Therapy Showed Me My Childhood Was Not as Fine as I Had Decided

I did not go to therapy in my mid-twenties because I thought I had significant unresolved issues from childhood. I went because a friend had recommended it as generally useful and because I was experiencing some work-related stress that I thought would benefit from having a structured space to process.

My childhood in Chengdu had been, by my consistent assessment, unremarkable and fine - two parents who stayed married, material comfort, educational opportunities, a family that functioned without crisis. I had no dramatic events to report and I said so clearly in my first session.

My therapist received this with the neutral attentiveness of someone who had heard it many times and was not particularly impressed by it as evidence of anything. Over the following months, as the sessions moved away from the work stress that had brought me in and toward the patterns I was using to manage it, I started finding things I had not expected.

My relationship with failure, which was extreme and disproportionate in a way I had long accepted as personality, turned out to trace back quite directly to a specific dynamic in my household where my parents' praise had been highly conditional on achievement and their disappointment at underperformance had been expressed in ways that were not unkind but were very consistent.

I had not experienced this as damaging because it was so thoroughly normal to me. What I had experienced, though I had not connected the origin, was a lifelong difficulty with the feeling of inadequacy when I did not perform to the highest possible standard. It was not dramatic. It was pervasive.

I also found, in the process of those months, a pattern around emotional needs that I traced back to a household where feelings were practically managed rather than emotionally acknowledged - a home where if you were sad your parents would try to solve the problem causing the sadness rather than sit with you in the feeling of it.

I had grown up understanding how to address problems and never fully understanding how to acknowledge feelings, and I had replicated that dynamic in every close relationship I had subsequently been in. None of this was catastrophic in its origin. The effects were real and active. The finding of them was neither comfortable nor regrettable.

It was information I had needed for some time.