember or imagine that the circumstances of our childhood could have had such an impact. We don’t remember ever being explicitly taught about self-esteem or communication styles. There wasn’t any particular moment when we recall coming to conclusions about trust. We have no memory of learning what we apparently now know in such detail – and so indelibly – about attachment. We just seem to have been busy building sandcastles and (according to certain pictures in the old album) doing a lot of handstands.

The Hidden Lessons of Early Life

But if we are to keep faith with the overall psychological thesis, it may be helpful to make an analogy with language. It’s also in childhood, chiefly between the years of zero and five, that we learnt an enormous amount about language, that we acquired a native tongue. Without us noticing, without us going to any school to do so, as we went about our daily business (imitating animals in the garden, drawing buttercups in the kitchen), we acquired a whole vocabulary and an advanced understanding of grammar. We picked up information about verb endings, tenses, sentence structures and hundreds of declensions, nouns, adjectives and adverbs – all the while having little clue that any of this was in train.

Furthermore, what we learnt was heavily influenced by the people most immediately around us. It was the precise accents of one or two people in the vicinity that powerfully moulded our manner of expression, not just for the short term – but for our entire lives.

At exactly the same time, alongside grammatical language, we were acquiring another sort of language, an emotional language about love, about men, about women, about anger, joy, vulnerability, sorrow and tenderness. Without us noticing, we picked up ‘rules’ about what happens when you give yourself to someone, what value we might have in another’s eyes, what is required of us to build up affection or maintain loyalty. We learnt principles no less complicated than those in grammatical language about how we should reveal our frustration to someone or how likely we might be to be forgiven for a wrongdoing.

And as with grammatical language, these rules came not from our entire society, not from the influence of millions, but from the ‘teachings’ of just a few people most immediately around us. They would be our unconscious teachers and role models.

Why Childhood Emotional Neglect Leaves a Long Echo

There is another point of similarity. Emotional language is very hard indeed to shift. As anyone who has ever tried, in middle age, to pick up a new dialect – who has bravely attempted to learn Finnish or Korean, Portuguese or Inuit at forty-five or fifty-two – will know, change doesn’t come easily. We shed our ‘voice’ of origin with great difficulty.

This might help us to be patient with our psyches. It is easy to get fed up with how stubbornly we seem to stick to old ways of feeling and acting. We may visit a psychotherapist and complain that, despite showing up obediently every week for seven months, we still lose our temper too often, we’re still inclined to sabotage ourselves in public, we haven’t yet learnt how to express ourselves affectionately with people we love.

Our frustration is understandable, but not – for that matter – any more reasonable than would be the sighs of someone who had spent the equivalent time trying to master Icelandic and was still stumbling with ‘Hvar er lestarstöðin, takk?’ (‘Where is the train station, please?’) and ‘Ég elska þig’ (‘I love you’). Emotional language can’t be shifted overnight any more than can its grammatical equivalent. We’ll sound foreign for a long while.

Learning to Speak Differently

We should go easy on ourselves. We may never entirely shed the ‘accent’ of our birthplace, especially when that accent has been shaped by wounds such as childhood emotional neglect. But we can do a lot nevertheless. We can understand the distinctive way in which we speak. We can take care – where necessary – to warn others of our ‘dialect’. We can be aware that there may sometimes be a discordance between our words and our intentions. And then, more hopefully, we can at other times surprise and delight acquaintances by clearing our throat and saying, with surprising fluency and a lot of charm, in an accent that really isn’t bad at all: ‘მე მინდა რომ თქვენ იცოდეთ რომ მე ვფიქრობ თქვენზე’ (‘I want you to know that I think about you’ – Georgian) or ‘Ndinokuthanda, kodwa ndiyoyika’ (‘I love you, but I’m afraid’ – Xhosa).