Josh Goldberg on the Importance of Disclosure | “Tell Me About Your Childhood”

Transcript:

There’s a cliche scene that you’ll see in a lot of movies and it features someone going to a mental health professional and the first question that the mental health professional asks them is “tell me about your mother,” and the idea is to understand the linkage between childhood and our functioning as adults. One of the things we’ve learned over many many years is that this question is actually a good question, not just a cliche.

Understanding our past training and our past experiences matters a great deal for several reasons. The first reason we have to be able to look back and reflect and talk about some of the things we struggle with is that at the core of posttraumatic growth and at the core of trauma and struggle are challenges to our core beliefs. Our core beliefs being what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about other people, and what we believe about the world and our future in that world. Those beliefs are primarily formed from the ages of zero to five and so if you are a kid who was constantly told that they were dumb, or they were slow, or they were fat as a child – you’ll start to internalize those beliefs even if they’re not true, and they will carry over. into your adult life. Being able to dispense with some of those beliefs is a really important part of writing your new story.

The second reason why it’s really important to be able to look back and reflect on our childhood is that what is not transformed is transmitted. If we do not try to find some way to make peace – to gain some understanding about the experiences we had – the limitations of the people that were in our lives – we are destined to repeat that history with people that we love and care about. In our context we talk a lot about the idea of My Old Story and we have a “My Old Story” diagram designed to allow you to go back a couple of generations and think about your family tree – to think about your inheritance – and to ask a couple of important questions about the major players in your life: What did they experience? How did they navigate stress and struggle in their life, and what were their gifts?

When I think about my story, I think about my struggle. I certainly had things that impacted me from my parents and other people in my childhood that created a lot of challenges in my life, but the more understanding I gain – the more listening I do – the better i understand why those things happened, and at the core of that is: It wasn’t about me – it was other people’s limitations – other people’s challenges. So when we talk about disclosure I encourage you to look back not for the sake of blaming – not for the sake of being a victim – but to look back to understand so that you can be the person and the parent and the partner and the leader that you deserve to be and that you want to be.